The Dark Herald Does Not Recommend: Antman and the Wasp Quantomania
I have rarely seen a genre movie so dripping with contempt for its core audience.
Nineteen eighties Mexican sword and sandals videos had more respect for the people that would be seeing it than this flick did. There are no characters, only cut-and-paste caricatures. This is no plot, only a series of ridiculous contrivances. This entire motion picture has been built around appearance for the sake of appearance. It is a Disney Frankenstein. This film is broken. Like its namesake, there is no substance to Quantomania at all.
The Antman character was a problem for Marvel Studios. The problem was that Ari Arad cared about Marvel Comics back when the studio had to listen to him. In the comic books, Hank Pym and his second wife Janet van Dyne were the original Antman and the Wasp, and they were also the founders of the Avengers. Back when Ike Perlmutter made sure that Marvel gave a rancid fart about the canon, not having an Antman in the team that Antman founded was a problem. The thing is Hank’s first wife was murdered by the Hungarian secret police which was why he became Antman in the first place. Bob Iger and Kevin Feige were at best uncomfortable with Hank’s anti-Marxist baggage. But there was no such problem with the Scott Lang version. A hero on a redemption arc is easy to write and easy to make a movie about. Consequently, Scott Lang settled into a role of Antman as a lovable loser trying to make good.
This is the part where I try to ruin the whole movie for you by spoiling it in detail, but this thing is such an inconceivably disjointed trainwreck that my brain keeps shutting down in self-defense when I try to recall the details.
The film opens with Scott strutting down a sidewalk in an alternate universe San Francisco, where he isn’t trying to avoid stepping on broken needles and human shit. The theme from Welcome Back Kotter is playing as Hank has a montage about what a great life he is having as a superhero. The whole city loves him. Apparently, he landed a book deal and has a number-one bestseller. We are meant to believe he wrote it himself; this is the least of the contrivances that are about to pummel an unsuspecting audience.
Montage ends when Scott has to bail his new teenage daughter out of jail (she was recast). Cassie was protesting for the rights of the homeless to establish her unassailable moral superiority over her Generation-X world-saving superhero father, and it is done with such brutal impact that passersbys suffer blunt force trauma. She shrank a police car and was apparently allowed to keep it in jail so she could put it on the comically outraged cops’ desk at the county lockup. She is allowed to leave rather than be arrested again for GTA of a police car because the movie has to get to the next scene as fast as possible. Cassie is such sassy.
The Snap and Blip are very, very briefly mentioned as the cause of this social unrest.
Kind of a pity they didn’t go into it because it’s the only potential source of interest in the current Marvelverse. In Marvel Phase I the basic question of the story was, how does the real world react to having superheroes in it? The question of Phase II was how do the Avengers come together and break up? Phase III was how do the Avengers defeat Thanos? The question of Marvel Phase IV was, how do we keep people watching this shit without Robert Downey in it? They didn’t come up with an answer for that one.
The question of Phase V should be, what happened to the people who moved on with their lives and remarried after the Snap? What happened when their spouses came back into existence? How do you adjust to losing your world a second time? Apparently, the answer is you just don’t talk about it.
At all. Ever.
Even if you really, really need to talk about it because your family’s lives literally depend on it.
You don’t talk about it at all.
More on that in a moment.
After springing his daughter from jail, Scott gathers for a pizza dinner with his SO Hope van Dyne (AKA the Wasp), her father Hank Pym, and Hank’s newly reacquired wife Janet van Dyne (Hope’s Mom).
I need to go over a couple of things that are a little confusing here. Why isn’t Hope’s last name Pym? Well, there is a version of Hank’s daughter ‘Hope Pym’ in the comic books, but she is a supervillain. In fact, she’s Cassie Lang’s nemesis. Hope Pym also has a brother Hank Jr who is also evil. In the first movie, he got turned into Darren when it was decided that Hope van Dyne was going to be the Wasp. More on Darren in a minute.
Hope wants her mother to open up to her about what the Quantum realm was like and Janet is extremely reticent. Now there was something worth exploring here and any kind of a decent script would have done so. Maybe there was one at one time that did but we sure as hell will never know about it. Consider, Janet and Hank have been separated for literally a lifetime. Thirty years separated is maybe too much time apart to come back together. But no, Janet just didn’t want to tell Hank that she had been banging guys in the Quantum Realm.
Over pizza, Cassie accuses her father of just sitting on his laurels after helping save the world. He needs to do better. Apparently, a superhero whose powers are shrinking, growing, and commanding ants should do more about the plight of the homeless.
When that conversation gets too awkward, Cassie (who is still a teenager) starts talking about her experiments with the quantum realm. Scott’s daughter is now a quantum super genius just like… Who exactly? Did they forget she isn’t a blood relation to the Pym-Van Dynes? She’s in high school. How the hell is she inventing Quantum this or that? Oh, she’s a girl in a Marvel movie, that’s her real superpower. So, we now have a third teenage girl super genius in Phase V.
