Ant-Man and The Wasp: Quantumania

So glad I didn't pay to see a third Ant-Man in the theater. The first two were light and fun, but this one is not. A rote peasant-uprising-against-a-tyrant story, with a third-rate villain. The screenplay builds up Kang The Conqueror to be as fearsome and powerful as Thanos. Jonathan Banks brings a lot of calm, slow, Yale School Of Drama gravitas to his line readings. Kang can manhandle the good guys with a flick of his pinky, or zap rebels into dust with his bare hands. We're told he has destroyed entire parallel universes out of some deranged (literal) Galaxy-Brain scheme- was his character in the Loki miniseries? I forget. Michelle Pfieffer accuses him of murdering "trillions" of lives. It's probably more than trillions, but movie audiences don't know any numbers bigger than that. All this build-up, and mostly Kang employs his useless, faceless foot soldiers to do his evil-ness for him, and badly. He literally tells one "find her and kill her".

The good guys aren't any better: there's a wild cornucopia of life forms populating the quantum realm. The character design is inventive, but they didn't spend much time giving them personalities. The rebel leader is your stock heartless militant who grudgingly respects the contributions of the newcomers at the end of the movie.

If you are wondering where the Van Dynes fit in here, well, me too. Michelle Pfeiffer's Janet has several long scenes of retconning exposition. At the end of the previous Ant-Man, we were led to believe that Janet was stranded in the Quantum Realm for 30 years, like Tom Hanks in Cast Away, but with more CGI. Now Pfeiffer is burdened with explaining, no, the Quantum Realm was more like Mos Eisley Spaceport, I led a revolution against my old roommate Kang, and I had an affair with Bill Murray. The massive re-inventing of the Quantum Realm is all explained as "Janet had PTSD so she never wanted to talk about it". 

Scott's daughter Cassie is a teenager with her own plot, and her own super-suit. I feel the worst for Evangeline Lilly as Hope/The Wasp: she has very little to do. 

My Grade = C

Read my reviews of almost all the Marvel movies!