Quantifying Quantumania

I'd have never expected Michelle Pfeiffer to carry the first blockbuster of 2023. But that's just what she did with Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania. Mostly a mediocre entry in the MCU canon, it's not as good as Wakanda Forever or Doctor Strange 2 but I'd rank it above Thor: Love and Thunder.

Even more than Loki, it was clearly, very strongly influenced by Rick and Morty and was written by Jeff Loveness who, like Loki and Doctor Strange 2 writer Michael Waldron, started writing for Rick and Morty in its fourth season. From its second season and a little bit in its first, Rick and Morty has prominently featured multiverse plots mixed with other weird stories involving shrinking, transmogrification, and space travel. It seems obvious to everyone at this point that Kevin Feige watched Rick and Morty and thought, "This could be a story told over a phase in the MCU." Again, though, why he chose only writers from after Rick and Morty's best era is beyond me. Obviously Justin Roiland's unemployable now but that still leaves a whole lot of writers from the first few seasons.

The new Ant-Man movie also carries over some of the amorality and politics from Rick and Morty, uncomfortably yoked to Disney's morality imperatives. The villain, Kang the Conqueror (Jonathan Majors), is a character from Marvel comics with a history of timeline variants, though, in the comics, several years would be spent with each variant before another was introduced. The MCU version seems clearly to be influenced by the vast civilisation of variant Rick Sanchezes on Rick and Morty with whom Rick occasionally clashes. To be fair, this aspect of Rick and Morty may have drawn influence from the comics' Kang. But I doubt the comics had so much ironic humour. One major character dies in Quantumania and it's basically played for laughs.

All the irony diminishes Paul Rudd's Scott Lang quite a bit and Rudd's performance somehow doesn't have enough heart to round him out. No-one gives such a performance except Pfeiffer.

They don't give her as many jokes, either, but I think its Pfeiffer's own abilities that actually made her the only character I felt any investment in. And she gets all the meaty dialogue, too, and although Kang's motives are vaguely written and his plan and arguments infamously unclear, I believed there were really things at stake when Pfeiffer was talking because she seemed to believe them. The only other actor in the movie who actually sells an emotional reality in the cgi realm is Bill Murray. He appears all too briefly as an old flame of Pfeiffer's but he quickly establishes something nuanced and interesting. It really is a shame people are in the process of trying to cancel him.

I loved some of the creature designs, particularly of a sort of red paramecium character called Veb (David Dastmalchian). I wish they'd avoided including humanoids among the Quantum realm's citizens but that might have been a budgetary problem.

Lang's daughter Cassie (Kathryn Newton) is pretty but really bland. I did like that she brought up the homeless crisis in US cities. When even the MCU is talking about it, hopefully we're getting to the point where people who can do something about it will finally get off their asses.

Evangeline Lilly's character, Hope van Dyne, is utterly pointless. She contributes nothing to any scene of dialogue and feels entirely like an afterthought. She dramatically saves Scott a couple of times but only serves to dilute the drama by doing so. Without a personality, she's basically a dull deus ex machina. If Feige were wise, he'd just make Pfeiffer the main Wasp. Hell, make her a star of the next Avengers movie. Her character was a founding member of the Avengers in the comics anyway.

I heard Jonathan Majors was influenced by Heath Ledger's performance in The Dark Knight and, once I knew that, it was hard not to constantly see it. Still, he's entertaining to watch and he transforms his imitation of Ledger's radical performance into a more conventional, but fun, exercise in scenery chewing.

Michael Douglas is fine, of course, though a scene where he extols the virtues of socialism when talking about his hordes of voiceless ants is funny for reasons I don't think were intended. Really, if you're trying to sell people on socialism, maybe using infamously mindless social insects is not the best idea. On the other hand, it's a good anti-socialist statement.

I don't think I laughed at any point the movie intended me to. Neither did the other three people at the 6pm Saturday night showing I went to. And this movie's doing well at the box office? Well, I do live in Japan.

