‘Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania’ Feels Like the MCU Has Lost Its Way

You guys remember the Quantum Realm, right? Of course you do!

That’s the universe right beneath our own, which you can only get to by going “subatomic” and shrinking down to beyond-microscopic size. The same one that Scott Lang (Paul Rudd), better known as Ant-Man, found himself floating through after he fought corporate bad guy Darren Cross, right after the latter stole the “Yellowjacket” suit. And which Hank Pym, the original Ant-Man, warned us was “a reality where time and space become irrelevant… everything that you know and love, gone forever.” To be fair, he speaks from experience, because he lost his wife, Janet Pym (also a superhero, also a super-shrinker), down there for 30 years. Then he got her back, then Scott got stuck down there (again), then got out (again), then the Avengers used it for time-traveling, then a guy who went by “He Who Remains” mentioned it to Loki (Asgardian god of mischief, has a TV show, long story), then…

At this point in time — pun 1000% intended — anyone going into the Marvel Cinematic Universe is expected, if not required, to have committed every bit of inter-franchise minutiae to memory. There are 30 movies and, if you count the non-Disney+ fare, 20 TV shows that claim to take place in and around an interconnected MCU. And any viewer who doesn’t instantly remember every plot point, every passing reference, every potentially teased development and Easter egg and character history and footnote to big world-altering events (The Battle of New York! The Snap!) can quickly find themselves in the weeds. MCU culture may be the closest thing we have to a pop monoculture right now. But it requires a scholarly knowledge of a constantly updating, perpetually mutating saga playing out over too many timelines and multiverses to keep track of.

Going into Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania (Movie No. 31, if you’re counting), you’ll want to keep all of that aforementioned narrative business in the forefront of your mind. Also, for those that easily recall what happened to Corey Stoll’s bad guy in the original Ant-Man movie — or that he played an MCU villain in the first place — and that Baskin-Robbins has a longstanding connection (see: product placement deal) to Paul Rudd’s Formicidae-friendly hero, you may advance three squares and collect $500. Lang, as we all know, was a key part of getting Thanos to shuffle off that immortal coil of his, and when we meet him again, the superhero is still dining off that victory. Literally — he hasn’t had to pay for a meal or coffee in San Francisco for months, thanks to his derring-do. Plus he’s published a successful memoir, Look Out for the Little Guy! And though his true love, Hope (Evangeline Lilly), is killing it in the corporate philanthropy sector, she can still buzz off with him for beer and Chinese food atop the Golden Gate bridge. “It’s a nice world,” he exclaims. “I’m glad I saved it!”

Except our world isn’t the only one that needs saving. Scott’s now-twentysomething kid, Cassie (Kathryn Newton), and her grandfather Hank (Michael Douglas) have been messing around with some bleeding-edge tech and, long story short, they’ve been sending signals into the Quantum Realm. Something or someone sends a signal back, which sucks them, Scott, Hope and Janet (Michelle Pfeiffer) deep into that netherworld of sub-molecular flotsam and jetsam. The two Langs land one place; the three Pyms end up several nano-leagues away.

Everyone’s naturally concerned. Janet, however, is petrified. During her three-decade tenure down under, she led a resistance movement against a tyrant. When her husband rescued her several movies ago, it turns out she left behind some unfinished business. A lot of people died. And the despot, who’s only grown more destructive, happens to have a personal connection to Janet.

That tyrant is “He Who Remains,” or rather he’s a variant of that guy known as Kang the Conqueror. Longtime comic readers know that this 31st century scientist actually has a gaggle of selves running around infinite timelines, under different names, causing all sorts of trouble for superheroes. The good news is he’s played by Jonathan Majors, who gives this character a sense of wounded pride, an aura of absolute power having corrupted absolutely and just the right amount of unchecked-megalomaniac thirst run amok. This is the villain that Marvel is putting all their chips on for the next few years (Avengers: The Kang Dynasty, coming to a theater near you in May 2025), and the Lovecraft Country actor understands how to communicate gravitas and ghastliness, a “monster who thinks he’s a God.”

Majors has long used a bruised baritone to give his ordinary and his extraordinary people roles (The Last Black Man in San Francisco, Da 5 Bloods, The Harder They Fall, the upcoming Magazine Dreams) a sense of wariness, weariness, and vulnerability. With Kang, he adds in a layer of something like pity — for himself (his backstory suggests he wasn’t exactly marooned in the QR) and for these humans who, supersuits or not, are no match for him. Even his fits of berserker rage seem laced with a kind of bone-deep sadness. It’s such a layered performance, and by far the single best thing about the movie. Which, not to damn a great actor with faint praise, isn’t a huge bar to clear.

