41: Quantumania

Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania kicks off the start of the fifth (fifth!) phase of the MCU. Phase 4 (everything to date since Avengers: Endgame, including the Disney+ TV shows) has felt a little scattered, a franchise in search of an identity^[1]. I haven't had much fun with Phase 4, but at the very least, it's been weird, which is one of the charms that Phase 4 shares with the first two Ant-Man movies. The problem is that Phase 4 is a franchise in search of a gravitational center; Disney is trying to fill the hole left by Robert Downey Jr.'s departure from the MCU. The post-Endgame Marvel movies are colored with a tinge of sarcasm, a remnant of the tone that RDJ lent that series, and that Disney hasn't been able to replicate since he left. RDJ's sarcasm is playful, and it works best as a seasoning surrounded by other flavors of jokes. When the sarcasm becomes a kind of house signature for the franchise's sense of humor, it overpowers everything else, flattening it.

Quantumania is an attempt to un-flatten the MCU once again, primarily by giving its characters a purpose in the form of another universe/multiverse-threatening villain to fight as a team. As an Ant-Man movie, Quantumania is also consciously concerned with a sense of scale, which the first two Ant-Men pull off with visual jokes involving humans being shrunk down, or everyday pocket-sized objects being blown up until they're massive. Where the rest of the MCU gets bigger and bigger, the Ant-Men go small; they're inconsequential, and that's part of the appeal. Quantumania falters because it tries to take on some of the weight of the MCU's plot machinery. It trades in its playfulness for portent, and it fails to hang on to the sense of scale that defines the previous Ant-Men in cohesive ways.

Quantumania takes the idea of size (bigness and smallness) way too seriously, while also forgetting to fold together a cohesive theme into its visuals. It's trying to do too much without saying very much of substance. The idea of the movie is that there is an entire universe underneath our own, so small we can't see it and yet teeming with life–and harboring a threat to humanity. But if it weren't for the background setting, and the fact that we're told repeatedly that the characters are in the Quantum Realm, they might as well just be on a different planet. The backgrounds are beautiful, but they're backdrops; characters pop up in front of them to deliver their lines, but there's no sense of cohesion between character and setting. Swap out the matte paintings and we're on another world, and yet the same one, tonally trapped by the flailing of the MCU.

This isn't to say that the film doesn't manage to get the idea of smallness across visually. There are a few design touches that I appreciated, especially early on in the adventure. Some creatures in the Quantum Realm look like colorful amoebae and paramecia; others have elements of design like snail eyes that reinforce the idea of smallness. A few of the backgrounds in establishing shots look like objects magnified by a microscope: the thin layers on a strand of hair like the skin of an elongated onion, the spiky-nobbly edges on a grain of sand.

It's this attention to detail in the pieces relegated to literal background dressing that made me long for the better movie trapped somewhere inside this one. The scrambling to set up the next wave of Marvel superhero movies leaves the possibility of actual character development behind. There's a sweet theme of father-daughter relationships that inhabit the first two Ant-Men; it's brushed aside in favor of plot mechanics here^[2]. The primary conflicts are set up to be about familial tension, but these conflicts are nothing more than a catalyst. Once the supervillain plot is in motion, there's no need to keep track of where the inter-family conflict goes, because the default state for these characters to occupy is their familial/job title. They don't really have all that much substance beyond their names and what they do: scientist, ex-thief, father, daughter, philanthropist, all pieces on a puzzle board designed to keep the plot wheels turning. Even Hope Van Dyne (Evangeline Lilly), the titular Wasp, is reduced to her position as a daughter here, then brushed aside when the movie drops its familial conflict theme in the second act. She's relegated to a side character in her own movie. In terms of meaningful storytelling, Disney is thinking too small.

Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania is in theaters this weekend.

What I talked about:

For Seeing and Believing podcast this week, Kevin and I reviewed Magic Mike's Last Dance. We paired it with the 1968 adaptation of John Cheever's short story The Swimmer starring Burt Lancaster.

What I'm reading:

I'm procrastinating on Infinite Jest by cracking open a copy of How to Do Nothing by Jenny Odell. I haven't gotten much further than cracking the book open, though, which I guess is living up to the title's instructions, so I also want to recommend an essay over at Bright Wall/Dark Room by my fellow staff writer Frank Falisi, who wrote about Hot Rod (yes, Hot Rod) as an activist text, with a little help from Odell's book.