A Movie that Can't Carry Half It's Weight

It's insidious how much easier it is to see movies I kind of want to see than movies I really want to see. That's how I ended up watching 2018's Ant-Man and the Wasp. It was right there, on NetFlix, ready to play. I liked the first Ant-Man but nothing I'd heard made me want to see the sequel. If I'd known then what I know, I definitely wouldn't have bothered. But like Merlin says in Excalibur, you don't know how the cake tastes until you've tasted it. Ant-Man and the Wasp tastes like styrofoam.

Which is not to say I altogether hated it. Michelle Pfeiffer is really good, her natural warmth so refreshing to see again after so long. It's not much of a role, it's certainly nothing compared to her Catwoman. She basically just shows concern and hugs people. But she's one of those people where you can see how star quality is something distinct from acting talent, though she's a good actress--there's just something about her mannerisms and voice that is fundamentally strange and appealing.

Of course, the fact that she's de-aged in many scenes adds another strange layer. Along with Pfeiffer, Michael Douglas and Laurence Fishburne get the de-aging treatment. None of them look quite as convincing as Michael Douglas did in the first film but maybe my eye is just learning to spot the seams. I suppose it's good enough for a full length feature now even if it isn't perfect. The de-aging on Shah Rukh Khan in Fan (the first film to feature a de-aged actor in a main role) wasn't nearly as good as in Ant-Man and the Wasp and I was still able to enjoy it. It's too bad Kirk Douglas' condition would make it impossible to use the effect on him. I wonder how he feels seeing his son de-aged.

The first third of the film is almost unendurable. It reminds me of any run of the mill Disney live action movie from the 90s because of the forced, hackey humour and the little girl who somehow knows much more about life than her goofy dad, Paul Rudd.

There are two little girls in the movie and they never remotely act like real little girls. They're not as annoying as Michael Peña, though, as an Hispanic stereotype. I don't remember him being so annoying in the first film--maybe this is because, according to Wikipedia, the actor improvised more in that film.

The action sequences are creative enough, though. I liked the car chases with shrinking and suddenly enlarging cars tumbling down the always cinematically reliable streets of San Francisco (see Bullitt, Vertigo, or Hulk). Sequences in the climax set in the quantum realm are truly gorgeous, despite the presence of tardigrades.

Tardigrades are so overexposed, they're so over. Let's have another microscopic star for a while, huh? I've always liked planaria.

Walton Goggins is also a bright spot in the movie though his character, a gangster or black market dealer, is completely superfluous. Still, he easily dominates every scene he's in.

The movie's called Ant-Man and the Wasp but it clearly should've been Ant-Man 2 for all Evangeline Lilly does in the movie. Rudd's character has a delicate balance, trying to get friends and family to trust him, changing people's minds about him and while the dialogue feels pretty canned Paul Rudd has some natural charm he lends to a rough around the edges character. Lilly's character, Hope, is basically a default action heroine and her only motive throughout the film is wanting to save her mother. The movie might have been called Ant-Man and Ghost--Hannah John-Kamen as Ghost doesn't get a lot of screen time but she conveys a lot of the pain that must be intrinsic to her daily life as a character who only halfway inhabits corporeal reality. In action scenes, this makes her a perfect foil for Ant-Man and Wasp, as well.

It's not quite as bad as Thor: The Dark World but Ant-Man and the Wasp definitely a below average MCU film.

Twitter Sonnet #1206

A restless tread acquires endless wheels.
Beside the driver sat a weary smoke.
The car this side includes protruding heels.
A feeble kick reproached an empty Coke.
A sense of glowing sight adorned the box.
As steps the finger tips resound to-night.
In time the random ruckus all but talks.
A diff'rent song was writ to now recite.
A row of sour brass imposed a sound.
The air was cut by window grids to cubes.
The long and shaking shadow fell to ground.
The voices mixed were sages, gods, and rubes.
On mirrored rails appeared the other train.
The wood and iron fixed the box's lane.