Save the last ants for me
The low-hanging fruit first: Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania is complete garbage as an Ant-Man movie. 2015's Ant-Man and 2018's Ant-Man and the Wasp are two of the most perfectly-matched films in the vast corpus of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, now arriving at its 31st feature film, providing almost identical experiences, and in their offbeat way, maybe the most distinctive experience the MCU has been able to offer. In a world where superhero movies have become increasingly addicted to scale and cosmic stakes and bloat and a lumbering sense of self-important grandiosity, they were all about keeping things small, you'll please excuse the expression, with modest conflicts built around fairly localised and low-key situations. They're breezy, a little silly, playful, pleasant; the palette-cleansers after the great heaving Mythos that takes up so many of these movies, both made by Marvel Studios as well as their various competitors. So the first obvious misstep of Quantumania is to take up space in this sub-series, of all sub series, to wallow in one of the most dismally elaborate, heavy acts of table-setting for future MCU movies that the MCU has yet indulged in. And to still force the job of directing it onto Peyton Reed, a director whose defining skills are almost exclusively in making light-touch comedies, which is probably why the only parts of Quantumania that don't feel strangled and bitterly impersonal are the jokes. Neither he, nor these characters, nor the way the returning actors have developed their performances are at all right for a grand-scale epic being aggressively positioned as the new foundation to the ongoing narrative of the shared universe.
More the point, Michael Peña isn't anywhere to be found.
So that's all one huge problem with Quantumania, but it's not necessarily a fatal one - sequels move in a different direction than their parent often enough, and sometimes it even works out. Unfortunately, it's not even the biggest problem with Quantumania, which is, independently of any other movie connected to it in any direction, an enormous fucking drag to watch. It is on the one hand a gaudy, overstuffed sci-fi fantasy full of wildly-designed creatures, rooms, costumes, vehicles, and landscapes, a bizarre fever dream world of the sort you got by the fistful in the decade or so following the original Star Wars. It is, on the other hand, horrifically underlit - it is an inexplicably wrong-looking film for something shot by Bill Pope, of The Matrix and Spider-Man 2 and The Jungle Book, in whose wheelhouse this could not more securely lie - and while the omnipresent CGI looks good in and of itself, the human actors never seem to be more than adequately stitched into it, and they are almost uniformly bad at pretending that all the tennis balls on sticks they're looking at are remarkable sights from an indescribable new dimension. The editing slaps these murky images together at an arbitrarily fast rate suggesting that the guiding principle in the editing room was "well, we've got all these takes, be a shame not to use them". Parts of it, especially early on, when we're still learning about the world, have some echoes of the tacky charm of a certain breed of '80s sci-fi epics, going all-in on design and praying they could find the budget to make it look not completely awful; but it is so hapless at some very basic things, and the extremely high budget and thick varnish of digital production techniques do such a good job of stripping out the charm of those designs, that it's more obnoxious and ugly than fun and imaginative. The best I can say, and this is by all means an obscure comparison, but it feels like if Albert Pyun's strikingly terrible Alien from L.A. from 1988 had somehow been gifted with the largest budget of the decade. It's clunky, senseless, tasteless, and very polished in a way that makes those other things feel even worse.
The basic deal: all our friends from the Ant-Man movies - Scott "Ant-Man" Lang (Paul Rudd), an ex-con turned size-changing superhero; Hope "Wasp" van Dyne (Evangeline Lilly), the same except for the ex-con part; Janet van Dyne (Michelle Pfeiffer), Hope's mom; Hank Pym (Michael Douglas), Hope's dad, and the inventor of the size-changing technology; and Cassie Lang (Kathryn Newton), Scott's daughter, recast for the third time so that Quantumania can get in on some of that white-hot Kathryn Newton action - get sucked into a device that shrinks them until they are smaller than atoms, sending to them to the Quantum Realm, the indescribably tiny universe where Janet was once trapped for 30 years. The complicated deal is harder to summarise, not because Quantumania is difficult to follow, but because it keeps losing interest in its character arcs, and so at any given point we could be looking at a fundamentally different conflict, especially the ones involving Scott and Janet. A lot of this involves characters reconnecting after the events of earlier MCU films, primarily Ant-Man and the Wasp from 2018 and Avengers: Endgame from 2019, and it seems a little weird to me that the particular interpersonal tensions fueling this movie weren't resolved years ago. But anyway, I am optimistic enough to imagine that we're finally going to be done with the whole "sequel to Endgame" phase of the MCU, now that Quantumania has put such painfully visible labor into setting up the future of the franchise in the form of this film's villain, Kang the Conqueror (Jonathan Majors), who can hop between alternate universes and also - incredibly - shoot blue beams from his hands.
