[dropcap]There[/dropcap] seems to be a trend of Post-Punk music in film these days, after just being pleasantly surprised by OMD and Savages being featured in Ex Machina, I was blown away by the inclusion of The Cure’s “Plainsong” in Marvel’s Ant-Man.
The scene in question is during a battle where a briefcase falls from a helicopter where Ant-Man is continuing his battle against the villain Yellowjacket. As the briefcase falls, the contents are being tossed around, and our hero Ant-Man accidentally activates Siri on an iPhone, and then Yellowjacket yells, “I am going to disintegrate you!” and Siri responds with “Playing Disintegration by The Cure”—and the opening track from the album “Plainsong” begins as the two proceed to fight, and ultimately land in a swimming pool.
The interesting thing about this sequence, is that we’ve seen The Cure in falling luggage before…landing in water. In fact this was the case in the 1985 video for “Close to Me”, a single off of the album “The Head on the Door”.
https://vimeo.com/64520704
Something tells me this entire sequence was written as a love letter to The Cure…Director Peyton Reed tells Film School Rejects how and why this scene happened.
“Reed also would’ve been upset if Marvel couldn’t secure the rights for a song from The Cure’s finest album, Disintegration. Ant-Man may be the first movie in history to have a song by The Cure playing during one of its big set pieces. At one point Ant-Man and Yellow Jacket fight in a briefcase to the amazing sound of ‘Plainsong’. “In the briefcase battle, we knew we wanted to have an iPhone joke,” Reed says. “We had all these different versions of jokes, like, Yellow Jacket saying, ‘You’re going to end up dead!’ and then you’d hear ‘Searching for the nearest Panera Bread.’ There were some funny jokes and some not-so-funny jokes, but, at the end of the day, they were just jokes. What if he activated the music feature? What would it be? I’m a massive Cure fan. We came up with a bunch of things, but we thought we could find a joke for ‘disintegration.’ The first song on Disintegration, which is the second CD I ever bought, was ‘Plainsong’. It’s such an epic song that it transcended the joke — scoring this whole battle in a briefcase. There was this weird, cold wave goth vibe, changing the character of that action scene. You have all these action scenes you want to have a different flavor. Then it became a question of, ‘Will [The Cure frontman] Robert Smith let us use his music?’ He ended up loving it, so he did.”
h/t to Chain of Flowers
