I should start by saying that I am not sure that I’ve ever seen any of the Antsmen movies. I am vaguely aware that he can get small and also that he can get big and that someone once asked about how come he didn’t just go into Thanos‘s body and a’splode him Magic School Bus style. Also, I think I may have once seen an end credits scene in which Antman wakes up in a van after having been in the Quantum Realm for a while during the Snappening? Anyway, I’m here because of Jonathan Majors and Loki, and you need to understand that before we go any further.
Wife said that she would see this movie “if she didn’t have a book with her and she’d seen every other movie on the plane’s video service,” so I resorted to take visiting Friend with me along with ten other colleagues to view the third installment to the Antman and Wasp franchise, a phrase no one ever anticipated or asked for.
I went in with a few (“Are you still talking about your predictions?” Friend hissed as I turned to yet another Friend to try out a few more theories before having them tell me in so many words, “We’re going to see this thing in like ten minutes, do you really need to narrate such an elaborate plot right now?” or “Is there a prize for being right, like calling your home run, or something?) predictions:
- 1) Kang and Janet have had sex, which is why she’s so cagey about talking about her time there;
- 2) the introduction of a zany villain like M.O.D.O.K. would lead to the introduction of an equivalently silly super niche superhero: like a guy who can summon overly honest criticism or a woman who can talk to her future self but only about disappointment. I am now chasing that feeling in the theater on opening night of the Multiverse of Madness when people lost their goddamn minds seeing Prof X, the head of the Fantastic Four, and whoever else, that WTF moment that leads to involuntary cheering;
- and lastly, 3) Antman would have to decide whether to let Kang back into Earth and save Hank and Janet Pym or trap them with Kang in the QR, thereby granting Michelle Pfeiffer and Michael Douglas the sweet release of the MCU’s deathgrip on their time.
I would say that I was… half right? In many ways, A&V3 is a bit boilerplate for the opening of Phase 5. It introduces the Big Bad to the silver screen and the furry timeline of variants that was so thoughtfully developed in the Loki television show, but offers very little of the things that made the multiverse so “freaky” and fun–the many, many televised experiments with gender bending, alternate history, and (even among the shards of fairly disappointing movies that did their most interesting characters dirty) the introduction and swift destruction of long-awaited fan favorites. If the post-Thanos era of Phase 4 was typified by some real off-screen challenges like the death of one of the most beloved actors in the MCU and a global pandemic which halted production and filming for months and years, as well as some adroit on-screen feints to fill the ranks with Ms Marvel, Hawkeye, Yelena’s Black Widow, America Chavez, Monica Rambeau, and She-Hulk, just to name a few, Phase 5 has opened leaning hard on a property that never really secured or earned a loyal fan-base of its own, so much as it purchased an actor with name recognition to broaden its bench of affable white men.
A&W3 as the introduction to Phase 5 feels weirdly conservative, a little small stakes? Really, any movie where the climax involves the hero going Godzilla and then Hulksmashing the thing his antagonist has spent decades upon decades trying to protect and perfect has some explaining to do. I’m speaking from a place of ignorance, but my understanding is that Antman’s chief strengths lie in the fact that he is a cowardly, wise-cracking safe-cracker with a penchant for heists, but none of that characterization operates in this movie. His motivations are weirdly interchangeable with just about any other super (save the girl, save the universe), and if the Wasp has a different motivation than Help the Man Save the Girl, Save the Universe, it’s hard to see what it is. Being the Wasp is a thankless job, by the way. If someone ever asks you if you want to be the slightly gendered sidekick to a minor sidekick hero, take the job, definitely, but be aware that if the script is running long, they’re cutting your lines first.
Part of what makes this movie so difficult to quantify for Friend and I has to do with the strangeness of not knowing where it fits in the chronology of the Loki series. It would be easy to say that this movie was a brilliant pre?/se?-quel in a series of mysteriously assembled films about a quizzical and sometimes fabulously weird arch villain–if we had the advantage of understanding the misdirects and complexities of Kang’s characterization. Similarly, if we had the disadvantage of knowing how anticlimactically this arc ends, it would be easy to condemn this film as a confused, milquetoast installment in an artistically bankrupt series that cannot assemble the mojo of its wonder years as its target audience lumbers into its late 30s and 40s, pining after live action reboots of its favorite comic book moments, grumpily denouncing Kids These Days with their penchants for films about cultural alienation with a healthy respect for the past and a creative impulse to remix nostalgia, all the while unironically waxing nostalgic about the MCU’s good ol’ days when it made films about cultural alienation with a healthy respect for the past and a creative impulse to remix nostalgia.
