Although I’ve kept up to date with the MCU movies, it’s been a real struggled to recall the throughline for Ant-Man without rewatching Ant-Man and Ant-Man and the Wasp. How did Scott Lang first become Ant-Man again? And Walter Goggins was in the second movie, right? What did he do? Without ever reaching great heights, these movies are still fun – I actually liked the first Ant-Man slightly more in cinemas, but put Ant-Man and the Wasp a fraction ahead on the rewatch. But I think the last two years have established that it’s the last movie of the calendar year that Marvel believes in most (2021: Spider-Man: No Way Home. 2022: Black Panther: Wakanda Forever), and since Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania is the first of three to come from Marvel this year… could be a mixed bag.
Scott Lang is a hero! Where Ant-Man’s last solo adventure saw him navigating house arrest, the citizens of the world now know who he is and celebrate his blip-revoking achievements with the Avengers in ‘Endgame 🤩 Scott (Paul Rudd) is on a triumphant book tour, while his now teenage daughter Cassie (Kathryn Newton) still has some fight in her, and wonders if her father remembers to stand up for the little guy as well. Cassie has also been working with Hope Van Dyne (Evangeline Lilly) and Hank Pym (Michael Douglas) on quantum mechanics, building a machine that can send out and retrieve information from the Quantum Realm. Last to hear this news, a quiet Janet Van Dyne (Michelle Pfeiffer) suddenly urgers Cassie to turn off the device, but it’s too late – our crew are sucked into the Quantum Realm to a surprising and unexpected ongoing war.
I’m not even sure if I hate the premise for this one, but there’s an accumulation of questionable details that crumble this movie like a Scott-Lang stack in a probability storm. I’m betting it took me longer than most to turn against Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, but it happened, around the time Janet is explaining how she first met Kang (Jonathan Majors). We were originally sold that Hank Pym believed people lost their minds without time and space in the Quantum Realm, which has clearly turned out to be untrue – not only was Janet perfectly cognitive in the Quantum Realm, but she had a functional suit and those enlarging throwing discs, which is all Scott needed in the first movie to figure out how to get home in five minutes. It seems trying to get back to her family was merely a side-hustle for Janet, and when Kang came along, he brought bigger fish to fry. But the bigger problem is this; if Janet deemed the Quantum Realm too dangerous to explore, then how did she allow Scott to reinter it right before the Thanos snap? PLOT HOLE – we’ve found a big old fat plot hole, people.
But wait, let’s stop, and reflect quickly on the few things I did like about this new movie. I like that Janet, and Loki, are the first to have experience with Kang – as more obscure characters, it ups their relevance leading into Kang becoming the next big baddie of the MCU. It’s similar to me to how Thanos was once this looming alien might, but the Guardians of the Galaxy informed us that he was also Gamora’s father, and a bastard war monger in the eyes of most in the universe, including Drax. I love that Kang was banished to the Quantum Realm – it seems a solid place to imprison him as any, and although I’m not an avid comic reader, I like the idea of the Secret Wars. I can even accept that there are sentient beings in the Quantum Realm, and that Cassie is another technological MCU super genius if the movie needs me to, but I draw the line at there being so many human-faced creatures down in the Quantum Realm without explanation, beyond just saving money in the costume department. The MCU’s landscape has expanded very rapidly, and the Quantum Realm was an established region yet to be fully explored, but now that it has been conquered, it feels very generic and massively underdeveloped, compared to what we’ve become accustomed to with other places in the MCU. It feels like Marvel forgot to put in the energy making this a fully-fledged world, in lieu of it perhaps being a steppingstone to a bigger event, and it probably goes to further compliment Ryan Coogler and the team behind Black Panther: Wakanda Forever for making the Talokan peoples stand out so wonderfully. This movie seemingly raided the Disney Star Wars wing for its unused wardrobe and basic plot ideas anyway – well, maybe except for broccoli man 😂 – but I think the world-building demanded some tighter rationality. That is, except for the drinking goo, that helped creatures understand each other; I liked that. The opening five minutes played to ‘Welcome Back’ by John Sebastian, was also classic Paul-Rudd-fun.
