Light spoilers for Ant-man and the Wasp: Quantumania but full spoilers for the rest of the MCU up to that point
I spent much of Marvel’s phase 4 remaining enthused about the MCU as a lot of people – including it seems the majority of critics – turned sour on it. Well the good news is that with the release of Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania and the start of Phase 5, I’m no longer on a lonely island proclaiming that Wakanda Forever was actually the best film of last year. The bad news is that this is because I found Quantumania deeply underwhelming.
In the third Ant Man film, when Scott Lang’s (Paul Rudd) daughter Cassie (Kathryn Newton) creates a probe able to send a signal down to the “quantum realm”, a micro-universe which lies between the cracks in our own, Scott, Cassie and the Pym/Van Dymme family are sucked down into the quantum realm, where they must survive a confrontation with Kang the Conqueror (Jonathan Majors), a variant of the character we met in Loki as He Who Remains, whilst plotting a return to our universe.
I know of very few people who would say the Ant Man films are their favourite part of the MCU. Nonetheless, the previous two entries were able to act as lightweight, entertaining intermissions between more dramatic and important seeming instalments in the saga. Quantumania jettisons this idea. Instead, the third Ant Man film is supposed to launch a new phase of the saga and raise the stakes of MCU’s engagement with the multiverse. This is very much playing to the franchise-within-a-franchise’s weaknesses. Indeed, let me propose three key things that made Ant Mans 1 and 2 enjoyable: 1) Paul Rudd’s natural charm, 2) the trio of loveable ethnic stereotypes played by Michael Peña, T.I. Harris, and David Dastmalchian, and 3) the childish glee of action sequences in which things are shrunk and expanded to be comically out of proportion with what we expect. In Quantumania, these are systematically neutralised by: 1) getting Rudd to mostly do generic leading man stuff, 2) not featuring those characters, and 3) setting almost all the action in a CGI sci-fi world where we have no instinctive sense of what size things are supposed to be.
Indeed, Quantumania extenuates Ant Man’s main weakness relative to the rest of the MCU: its rather bland supporting characters. Anyone you might remember fondly from the previous films gets left in the regular sized universe. Kang aside, the new characters we meet in the Quantum Realm are neither sufficiently distinctive nor given enough screen time to make an impact. That leaves us more focused than ever on the underwhelming Pym/Van Dyme family. Despite the amount of time we’ve now spent with Hank (Michael Douglas) and Hope AKA the Wasp (Evangeline Lilly), they still seem like stock characters. Indeed, despite having been theoretically promoted to co-lead in the previous film, Lily’s Wasp is such an afterthought, that at the very climax of the film her character is jammed into the action in a way that suggests that late in the day someone looked over the script and was like “shite, we really need to give Wasp more to do”. Michelle Pfeiffer gets a larger role on account of having spent the most time in the quantum realm and encountered Kang before. However, that does turn her into something of an exposition device. Nor are her character’s choices psychologically interesting enough to give the story any additional oomph. A lot of narrative real estate is devoted to Scott’s relationship with his daughter. Granted, the previous two films did a lot to set this up and imbue it with emotional stakes. However, given that since then Cassie Lang has been recast not once but twice, the link between that version of the character and the one we see in Quantumania feels rather abstract. We also get the rather cartoonish and faintly cringeworthy reintroduction of a previous MCU antagonist, which mostly just confirms that the actor who plays him/her is the most hard done by performer in the MCU not named Idris Elba.
The glaring exception to all of this is Majors’ Kang. Well, kinda an exception. The film certainly establishes Kang, who appears set to replace Thanos as the MCU’s overarching villain, as a formidable threat. Or maybe Majors, who has Olympic level screen presence, does that all by himself. Either way the film’s finale and the mid-credit scene undo all that and make him seem ridiculous.
Indeed the film consistently undermining the things it gets right becomes something of a theme. Notably, in contrast, to a lot of the MCU of late (including the films but especially the TV series) the CGI looks pretty good. Indeed, the one exception is for the rendering of the aforementioned cartoonish antagonist, which I suspect was done intentionally. This turnaround is important because the story is taking place in an imaginary realm which has to be created digitally. That the vision for quantum realm is ably executed, albeit by visual effects artists apparently once again working under dire condition, is a blessing. However, its conception is fundamentally lacking. For starters, it appears nothing like the quantum realm we saw in the previous films. It is also hard to isolate what about it is supposedly ‘quantum’. Granted Marvel is generally the softest of soft sci-fi. However, even by that standard, seemingly negligible effort has gone into identifying what might make a quantum universe distinct from our own. Consequently, any of the settings we see within the quantum realm could easily feature as a planet the Guardians landed on, without anything seeming off. Furthermore, nothing really marks these different settings out as coherent whole. Thus, the moves between them feel arbitrary. Even the individual ideas we encounter – buildings are alive, travelling about on the backs of giant manta ray like creatures, drinking ooze that acts as a universal translator – feel like something out of a story by Mythic Quest’s C.W. Longbottom. They might seem cool but there’s no apparent logic to them nor do they gel together. This thin worldbuilding would be less of a problem if there were compelling character dynamics to engage the audience instead, but as we’ve already established there aren’t really.
Finally, there is the problem that for what’s supposed to be one of the more lighthearted parts of the MCU it doesn’t seem all that funny. Indeed, the screening I was in there were fewer laughs than when I went to see Wakanda Forever, which lest we forget was mostly about grief.
[Interestingly, this is the third MCU project to be written by a Rick and Morty writer. I’ve not seen the show but my impression of it is that it may not be a great tonal fit for the MCU.]
None of which is to say that it’s not diverting and, in its way, likable. But it’s deeply uninspiring. For my money it’s the weakest MCU film since at least Eternals, possibly since the Dark World. Hopefully, it’s a blip and not a sign of things to come.
Matter Of Facts 