If you tried to turn the first reel of this film into a drinking game involving every utterance of the word “Quantum,” there would be no survivors. I stopped counting after 20 in the first 15 minutes, and it doesn’t really go away. It’s like “fuck” in a Joe Begos film, or “Kirsty” in Hellbound: Hellraiser II — a word said so many times it loses all meaning and then sends you into a linguistic deathloop where you’re trying to figure out why these sounds represent anything. Wittgenstein would be proud, to be sure.
The gang from the previous Ant-Man adventures is back, journeying through the Quantum Realm (think a subatomic freakout land composed of bits of every ’80s dark fantasy/sci-fi crossover) to try and get out of it while also avoiding the many, many, many secrets from Janet Van Dyne’s 30 years spent in this realm before we ever really met her on screen. It’s not a movie-killing retcon like Back to the Future II, or the character assassinations of Wanda Maximoff and David Marcus in Dr. Strange in the Multiverse of Madness or Star Trek III: The Search for Spock, respectively, but it generates a lot of the wrong kind of suspense for a movie that is basically treading water for a collective narrative weight its previous installments were refreshingly free from.
The thing about everything that gets shot on The Volume — or whatever they’re calling the surround LCD-wall system wherein actors can actually see whatever CG vistas are going to be surrounding them (see The Mandalorian and such) — is that it’s great for actors so they can have some sense of perspective. The problem is, it’s still a screen that occupies a different plane of existence from whichever performers and props are being photographed in front of and amidst it. This means a pronounced lack of depth. Which is actually a reason why I’ve no doubt that the 3D conversion of Quantumania is a more visually satisfying experience. Though this isn’t how the film was screened for the press, it demands to be seen that way. This is Marvel in full-on Juicy J “Trippy Mane”/Maxfield Parrish mode, with all manner of creatures, realms and squiggly electrified particles all in flux in most every shot, and all the kinky and diaphanous edges are what’s the most fun.
It’s weird how, for an Ant-Man and the Wasp film, the titular twosome at times seem like guest stars. The first hour tends to keep focus on Michelle Pfeiffer’s Janet Van Dyne character, which is in no way a mistake. The writing is shaky, and the whole thing seems to exist to retcon Loki villain Kang the Conquerer (Jonathan Majors, taking some chicken-shit dialogue and treating it like it’s chicken salad) as part of the Van Dyne/Pym/Lang section of current Marveltry to set up future Big Bad rumblings. It also sidelines Evangeline Lilly’s Wasp for big heaps of the film, which could be knee-jerk sexism but could just as easily be the Corporate Powers That Be dealing with Lilly’s anti-vaxxer social profile.
But in addition to Pfeiffer, and the reliable and soothing perpetuality of Paul Rudd, this movie has two superb creatures. One, a swooping crab-manta thing that actually had me saying out loud, “I love that monster.” The other, genre cinema treasure David Dastmalchian voicing a superintelligent bipedal liquid who conveys the gift of universal communication when all the creatures drink some of them. I’m sure the latter triggers someone’s hypersensitivity to the point of helplessness as a signifier for queerness, or the existence of a creature which refutes the legend of Babel being some threat to shaky Sunday school memories, but for regular people, this creature steals the whole movie.
This film is silly and messy and pretty and trippy, and though it fulfills the obligations of vweepy laser fights, digital everything, and several different varieties of product placement (including one genuinely funny appearance in the midst of an unexpected riff on Clive Barker’s The Hills, the Cities), it’s not going to reshape the marketplace the way some previous Marvel films have. To be sure, there are little touches for longtime heads (there’s a D’Bari in this film, with lines and everything), and I had fun with the experience. I’ve already got tickets for a 4DX show just because of how bad I want to see it in 3D (and also because I need some evil shaken out of my lower back and spine). But it feels like it’s going to be another couple TV series and at least one more feature before the MCU regains that expansive focus that made its first 20-some-odd films such a phenomenon.