Now to the roast, and this movie has a Suicide Squad problem, where the main villain is much too powerful for the heroes; and since the villain loses, it makes him look like a punch-ass bitch. I might be the first to say it, but I don’t like what Jonathan Majors is bringing to the MCU thus far – he hasn’t hooked me in, and Marvel have gone all-in on him as their next big ultimate, who also comes in multiple forms. What it is about Kang that I don’t like? He seemed perfectly frustrated, and spacy having been to so many timelines, but he didn’t exude a focused intent to make me love him or hate him yet. In Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, it could be a fault of the writing, and Kang will be given more floor to build, but maybe I should watch Lovecraft Country in the meantime in the hopes of latching onto something great Majors does well.
The emotionality of this movie always fell flat too. I’m disappointed for the previous actresses who have been replaced by Kathryn Newton, but what’s most annoying about Cassie’s larger role is that the Wasp gets pushed a little towards the background, when she’s hardly been given her opportunity to shine as it is ☹ I don’t know why Bill Murray is in this picture, as an extremely cheap knock-off of Jeff Goldblum’s Grand Master, who offers next to nothing, and appears in only one scene! Then there’s also teeny tiny details that took me out of it – Bill Murray baulks at the word ‘human’, but then uses the word ‘man’ so casually in the next sentence. Cassie shrinks a guard down and then kicks him across the room, which shouldn’t be able to work since Pym particles shrink a person’s density with them too, which is why Ant-Man is able to get so much force in his hits, right?
Which brings me to M.O.D.O.K (Corey Stoll), and let’s go right to him telling Scott he was always like a brother to him, making me wonder if director Peyton Reed had even seen his own movies. Sure, it was a joke, but it was a so very poorly placed punchline considering Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania was already swirling around and changing so much of its original parameters anyway – it wouldn’t have surprised me if the movie had expected us to take M.O.D.O.K’s closing sentiments seriously as well. I don’t know who rewatched Ant-Man and thought Yellowjacket needed a redemption arc – the people behind the scenes may like Corey Stoll but I can’t forget that Darren Cross was a straight-up murderer! Remember when Trevor Slattery got an awesome reinvention in Shang Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings? Yeah, this wasn’t it. This movie makes a mockery of M.O.D.O.K, whom I’ve never come in contact with before, but I’ve been under the impression that he’s a menacing villain – he sure seemed like he could’ve been. I suppose having Cross return as Kang’s minion could have worked – perhaps Kang manipulated Cross to use the Yellowjacket to retrieve the power core when he first came to the Quantum Zone. But it went horribly wrong, leaving Cross as a mangled body that Kang used to power the robotic M.O.D.O.K, subservient to him like the Mountain in Game of Thrones – this would’ve been somewhat tragic, and gone to show how resourcefully callous Kang was capable of being. If the movie wanted Darren Cross back because he was the first villain Cassie ever fought, he still needed to have paid for his sins, I think.
Mostly, the movie just reminded me of Terminator: Dark Fate, where I held a slightly controversial take back in the day in stating that as a fan-fictional add-on to what is ultimately a cooked franchise, I enjoyed it. In that vein, I can even dismiss the final scenes with Hank Pym commanding an army of giant ants, although the plot explanation was completely silly and contrived – if this is to be the last time we ever see of Hank Pym, then he exits in his own glory. But the problem is that the MCU still considers itself very much alive, building towards the next big thing, so this rapid-fire convenient mess is not good enough. Phase Four might’ve slowed down to establish new characters, and reflect on our favourites in the aftermath of ‘Endgame, but this was supposed to be the beginning of Marvel ramping up again, and it’s not exactly captivating stuff. I’m not offended by Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, but it must sit in with the worst for the MCU, and not long after Thor: Love and Thunder too 😬 For me, this movie was the equivalent of a death by a thousand cuts, where I think most of the problems it brings could’ve been solved by a couple more steady read-throughs and many story edits. There’s also being unhappy with what we got, and disappointed in that there must’ve been a better conclusion to the Ant-Man trilogy out there somewhere. I walked out of the cinema with a mate, and it took us less than five minutes to talk about something else, indicating to me that Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania already feels like a forgettable experience. But since it’s ‘never too late to stop being a dick’, I’ll stop griping now and my negative commentary can melt away…
2.0
P.S. Pour one out for Judy Greer, Bobby Cannavale, T.I., David Dastmalchian, and Michael Peña, who do not return as their established characters. Although there was no place for you guys in Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, your contributions to the series must not go unnoticed. Dastmalchian does actually return as the voice of the blob who loves holes… but who cares 😕
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