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.

Rickcelled

I'd just gotten a few episodes into season four--the 2019 season--of Rick and Morty when the news broke about co-creator Justin Roiland's public scandal. He's been charged with "felony domestic battery and false imprisonment". The latter charge is vague but suggestive. Was he keeping someone in his basement? Anyway, he's been fired from Rick and Morty and everything else he was working on. Since he was the voice of both Rick and Morty, the show will never be the same. Though his writing credits on the show are few and far between. He did at least co-write one episode per season until season four. Almost the entire writing staff seems to have changed for the fourth, fifth, and sixth seasons, in fact, and just a few episodes into the fourth season I can already see the difference in quality.

The funny thing is, it's only now I'm getting to the writers Keven Feige hired to work on Marvel projects, with the exception of Jessica Gao (She-Hulk) who wrote the third season episode "Pickle Rick". Michael Waldron (Loki, Doctor Strange 2) didn't join the series until the second episode of season four, a lame episode about defecation called "The Old Man and the Seat". Last night I watched the first Jeff Loveness episode, "Claw and Hoarder: Special Ricktim's Morty" from December 8, 2019, a lazy deconstruction of heist movies. Loveness wrote the upcoming Ant-Man in Quantumania and is working on one of the upcoming Avengers movies. Can't you read, Kevin Feige? If you like Rick and Morty so much, why didn't you hire writers from the show's heyday? It's like being a big Beatles fan so you hire The Monkees. All the best writers can't be up on domestic battery charges. Can they?

Along with news of the charges, a series of tweets and DMs have magically appeared, attending the scandal as they seem often to do. In this case, apparently Roiland had some inappropriate conversations with a 16 year old fan. And if you read them, and you're not a tool, you'll see they are inappropriate, not predatory. He's using the same kind of ironic humour the show uses and maybe he figured an avowed Rick and Morty fan would be hip to it. But he should have known better. You can never talk to a kid like that, no matter how dirty their sense of humour is. The poor thing is probably vengeful now because she built up all kinds of castles in the clouds around her famous friend. She should count herself lucky he didn't beat her up or something. Or whatever it is he's allegedly done.

I don't know why studios haven't learned by now to hold off firing someone until the courts have finished doing their jobs. Obviously this is more serious than a James Gunn situation but, even so. It seems like we should have learned the "innocent until proven guilty" lesson by now.

Contemplating the possibility of his guilt has made me think back on the series differently. It's not like Bill Cosby, where the guy had a wholesome public persona. Rick Sanchez is an unapologetically amoral and abusive character. I went back and watched the one episode on which Roiland has sole writing credit, season one's "Rick Potion #9" from January 2014. Morty asks Rick to make a love potion to make his crush, Jessica, fall in love with him. The episode was praised as a "deconstruction of the creepiness of the love potion trope", which seems potentially ironic now. I mean, the episode's humour is ironic already, so I guess this is ironically ironic . . . Actually, one of the appealing things about the first couple seasons of Rick and Morty is that it has some genuine creative thought instead of just endlessly complaining about other media.

In the first seasons, Rick isn't just another lousy dad figure. He really is a pig and sometimes, watching him with Morty, a relatively innocent kid, it's like watching a baby locked in a cage with a rabid dog. You can tell Roiland made the conscious decision to make nearly all of Rick's lines compulsively narcissistic, and the way he manages to make every dialogue exchange about how he's a victim and Morty needs to be punished is genuinely clever and funny. Moreso because it's genuinely worrying. In the climax of the episode, when one thing has led to another and the entire population of Earth has been turned into genetic monstrosities, Rick and Morty hover safely overhead in their spaceship. Rick gloats about how he was right and Morty was wrong about the wisdom of using a love potion. When his attempt to cure Earth's populace has failed, he berates Morty for wanting to gloat about his failure. The episode has a pretty impressively dark ending set to Mazzy Star's "Look on Down from the Bridge" (the episode was directed by Stephen Sandoval, I don't know if he's any relation to Hope Sandoval, lead singer of Mazzy Star).

I come away from the episode feeling like the writer really understands something about the psychology of abuse. I wouldn't say that necessarily means he would become abusive himself, nor would I say it would make him less likely to be abusive.

I'm glad I watched those first three seasons, I feel considerably better informed on modern pop culture now. I also got to thinking, the show feels very much like the next step in evolution from Russell T Davies' run on Doctor Who, which was often about how the Doctor could be amoral and dangerous. Rick and Morty began as a Back to the Future parody and, since Back to the Future was one of the many American projects that "paid homage" to Doctor Who in the '80s, it makes sense. I wonder if Russell T Davies has it in him still to add another knot to this mouse's tail.

The Old Funny Future

I decided to see what all of Kevin Feige's fuss was about and started watching Rick and Morty. Though, seven episodes into the second season, I still haven't seen any episodes written by Jessica Gao and Michael Waldron, the two talents Feige hired from Ricky and Morty to mastermind Marvel projects. So far I've enjoyed the show and it's pretty much what I expected--an ultra-cynical, postmodern Adult Swim comedy, not too far afield from Venture Brothers or Aqua Teen Hunger Force. Actually, what it really feels like is Futurama, and the central character, Rick, is like a combination of Bender and Professor Farnsworth.

Some of the plot concepts are genuinely thoughtful, if not quite reaching their potential depth. Last night I watched "Big Trouble in Little Sanchez" in which Morty's parents go to an alien planet for marriage counselling. The aliens' devices create physical manifestations of Jerry and Beth's perceptions of each other--Jerry's Beth is a giant, powerful, and angry bug monster while Beth's Jerry is a whiney worm. Writer Alex Reubens (Key and Peele, Community) takes the concept in interesting directions. The two manifestations are naturally co-dependent so they work together to take over the alien planet. It results in some good gags and a sort of "wrong-sweet" moment when Beth realises the bug monster's existence implies Jerry sees her as the smartest and strongest person he knows. Maybe that is just as far as the concept needed to go.

The first two seasons I've been watching come from those far off days of 2013 and 2015 so the show isn't saddled with to-day's paranoid political correctness. Much of Rick's humour is reliant on him saying and doing fucked up things, like the episode where he accurately describes the love potion Morty has him make as ruffies, or a subtler joke in a later episode where he uses an alien racial slur. I wonder if this is related to the fact that the viewership chart on Wikipedia shows viewership dropping off sharply after the third season. Maybe it just reflects the exodus of viewers from cable television.

Anyway, it's a surprisingly nostalgic experience so far. I used to watch Adult Swim all the time in the early 2000s, back when the concept of cartoons for adults on normal television was kind of a novelty.

Rick and Morty is available on Netflix in Japan and on HBOMax in the US.

Twitter Sonnet #1642

A puppet waits upon the parapet.
Repurposed purses pluck the pouches clean.
Denuded numbers change to alphabet.
Corrupted cats'll cut the cutlass keen.
Returning lances light the seas for eyes.
Repeated words became a mindless noise.
Determined squash becomes the pumpkin pies.
Subconscious basements hide the evil boys.
The vampire dice were sucking all the bones.
Revolving clouds were nothing underground.
Discerning rocks diminished thoughts of stones.
Assorted eyes beheld the mob around.
The joker's fuss results in funny shirts.
Revenge attracts the Ernies more than Berts.