Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania gets caught in a sticky MCU trap.
I love all the Multiverse Saga set-up, but had issues with this as a standalone Ant-Man story.
The Short Take:
Even though it’s too big, busy, and tonally dissonant to work as a standalone Ant-Man movie, Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania still serves as successful set-up for Phase 5, as I am now very excited for future storylines involving Kang. The time of Jonathan Majors has begun.
[This review will be SPOILER FREE for the first half, and then will, with plenty of loud warning, switch to spoiler mode. There will also be a spoiler for the Disney+ series Loki in the non-spoiler section. I’ll give an additional warning when we get to that paragraph.]
Image Credit: Entertainment Weekly
The Long Take:
I’m not usually one to complain about MCU movies trying to set up other MCU movies. In fact, that’s what I’ve come to love about this unique franchise. They pulled off what I once thought might be impossible: telling a big, interconnected story across multiple movies. Phase 4, however, has prompted some doubt, especially amongst critics. Whispers that maybe Marvel has lost its touch. I was never on that train because we got so many exciting new characters during the recently completed phase. And while it wasn’t clear where the larger story would go, I was excited by the possibilities.
Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania accomplishes what I think is its primary goal: making me extremely excited for Phase 5 and, more specifically, what Kevin Feige has called The Multiverse Saga. And that is because of a character named Kang the Conquerer and an actor named Jonathan Majors.
When Cassie, Scott Lang’s daughter, demos her new invention, explaining that, with it, they can now study the Quantum Realm remotely by sending a signal down to it, Janet Van Dyne, played by Michelle Pfeiffer, immediately, frantically, says to shut it down. She’s never told her own family about the 30 years she was trapped in the tiny, hidden world, and in doing so has kept a major threat to the universe a secret. That threat is Kang the Conquerer.
This film successfully introduces Kang as essentially the next Thanos. And when I say that, I don’t mean that they are similar characters at all. Kang is a human genius turned multidimensional time traveler, while Thanos is an alien warlord with a twisted surrogate family and a taste for population control. What I mean is that I feel as though Kang could, like Thanos, carry an entire multi-film saga. He is as complex as he is menacing, and, like many of the best Marvel villains before him, starts to make a dangerous amount of sense at times. In a lot of ways Kang reminds me of an evil version of The Doctor from Doctor Who; he seems weary and burdened with how much he has seen across space and time, but is also fueled by scientific curiosity and the power that comes with its yield.
[SPOILER for Loki Season 1 finale incoming. If you haven’t seen it, skip this next paragraph.]
To clarify, Kang the Conquerer, who appears in this movie, Quantumania, is a different version of Kang than He Who Remains, who appears at the end of Loki Season 1. Both are variants of Nathaniel Richards, whose name has not been uttered in the MCU yet, but is Kang’s original name in the comics. And, if you’re wondering, both Greg (@eyeoncanon) and I walked out of the theater (together, for once!) wishing that we had rewatched Loki before seeing this movie. WandaVision was not technically necessary to understand Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness, but it would have enriched your understanding of that story a lot more. I would say that Loki, however, would actively help you understand the storytelling mechanics of the MCU’s multiverse. Plus, I’m more excited about the future of Phase 5 because I have two variants to compare now. He Who Remains seemed mischievous and nihilistic while Kang the Conquerer seems so much more brooding and ruthless. I’m looking forward to seeing how there may be some Kangs who are more villainous and some Kangs with whom Avengers can forge uneasy alliances. More and less bad Kangs who can fight each other and our heroes.
Image Credit: Radio Times
Majors seems to know exactly when to speak softly or look forlorn and when to bring out the wrath fuming inside of his character. During his fight scenes, I was completely convinced that Kang could take on any hero in the MCU. It takes a skilled actor to balance that combination of sympathetically tortured and downright terrifying. Career-wise, Majors is having and will continue to have quite a year. He’s in the Best Actor Oscar conversation for next year after his turn as an amateur bodybuilder in Magazine Dreams, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival. He’s about to co-Star with Michael B. Jordan in Creed III starting March 3, which will likely be a big office hit. Sean Fennessey of The Big Picture Podcast called him the “number one draft pick” of actors right now. I predict that when we look back on the Multiverse Saga, we will point to him as what held it all together. It’s a little tricky to go into more detail as to why I’m so excited for more Kang as a result of this film, but I will circle back to it in the spoiler section.