Because even with all of its various bits of hurly-burly business and its sheer visual overload, Quantumania is some pretty weak tea in almost every other regard. Where to start? There is the reliance on digital-effects-heavy backgrounds (no less than a dozen VFX houses get namechecked in the credits) that try to mix and match various bits of sci-fi imagery, and leave you feeling like you’re poring through a bottomless rummage sale of generic pulp-paperback covers and genre clichés. The general look of the Quantum Realm might be best described as Mitochondria Chic — so many globulars and spheres and lava-lamp decor, so much cosmic slop — but after passing by enough straight-outta-Dune desert-dwellers and Mos Eisley Cantina rejects and spaceship-bridge picture windows, you wonder if the design methodology was simply, “Throw it against the wall, see if it sticks, use it regardless.” The Star Wars borrowings are strong in this one. Too strong, some might say.

The fact that this all becomes the backdrop for what’s eventually a stock rebellion story, which rides on the back of Lang & Co. trying to keep Kang from escaping to our world, doesn’t help matters. Nor does the peripheral stuff that’s meant to enliven things and somehow flatlines. (I am about to type a sentence I never thought I would ever have to write: There’s a Bill Murray cameo here that’s completely pointless and adds absolutely nothing.) Nor does the deep-cut fan service stuff, though if the words “Mechanized Organism Designed Only for Killing” mean something to you, you may be stoked. Or perhaps not, given how a legacy character gets surprisingly wasted in all this flailing back and forth.

The veteran cast members do what they do gamely enough — Rudd’s gonna Rudd, and Pfeiffer is given enough screen time and shouldering of the storytelling that she’s effectively a co-lead. And you can admire, I guess, the fact that director Peyton Reed switches things up by ditching the ring-a-ding vibe of the first two Ant-Man movies for a more somber, almost funereal tone. Those films distinguished themselves not just with Rudd’s deadpan self-deprecation and some peripheral goofiness (pour one out for Michael Peña’s motor-mouthed patter, much missed here), but also via a deft blend of heroics and heist-flick pleasures, down to a Lalo Schifrin-esque score. Quantumania is somehow heavy without feeling substantial, almost desperate in its dourness. Even scattered with occasional wisecracks, it makes Eternals feel positively breezy by comparison.

One scene does stand out, as notable for its nuttiness as it is its nightmarishness. Lang is tasked with retrieving something that will set one segment of the plot in motion — it’s part MacGuffin, part side-mission bounty. Our man in the helmet has to enter a “probability storm,” however, to get it. “You’re inside Schrödinger’s box,” he’s told, “and you’re the cat.” Long story short, he encounters millions of other Ant-Men from every possible timeline, which allows him to scale a virtual tower of Scotts to get closer to the prize. It also comes close to consuming him, as those legion of alt-Langs pull him down in an attempt to pull themselves up. Feel free to draw your own metaphor here.

An ant can carry 10-15 times its body weight, yet as the designated kick-off film tasked with setting up the next two-phase, multi-movie/TV arc, Quantumania is still being crushed by having to bear way too much of a franchise burden. The pile-up of previously-in-the-MCU incidents you need to know to get what’s happening is only outpaced by the sheer amount of scaffolding this threequel is tasked with assembling for future endeavors. It’s meant to help usher in a bold new era. So why does it feel like it’s simply one more product coming off an assembly line, one more bit of evidence that — post–loose-end tying and end-of-contract farewells — this universe is still floundering through a Diminishing Returns phase?

A cynic would simply cite a “too big to fail” mindset, saying that whatever Marvel and its mouse-eared conqueror puts out will still dominate box-office returns regardless. But the issue here feels deeper, as if the superhero fatigue syndrome you hear about regarding audiences has infected those behind the camera as well. The powers that have several years worth of narrative mapped out, and given the last few entries in their superhero soap opera, even they seem a little tired by all of it. Until some sort of creative second wind blows in, casual moviegoers and deeply invested fanatics may have to simply keep enduring overly familiar, frustrating placeholders like this. Quantumania revolves around a powerful villain who wants to control time. The movie itself is merely killing time.

From Rolling Stone US.