Ant-Man: Quantum"meh"nia

The MCU's smallest hero goes bigger, but not necessarily better.

This entry includes spoilers for Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania

A trip to the deepest reaches of the Quantum Realm, Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania aspires to be the next big, weird entry in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. It takes a tour of one of the most bizarre settings in the MCU, introduces several visually intriguing species and landscapes, and features a villain comic fans probably thought was too weird to ever show up on the big screen. It trades the franchise’s usual heist comedies for a fantasy adventure ready to let its freak flag fly and explore the strangest corners of the multiverse. 

So why is it all so safe and bland? 

Quantumania is the much-vaunted start of Marvel’s Phase 5, hoped by many to serve as a course correction to some of the problems seen post-Avengers: Endgame. But many of the same issues people had with the last year of Marvel movies and TV shows are still evident; in fact, many are amplified. It takes one of the MCU’s lowest-stakes franchises and weighs it down with bombast and mythology, robbing it of its charm. And even though it all takes place in an environment full of weird and wonderful sights, it can’t escape feeling like we’ve seen this all done much better many times before. 

Little hero, big villain

The Ant-Man movies have always prided themselves on being the smallest entries in the MCU, a phrase with a double meaning. Yes, Scott Lang (Paul Rudd) can shrink down to insect size or smaller. But the films have also traditionally been respites from the galaxy-sprawling stakes of the other Marvel movies. The first film came out only two months after Avengers: Age of Ultron, and its sequel arrived the same summer as Avengers: Infinity War. 

Ant-Man adventures are traditionally palate cleansers from the bombast, focusing on Scott using Hank Pym’s (Michael Douglas) shrinking technology to pull off a heist. The previous two films are light, dashed-off capers mixed with a bit of romantic comedy between Rudd and Evangeline Lilly’s Hope/Wasp, and laced with just a bit of family movie dynamics. They’re fun piffles, and that shouldn’t be seen as a dig – in a saga spanning 30 entries, not everything can or should have cosmic stakes. The beauty of those early days of the MCU is that each hero could have movies that flirted with their own genres – espionage, space opera and spy movie are just a few of the flavors the MCU comes in; Ant-Man’s movies gave us superhero shenanigans filtered through comedic capers. It lent a welcome freshness to the lineup. 

And we get a bit of that in the film’s first 10 minutes. It’s not too long after the events of Avengers: Endgame, and Scott’s riding high on the fame and good fortune that come with helping save the world. He’s recognized by fans on the streets, he’s back in good graces with his former employers at Baskin Robbins and he’s even written a memoir. He’s got a good relationship with Hope, has family dinners with Hank and his wife Janet (Michelle Pfeiffer), and is making up for the time lost to daughter Cassie (Kathryn Newton) during the Blip. 

It’s a light and funny opening, particularly Rudd’s delivery of the lines of Scott’s overwritten biography, and there are some interesting ideas scattered throughout, particularly Scott’s swelling ego and search for meaning after saving the world, and Cassie’s attempts to live up to her dad’s heroic reputation, which is getting her into trouble with the authorities. But none of this is really stage-setting so much as wheel-spinning, because shortly after, one of Cassie’s inventions gets everyone sucked down into the Quantum Zone, where they encounter the villainous Kang (Johnathan Majors), a bloodthirsty conqueror who can leap across multiverses. 

Kang, who we’ll discuss more in a bit, is set up to be the Big Bad of the next stage of Marvel movies, and I understand the desire to have him first appear in the furthest reaches of inner space as opposed to Thanos’ appearance from outer space (yes, technically his first appearance was in season one of Loki, but that was a different variant, and my head’s already hurting). And there’s something compelling about a giant threat – one of the biggest in the Marvel universe – being first encountered by the smallest and most insignificant of heroes. Scott’s always been insecure about his status as an Avenger and realizes he doesn’t quite measure up to Iron Man, Captain America and Thor. And nursing the wound of having lost five years with his daughter, there could be a strong emotional hook that might tempt Scott to help out someone who can reset timelines and give him that time back. 

Instead, Quantumania strands Scott and Cassie in one corner of the Quantum Realm with Kang while Hope, Janet and Hank make off for another. This allows Michelle Pfeiffer to do a bit more than in the last film, as she has to provide the backstory about her previous encounter with Kang and spell out what a giant threat he is. All the while, Scott and Cassie are unaware just how dangerous he is, and the villain coerces Scott to steal a mysterious doodad for him – not by appealing to his desire for more time but just by threatening to kill Cassie. I guess that, technically, Scott does find some purpose post saving the world (he fights Kang) and learns to trust Cassie’s desire to stick up for the underdog, but the film doesn’t really engage these themes in any compelling manner. They fight Kang and help others because it’s a superhero movie; there’s no internal struggle. The film never features anything truly emotional, and the stakes never feel particularly high – despite Kang’s ongoing role in the MCU. There isn’t much question whether everyone will get out unscathed; the film seems to be heading for a cliffhanger at the end, with Scott and Hope stuck in the Quantum Realm, but it resolves that five seconds later, probably because they need Scott back in the regular world for franchise continuance reasons. 

