Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania
starring Michelle Pfeiffer, Evangeline Lilly, Kathryn Newton, Jonathan Majors, Paul Rudd, Michael Douglas, Katy O'Brian, Corey Stoll, a bunch of floppy cartoon people and (for some reason, and very briefly) Bill Murray
directed by Peyton Reed (Bring It On, Yes Man, previous Ant-Men)
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LOOK, I'M NOT TRYING TO SPOILER YOU SPECIFICALLY ON PURPOSE, I'M JUST TRYING TO TALK ABOUT THE MOVIE. WHATEVER HAPPENS BEYOND HERE IS ON YOU, MAN
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I understand the appeal of writing certain types of genre fiction. The rules of actual physics or logic are time consuming and paralyzing to account for and write around. If you're writing a screenplay about a soccer team trying to climb down from a mountain after a plane crash or the slow disillusionment of German enlistees during World War I, you're committing to the idea that things are going to happen in a ways that are relatable, human and bound by space, time and the basic parameters of both general and special relativity, with all caveats therein implied. This is super good news, if you're a giant fucking nerd.
Sometimes, on the other hand, you just go all in on the idea that the dog can play basketball. And everyone has a great time while learning nothing. Some people might call that the primary failing of western mass culture and the slow slumping toward an undifferentiated monoculture of two-dimensional ideas whose primary value is in consumability over engagement (mind, body... soul, if you're some kind of hippie) until the last thing consumed is ourselves, by ourselves. But you've heard of twitter, you've seen this critique of Marvel films before, so we will neither rehash nor indulge it here. Suffice it to say, I paid an electronically transferrable amount of fiat money to see the third Ant-Man movie in a theater, so you know I'm either not sold on the corrosivity of Marvel-Disney on the American mind OR I'm already corroded past the point of knowing the difference.
Am I still part of the fandom? Sure, for what that's worth. Was I counting the days until this one came out? Reader, I was not. I don't have a lot of time for reviews that elect to watch a thing (the non-professionals, like me) and then pretend to be too good for it, so I'm not leaning in that direction, to be clear. I do think it's important to catalogue at this cultural moment, I've lost some of the edge I had in the pointy, swirling hype matrix leading up to, say, Infinity War or even Captain Marvel. At some point in there, I've lost the primary ability to be marveled (I know, just leave it...) by these things and instead am content enough when I walk out pleasantly surprised, like with Shang-Chi. The bar is lower, but it's still not on the ground. We're not at Avatar levels here yet.
The dialogue isn't laughable and the performances by deeply talented people are still creditable and fun. And the benefit of this being a sort-of sci-fi/fantasy piece is you sure can get away with a lot if you get to make up your own rules. It's almost refreshing the way Peyton Reed and screenwriter-stand-in-for-the-probably-two-dozen-people-who-worked-on-this Jeff Loveness really lean in to the bullshit of it all.
My favorite recurring bit in all of Star Wars, especially the first one,* is that shooting door controls with a laser gun does exactly what you need it to every time you do it. Bad guys chasing you and you need to open a locked door? Shoot the door controls! Door opens. Bad guys chasing you and you need to keep the bad guys from opening a closed door? Shoot the door controls! Door locks. Somehow the projectile from a blaster rifle is infused with the intent of the shooter, delivering only desirable outcomes. Which is impressive considering they were mostly stolen stormtrooper blasters being used on Imperial doors, so these guns were total traitors. But as a viewer, you don't get too hung up on it** because considering the door issue (does it work on all door models? are these bespoke Empire design or off-the-shelf third-party door controls?) means you also have to consider that these are space doors in a space hallway on a space station made out of metal, toting a space laser that blows up planets. And we haven't even started to consider the brain-magic space monks. Better to just leave it, or leave the theater. You're either on board or you're not, both of which are OK.