Amidst all this praise for Majors and this film’s rendering of Kang the Conquerer, I do not want Michelle Pfeiffer to get lost in the conversation. Jonathan Majors as Kang is, by far, the best part of this movie. No doubt. Any scene with him had my attention. But Michelle Pfeiffer is right behind him. I thought she was really bringing her A game, taking advantage of finally having a bigger role in the Ant-Man franchise. She was completely convincing as someone who had become a badass freedom fighter, and I enjoyed how she reacted to secrets getting out or everyone in this world hating or resenting her. Any scene that featured Kang AND Janet captivated me the most. Learning about their history and learning more about Kang through Janet made a lot of sense to me, and, more importantly, gave us a window into the moral conundrums that future heroes will find themselves in when they face Kang.
Image Credit: Looper
Big inhale. For me, all this Kang goodness comes at the expense of this as an individual film. More so than with its predecessor, Wakanda Forever, Quanumania suffers from the burden of having to propel the broader story of the MCU. In the sequel to one of the most successful Marvel movies of all time, Wakanda Forever, the bloated nature of the script stems not from the core story being told, but the seeds for other stories being planted in the margins of that core story. We didn’t need all the Valentina stuff, as much as I love her, and we didn’t need the backdoor pilot for Ironheart. In Quantumania, there aren’t clear subplots that are unnecessary. Rather, the entire story feels more like a means to end, to set up Kang and the Multiverse Saga, rather than a story that does anything for Ant-Man and his family of superheroes. I am a big fan of the previous two Ant-Man films, and appreciate their heist movie touchstones. And I love Paul Rudd’s ne’er-do-well charm as Scott Lang. Quantumania just doesn’t feel like an Ant-Man movie to me.
I can hear the pitch for it in my head and it’s all backwards. Okay, so we have to introduce Kang the Conquerer. The best place to meet him would be in the Quantum Realm. Who’s closest the Quantum Realm? Ant-Man. Read in movie announcer voice: Scott Lang will have to do ONE LAST HEIST and the stakes have never been higher — his daughter or the multiverse? Dun dun dun. See, he’s doing a kind of heist, so it’s still an Ant-Man movie.
That wasn’t enough. Most of what I’ve enjoyed about past Ant-Man movies is largely absent here. I missed Scott’s best friend, Luis. More importantly, the movie doesn’t actually move the needle for Ant-Man’s character at all, and that’s a problem. He doesn’t grow or change as a result of his encounter with Kang, except maybe that he accepts Cassie as a budding superhero? But even that’s more about Scott Lang as a dad than about Ant-Man as an Avenger. Janet has an arc in which she confronts her past and reconciles her two selves. But Ant-Man is the same character, largely intact and unchanged, from the beginning and the end of the film. In fact, the very structure of the film cutely pokes fun at this fact. The same could be said of The Wasp, maybe to a more extreme degree. Her name appears alongside Ant-Man in the title of this film, and yet I only felt as though Quantumania was a film about the pair of them — the Ant-Man and the Wasp — in the last five minutes.
Image Credit: Deadline
I don’t think Ant-Man was the right Avenger through which to introduce Kang. I get that the Quantum Realm is an Ant-Man thing and that it makes sense to meet Kang there from an MCU lore/science sort of perspective. But by plunging Ant-Man into the Quantum Realm and having him be the first Avenger we see go up against The Conquerer, the story gets too serious too quickly, and we lose the humor. There are, I should acknowledge, attempts to infuse some goofiness and punchlines throughout (I’ll get more specific later), but it either didn’t work for me or seemed too cursory.
We do meet a whole new world in the Quantum Realm, with new characters who inhabit it, but the attempt to worldbuild was fairly surface level. These new characters seemed like they had potential, but we never spent enough time with them for me to care about their struggles and root for them in the fight. William Jackson Harper, for example, is delightful as a snarky telepath, but we never learn anything about him, where he’s from, or what his relationship with Kang’s colonization of his home might be. The Quantum Realm had a lot of potential, and I liked that they made it extra weird and wacky, but it ended up being a backdrop because Kang was the main event and isn’t actually from there.
I admit that investing in more worldbuilding and character development would have put the run time over 2 hours. And I appreciated that it was only 2 hours. I didn’t want the film to be longer. I just wanted it to try to do less with the time it had.
I’m running out of non-spoiler commentary at this point, so I’m going to wrap up this section for those of you who have not yet seen the movie. If you, like me, are invested in the MCU in the long term — as I imagine many of my readers are — then Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania is a must-see. But if you were just hoping to see a fun Ant-Man movie on its own, manage your expectations.
[SPOILER WARNING: If you have not seen Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, shut this signal down now before it’s too late!]
