Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania

The days of being excited for a new installment of the Marvel Cinematic Universe have been long gone for me personally, as it seems more like an obligation to try and keep up with what's going on at this point. Marvel projects pre-Endgame were can't-miss events with a real feeling of cohesion between them, and were spaced out far enough to allow for genuine anticipation, two strategies that seem to have gone by the wayside in recent years in favor of multi-platform market saturation.

And in full disclosure, I've never really taken these movies for anything other than popcorn entertainment (not necessarily an insult), so as each successive release has lost that sense of wonder, cohesion and novelty (not to mention overall quality), expectations haven't exactly been high for the past few years.

Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania doesn't exactly do anything to change any of that. It's very much a sci-fi space opera set in an entirely CGI setting featuring absolutely ridiculous characters and an even more absurd story, but somehow it's all so silly that it actually works for the most part.

Paul Rudd returns as Ant-Man, reunited with his little family unit that consists of Evangeline Lilly as The Wasp, Kathryn Newton as their teenage daughter Cassie, and Michael Douglas and Michelle Pfeiffer returning as Hank Pym and Janet van Dyne. They have about 5-10 minutes to enjoy life at the very beginning of the movie before being sucked into the Quantum Realm, the very tiny universe where Janet was rescued from in the second Ant-Man movie.

It turns out the Quantum Realm is populated by an entire civilization that is very much like Star Wars. Colorful alien creatures of all shapes and sizes drink at cantinas and clue in our heroes to a rebels vs. the empire situation going on. In this case, the empire is ruled by the MCU's newest big bad Kang the Conqueror (Jonathan Majors), who has been popping up here and there in other recent Marvel projects, most notably Loki. Basically if Kang is ever able to escape the Quantum Realm it would be very bad for everyone, so Ant-Man and Crew do what they can to prevent this.

If you think about it too hard, the movie is a failure on just about every level. Our main characters rarely interact outside of repeatedly telling the audience how much they love each other (the fact that Ant-Man and The Wasp are romantic interests isn't even acknowledged until five minutes left in the movie). The visuals are just a jumbled mess of CGI characters shooting lasers at each other while our heroes run away in front of a green screen. The story rushes along from one sci-fi trope to the next, full of quips and wisecracking that dull any kind of real drama. Even as Jonathan Majors does his best to give Kang an appropriate Thanos-level of threat and menace, he's continually undercut by the fact that he just doesn't wipe everyone out in seconds (not to mention the way he is eventually defeated; we're supposed to be scared of this guy?).

Maybe the movie's biggest sin is completely sucking away the charm of Paul Rudd, who isn't given much to do other than to stress out about the safety of his daughter and grow really big in order to punch things. Most of the appeal of the previous Ant-Man movies was Rudd's interactions with his wacky family and crew (Michael Peña is sorely missing from this movie), and that kind of thing is pretty non-existent here.

That all being said, at some point my critical brain just shut off and I started having a lot of fun with the sheer ridiculousness of it all. Bill Murray shows up and makes some crass jokes while drinking bizarre alien drinks. The main villain from the first Ant-Man movie shows up as a giant head on a robot body with very tiny legs. You inexplicably start to care about a little slime blob creature that has a very sunny disposition. The jokes don't always land but there are enough that do; it's very apparent that screenwriter Jeff Loveness also writes for Rick & Morty, for better and for worse. And even though Kang is being pitched as the MCU's next big villain (and there's the requisite post-credit scenes that push that along), this movie is a pretty self-contained adventure that doesn't require a ton of background knowledge to enjoy.

So maybe it's a case of damning the movie with faint praise but given how poor the last few Marvel movies have been, I'm calling this a win. Your opinion might be lower if you're really invested in the MCU and its future, and I don't disagree that it's not very heartening if this is the direction the next phase of movies are headed, but in isolation it's a decent piece of dumb spectacle. I doubt I will ever be returning to this and the more I think about it the worse it gets, but for now I'm happy to remember Quantumania as a pretty lighthearted and enjoyable two hours of entertainment at the movies. Things could certainly be a lot worse than that.