Review: Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania

 Into the tiniest of spaces.

Okay, another movie a long time coming. It’s unfortunate that the delay was due in no small part to the… unsavory reveal that Jonathan Majors plays barely controlled sociopaths is due to him actually being one. I’m not qualified to discuss how often Hollywood seems to rise and protect extremely dangerous individuals like this, but yeah, I’m seeing a trend. Enough heavy stuff let’s talk about something fun. Let’s talk, Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania.

 

When we last saw Ant-Man and the Wasp, they were having a moment with Scott’s daughter Cassie. They were trying to make up for the five years lost with Scott in the Quantum Realm and the Pym/Van Dynes being dust. It was a nice bit of relaxation for them after battling with the forces of Thanos.

 

The movie begins with a flashback to the original Wasps, Jan van Dyne while she was stranded in the Quantum realm, an extra dimensional space that can be reached by shrinking down beyond subatomic size. She sees something fall into the realm and crash nearby. She runs out to investigate it, finding a crashed ship. She’s immediately attacked by some Quantum realm monsters, one she kills herself, but the second is taken out by Kang, who had pulled himself from the wreck of his ship. He asks what this place is.

 

We jump out to San Francisco and a reading from Scott Lang’s book “Look Out For The Little Guy,” he seemed to have moved up in the world since fighting the Infinity War. He’s a local celebrity, getting lots of free food and random “thank you’s!” for his part saving the world. He’s still with Hope van Dyne, whom has taken over her parent’s company, rebranded it as Pym Van Dyne and is using her power and resources to try to help the world. So, in short, things are good for them. That is until its revealed that Cassie has gotten into her teen vigilante phase. She calls her Dad to bail her out of jail. She’s apparently used Pym particles to shrink a cop car during a raid on an illegal homeless camp. Oh my.

 

On the drive home, Scott tries to not be a disciplinarian parent when he REALLY needs to be, trying to tell Cassie to not do stuff like shrinking cop cars while trying to act like it’s her decision to make. It’s revealed that Cassie has a size changing suit, and she makes rather backhanded comment about being able to look after herself after all that. They try to change the subject and turn on the radio, only for it to be revealed that Scott listens to his own audiobook. Eyeroll.

 

They all arrive that the Pym’s house, where they have dinner. Hank shows off how much he loves using Pym particles by supersizing a personal pizza with them. Damn. Hank makes an offhand comment about if Cassie made any new friends in jail this time, inadvertently informing Scott she’s been arrested before. Cassie says that she didn’t want to tell him because he’d be like this, and Hank mentions he’d break her out with ants. Scott tries to talk to Cassie about her feelings of wanting to help people, with Cassie again making a judgey comment about how at least she’s still trying. Scott is clearly hurt by the implication that he’s ‘not being heroic’ anymore, helped along by his life-partner and her parents teasing him about saving the world and writing a book. Cassie mentions that they’re “working on something,” Hank, Hope and Cassie that is, and when pressed says they just need to show him.

 

They all go down to Hank’s lab, where we first see a hyperintelligent ant colony building a super society. He’s pulled away by Cassie talking about having read Hank’s journals while everyone was gone and learning about the Quantum realm. With the help of Hank and Hope when they got back, Cassie made subatomic ‘Hubble telescope’ in the basement while everyone was gone. Jan’s back is clearly up at why she wasn’t consulted about this, but the other Pym’s claim they tried to talk to her but she never wanted to talk about it. Things come to a head when Cassie reveals she’s sending a signal down into the Quantum Realm. Jan freaks out, demanding that they shut it down and violently pulls the plug on the device. Before she can explain why she did it, a blue sphere comes out of the device. It blasts them back and then starts sucking things into the Quantum Realm. Scott is the last one pulled in along with Hank’s super ants. Hope suits up and catches her parents before crashing into a part of the Quantum Realm, Scott doing the same to save Cassie.

 

With the Pym’s, Hope wakes up in a sort of fungal forest, finding Hank a moment later. He’s clearly confused by what they see here, as it’s nothing like the part of the Quantum Realm he saw when they saved Jan. They see something flying in and scanning the forest, but Jan grabs them and shoves them out of sight of the scanner. She says they need to find Scott and Cassie and get out of there.

 

Scott tries to get in contact with the Pyms and is getting nothing. He’s clearly freaking out but trying to seem calm. Mere moments after repeatedly saying they’ll be okay, they’re attacked by a carnivorous plasma ball and then an ameba the size of a Sandworm. Scott gets rid of the Plasma ball, but the Lang’s are saved by the Ameba from a group of Quantum People. One of which has a cannon for a head.

