Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania

Peyton Reed’s Ant-Man films have been some­thing of a safe har­bor in the wider Mar­vel Cin­e­mat­ic Uni­verse: charm­ing­ly low-stakes out­ings amid the apoc­a­lyp­tic stakes of the wider fran­chise. Amid their visu­al­ly homog­e­nized peers, their clever sight gags of rapid­ly shift­ing scale and unabashed Sil­ver Age goofi­ness have marked Reed’s two MCU entries as some of the few con­tem­po­rary super­hero films to feel affec­tion­ate rather than self – con­scious about their com­ic-book origins.

But the demands of the Mar­vel machine come for all its prop­er­ties even­tu­al­ly, and it falls to Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quan­tu­ma­nia to offer the first real direc­tion in the MCU’s over­ar­ch­ing nar­ra­tive since Avengers: Endgame. Scott Lang (Paul Rudd), part­ner Hope (Evan­ge­line Lil­ly), and their shared fam­i­ly find them­selves sucked into the sub­atom­ic Quan­tum Realm seen in glimpses in pre­vi­ous install­ments. There, they must con­tend with Kang the Con­queror (Jonathan Majors), a dimen­sion-hop­ping tyrant seek­ing to escape from this sur­re­al prison after being exiled there for his ram­pages across time and space.

Almost imme­di­ate­ly, the movie buck­les under the pres­sure to simul­ta­ne­ous­ly deal with Kang’s threat and estab­lish him for future movies as the offi­cial new Big Bad of the MCU. It doesn’t help that Kang scarce­ly feels dif­fer­ent from Thanos despite Majors’s attempts to add shades of cal­cu­lat­ing omni­science beyond the pre­vi­ous archenemy’s brute force. Kang forces Scott and the rest into a fetch quest to retrieve the means of his escape in a man­ner that recalls much of the Infin­i­ty Stone hunt­ing of the last Avengers movies. 

While the Quan­tum Realm felt strange and unique in ear­li­er, briefer views, here is quick­ly falls in line with much of Marvel’s recent CGI out­put: splashy but non­de­script, all psy­che­del­ic pur­ple clouds and gar­gan­tu­an, bru­tal­ist mil­i­tary build­ings that homog­e­nize every loca­tion in a uni­verse of seem­ing­ly infi­nite pos­si­bil­i­ty. The action is sim­i­lar­ly blown up from the franchise’s erst­while empha­sis on Scott’s quick-tim­ing size changes in one-on-one fights to the kind of over­whelm­ing but inco­her­ent spec­ta­cle that defines near­ly all super­hero movie third acts.

And where the ear­li­er Ant-Man films wrung com­e­dy out of Rudd’s easy­go­ing charm and a rel­a­tive­ly earnest ban­ter com­pared to the irony of oth­er Mar­vel movies, Quan­tu­ma­nia is clear­ly informed by writer Jeff Loveness’s tenure on Rick & Morty. Jokes tend to con­sist of repeat­ing phras­es over and over in the cadence of that show’s delib­er­ate­ly shod­dy impro­vi­sa­tion, and the var­i­ous crea­tures encoun­tered by the heroes are fil­tered through its vul­gar imag­i­na­tion, such as a gelati­nous being who open­ly envies the humans’ orifices.

This tack­i­ness even car­ries over to how the film devel­ops its themes. At the start of the sto­ry, Scott’s daugh­ter, Cassie (Kathryn New­ton), urges her father out of his post-Thanos com­pla­cen­cy that peo­ple still need help in the world. It’s a sim­ple but effec­tive bit of com­ic-book opti­mism. By the end, though, that mes­sage has been cor­rupt­ed into the crud­er, blunter state­ment ​“don’t be a dick” – an odd­ly glib note on which to end a sto­ry about a less­er super­hero learn­ing to recom­mit him­self to the greater good.

Lit­tle White Lies is com­mit­ted to cham­pi­oning great movies and the tal­ent­ed peo­ple who make them.

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