The Ant-Man franchise has its own brands of hokum it demands you not think too deeply about. In the first one, Ant-Man II (the man, not the movie title... meaning the one that looks like Paul Rudd) accidentally shrank himself dangerously past the normal booger-sized limits of the hooey-tech, but remember at the LAST SECOND! that he had him some hooey-tech ninja stars tucked into his super-belt which made him grow back to just under average height for an American male in the 21st century. Victory!
This movie, the third iteration, is absolutely lousy with these little Pym-particle throwables. In the first movie, they were the miraculous answer to how one escapes the limbo of the Quantum Realm. A breakthrough! Now we can save Michelle Pfeiffer! Always a worthwhile goal! In this movie, five normies get stuck in the Quantum Realm, but these little tchotchkes (even though they have MANY super belts filled with MANY of them) are never really considered as a solution. Instead they can be used, as needed by the plot: a) to make things really big (but only relative to the sub-microscopic things around, not in human-relative terms), b) make things really small, c) blow up a space ship battery?, d) fix the same space ship battery, and e) only choice D when used with several other ones in a big ole fistful because just one by itself in the exact same application will fizzle for some reason.
I don't know. It's all kind of a lot. They got Michelle Pfeiffer from the Quantum Realm in the second movie (you remember the second one... oh you don't? Well, that's not that weird I guess. Laurence Fishburne was in it! Morpheus is cool!), then immediately went about making a Quantum Realm Express Tunnel machine in a van. Now in this one, Ant-Man II's six year old daughter (who, after five years of Thanos-blip is somehow like 23) makes a Quantum Realm radio and Michelle Pfeiffer (who was both there and on board with the Express Tunnel idea) is like "NO, YOU CAN'T, DON'T, NO QUANTUM ANYTHING, AAAAAAAggh...." and then the plot kicks off.
It doesn't make a lot of sense. But if you went into a movie called Ant-Man expecting that, well, that's a misjudgment on your part and I'm sorry for it.
Is it a good movie? It. Was. Decidedly. Fine.
Paul Rudd is charming and lopsided-smirky. Michelle Pfeiffer is super good in parts, especially when she's a Michelle Pfeiffer stunt double reminding us her character used to be The Wasp and beats people's quantum asses. Evangeline Lilly gets to be the muscle really, which is exciting and interesting enough as Paul Rudd and Kathryn Newton as his daughter kind of take turns being damsel-in-distress. All of this takes place under the heel of still-frustratingly-under-defined Kang, bolstered totally unfairly by the effortless intrinsic charisma of Jonathan Majors. His power capability bobs up and down on the Deadliness Scale as needed by the plot (single handedly destroying planets in one sequence, punched out by a 57-year-old guy wearing a leather unitard in another), but that's to be expected. Power scaling in super-hero sci-fi is the only trope more prevalent than the beam of light going into the sky for no reason in the finale.
Michael Douglas gets to be ANT-man against Paul Rudd's ant-MAN, which you have to appreciate about these films. The character has two power sets: growing/shrinking and... talking to ants. The second one is so relentlessly stupid as powers go, the only way to make it work is to lean all the way into it and they do. In 120 minutes of "oh, huh, that's interesting" it gives a good 90 seconds of "ha, fucking rad, you get 'em, Mr. Zeta-Jones."
It looks great, all of it. It feels like a Star Wars movie in some ways, basically from a character design point of view, a film-length version of the alien cantina scene if they could have made it in 2023. Everything is colorful and blobby and borderline gross, which is great.
In the end, it's borderline whether to recommend it or not. I don't know there's much here on its own for non-Marvelites. If you haven't started, this is not your first stop, no. For Marvel people, some important world-building, but that's a trick to some degree. If I'm wishy-washy about it, I guess there is a tipping point that makes me land on: do no recommend. No exclamation point after QUANTUMANIA! in the title is the act of a diseased mind. It deserves the punishment of your cold indifference for that alone.
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*Chronologically by release, not Roman-numerically
**Unless mentioning makes one of your kids laugh, then it's suddenly The Most Important Thing
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