Ant-Man & The Wasp: Quantumania kicks off Phase 5 and introduces the fearsome villain of the Multiverse Saga: Kang the Conqueror.
The film-television epic of the eternally unfolding saga of the Marvel Cinematic Universe reaches a decisive turning point in the new feature film directed by Peyton Reed, Ant-Man & The Wasp: Quantumania, the third installment of the saga dedicated to the smallest superhero on the big screen as well as the first release of the so-called Step 5, the central act of the Saga of the Multiverse.
Set after the events of Avengers: Endgame and Doctor Strange in the Madness Multiverse and especially the first season of Loki, the film continues to develop one of the big themes of the fictional universe created and produced by Kevin Feige, that of legacy and passing of the baton, with protagonist Scott Lang grappling not only with the Quantum Realm and the fearsome new villain Kang the Conqueror (a titanic Jonathan Majors who, after his debut in Loki, assumes here a central role destined to delineate the entire future of the franchise) but especially with his relationship with his daughter Cassie Lang, ‘grown up five years’ after the events of Endgame and here played by rising star Kathryn Newton (The star of Three Posters to Ebbing and Freaky is the third actress to lend her face to the character, previously played as a child by Abby Ryder Fortson in Ant-Man and Ant-Man & The Wasp and as a teenager by Emma Fuhrmann in Avengers: Endgame).
It will be just The father-daughter relationship the emotional focus of the story and the driving force behind most of the script subplots, with the entire Lang Family (there would be a need to analyze how much and how Hollywood blockbusters are increasingly becoming a choral narrative, moving further and further away from the figure of the lone hero that characterized the entire twentieth century) who will find himself at the center of a subatomic space adventure, to unleash a full-fledged Marxist revolution (talking about a chorus) and to come to terms with a big dark secret concerning the past of one of them.
Film socialisme
With rather pronounced political traits from the very first scenes, in which they talk about police abuse and displaced people (but the MCU has accustomed us to such lashings: who remembers Zendaya’s line in Spider-Man: Homecoming about the ‘symbol of Washington built by slaves’?), Ant-Man & The Wasp: Quantumania brings the typical lightness of Marvel movies in a world free of all space-time logic, in which geographical coordinates cease to make sense, actors’ faces are deformed to accommodate the design of their respective cartoon characters, and every object can be animated, Giving way to the indispensable comic gags.
Scott Lang plows the red carpet and has become a writer, white rich privileged (Marvel stars in real life are now also stars in the Marvel world itself, a meta-thematic procedure that we have already analyzed on the Freaking News podcast) but her daughter Cassie, also a superheroine (despite her parent’s recommendations) does not want to sit on her hands and tends to make every social battle possible her own, especially when our heroes discover that the inhabitants of the Quantum Realm are enslaved by Kang the Conqueror. But what can ants do in the face of titans?
Scott Lang, a hero out of time, thus finds himself in spite of himself facing The Time Lord: Jonathan Majors proposes a very physical Kang, who does so much acting with the muscles of his face and the movements of his arms and shoulders, and the idea of deploying this semi-divine (who will be the main villain of the upcoming crossover films Avengers: The Kang Dynasty, indeed, and Avengers: Secret Wars) in the face of the tiniest of superheroes, in this reimagining of the 1950s sci-fi space-opera of the David and Goliath myth. (“I’m the ruler of time, you talk to ants!” will be said at one point) is an idea that works: the confrontation is deliberately unbalanced and because of this the stakes are raised, especially if the protagonist’s real goal is not so much to save the whole universe but his only daughter.
Of course, amid so many visual gimmicks (From self-propelled palaces to drink-sentients) Quantumania suffers from the effect James Cameron’s Avatar: The Waterway, which exactly two months ago established itself as the new quality standard in science fiction and special effects, but the comparison would be unfair, as it would be unfair to call Ant-Man 3 ‘a gateway film’: Marvel Studios goes on their way, a road built chapter by chapter, which like TV series (which is what it is) should be analyzed as a whole. And this ‘episode,’ like any good serial episode, makes you want more.
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