I know I sound like a grump here, and I should clarify none of this is particularly bad. It’s…fine. Paul Rudd is charming, funny and sweet as always. His dynamic with Newton is solid, even if it means the new relationship dynamic requires Wasp to sit out 90% of a movie where she’s name-checked in the title. Pfeiffer and Douglas bring gravity to parts that ask them to spout a lot of silliness (Douglas spends half the movie with his hands in goop). But despite the risks facing the universe, the film lacks a sense of focus or urgency. A big part of the problem is that it’s about three hours of movie crammed into a two-hour runtime — there’s no urgency, but there is a lot of hurry — so there’s no room to breathe. Ant-Man’s a fun character but not a particularly complex one, and tacking the new super-villain’s debut into his film feels fairly inconsequential, particularly since the film is unconcerned with letting Scott’s insecurities or flaws cause any complications. It has the emotional weight and consequence of a Saturday morning cartoon. 

Instead, the film tries to compensate by trying to go big and weird, but ends up feeling too familiar. 

Weird, but not weird enough 

It’s funny to think that there was a time when people wondered whether audiences would buy the presence of aliens in the Marvel universe. I remember that question popping up in film geek communities during the lead up to The Avengers. In hindsight, it might be a bit silly; after all, audiences were perfectly willing to go along with the mythology surrounding Thor just a year earlier. But it’s amusing to think of how much Marvel has tossed at audiences in the 11 years since. Space operas featuring sentient trees and ending with dance offs, trips to the spiritual realm, time travel, zombies, multiverses, and millennia-spanning heroes (okay, audiences didn’t quite care for that one). I would have thought any one of these might be too out there for mainstream audiences, but the weirder Marvel gets, the more people seem to love it. 

So, it makes perfect sense that the Ant-Man franchise, with its access to the largely unexplored Quantum Realm, would turn its attention from the furthest reaches of the cosmos to burrow into the subatomic world. And what Scott, Hope, Hank and Cassie find there – that Janet kept hidden from them – is a world beyond their imagination, with thriving, technologically advanced civilizations, sprawling cityscapes and complex ecosystems. 

The film’s best moments come from watching the characters explore this world. I liked the ecosystems and inhabitants they encounter, which sometimes mimic plant and bacterial life. There are cool little blobby organisms, including a gelatinous character named Veb whose only desire in life is to have holes (he’s voiced by David Dastmalchain, who previously played a con in the other Ant-Man movies; I’ll deduct a half-star from the movie altogether for not finding a similar way to incorporate Michael Peña, the highlight of the other films). The Good Place’s William Jackson Harper gets laughs as a telepath cursed to hear everyone’s dirty thoughts. And I like the weird details, like the buildings that are alive (when Scott points that out, a Quantum Realm resident quips “are yours dead?”). There are some fun ideas bouncing around. 

Or rather, there might be. The film, like Black Panther: Wakanda Forever and many other recent Marvel entries, tries to do so much that there’s no time to bask in the weirdness of it all. The movie has to get everyone to the Quantum Realm. It has to make some half-hearted attempt to give Scott and Cassie an arc. It has to unpack Janet’s exposition about Kang. It has to have many scenes showing Kang being badass and destructive to underline that he’s a big threat. And while I’m grateful that this isn’t another three-hour Marvel journey, the two-hour runtime feels close to bursting at the seams. 

And so it’s funny that Veb is obsessed with holes and that Harper’s character is disgusted by people’s inner thoughts – but they’re jokes, not actual characters. There’s a character named Jentorra (Katy M. O’Brian) who appears to be some sort of freedom fighter Cassie aligns with, but we never know anything about her other than she’s mad at Kang; in fact, the only reason I know her name is Jentorra is I had to look it up on IMDB, I don’t even know if they say her name in the movie. The world looks weird, but there’s never much attention paid to how it functions; it’s just supposed to be enough that it’s weird and funny, and ha-ha, the building is shooting people. Even Bill Murray flits in for a cameo, his presence papering over the fact that there’s no actual character for him to play. Part of me wonders whether these characters were being saved for an inevitable Disney+ series, and I, honestly, wouldn’t be surprised. 

But maybe that’s for the best, because the more I stared at the film, I realized that what director Peyton Reed and screenwriter Jeff Loveness want us to embrace as cool and weird just looks depressingly familiar. The Quantum Zone, with its alien-like bars, warrior factions and mix of creepy/cuddly creatures, is basically just reheated Star Wars. The blobby denizens and organic buildings and creatures look so directly lifted from Disney’s Strange World that I briefly wondered whether the studio just cut its losses with that film by recycling backgrounds. There’s quite a bit of Rick and Morty in the way the humor and sci-fi mingle (Loveness cut his teeth on Rick and Morty, so I’m sure that’s more than a coincidence), even if Quantumania lacks that show’s wit and bite (the broccoli-headed creature definitely feels like Marvel asking for their own version of “Pickle Rick.”)  

