REVIEW Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania
Welcome to Season 5 Episode 1 of the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
By and large, I have greatly enjoyed the MCU. And I do genuinely think some of its output has been excellent. I’ve spent the last 15 years growing up with this series. But 31 films in, and things are starting to really creak. I don’t think Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania marks the beginning of this downward spiral. Things started sliding downwards after Avengers: Endgame. Each subsequent film or show has had some obvious cracks. As if the weight of their own universe has finally caught up with them, and is threatening to crush it all into oblivion…
Scott Lang’s (Paul Rudd) first line in Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania is: “My life doesn’t really make sense.” An almost prophetic promise for the audience of what is about to come.
We begin with Scott’s life going pretty great; people on the street love him, he’s published a book, he can finally spend time with his daughter Cassie (Kathryn Newton), and he’s no longer on the run or being attacked by aliens.
Things quickly go sideways when Scott gets a call from the local county jail. Cassie’s been arrested for participating in a peaceful protest against the police, who – the night prior – had driven out a group of homeless people from their makeshift camp. Cassie mentions getting tear-gassed by the police.
She talks angrily about how the police are treating these people who lost everything due to no fault of their own. She reminds her dad of his roots; being the people’s hero who stood up to big business for the sake of the working class. Maybe it’s time for Scott to be a hero to the people again, to help clean up the mess his friends (The Avengers) are at least partly responsible for.
Anyway, three minutes later that’s all left behind and we’re in the Quantum Realm – where the bulk of the movie takes place. This is, regrettably, where the movie properly kicks off. Our cast of heroes have been sucked into the Quantum Realm and entered a universe ruled by Kang (Johnathan Majors).
Often the criticism of earlier Marvel films revolved around a solid movie having a lackluster villain. Quantumania has the opposite issue. Majors is a fantastic actor, who brings a lot to Kang. In the comics, Kang was always more of a cool piece of art than any sort of character. His performance as Kang gives the movie a pulse, he adds a lot of intensity and gravitas to his exposition-heavy dialogue.
Outside of Kang, we have Hank (Michael Douglas), Hope/The Wasp (Evangeline Lilly), and Janet (Michelle Pfieffer) who navigate the movie's B plot. Sadly the B plot of the film is less plot and more Pfieffer explaining who Kang is, how the world works, and what she had been up to while trapped in the Quantum Realm. Lilly, in particular, is wasted. She shares the film’s title but is totally sidelined through much of the action, and more importantly, the emotion of the film.
Douglas appears to be fully over his time in the MCU. His performance is completely phoned in. It’s not awful… he’s such a talented actor that even his C-game is better than most actors’ A-game. I will say, however, that he really makes a meal out of saying the word “ants”. He gets to say it with such frequency that I wondered if his character was even aware of what was going on – or if he was just constantly thinking about his ants.
The issue here isn’t necessarily what the movie is trying to do. It tries to create a parallel for what Cassie was fighting for at the beginning. But it’s too caught up with balancing all the other plot lines to commit to the idea beyond a surface-level acknowledgment. Along with its convoluted plot, the supporting cast outside of our returning characters, and Majors, is totally wasted. The ensemble is designed to add some vibrancy and grounding to the film, and yet they serve no other purpose except to tell Scott and Cassie the same information Janet is telling Hope and Hank.
The film is also stiflingly dour. The prior Ant-Man films had a real streak of levity in them, which combined well with an earnest sensibility captured in Rudd’s performance. This isn’t to say there are no jokes, but they are scattered and placed in between such self-seriousness that they seldom land. Rudd’s natural charm and ability carry a lot of the film; he is an engaging actor, but much like Majors, I wish he had something real to hold onto.
On the topic of real things, I truly wish the visuals of the film had any sense of reality to them. The Quantum Realm should be this beautiful bright place, filled with vivid colours and designs. The movie, however, looks so muddy and lifeless. The opening scene is so underlit it’s honestly hard to parse any details that could be there. Recent MCU movies have all suffered from this, but Quantumania basing itself in a world of CGI backdrops makes it especially egregious. Not quite Thor Love and Thunder levels, but not exactly hitting the high watermarks of cinematopgrapher Bill Pope’s previous work e.g. The Matrix.
This lack of grounding also affects the powers we see on display. Part of the joy of the previous Ant-Man films was seeing Scott shrink and have to dodge a giant penny or grow to a size where a boat fits in his hand. Yet the Quantum Realm lacks any sort of real scale, at times I couldn’t tell what size our titular heroes were meant to be unless they explicitly said it.
Quantumania really only sparks into life during the all-too-brief moments of levity or in watching Majors really chew the scenery. Both Krylar (Bill Murray) and Quaz (William Jackson Harper) provide a lot of amusement. Krylar is a Bill Murray type who just Bill Murray’s it up and Quaz is a mind reader whose sick of reading people’s minds. They’re a highlight, but both get maybe four minutes of screen time (combined) before we go back to the “serious stakes” at hand. Which we are told at length, many times, by many characters, are very serious stakes. Super serious, trust us. It’s, like, really super important and serious. Yet, it simply isn’t! There is no real peril! Because no real tension can build! We never get a chance to feel what could be lost.
So, Phase 5 of the MCU begins, but I can’t help feeling disheartened. Quantumania plays like an episode of TV, mid-way through a season. It has no real beginning and no real ending. The characters remain emotionally static, and the audience doesn’t get to see any real change. This movie’s sole purpose seems to be setting up Kang, who we were already introduced to in Loki, and who will presumably appear in the forthcoming Avengers: The Kang Dynasty. Yet Kang’s nature as a character means he will forever be a new varient, a new setup, a new Avenger to fight. There seems to be no end in sight; just a perpetual plot machine, chugging along, pushing aside the characters who we came to see.
My first thought walking out of Quantumania was: what if we’d been given the movie those opening six minutes had hinted at? Maybe I would’ve still been disappointed, but at least I would’ve witnessed Marvel taking a risk. Alas, instead we get a film designed to remind you to see the next one. Anyway, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol.3 is out on May 5th, 2023.
Cool review
maybe the true phase 5 was the friends we made along the way