ANT-MAN AND THE WASP: QUANTUMANIA

Directed by: Peyton Reed

Written by: Jeff Loveness

Paul Rudd has long been a fan favorite Hollywood leading man. His boyish looks and charm seems to never age. In 2015’s Ant-Man. he was brought into the Marvel Comic Universe to portray Scott Lang, aka Ant-Man, no one could imagine a better suited actor to bring this character the levels of comedy and drama that drive the themes and narratives of the films. What is very interesting about this film is that it is written by a single writer and his biggest work prior to this film was writing four episodes of season four of the animated series Rick and Morty. He is now attached to writing on the upcoming Avengers: The Kang Dynasty. This means this guy has some solid writing talent going for him.

Here comes the spoilers.

Movie starts with showing us a past event of Janet Van Dyne (Michelle Pfeiffer) in the Quantum realm and a small ship crash lands nearby. She comes to meet with a strange man. We jump forward to present day we see our hero, Scott Lang (Paul Rudd), walking along the street and greeting people along his walk and getting his morning coffee. Then he gets a call from the police station as his daughter has been arrested for trying to help homeless people. As we get reacquainted with the family of Scott, Cassie, Hope Van Dyne (Evangeline Lilly), and Hank Pym (Michael Douglas) as they sit for dinner and suddenly end up in a basement lab where Cassie shows off something she has been working on with Hank that is a device to send signals down to the quantum realm. Janet gets upset and yells at them to turn it off. As soon as they do, the machine comes back on automatically and creates a vortex that sucks them all into the quantum realm. They all land with Scott and Cassie separated from Hope, Janet, and Hank. Janet has to reluctantly reveal information about why she is so scared in the quantum realm. She reveals her meeting with Kang and how she helped him repair his ship that allows him to time travel across the multiverse. She reveals that he was exiled to the quantum realm and that they must at all costs prevent him from getting out.

Scott and Cassie cross paths with the Micronauts and they see that they too fear the conqueror. Soon Kang sends his right hand to capture them and we get a surprise reveal of Darren Cross (Carey Stoll), who somehow survived the events of Ant-Man (2015). He is now mostly a head in a floating suit and his name is now M.O.D.O.K. (Mechanized Organism Designed Only for Killing). He takes them to Kang who offers Scott the chance to return home with his daughter if he helps him retrieve a device. He needs his power sphere to power his ship to get out from the quantum realm. Kang causes his daughter pain which convinces Scott to do as Kang says. Scott goes and retrieves it with some help from Hope, and Kang shows he is not a man of his word. I will stop here as there is quite a lot of things happening with this film that I don’t think people would appreciate upon a first viewing. The theme of family together is there from the opening few scenes. Themes of fighting together against evil is there. The theme of time lost is also very prevalent in this film. Scott losing out on many birthdays with Cassie and Janet missing out on seeing Hope grow up. What should have happened is to pit people against each other.

If I was to make a significant change to this film it would be this: When Scott is about to give Kang the sphere have Janet aggressively implore Scott not to. Scott hesitates and Kang without hesitation kills his daughter. As Scott runs to her side in agony Kang tells him that he can fix it if Scott gives him the sphere. This now pits Scotts desire to get his daughter back against saving the world. What parent wouldn’t seriously consider this? Scott gives into Kang’s offer knowing he may not honor his word. Kang assures him he can even put Scott back to before the blip and get back all the time he has lost. Of course Scott would at the last moment turn against Kang and destroy the sphere and the film would carry on much as it did in theaters. Except when the scene of strolling down the street occurs it is without Scott and the weather is grey skies. We jump to an empty dinner scene where no one is at the table. We get cuts of scenes where Hope and Scott become estranged due to his depression and loss. Hank isolates himself in his lab to try to figure a way to manipulate time like Kang did to fix things. Janet therefore leaves Hank because she doesn’t support his attempts to meddle with time. Back to the empty table as the camera pans out and screen fades to black. This family is now forever broken. The micronauts rebellion won and the world may have been saved from Kang the Conqueror, but it came at a great loss to our heroes. This would be the gut punch Marvel should’ve given its fans to establish Kang as a terrifying and truly unpredictable character they need to raise all stakes when it comes to our heroes in this next phase of films.

Is Kang better than Thanos? Yes. The idea of multiple Kangs working together is terrifying. The idea of mad scientists working across generations, centuries, etc. is a very terrifying thought indeed. I would rate this film a solid 6.5 out of 10, but if they incorporated my changes it could have easily been an 8. Nonetheless I am looking forward to the Kang Dynasty.

Thanks for reading Writing Movie ‘WRONGS’.