 

Back with the Pym’s, Jan repeats her mantra for this movie “We’ll talk later” about the Quantum Realm. Hank notes that he’d studied the Quantum Realm for years searching for Jan and wonders why it didn’t look like this to him before. Jan reveals that he simply could get good enough view from outside. He claims that there are worlds within worlds, a secret universe in the Quantum realm. 

 

We jump back over to Scott and Cassie being captured by the Quantum People. Scott is clearly freaking out, but no more so then when Cassie, with obvious jelly on her face, tells him to “Drink the ooze.”

 

The Pyms meet with a caravan of some sort. They get encircled by these Quantum people, Jan going to confront them. She fights with the leader, slicing off his arm and stabbing him, only for the creature to regenerate and them to laugh about the whole thing. He summons a giant beast for them to fly on. Jan says they need to look for an old friend of hers that should know where Scott and Cassie are.

 

Back at the camp, Scott is force fed the ooze. It’s revealed that the ooze is from an organism called Bev, and that the ooze seems to work as an auto translate feature. One of the leaders of the camp, Quaz the telepath, walks up. There’s a joke that he wishes he couldn’t read minds because everyone is disgusting. The Quantum people wonder what they should do with them. They try to explain that they’re from another universe, or whatever. Quaz confirms it, though he’s clearly confused by this. A woman comes down saying that it doesn’t matter what they say, as they’re from a different world like “Him” and he will seek them out. When asked who she means, she simply says “The Conqueror.”

 

The Pym’s fly into a space port. Hank is flabbergasted by the idea of a subatomic universe. His musings on evolution and humanities’ place in the universe are interrupted by a robots with glowing heads abusing locals, Jan saying to keep his head down and ignore it. She leads them to a secret bar area where a bunch of organisms have gathered. She orders the ooze for everyone, letting them get the auto translate feature. Jan goes off, saying to a creature that she’s here to see Crylock.  Jan grabs them just after a creature with a broccoli head hits on Jan. As they walk over, Hank gets some kind of interference on his hearing aid. Jan explains that she was a “freedom fighter” with Crylock and he should be able to help. “Lord” Cryler, who is revealed to be Bill Murry, arrives and is very Bill Murry. He reveals to the Pyms that Jan spoke of them often before getting down to business. Before they can talk about what they need, Cryler suggests getting food.

 

At the camp, Quaz reveals that the Lang’s know nothing, and the leader woman says to get rid of them. Scott tries to get their help to get them home, but they aren’t interested. They’re busy dealing with the Conqueror, who burned their homes and built his citadel in the ashes. Scott really wants to get Cassie out of there, but Cassie wants to stay and fight. She’s again, incredibly judgy of her father’s choices, saying that just because it’s not happening to him doesn’t mean it’s not happening. Scott takes the comments, saying that they need to find Jan and get out of here. The warrior woman reacts to the name, saying that Jan shouldn’t be there.

 

Cryler jaws with the Pyms for a few minutes before it’s revealed that he’s now working for the Conqueror. As if the “freedom fighter is now a lord” thing wasn’t a huge tip off. Some of Kang’s drones arrive, Cryler holding them off so that everyone can talk. He reveals that Kang wants to talk to her, and their other friends. Unfortunately, while Cryler came to speak to Jan, Kang has dispatched the “Hunter” to find the Langs. A Mechanized Organism Designed Only for Killing. Oh no. Cryler says he doesn’t know where they are but they’re probably dead. Cryler tells Jan to just give Kang what he wants, and Jan laments her friend becoming ‘this.’ The Pyms spring a trap, Hope blasting guards about with her powers and her parents’ getting weapons. They steal Cryler’s ship and fly off.

 

The camp begins to disperse, the leader lady wanting the Langs to be taken as far from them as possible… just before Kang’s ships fly in and a raid begins. The resistance people scramble to get away while Scott and Cassie run around in the chaos. Scott is forced to grow to save them from being hit by a crashing ship. They see the warrior lady get captured by Kang’s guards, Cassie running in to save her. Scott follows her and tries to give her a crash course on with size changing powers. Quaz’s telepathy goes off and he tells the warrior lady, Centoro they need to leave. Why? The hunter has arrived. It lays waste to the remaining rebel forces before cornering Scott and Cassie. The hunter is revealed to be Darren Cross, who had been sent to the Quantum realm in the first movie and rebuilt into MODOK. He claims that Scott can’t run from him, or his master. Kang is the future, the past and now all he needs is Scott.

 

On the Pym’s ship, Jan still dodges around telling her family anything.

