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.
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A nice domestic moment.
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.
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Obligatory not in Kansas anymore.
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.
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This is actually an improvement. The theatrical
version looked like his face was being projected on
a screen.
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.
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I will give it to Kang, he's intimidating as hell.
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.
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Her name has never been accurate.
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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Twitter: @BasicsSuperhero