Image Credit: Vulture
Quite a big spoiler for this film is that an iconic Marvel villain, M.O.D.O.K. appears — and not in the way I would have expected. The Mechanized Organism Designed Only for Killing turns out to be a mutated Darren Cross, who was the villain from the first Ant-Man film, Yellowjacket. I can see how the jokes surrounding him might have worked for others, and I imagine that if the MODOK-centric humor worked for you, then maybe the movie as a whole works better. The “Darren?” bit spread across multiple characters had real Arrested Development “Her?” vibes.
I, however, cannot abide this version of MODOK, either in general or as a plot device for this movie. Visually speaking, Darren/MODOK made me cringe every single time. His face was spread too wide and looked almost blurry or pixelated. M.O.D.O.K has always been a weird character, and often a loser who provides comic relief, but, to me at least, he still needs to be a vaguely threatening villain hellbent on world domination. The choice to make MODOK and the completely doofy Darren one and the same fails to align with my conception of the character. And while I know we’re headed to multiverse storytelling when another universe may have a M.O.D.O.K. who is not Darren Cross, this still feels like a wasted character debut.
Even if I had been more okay with Darren as MODOK, his subplot in the film to me contributes to the tonal mismatch between the type of story this movie is trying to tell overall and the carefree tone that Ant-Man films past have had. Even when Scott Lang played a pivotal role in the time heist in End Game, it was still funny because he’s very much a B-list Avenger; the humor made sense because his level of importance was unexpected. So to have him face-off alone against the next big MCU villain without that “aww, shucks, me?” feeling seems like a miscalculation.
Image Credit: IGN
I’d even say that the writers of the film knew this might be a problem. The structure of the film is bookended by scenes that feel more like the tone of Ant-Man movies past, as if to try to make it more recognizable as a sequel to the first two films. I found the return to the sunny Ant-Man world to be pretty jarring at the end of Quantumania. It seemed too flippant considering the multiversal stakes established during the run of the film.
In fact, I find that the ending splits the difference between Ant-Man’s happy go-lucky world and the high seriousness of destroying entire universes, to the film’s detriment. It felt like they wanted to make a bold move and have real cost and consequences when dealing with Kang, but then backed off from that at the last minute. Most notably, Ant-Man legitimately looks like he’s going to sacrifice himself to save the rest of his family. They all neatly hop back to our realm and he stays behind to deal with Kang. During the fight, Scott says something to the effect of “I just need both of us to lose,” which pretty heavily implies that he will die or at least face being trapped in the Quantum Realm to protect everyone else from Kang. But then, by the end, the status quo has been restored. Ant-Man is buying birthday cakes of questionable quality from Baskin Robbins.
I’d like to stay positive. When I think about what got me the most audibly excited, I’d actually point to the two end credits scenes — especially the second one. This speaks to, again, how the film works a lot better as a launch pad for Kang than the next chapter in the Ant-Man story. I would call the first one “The Council of Kangs” because it reminds me so much of a Rick and Morty arc in which “our” Rick challenges the authority of the Trans-Dimensional Council of Ricks, a governing body designed to protect Ricks across dimensions. Getting a taste of what it will be like to see Jonathan Majors play so many different versions of Kang, each with a different look or mannerisms, was such a treat. In the short amount of time we see him play opposite himself, I can already tell that he’s up for the challenge (and, maybe more importantly, is going to have a ball doing this).
[Another Loki SPOILER in the next paragraph.]
Seeing Loki and Mobius stealthily scoping out Kang in the audience of a Thomas Edison-esque exhibition (you know Kang would have electrocuted an elephant too) made me gasp out loud. I did not expect Marvel to cross film and series streams (get it?) quite like this, but I was delighted to see it. All three characters look pleasingly dapper in their Victorian garb, and, again, this brief scene shows how much potential this multidimensional, trans-dimensional storyline can have. Loki still holds as my top Marvel Disney+ series. So the fact that “our” Loki and the new variant of Mobius — that he presumably meets after he ends up in a completely rewritten timeline at the end of Season 1 — seem so central to moving the Kang story forward is a great sign; just as the Infinity Saga gradually created a massive convergence with multiple film storylines, the Multiverse Saga will do the same, only with films and Disney+ series.
Image Credit: CBR
It’s no secret that this movie has been getting blasted by many critics; as such, I went into it bracing myself for the worst. As my review might indicate, I’m on the one hand mixed, willing to acknowledge that the film as a whole doesn’t really work; on the other hand, I’m happy to report that there is still much to enjoy. Sure, that’s mostly Jonathan Majors, but Kang was arguably the one part of this film that I needed them to get right anyway. If the primary goal here was to set up the next phase, then mission accomplished. And I’m okay with that.