 

We move to the Citadel. MODOK arrives to gloat. We get a few snippets of what happened to him via flashback as he talks about being abandoned in the Quantum realm to die. It looks like that he crashed into the realm after having shrunken unevenly. After that, Kang found him, fitted him in his flying chair thing and used MODOK to help him build his new World. MODOK is clearly trying to make his life sound less horrible than it is.

 

Back on the ship, Jan spills the beans. She met Kang after his ship had crashed. He claimed to be a traveler who crashed when his ship malfunctioned. The Ship can travel across time and through dimensions, Kang promising her it can take them anywhere if they can get it going. They work together to attempt to reenergize his ship’s energy core, but they spend years hitting dead ends. But, Jan admits it was nice to have someone to talk to after years of being alone. Kang tells her that he can give her more time, more time with Hope once they escape. He claims time is a cage and that it’s only when one is broken free of it that you see how small it is. They were finally able to get the ship recharged. They prepare to leave, but the ship was connected to Kang’s mind and when they powered it on, she saw what he really was. She saw the destruction he wrought over multiple realities. It’s at that point where she learns that he didn’t “crash” but was exiled to the Quantum Realm. She didn’t know by whom, but that was clear. Kang offers to take her to Hope, and when Jan asks what he’ll do after that, he just says “win.” He uses his ship to outfit him in his armor. He promises to use his ship to rewrite history for her so that she never left Hope, and even promises he’ll leave that timeline alone. Not wanting to unleash Kang, Jan used her own Wasp powers to shrink down and attempt to steal the power source for his ship.  Kang stops her from flying off, but Jan is able to thwart him by using some size changing charges to make the sphere into a giant damn mountain. So, while Kang was trapped, access to his suit made him more powerful and he used his power to turn his cage into his empire. Jan claims they fought for years before they pulled her out of the Quantum Realm. They know that he’s after his ship’s core and that he needs Pym particles to get it.

 

In the prison, Kang arrives. Scott tries to use his Avenger’s cred to just get Kang to let them go, but Kang admits he doesn’t remember Scott, asking if he’d killed him before. MODOK tries to get a word in, but Kang tortures him, telling his minion to not speak in his presence. Kang offers Scott a deal, get him the power core and free him, and they get to live. He claims that he’s the only one who can stop what’s to come, the ending that will destroy them all. The ending brought about by all of his Variants. When Scott still refuses to deal, Kang pulls him into the force field to torture him. He then tells Scott what is going to happen, he’ll get Kang the orb or he’ll kill Cassie in front of him and replay it in front of him until he begs for death. Scott buckles when Kang starts torturing Cassie, Kang releasing him and telling the “Ant-Man” that he’s out of his league. He opens a portal to the power core and users Scott, Cassie and MODOK through it.

 

The Pyms arrive on the outskirts of the core as Scott is sent in to shrink the core back to size. Cassie breaks free of her guards to hug Scott and tells him it’s all her fault. Scott tells her that his whole life happened because of screw ups and not to bat herself up about it. he leaps into the core. What follows is a trippy as hell scene where basically all possible versions of Scott start appearing and arguing with him about how to handle the situation. Hundreds of Scotts form, including one that’s in the Baskin Robbins outfit for some reason. All these Paul Rudds screaming they’re real just takes me back to Jericho the imaginary horse from that episode of Bob’s Burgers.

 

Hope gets a reading on Scott and dives in to help him. All the Scotts start running around, trying to figure out how to get to the core as some of them start dying. The original Scott gets buried by his possibilities, until Cassie begs him to just come back one more time. The Ant-Men all help original Scott raise up to the core and get one of the shrinking devices onto it. Unfortunately, it shorts out and burns. The tower of Ant-Men fall, almost taking Scott with them, but he’s grabbed by Hope at the last second. All the possibilities merge at this point, and they fire more rings to shrink the core back down to size. They grab the sphere as Hope’s parents’ land. Jan tries to convince him to run with the core, but Kang arrives while they’re arguing. Back on the ship, MODOK runs into Hank and MODOK tries to get payback for being abandoned. Kang steals the orb telekinetically from Scott and knock him and Wasp aside with at flick of his wrist when they try to stop him. MODOK cripples Hank’s ship and causes it to crash. Kang grabs Jan, saying she left him right there to die, so they can see how her family does. In the wreckage of the ship, a giant Ant finds Hank.

 

In his throne room, Kang brings Jan to him and asks her what she saw when she saw into his mind. She tells him that she saw a monster that thinks he’s a God. He admits that him and his variants were the ones that continually broke creation. He saw that inevitably they’d destroy everything, and that he forced his other selves into line. Before they banished him. She claims it’s not about saving anyone but about getting revenge on those who wronged him. And he just says that he wished that killing trillions to get his way mattered. Meanwhile, Cassie frees herself and slips away from her guards.