I suppose one more hardly matters at this point.
Janet freaks out about Cassie messing around with the Quantum realm for undisclosed reasons. Or rather, reasons she completely refuses to disclose no matter how much danger this ignorance inflicts upon her family. I suspect that in an early version of the script Janet was suffering from PTSD and having trouble adapting to life in the real world.
This Janet doesn’t have that excuse. Cassie shows her family the experiment in Pym’s lab. Janet is even more upset and pulls the plug on the experiment. I’ve been trying to remember how they got sucked into the Quantum realm, but it doesn’t matter, they just did. Also, Hank’s ant colony gets sucked in too, this is important you have to remember that.
They get split up. Scott and Cassie are one team. Hank, Hope, and Janet are on another, and the ants are doing their own thing somewhere else.
Janet is terrified about being back in her old stomping grounds. Hank tries to comfort her by saying, “we’re together this time.”
Janet shrieks, “YOU DON’T UNDERSTAND.” And spends the next half hour refusing to explain a single damn thing.
Look, there are things that you have to just accept in a superhero movie, you aren’t going to have the hardest science for example. They are in the quantum realm, so what are they breathing? Because an Oxygen molecule is going to be the size of a mountain. You have to forget stuff like that. I can even accept running into lifeforms that are completely identical to humans. There are civilizations in the Quantum Realm as it turns out. It’s a stretch but I was expecting that from the ads. But I do require a character’s actions to make sense in terms of the consequences those actions will create. Janet keeps her family deep in a mystery box no matter how badly they need to know the information she is hoarding. It gets ludicrous when it becomes obvious that she had shitloads of time to tell them all about Kang the Conqueror. But no, she keeps them in the dark no matter what. She leads them to some bar where Team Hank can drink Red Slime which acts as the Quantum Realm’s Babel Fish.
It is at this bar that the first of her ex-boyfriends shows up. And it’s Bill Murray! You may have heard all about how Jonathon Majors killed it as Kang. All the critics were saying so, (they were even using the same words, it’s like they had been paid and instructed or something). There was a reason nobody was singing Bill Murray’s praises. Murray was in full-on “I don’t give a fuck about acting where’s my paycheck mode.” He walked down a staircase and then sat for his entire scene. He clearly hated being there and hated himself for accepting Marvel’s filthy money. He turned in a better performance in Ghostbuster (2016).
Murray betrays them to Kang because there was no one to lead the Resistance against Kang after she left. Action scene! Then Team Hank escapes.
Speaking of the Resistance, guess where Team Scott has been? Cassie and Scott drink the Red Slime and don’t get much more information from the rebels than Janet gave Team Hank. The film wanted to wait until the middle of the story to go into Kang and Janet’s history together. The timing of that is correct but the series of absurd contrivances to get it there, break the damned movie.
The Resistance is led by Katy O’Brian who frankly gets too much screen time for a part that doesn’t matter in future movies. She’s like Erin Kellyman, in that she is part of that stable of diverse and inclusive actresses Disney is pushing like the rock of Sisyphus. Her thing is being a bodybuilding, lesbian martial artist of color.
A big chunk of the characters are completely CG. This thing is very heavy on the CG and as usual, Marvel does a crappy job with it.
The rebels are attacked by Kang’s forces. Cut back to Team Hank so now we can finally get to hear about Janet and Kang.
This extended montage sequence has a ton of VoiceOver from Michelle Pfeiffer, meaning this was hacked together in post from a bunch of different scenes.
Janet had been lost in the QR for a while and then Kang crashes there in his super-advanced 30th-century time and space machine. A whole Quantum Realm to crash in, and he lands on her front door. Kang and Janet become close as she super sciences his ship’s power source back into working order. He had been exiled there by the other Kangs…
…with his perfectly operational time ship.
Jonathon Majors has been praised up and down for his portrayal of Kang the Conqueror. I’ll readily grant he was the best thing in this movie and was clearly determined to put the best coat of polish he could on this turd, but to hear the critics tell it this is the most out of the ballpark performance since F. Murray Abraham’s Soliarl in Amadeus. It’s not. He’s good but his performance doesn’t outweigh the price of admission or the film’s parade defects.
Janet repaired the power source and Kang had sworn to take her home to Hope on the day she had promised to come home on time. But then she touched his ship, which is neurally linked to Kang and she sees him doing lots of super evil stuff. Yes, It’s ANOTHER MEMORY STORE. Kang for some reason doesn’t come up with the simple idea of lying to her about quantum this and that or about different versions of himself across the multiverse all being linked, even after he had hinted at it. He just basically says, “oops.”