Spoilers. The chronology of the movie presents some interesting possibilities for Phase 5. If, for instance, this Kang proceeds the TVA’s destruction, as evidenced by the fact that Scott Lang is seen walking the streets of San Francisco, enriching himself from the newfound fame of his involvement in Endgame, and the fact that the Loki series features a Loki variant who has witnessed his own demise at the hands of Thanos, then what does that mean about Kang’s characterization in A&W3 and Loki? First, the portentous threat that Kang makes in Loki, that his death would usher in a period of deadly conflict and destruction appears to already be coming to fruition. After his offer to the Lokis to become the new Time Lords and their subsequent denial, the Kangs have been hard at work scorching the variant time lines that have cropped up as a result of the TVA’s careful pruning. Kang variants are “killing trillions” in an act of self-preservation: one Kang to rule them all, so to speak. The variants are going to have to answer for their role in this chaos and would have a hand to play in the ensuing action. If we’re running chronological, the Kang the Conqueror of A&W3 is deadly and dangerous–yes–but a nuisance, nonetheless, compared to the legion Kangs who’ve assembled. We’re witnessing the power creep of Kangs in real time.
But if this is pre-Loki, which also seems possible? Considering this is all happening outside of time, which appears to be what the Quantumverse is all about, which is the reason why Kang doesn’t seem to have the ability to anticipate what is going to happen like he does in the Loki series. His discussion with Loki and Sylvie when they’ve allowed for variant timelines to branch beyond the TVA’s control makes it seem like the Quantumania Kang is a predecessor, because so many of his monologues have to do with how impatient he is to “skip to the ending,” which appears to extend beyond his imprisonment in the–weirdly small, contrary to Janet’s assertion of a “universe within a universe”–Quantum Realm. Kang the Conqueror says he exists outside of time, which seems to suggest that he is still bound by the restraints of the TVA. He actually calls time a kind of prison when he talks to Janet in a flashback, even as he finds himself imprisoned out of time in the QR. So, is he just foreshadowing his own imprisonment, which Janet will soon discover when she touches the neuromotive engine, or is he foreshadowing some larger arc, one that finds him the head of a kind of authoritarian empire, the TVA, depicted in Loki? And if so, what a twist that would be: all the glory, all the “winning” that he dreams about in Quantumania are replaced with some pretty bleak depictions of bureaucratic sclerosis. The Kang he becomes after he has achieved his victory over the variant time lines is a bored tyrant, stretched thin as he attempts to keep the timeline in a tight loop, but not overly upset about the way in which he’s been done in (by another sidekick to a sidekick to a leading man, I might add!). In which case, it seems like Kang’s “death” in A&W3 is a pretty significant headfake, because his disappearance into the multiversal engine appears to trap him even deeper into timelessness–maybe a space like the TVA, as one Friend suggests–or maybe an escape from the QR by a different means. Both of which would represent a pretty significant oopsie on the part of Antman and Wasp, because they have no reason to inform the Avengers of a job well done in the aftermath of a personal, family adventure, even as they may be responsible for causing a fairly serious departure from business as usual.
If Antman is able to vanquish the villain, it “completely neutralizes the danger of Kang” Friend suggests, unless it doesn’t? We both agree that Kang himself represents a shift from the Thanos mold for a more slippery, conniving villain. “I like that he doesn’t have superpowers,” another Friend has told me, someone who’s a fan of Star Wars’ Thrawn and the mundanity of evil in a universe full of space magicians. For me, the wiliness of an individual who has access to multiple realities and a whole lot of versions where things work out just fine for him pushes the Avengers to plan all the more elaborately than they are wont to do in earlier phases, and that’s a welcome change. Bring on the complexity and hold off on the reveal that everyone has been replaced with space clones for a few more years. Let’s embrace the darkness of not knowing how to beat the Big Bad a little longer, because Kang has been around this block before.
As have the ants, apparently? And I say this with all the warmth in my heart, but the real weakness of this movie is apparently that the ants were not ruthless enough. Almost like… instead of finishing the job they spent literally centuries preparing for, they just kept.. marching on….
Last but not least, the goo with no holes really grew on me.
A&W3 is awkward and unwieldy, but so was Wakanda Forever and that didn’t seem to bother most people. It’s not high praise for the debut of the next phase, but it’ll take time before we understand how much forethought was put into this assembly of stories.