The general feeling that writer Jeff Loveness has no real idea what he wants the story to be, other than that he knows what boxes have to be ticked in order to set up the next five or six movies in this shared universe, and that Reed is largely disinterested in any of the almost-stories Loveness has strewn about, never leaves Quantumania, which stumbles about aimlessly from scenes that are charming and work, to scenes that are silly and dumb, to scenes that are weighed down with mountains of exposition until they are about to snap, like a tree branch with too much snow on it. It's a sign of how lost the film is in the weeds that it pulls Bill Murray in for an extended cameo sequence, during which time he is very obviously the only person in the entire ensemble who is actually having a good time being on set, and it cannot think of a better thing to do with him than give him a big information dump and then repeat the same sex joke three times. The film dithers, and when it is spectacularly lucky, it dithers on a moment that's somewhat visually interesting and productively weird, as in the bit when Scott and Cassie first meet the Quantum Realm aliens, whom I'm sure are called something more specific than "Tall Jawas", but that gets at the idea well enough.
Even more than the flabby, directionless script, what really does Quantumania in are the across-the-board bad performances. The conventional wisdom is that Majors is quite good, and that's almost true: he's fine, but he's giving a kind of one-note performance in which Kang speaks very prim, mannered dialogue slightly quietly and therefore menacingly. It's almost hammy, but not quite - turkey ham, maybe. The reason that Majors stands out, I think, is that he's the only lead who isn't actively, persistently bad. Rudd seems bored out of his mind without any real gags to play, and a stillborn plot about reconnecting with his onscreen daughter, which wasn't going to yield anything even without Newton proving to be such a spectacularly bad scene partner, going for what I imagine was meant to be "sassy" or "spunky" or something like that, but ending up in a thoroughly insincere register of saccharine can-doism. Lilly and Douglas are profoundly, palpably confused by what the hell they're doing, spouting technobabble and attempting to interact with things that aren't there. Pfeiffer seems flat-out angry that she's here, having been given a much larger role (I have no idea if this is true, but it seems very plausible to me that she has the second-longest amount of screentime after Rudd), but one that makes Janet a weirdly impossible figure, full of arbitrary and unlikely secrets, devoid of any scene-to-scene motivation, and generally reduced to the function of "we couldn't figure out any decent way to explain this bullshit concept".
So it's ugly, it's not fun, it's badly paced and overstuffed with nonsense; to be frank, I don't think anything is working here. In what was one, quite recently, Hollywood's single most consistently-managed franchise, Quantumania represents a stunning failure of basically everything that makes a movie go; I cannot imagine ranking it anywhere other than dead last out of the 31 features presently constituting the Marvel Cinematic Universe. It's sludge, nothing but: digitally over-processed, narratively arbitrary sludge.
Other MCU reviews (Phase 5)
Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania (Reed, 2023)
Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 (Gunn, 2023)
Tim Brayton is the editor-in-chief and primary critic at Alternate Ending. He has been known to show up on Letterboxd, writing about even more movies than he does here.
If you enjoyed this article, why not support Alternate Ending as a recurring donor through Patreon, or with a one-time donation via Paypal? For just a dollar a month you can contribute to the ongoing health of the site, while also enjoying several fun perks!
More the point, Michael Peña isn't anywhere to be found.
So that's all one huge problem with Quantumania, but it's not necessarily a fatal one - sequels move in a different direction than their parent often enough, and sometimes it even works out. Unfortunately, it's not even the biggest problem with Quantumania, which is, independently of any other movie connected to it in any direction, an enormous fucking drag to watch. It is on the one hand a gaudy, overstuffed sci-fi fantasy full of wildly-designed creatures, rooms, costumes, vehicles, and landscapes, a bizarre fever dream world of the sort you got by the fistful in the decade or so following the original Star Wars. It is, on the other hand, horrifically underlit - it is an inexplicably wrong-looking film for something shot by Bill Pope, of The Matrix and Spider-Man 2 and The Jungle Book, in whose wheelhouse this could not more securely lie - and while the omnipresent CGI looks good in and of itself, the human actors never seem to be more than adequately stitched into it, and they are almost uniformly bad at pretending that all the tennis balls on sticks they're looking at are remarkable sights from an indescribable new dimension. The editing slaps these murky images together at an arbitrarily fast rate suggesting that the guiding principle in the editing room was "well, we've got all these takes, be a shame not to use them". Parts of it, especially early on, when we're still learning about the world, have some echoes of the tacky charm of a certain breed of '80s sci-fi epics, going all-in on design and praying they could find the budget to make it look not completely awful; but it is so hapless at some very basic things, and the extremely high budget and thick varnish of digital production techniques do such a good job of stripping out the charm of those designs, that it's more obnoxious and ugly than fun and imaginative. The best I can say, and this is by all means an obscure comparison, but it feels like if Albert Pyun's strikingly terrible Alien from L.A. from 1988 had somehow been gifted with the largest budget of the decade. It's clunky, senseless, tasteless, and very polished in a way that makes those other things feel even worse.
