ANT-MAN AND THE WASP: QUANTUMANIA - A Review

Does this look like anything to you?

 Rating: ⭐⭐⭐

"People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel."

-Maya Angelou

My friend Adam has been quoting the great Maya Angelou every chance he gets for as long as I can remember. Which, admittedly, isn't very long. Now, I may have immediately complicated my use of the quote by recounting two people who said it while being unable to recount how it made me feel, but that's not important right now. We're here to talk about how the MCU all blends together these days and its diminishing emotional returns, which is what made me think of Ms. Angelou's words in the first place. It's a fine quote, and it applies to Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania. I had a good time, but also can't recall all that much of it just three days later. Is that enough to recommend it? The answer is a resounding "...Probably!" followed by an enthusiastic shrug emoji.

But there's a long way to go to reconcile another middling take from this writer. (I promise to someday love or hate something I pick for the weekly review. If I'd started this blog a week earlier a critical bouquet of roses would have been thrown to M3GAN, my precious/murderous robot daughter. Alas, I hesitated.) The fundamental flaw with the movie is that it breaks from convention. Ant-Man is, against all odds, the most grounded Avenger. His movies might as well be a sitcom. Scott Lang was a down-on-his-luck divorcee who got a second chance, and now he's trying to balance work and being a dad. Work just happens to be changing size and commanding armies of ants. It's set in San Francisco, has a stacked ensemble, and at the end of the day, no matter what they go through, everyone is still friends. Taking Ant-Man out of the real(-ish) world works when he's in someone else's movie. Getting pulled into Captain America's airport brawl? Fine! Inspiring Tony Stark to invent time travel? Cool! But leaving half your cast behind to have a green screen adventure in the dark? Not ideal.

Ant-Man's third solo outing has a pleasant enough start. Lang (Paul Rudd) is living his best post-Endgame life: doing book readings for his terrible memoir, having no chemistry with Hope Van Dyne (Evangeline Lilly), a.k.a. The Wasp, and routinely bailing his protester daughter Cassie (Kathryn Newton) out of jail. But Cassie has been building a fancy microscope to peer down into the Quantum Realm (a subatomic purgatory that you enter if you shrink too small in these movies) with the help of Hank Pym (Michael Douglas). Michelle Pfeiffer's Janet van Dyne (the original Wasp, mother to Hope) is pissed when this device is revealed, but before she can convince them not to use it, the device implodes and all five of the characters mentioned here are sucked into the Quantum Realm.

Luckily, everyone has a super suit on them at all times, because things do not go well AT ALL. Turns out the Quantum Realm is a Star Wars starter pack, populated by hungry monsters and a modest turf war between a robot empire and a ragtag group of humanoid rebels. Janet never bothered telling anyone this after spending 30 years down there, because... well, you'll just have to see it. (She was probably just embarrassed because she spent a lot of that time with Bill Murray, and he's been pseudo-cancelled, but she insists it's this other thing.) At this point everything becomes running and lasers, while the audience squints through the chaos, waiting for callbacks (there's a good one!) and the emergence of Kang (Jonathan Majors), the MCU's new big bad.

The Quantum Realm itself is the problem. Visually, it's an absolute nightmare. Pray your theater has changed their bulbs recently, because the Quantum Realm is dark. Sure, makes sense for the omnipresent pocket dimension all around us to have some lighting issues, but this is soft science fiction, baby! Light it normally and toss a reddish filter over everything and we'll buy it. It must have been a rushed production, because cinematographer Bill Pope has done vibrant work with the Wachowskis, Edgar Wright and Sam Raimi. Instead, the QR is a drab, muddy, uninspiring place that I'm already sick of typing out. Its inhabitants feel like cast-offs from the bar scene of A New Hope (or the casino scene from The Last Jedi), and most fade into the gloomy background. The ones that don't, however, lead us towards the aspects of the movie that work.

The supporting cast of the first two films are missed. Judy Greer, Bobby Cannavale, Michael Freaking Peña and his crew (who deserve their own Disney+ series) are nowhere to be seen. I don't know why so much talent was sidelined, so let's just focus on their replacements. For fans of The Good Place, there's a telepath character played by William Jackson Harper. His powers provide both a convenient acceleration to trust and some laughs at his misunderstanding of Earth culture. There's also a hunky lightbulb whose name I didn't catch, a freedom fighter played by Katy O'Brien who feels like an important figure in a niche series I've never read, and a slime creature named Veb (voiced by David Dastmalchian, previously a human in this series) who is obsessed with human orifices and whom you can drink to gain understanding of all language... Neat! None of these characters get enough screen time to really develop, but screenwriter Jeff Loveless (who formerly wrote for Rick and Morty and Miracle Workers) keeps things snappy, so the emptiness is at least filled with plenty of chuckles. The plot was surely written by committee, but the humor feels singular. The enthusiastic blob is an appetizer for a later character whose presence elicits a mix of shock and guffaw every time he appears. It's the kind of bold swing this studio rarely takes anymore, a warped and radiant beam that penetrates the darkness. Chase that vibe, Kevin!

Eventually Quantumania gets around to Kang. Majors brings gravitas to everything, even a multiversal madman in a dorky blue visor. Not many actors could pull that off. This iteration is more dour than the one we met in Loki, an odd fit for this goofy subspace opera. Feels like the versions should have swapped stories, but the character continues to intrigue, even if I'm not sure a bottomless pit villain will work across the overarching storyline of Phase 5. Does an Ant-Man film need a Thanos-level stoic sociopath? No. But with the Guardians of the Galaxy seemingly on their way out, Thor and Ant-Man are in clear competition for their job, and neither is really qualified. They were good at what they were doing, but Marvel is going through its Peter Principle phase, so here we are. Productivity is up, but the quality of the product is faltering.

Even with the radical plot turn Quantumania takes, the films feel united enough. This is probably thanks to director Peyton Reed's continued involvement. I hope he sticks around and gets back to the core tenants of the franchise. Everything that carries over from the first two still works (our titular heroes, the ants, and some very low stakes), there's just not enough of it. The scale of its sci-fi odyssey can't match the thrills of Fantastic Voyage or Innerspace, because the entirety of the Quantum Realm seems to only be about as large as the average middle school. And there's a reason another Disney property about dramatic size changes, Honey, I Shrunk the Kids doesn't explore the existential. If Wayne Szalinski ever blasted his kids into an adjacent hell dimension, responses would be comparably lukewarm. Some properties, especially the lighter ones, are best when sticking to the familiar. It's fun to see the Brady Bunch go to Hawaii, but that's not why people were tuning in. Allow Ant-Man some consistency, please.

Maybe it wouldn't be the worst idea to send Ant-Man to Honolulu, though. Shenanigans would be just as good, and we'd probably be able to see what was happening. Win win!