Sure, it’s weird. Sure, it’s kind of cool to look at – except when rendered with some of the most rushed and inconsistent CGI I’ve seen. But it’s oddly void of personality. It means nothing except to say “doesn’t this feel like [insert IP]?” There isn’t room for awe because everything is undercut with the typical Marvel humor, which felt refreshing with Iron Man but grows more smug with each entry. Reed and Loveness might know crazy visuals, but they can’t deliver them with the conviction, humor and curiosity that someone like James Gunn brings to the Guardians of the Galaxy films. Marvel has spent 15 years showing us how big and broad it can go that by now it’s old hat, we’ve seen it all. Post-Endgame, the challenge should have been to go deeper and explore who these characters are, what they can do and give each their own special corner of the Marvel multiverse. Instead, they’re still playing the all-connected game; it’s a mile wide, an inch deep, and it stretches and threatens to rip apart with every new adventure.

There is one exception in Quantumania, and that’s M.O.D.O.K., a weird robot head designed only for killin, and occupied by the first Ant-Man’s main villain, Darren (Corey Stoll). M.O.D.O.K. is one of those big, stupid Marvel characters that many assumed was too strange even for the MCU. But this is actually his second MCU presence; the character was recently the focal point for a Hulu animated series and voiced by Patton Oswalt. It’s a strange character, but hits just the right amount of weirdness here. Stoll’s face is warped and weird; the bad CGI actually is kind of useful in this instance. He’s a wild and bloodthirsty machine, but his baby legs and tiny arms call out how ridiculous it is. Would it have been cooler to make him a genuine threat instead of undercutting it with the usual Marvel snark? Sure, but I had a good laugh at its absurdity, as well as the way M.O.D.O.K.’s death is played for humor. It’s the one bit of WTF-ery that actually feels surreal and original. Sure, it would have been an even gutsier move to make M.O.D.O.K the big bad, but the film has to deal with Kang. 

And so, as we wrap up, should we. 

Let’s talk about Kang 

While Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania debuted as one of the lowest-rated Marvel movies on Rotten Tomatoes (currently sitting at a 48%), most critics I’ve read tend to agree that Johnathan Majors’ Kang is a bright spot. 

That’s not surprising; Majors is a really good actor, currently having a moment (I’m more excited to see him take on fellow MCU alumnus Michael B. Jordan in Creed III in a few weeks). And his entrance in the final episode of season one of Loki was a welcome surprise, a confident debut for an actor who will play a major role in the world’s biggest franchise. Majors can be intimidating, sorrowful, rage-filled and seductive in the space of a single scene, and he brings a gravity that this movie sorely lacks (one of the big disconnects is the way Majors is so sincere and resonant but Paul Rudd can’t help but come across as flippant and ironic). 

Marvel’s biggest strength tends to be casting, and it appears they found a great personality in Majors. And they’re probably breathing a sigh of relief because the MCU is all in on Kang. This movie takes the Poochie approach to Kang; when he’s not on the screen, everyone’s basically talking about Kang or going “where’s Kang?” The character is the focal point of both of this film’s post-credit scenes, including one in which there are literally hundreds of Kangs dying to get into our multiverse. The ending of an Ant-Man film promises Kang will return.

But while Majors is good, Kang isn’t really a compelling character. I’m confused about his powers – he can move things, destroy things and prompt an entire civilization to do his bidding…but he can’t get out of the Quantum Realm, when that’s something a 16-year-old literally does in this movie? I get that he’s stuck in the Quantum Realm because he needs his multiverse-hopping doodad (shades again of Rick and Morty and that show’s multiverse-hopping portal gun). But if the humans in the MCU are figuring multiverses out – again, there were literally two recent films about multiverse-jumping teenagers – then Kang’s biggest problem should just be getting out and seeing Doctor Strange or something. 

And sure, Kang needs to be in the Quantum Realm for Quantumania to happen. But that’s literally it. Who is Kang? He destroys and conquers. Why? Because he’s scared of what’s coming. What’s coming – he is. What does that mean? Tune in to the next movie to find out. Kang is a threat because we know he’s going to be a threat in future movies – but that leaves his presence here just vaguely threatening and confusing. And, much like happened on Loki, we learn this Kang isn’t really a threat – he’s just here to stop the really bad Kang from making a mess, but we won’t meet that one until later. Sorry, Ant-Man, but your villain is in a different multiverse. 

Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania isn’t the worst Marvel film, but it’s the most frustrating and exhausting. It sells itself as a crucial turning point, but it’s just wheel-spinning. We know who Kang is – next time he shows up, Marvel says, hoo boy. It’s the same approach they took with Thanos, who was largely nothing more than a big purple CGI presence with no character in several movies. Infinity War revealed him to have more depth and character, and maybe by the time we get to Avengers: The Kang Dynasty, Kang will, too. But for now, all we get is a feature-length trailer for the next few movies at the expense of doing anything interesting with Ant-Man or the others. 

Are the wheels off the Marvel wagon? The last few films – Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness, Thor: Love and Thunder, Black Panther: Wakanda Forever – have all suffered from the same bloat and shapelessness, each one a little worse than the one that came before. Maybe it’s just fatigue, but it feels like more. It feels like having hit the heights of Endgame, Marvel is trying to go bigger instead of going deeper. A shame, as they should learn a lesson from the previous Ant-Man movies: sometimes it’s okay to just be small.