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This question sort of spoils a lot of the movie, so I'm just going to spoiler tag the whole question.

The heist that they plan is well-thought-out, and they try to cover every angle. Dr. Pym is a genius, and Hope has almost limitless access to the facilities, so they do a good job with the planning stage. They need to secure the Yellowjacket suit and formula, as well as destroy any backup data on the research. Part of the plan is to have Hope and Kurt wipe all the data from the servers, which worked. However, the execution of getting the suit gets spoiled at the last second (it is a movie after all). Things kind of go crazy, and Cross gets away with the suit.

During their escape from the building, they pull the fire alarm to get everyone out of the building before charges which the ants set go off. This seems like a bad idea, because it was the big reveal of the tech, so lots of people would have been there, making evacuation difficult. This also seems redundant, because they went through all the trouble and risk of wiping the servers just to have a black hole appear in the middle of the building, literally sucking every piece of it into nothingness.

I've only seen it once, but I don't remember why they set the charges. Honestly it seems like it would have been safer to just go in with the ants to set the charges and pull the fire alarm. The backups and the suit would have been destroyed, and the risk would have been lower. Basically Hope could just walk in, lower the water pressure to allow Scott in, pull the fire alarm, and watch the fireworks. Was there any reason for setting the charges to blow up the building?

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  • Redundancy & contingency planning.
    – gowenfawr
    Commented Jul 21, 2015 at 14:48
  • 3
    Is there even a question here? Is it "Why do Scott, Hank and Hope choose to blow up Cross Technologies building"?
    – Dr R Dizzle
    Commented Jul 21, 2015 at 15:14
  • The question is why go through all the hoops for their "discrete" plan if they are just going to blow it all up anyways. Why not one or the other? It seems like a big risk to try them both because of how many pieces need to fall exactly right to avoid catastrophic failure.
    – Smeghead Sev
    Commented Jul 21, 2015 at 15:42
  • In short: They wanted to make sure they got everything. Couldn't guarantee everything was destroyed without the explosion, but they couldn't guarantee everything they wanted to destroy would be destroyed without first making sure it was in the building. It also would have been nearly impossible to sneak that much C4 in without the use of the ants/Ant Man suit.
    – Dr R Dizzle
    Commented Jul 21, 2015 at 15:49
  • 1
    +1 for generous use of the spoiler tag!
    – Daft
    Commented Jul 21, 2015 at 15:51

1 Answer 1

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The reason that Hank Pym and Hope Van Dyne decided to blow up the Pym Technologies building is simply a matter of ensuring that there was no way that Darren Cross could continue his research on Pym Particles any time soon.

Their plan was to;

  • Use Scott to enter the building unseen. When inside, he would plant the C4 that the ants were carrying before attempting to steal the Yellowjacket suit.
  • Use Hope to wipe the servers clean of any information about Pym Particles. I would assume she was also checking for back ups, including those in cloud storage, which she could then delete.

If the plan only consisted of blowing up the building, they would have been unable to;

  1. Ensure that the Yellowjacket suit was destroyed,
  2. Ensure that the servers were completely wiped,
  3. Ensure that any copies of the research were destroyed.

In short, it's simply a matter of making sure that they had completely eradicated any chance of Darren Cross being able to continue his research in the future.

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1
  • Also, based on this somewhat speculative answer, they probably weren't expecting the building to implode so drastically. So without doing all the other steps, something might have been salvageable from a conventional explosion.
    – Bobson
    Commented Jul 24, 2015 at 17:18

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