The basic deal: all our friends from the Ant-Man movies - Scott "Ant-Man" Lang (Paul Rudd), an ex-con turned size-changing superhero; Hope "Wasp" van Dyne (Evangeline Lilly), the same except for the ex-con part; Janet van Dyne (Michelle Pfeiffer), Hope's mom; Hank Pym (Michael Douglas), Hope's dad, and the inventor of the size-changing technology; and Cassie Lang (Kathryn Newton), Scott's daughter, recast for the third time so that Quantumania can get in on some of that white-hot Kathryn Newton action - get sucked into a device that shrinks them until they are smaller than atoms, sending to them to the Quantum Realm, the indescribably tiny universe where Janet was once trapped for 30 years. The complicated deal is harder to summarise, not because Quantumania is difficult to follow, but because it keeps losing interest in its character arcs, and so at any given point we could be looking at a fundamentally different conflict, especially the ones involving Scott and Janet. A lot of this involves characters reconnecting after the events of earlier MCU films, primarily Ant-Man and the Wasp from 2018 and Avengers: Endgame from 2019, and it seems a little weird to me that the particular interpersonal tensions fueling this movie weren't resolved years ago. But anyway, I am optimistic enough to imagine that we're finally going to be done with the whole "sequel to Endgame" phase of the MCU, now that Quantumania has put such painfully visible labor into setting up the future of the franchise in the form of this film's villain, Kang the Conqueror (Jonathan Majors), who can hop between alternate universes and also - incredibly - shoot blue beams from his hands.
The general feeling that writer Jeff Loveness has no real idea what he wants the story to be, other than that he knows what boxes have to be ticked in order to set up the next five or six movies in this shared universe, and that Reed is largely disinterested in any of the almost-stories Loveness has strewn about, never leaves Quantumania, which stumbles about aimlessly from scenes that are charming and work, to scenes that are silly and dumb, to scenes that are weighed down with mountains of exposition until they are about to snap, like a tree branch with too much snow on it. It's a sign of how lost the film is in the weeds that it pulls Bill Murray in for an extended cameo sequence, during which time he is very obviously the only person in the entire ensemble who is actually having a good time being on set, and it cannot think of a better thing to do with him than give him a big information dump and then repeat the same sex joke three times. The film dithers, and when it is spectacularly lucky, it dithers on a moment that's somewhat visually interesting and productively weird, as in the bit when Scott and Cassie first meet the Quantum Realm aliens, whom I'm sure are called something more specific than "Tall Jawas", but that gets at the idea well enough.
Even more than the flabby, directionless script, what really does Quantumania in are the across-the-board bad performances. The conventional wisdom is that Majors is quite good, and that's almost true: he's fine, but he's giving a kind of one-note performance in which Kang speaks very prim, mannered dialogue slightly quietly and therefore menacingly. It's almost hammy, but not quite - turkey ham, maybe. The reason that Majors stands out, I think, is that he's the only lead who isn't actively, persistently bad. Rudd seems bored out of his mind without any real gags to play, and a stillborn plot about reconnecting with his onscreen daughter, which wasn't going to yield anything even without Newton proving to be such a spectacularly bad scene partner, going for what I imagine was meant to be "sassy" or "spunky" or something like that, but ending up in a thoroughly insincere register of saccharine can-doism. Lilly and Douglas are profoundly, palpably confused by what the hell they're doing, spouting technobabble and attempting to interact with things that aren't there. Pfeiffer seems flat-out angry that she's here, having been given a much larger role (I have no idea if this is true, but it seems very plausible to me that she has the second-longest amount of screentime after Rudd), but one that makes Janet a weirdly impossible figure, full of arbitrary and unlikely secrets, devoid of any scene-to-scene motivation, and generally reduced to the function of "we couldn't figure out any decent way to explain this bullshit concept".
So it's ugly, it's not fun, it's badly paced and overstuffed with nonsense; to be frank, I don't think anything is working here. In what was one, quite recently, Hollywood's single most consistently-managed franchise, Quantumania represents a stunning failure of basically everything that makes a movie go; I cannot imagine ranking it anywhere other than dead last out of the 31 features presently constituting the Marvel Cinematic Universe. It's sludge, nothing but: digitally over-processed, narratively arbitrary sludge.
Other MCU reviews (Phase 5)
Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania (Reed, 2023)
Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 (Gunn, 2023)
Tim Brayton is the editor-in-chief and primary critic at Alternate Ending. He has been known to show up on Letterboxd, writing about even more movies than he does here.
If you enjoyed this article, why not support Alternate Ending as a recurring donor through Patreon, or with a one-time donation via Paypal? For just a dollar a month you can contribute to the ongoing health of the site, while also enjoying several fun perks!
