Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania
Directed by Peyton Reed
Written by Jeff Loveness
Starring Paul Rudd, Evangeline Lilly, Jonathan Majors, Michelle Pfeiffer, Kathryn Newton
Rated PG-13
Runtime: 2 hours, 4 minutes
In theaters February 17

by Ryan Silberstein, Managing Editor, Red Herring

The third Ant-Man movie opens in a world that has seemingly gone back to normal after the events of The Blip (when Thanos snapped everyone out of existence, before the pandemic). Scott Lang (Paul Rudd) has written a memoir, Look Out for the Little Guy, in addition to his podcast referenced in the Ms. Marvel series, talking about how he went from prison to being an Avenger. He is on good terms with his partner, Hope (Evangeline Lilly) and her parents Hank Pym (Michael Douglas) and Janet van Dyne (Michelle Pfeiffer). His biggest problem is while he is taking a break from heroics, his daughter Cassie (Kathryn Newton) is running headfirst into trying to use Pym technology for good, like getting in between the cops and a homeless encampment. This comes at the encouragement from the Pym/van Dyne side of the family. 

The cool fights aren’t the reason superheroes are popular, it’s the characters. “Dinner table scenes,” like the one early in this film, are as important to the genre as the costumes. Seeing these characters as fully realized, with particular relationship dynamics gives the conflict, and the all important overcoming the odds for a climactic triumph, meaning. These scenes are some of the highlights of recent Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) movies like Black Widow, Shang-Chi, and The Eternals. The Fast franchise also understands it, which is why those movies typically end with one. Cassie calls the elder Ant-Man “Grandpa Hank” and honestly, it would have taken a lot to make me dislike Quantumania after that. I’m a sucker for found family stories, and the way Ant-Man has built one over these movies is one of the sub-franchises’ best features. If the entire movie had been about their family unit and the dynamics with it, even without superheroics, I would have been happy.

But of course, as the trailers promises, this is a very different Ant-Man movie in terms of scope. While both previous entries had featured the Quantum Realm as either a Checov’s gun or a MacGuffin, this third story makes it the setting for most of the runtime. Functionally, the Quantum Realm acts like any sort of science fiction setting, like a planet that is really chaotic and has blobby terrain. It’s mostly not terribly fun to look at, but it allows the Ant-Family to get their own kind of road trip, even if the geography falls into an uncanny valley of not being concrete enough to track how the locations connect and not being psychedelic enough to lean into the potential for kaleidoscoping visuals. What results is taking a lot of beats from other space adventure stories. There’s been a lot of Star Wars comparisons floating around, but I think those do this movie a disservice, since this is much more like Flash Gordon, with a ‘regular guy’ brought into a strange world that is big on colorful costumes and light on actual worldbuilding. But at least this story’s version of Ming the Merciless is worth the messiness around him.

While in the Quantum Realm, Janet reveals the reason she never talked about her experiences there before was her friendship with Kang (Jonathan Majors), a multiversal traveler also stranded there. While trapped, he has since conquered much of the known areas of this dimension, building a citadel at its center and preparing an army to bring even more worlds under his control. Jonathan Majors made his debut as a version of Kang named He Who Remains in the Loki series, a weary and bored incarnation of the character. Here, Kang is a calm exterior layering over a feral anger at the entire multiverse. I first noticed Majors in The Last Black Man in San Francisco, and he’s been great in everything I’ve seen since, especially Devotion, and I can’t wait to see him in Magazine Dreams from this year’s Sundance. In the comics, Kang is a character who shows up in different flavors across time and the multiverse, which should give Majors a chance to essentially play different villains almost every time he appears. 

While the entirety of Quantumania is briskly paced, the second act still feels somewhat inert as the focus is pulled towards setting up the third act and much of the character work feels basic. However, the finale is one of Marvel’s better efforts, with the final confrontation using the clear emotional stakes as a reason to give the acting out of the conflict a few different phases that make great use of these particular characters and their powers. There are some great moments I won’t spoil, and a surprisingly cogent take on one of Marvel’s more oddball characters. Aside from family, the biggest thematic concern is that of collectivism overcoming dictatorship. Kang the Conqueror is a self-styled Alexander the Great, wanting to expand and control his empire. The way that the nature of ants are used as a counterexample is fun and somewhat clever, but also neatly links Cassie and Hanks’ anti-police stance from our world into the Quantum Realm. 

The Ant-Man characters have always deserved better movies. The cast is so charming and fun (I truly love what Michael Douglas has brought to Hank Pym in particular), yet the series shines more in individual moments than it does in overall story. This one in particular, pushing forward the far-reaching cosmic inventiveness of Jack Kirby and Stan Lee more towards the center of the MCU. Kirby and Lee excelled at inventing entire worlds and memorable characters from whole cloth, and later artists and writers have developed them further and combined them in endless ways to tell new stories with these building blocks. Quantumania feels like pulling a random comic book from a box and going along for the ride. It’s not pushing the form further or playing with genre, but it is a fun adventure with great characters.