 

At the crash site, Hank finds Scott and Hope with his giant Ants. He reveals his super ants landed in another part of the Quantum Realm and spent the day advancing thousands of years. The ants are repairing his ship, and the team try to think of a plan.

 

Cassie goes to Centoro and tries to free her to get backup. Guards arrive to stop her, but Cassie has figured out the jump and tap of Ant-person fighting, slamming the face of a guard into the cell and freeing Centoro.

 

Kang reveals to Jan that he’d built an empire down here in her absence and that he plans to take it with him. He plays a broadcast to his minions, promising that today they are going to conquer eternity. He’s cut off by Cassie and Centaro who basically call on everyone who can help to stop Kang.

 

So it’s Ant-Man, the Wasp, another Ant-Man, Cassie, an armada of ants and some rebels vs. Kang the Conqueror. Check out the movie to see how they do.

 

…

 

In an after credits scene, it’s revealed that the Grand Council of Kangs, the giant collective of Kang Variants, are aware of the Exiled One’s death and are planning on moving to now that he’s been permanently removed.

 

There’s also a teaser for Loki, Season 2, where Loki and Mobius watch as Victor Timely, one of Kang’s Variants, unveils his time machine and Loki is absolutely terrified.

 

Okay, so good first. The effects of this movie are great. The main issue I had on firsts viewing was MODOK’s unarmored face. It looked like they were just projecting his face onto a space helmet. Like, his face was all there but it was just too… flat to be natural. While I rewatched it, they clearly added additional depth and texture to MODOK’s face to seem more… real. MODOK himself was also fun. I enjoyed that basically everyone refused to call him MODOK when they realized he was Darren. Some folks were disappointed that he was such a comedic character… but he’s literally a giant floating head, you can’t play that straight in a medium outside the comics. Jonathan Majors as Kang is the standout in this film. This is less acting, as we’ve learned and more like him channeling the rage that he’d kept more or less under wraps until recently. He’s vaguely threatening in every scene, and he gives Kang’s insane god complex speeches perfectly. It’s a real shame that he’s apparently a violent abuser.  The final brawl between him and Scott was pretty well done too. I kind of enjoyed the whole undertone of their interactions, where they both know Scott Lang isn’t really a threat to Kang in any way, but he just refuses to get out of Kang’s way, and that is more frustrating than anything else. Honestly a good message for an Ant-Man story.

 

The bad is a combination of being extremely dull and paint by numbers. The resistance that we learn about in this film is generic as hell. They try to act like Centaro and her crew are super relevant to the plot… but they could have been completely wiped from the plot and nothing would change. Just send in more ants and sooner. I honestly don’t know why they didn’t just have Kang be the unopposed Ruler, as the rebels did almost nothing to affect the plot. They’re just kind of there for most of the movie. Aside from giving Scott and Cassie the ability to speak… subatomic and to help with the final push, (something they did badly by the way) they did absolutely nothing. The story seemed to not know what to do with the Pym’s in particular between getting into the Quantum Realm and reuniting with the Langs at the core. That whole bit with Bill Murray was just a solid 10 minutes of nothing really interesting. Hell, they could have just flown that giant manta ray thing to the core and skipped the port all together. The story picks up once Scott and Cassie are captured, but that’s a solid 45 minutes of this movie that just drrraaaaggggsssssss. And… I’m just not a fan of how Cassie especially but the Pyms too, seem to have decided that Scott has stopped being a hero. The man is an Ex-con that spent the last decade jumping from major conflict to prison to major conflict, I can’t fault him for taking some time off to try to enjoy himself after all that. All I’m saying.

 

Also, this isn’t so much a bad… but… uh… Ants are expansionist, relentless and have a very rigid caste system. Leaving a highly advanced Ant civilization in the Quantum Realm feels less like an out-and-out victory and more like a “under new management” moment. All I’m saying.

 

So… this is a very middling Marvel movie to me. The biggest saving grace of it is Jonathan Major’s performance, a performance that is incredibly soured by the reality of the actor. The first and second act really drags despite us jumping into the Quantum Realm almost immediately. The Wasp and her parents were really under utilized and it feels like we traded Scott’s Ex-Con crew in for more support characters but completely uninteresting ones. Scott feels like he’s being judged on all sides for wanting to take a break and enjoy his life a little. And while I love Bill Murray, he was not necessary to this movie at all. Waste of ten minutes. I’d say it’s a lackluster entry into the MCU, but I do know that the next film blows it out of the water. More on that later this week. Have a good night, everyone. 

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