Review: Ant-Man & the Wasp: Quantumania (2023)
A fun, vibrant mess, but a mess nonetheless
Ant-Man & the Wasp: Quantumania (I swear there’s an ‘m’ missing in there) is the third Ant-Man movie, the second Ant-Man & the Wasp movie, Marvel’s first Phase 5 movie and it’s first movie in 2023, the eighth movie in the Multiverse Saga, and its 31st movie since Iron-Man came out in 2008. Confusing? More so than the movie itself, no doubt, but it’s clear that Quantumania feels the weight of all these different roles. And while the end result is a fun and at times imaginative romp, it definitely suffers from its lack of purpose and focus. Tone, tempo, motivation, consequence, everything is all over the place. But still, it’s fun.
Paul Rudd is once again Scott Lang, aka the Ant-Man, an electrical engineer (not relevant here) and ex-con (also not really relevant) who had created a pretty neat familial constellation around his daughter Cassie (Kathryn Newton) in the last two films, including her mother with her new boyfriend, and Lang’s own lover Hope Van Dyne, aka the Wasp (Evangeline Lilly), and her parents, Hank and Janet, the original Ant-Man & the Wasp (Michael Douglas and Michelle Pfeifer). It is a shame that Cassie’s mom and stepdad don’t even get a cameo here, because dammit if those two and the post-divorce relationship they had with Lang weren’t a highlight of the previous movies.
After Endgame and Lang’s instrumental role in it, he is taking things more slowly and tries to reconnect with his daughter after missing five years of her life. Bing bang boom and the five of them are sucked into the quantumrealm and separated and it turns out that Janet hasn’t been entirely truthful about her time there (before she was rescued by the gang in the previous movie). And this is the first of my three main problems with the movie: the script is a mess and characters act out of narrative necessity instead of internal motivation, and nowhere is this more apparent than with Michelle Pfeifer’s Janet Van Dyne. It’s clear that she is both ashamed and fearful about her history in the quantumrealm, but she refuses to say anything at all against her allies for way too long, only to artificially create a little conflict and tension. And that feels very unnecessary, as the main source of conflict is the amazing Jonathan Masters as Kang the Conqueror. Casting him as the antagonist of the entire Multiverse saga is a very solid foundation for it, I’m happy to say. Slightly less happy to say that Michelle Pfeifer is one of, if not the weakest piece of this movie. And that is a pretty big strike against Quantumania. You know what’s an even bigger strike? Bill Murray is in this movie, and he is… Oh god, ok, I can do this: Bill Murray is boring. Feels bad, man.
The second issue is that the quantumrealm remains vague; weird enough that it evokes the early Star Wars worldbuilding in a good way, but not that weird so as to be unique. I have no idea how it works, this realm; it’s supposed to be very tiny, but at the same time it’s the same everywhere, I think. It doesn’t make a difference where you enter it, Belgium or Belize, you’ll end up in the same place. Sure, it’s quantum. But once inside, there are some fractals as a backdrop and a few creatures with weird(ish) anatomies, but otherwise it’s just a place. Except for a single Shrödinger action sequence (well thought up but doesn’t quite stick to landing) and the explanation behind an (admittedly glorious) formica ex machina, it could have pretty much been Anywheremania. I don’t mind that I don’t know how it works. I do mind that I don’t think anybody has a concept for it.
My third issue is… well, basically that it’s a mess. I’m reminded of the training sequence in the first Ant-Man, when Hank tells Scott: “You should be able to shrink and grow on a dime, so your size always suits your needs.” And I felt as if a similar skillset was required of me, being able to quickly shift my emotional registers as a single scene can pivot fast enough between action, humor, drama and/or pathos that it occasionally gave me whiplash. There’s an ebb and flow to these things, a certain rhythm that works alongside and plays upon the audience’s expectations. And if you mess to much with it, it will be much harder for your beats to land. And, well, they messed with it. You might think that M.O.D.O.K. is the biggest culprit here, the weird secondary antagonist slash extended call back slash fan service slash comic relief slash CG monstrosity, but I would not have minded had it been limited to him. A single character that disrupts the consistent tone of a movie is great. A movie that can’t grasp a single consistent tone is rarely great.
More on M.O.D.O.K.: he definitely wasn’t necessary, but if you’re going to do a weird character that’s hard to fit into your universe, this is the way to do it. Acknowledge the absurdity, lean into it, place them in an environment where they’re (technically) not the weirdest thing, and end it mercifully and completely. Good, weird fun.
To confirm a final time that it’s a mixed bag: one more thing I liked and one more thing I disliked. The design is good to great to amazing. The weird living houses, the clean time-fascist aesthetic of Kang and his ilk, William Jackson Harper’s face, it’s all gorgeous. Oftentimes, though, it feels empty, as if it was designed to look cool first and foremost, not to have a function within this world. But what had me foaming at the mouth, positively fuming, was a short scene where Michael Douglas explained that he had been getting interference on his hearing aid. And as he is talking we are shown the clips from earlier in the movie, showing him creasing his brow and touching his ear and goddammit, movie, not only do I remember what you showed me very explicitly an hour ago, even if I didn’t, frowny Douglas does not add one single iota to anything! Stop disrespecting me this way! I guess that’s to be expected from a movie that lets its characters emote long and hard towards the camera, even (especially?) in time sensitive scenes where I thought every second mattered. In truth, I do not need the emotion on another person’s face to know how to feel. But maybe that’s just me.
Oh, shit, women. Both Evangeline Lily and her character Hope Van Dyne are criminally underused in this movie, but that’s to be expected . Where Ant-Man & the Wasp stories are about Lang stumbling through life with a good heart, a good head and good people, but with little wisdom and poise, stories about The Wasp & Ant-Man would probably be tales about hypercompetent superhero and businesswoman Hope van Dyne who occasionally needs to be reminded by her cute little boyfriend what’s really important (uhm, love, probably). I’d watch that.
Kathryn Newton is fine as Cassie? The question mark is there because nobody will ever trump Abby Ryder Fortson, and because Cassie has very little to do in this story. She’s mostly there as motivation for Lang. Not that she lacks agency, per se, more that she lacked conflict. But, you know, sometimes, when half of your main characters are women, you just have to shaft them all equally. Quantum!