Janet uses a Pym particle on the powersource to make it too big to use. Kang however has his power armor back so now he sets about creating a microscopic empire in quantum space.
His soldiers are faceless stormtroopers and are about as militarily effective as their white-clad brethren in a galaxy far, far away. However, Kang does have one heavy hitter. MODOK, who he sends to grab Team Scott.
Indulge me in another brief diversion
MODOK is one of Marvel’s better supervillains. Generally speaking, a comic book supervillain falls into one of two archetypes.
- The Brawn. This guy is the muscle, and muscle is about all that he brings to the party. The Brawn is characterized by low intelligence and is very much a creature of the id. He is driven by his baser desires. And is as quick to anger as he is to drooling lust. He doesn’t eat, he gorges. He doesn’t drink, he gets drunk. His typical weakness is that he has very little self-control.
- The Brain. Pretty much the mirror opposite of the Brawn. Where the Brawn is compelled by the id the Brain is a creation of the super-ego. He is all intellect. Unconcerned with the desires of the flesh, the Brain lives only to expand his mental prowess. His ambitions are as vast as his ego. He views other humans as less evolved organisms barely worthy of his contempt. His typical weakness is his ego.
MODOK is very much a Brain. Created by Stan Lee and designed by Jack Kirby, MODOK is the extreme version of this archetype. In fact, he is nearly a caricature of it.
His brain is the only thing that matters. The rest of his body is a nearly a useless, vestigial appendage.
But this garbage tier MODOK is Darren from the first movie. The guy who was a brawn villain in the Yellow Jacket suit. Marvel simply doesn’t care anymore. One of the best villains in their library of characters and they turn him into a comedy relief villain who is everything MODOK isn’t. A dumbass bruiser who exists only to create laughs and can’t. His CG face is hideously rendered. It’s so unbelievably awful that even Marvel figured that one out because they have MODOK spend as much time as possible wearing a mask. Patton Oswalt did a better job with MODOK than Marvel Studios.
Kang menaces Cassie until Scott goes and gets the powercore. There’s more to it than that but I’m not going into it because it was all pointless and contrived in order to do more CG stuff and tell jokes.
So many, many jokes.
This film was originally supposed to have a dark flavor but then Marvel frantically started sending them notes to lighten it up. Which they did. They lightened this thing up so much it’s as washed out as a K-Pop girl group’s music video.
Marvel jokes are shotgunned randomly all over this flick. No matter what the circumstances or the stakes, or what the tone of a scene happens to be there were jokes flying in to shatter the tenor of the moment. None of which were funny. I was honestly startled when someone in the audience laughed at one of the jokes.
Stuff happens and it doesn’t matter. Jumping to the end. Scott leads an attack in giant man form. The resistance attacks. Cassie for some reason has to validate Katy O’Brian, “You’re amazing.” I mean if they were going to be lovers, I’d expect it but this character is one and done. Anyway, you have the usual back and forth of; heroes are winning, then Kang is winning, we reach the All Is Lost moment, and then…
…Do you remember when I told you that Hank’s ants were important?
Yeah, the ants saved the day, they defeated Kang.
Then Scott defeated Kang. Then Hope defeated him some more. Cassie didn’t get to defeat him. She was already back in San Francisco with her pseudo grandparents ready to become “Stature” and replace Antman and the Wasp. It is extremely obvious that Scott and Hope were supposed to be trapped down there but Marvel had a last-second change of heart. It either tested badly or someone finally realized that Paul freaking Rudd was the only actor they had left with on-screen charisma.
In case you were wondering about the ants, they went to Contrivance Land for 100,000 years and developed the perfect communist civilization in the hope that maybe this one would get a China release. It did but it bombed there on opening weekend. Ha! Ha!
You get two post-credit scenes.
First. The Council of Ricks. (sigh) Kangs. I meant the Council of Kangs, gets together to yell about conquering everything.
Second. After the credits, we see an 1890s Kang on stage. Loki and Owen Wilson are in the audience AND are you fucking kidding me? A Marvel film is now the goddamn lead-in to a Marvel TV SHOW?!?!?!
There was no part of this movie worth seeing. The plot if you can call it that is just one contrivance after another whose only purpose was to get to the next contrivance. The jokes were unfunny and inappropriate. MODOK got a redemption arc because Cassie called him a dick, so MODOK heroically dies defeating Kang (sorry should have thrown that in the list), and his death scene is making fun of him as he checks out.
This thing was killed by studio notes. It was obviously and repeatedly thrown down the editing room garbage disposal, fished out of the sewage line, slapped back together again, and sent out for more audience testing. It is utterly unwatchable. It is without question the worst Marvel movie ever made.
Consequently…
The Dark Herald Does Not Recommend Antman and the Wasp Quantomania.
And Hank didn’t mind that his wife was screwing around.
He lives in San Francisco.
