Quantum Leap?

The Marvel Cinematic Universe kept chugging along this past weekend with the arrival of Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania. Marvel fans are hurling rotten tomatoes at Rotten Tomatoes, which has dubbed it only the second MCU movie after Eternals to be "rotten." Inasmuch as I found this movie much far more fun than the ponderous Eternals, I agree with them. But I certainly didn't think it was "good."

Quantumania is an mammoth-sized journey down into the atom-sized quantum realm -- bold and colorful and action-packed... but disappointingly light on character, and utterly devoid of logic. It looks pretty great. Maybe the visuals seem cribbed from Strange World at times, but they're fairly impressively blended with the live-action elements. There are cool-looking character designs, both for human actors in makeup and more wild-looking CG creations. The color palette uses every shade in a Pantone swatch set, but still looks unified and coherent.

But the two title characters, Ant-Man and the Wasp, do basically nothing until the last act. Paul Rudd spends most of the movie running in front of a green screen from things he can't really see, a victim of circumstance rather than an agent of narrative. Evangeline Lilly is dragged along in tow of a story focused entirely on Michelle Pfeiffer and Michael Douglas's characters. Granted, that's an upgrade in some ways, as Pfeiffer and Douglas have the long careers to prove they have more screen presence than their co-star; still, they're not really suppose to outshine the (ostensibly) lead characters here.

There are some other side characters who shine without seizing control of the movie so distractingly. William Jackson Harper's comedic gifts are put to great use as the telepath Quaz. Kathryn Newton is enjoyable enough as Cassie Lang. (But if she's part of the "next generation" of characters, as this movie clearly implies, there seems to me to be a charisma gap between her and Hailee Steinfeld, Florence Pugh, or Iman Vellani.) Jonathan Majors seems more than capable of anchoring the MCU as main baddie for a while -- though I find him far more chilling in "quiet rage" mode than in the "shouting maniac" mode he increasingly embraces in the movie's final act.

The big problem here, though, is a story that makes no sense. And I don't mean all the (considerable) technobabble about the quantum realm and the multiverse. I watch science fiction; I can hang. It's that Roger Rabbit seems to have been the dramaturg of this script. ("You mean you could have done that at any time?" "Not any time. Only when it was dramatic!") The villain shows powers halfway through the movie that he simply stops using for the big showdown. The heroes roll out powers in that same showdown even though nothing seems to have been stopping them from doing so earlier. Characters who would prove really useful in key moments go missing, because their presence would offer inconveniently convenient solutions to problems that are meant to be challenging.

Such transparent cultivation of jeopardy makes the entire story feel like it has no meaningful stakes. But of course, it doesn't have meaningful stakes; we're just getting start with a new "phase" of the MCU, and we're laying track that won't carry traffic for two to three more years.

Would you divide your Marvel movie rankings into thirds? Quarters? Either way, I think Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania is clearly in the bottom tier. I suppose it's faint praise to say that I'd still give it a C-. (If this is approaching the floor for Marvel movies, it's a reasonably high floor.) But it's a shame that this seems like "must-see" Marvel in terms of setting up the story to come, because it feels like one of the more easily skippable movies of the franchise in every other respect.