Ant Man 3: Quantumania - Absolute Garbage

you come from above like him he will burn the world to find you who greetings earthlings I am Kang back in the before times a main character was shrunk down into another dimension while there they discovered an entire world full of other dimensional people they had a sidekick and with that sidekick they conspired to achieve technological Marvels but the sidekick betrayed our main character taking power in the miniature realm and becoming a genocidal dictator the portal back to the Real World closes and main character goes into hiding as the traitor consolidates their power building arsenals and armies in the hopes of one day invading our Dimension which he believes to be flawed and messy and in need of his Perfection our hero has the McGuffin the genocidal dictator needs to escape this Dimension and so the hero remains in hiding and in isolation believing they will never see their family again many years later in the real world Our Heroes kids are Renegade Tech whiz comes upon a machine linked to the miniature realm genocidal Maniac exploits the device in a bid to bring down our heroes friend but finds that his family suits his purposes just as well when they try to use the device they get sucked into the miniature realm they're captured but they managed to escape and they find our original hero original hero knows the danger they pose because of genocidal Maniac finds them he'll get his hands on the McGovern and be able to escape the miniature realm with his armies even so they attempt to plot their escape back to the real world and to do that they go to a colorful bar to meet an eccentric agent who they hope will get them out but this eccentric chap betrays them and a shootout ensues and they escape on a magical spaceyard genocidal Maniac catches up with them and takes one of our new Heroes prisoner believing that this will ensure the others bring the MacGuffin to him he assembles his armies in anticipation giving a rousing speech about the campaign to come pledging to bring Perfection to the real world and his plan almost works the portal opens he's so nearly there but then our heroes fight back most of them Reach the portal first but genocidal Mania is too close behind so our main character turns back and sacrifices himself to buy his family time to escape thereby preventing genocidal Maniac from using the portal and being transported up to the real world with them saving everyone or so we think until the mid-credit scene suggests that all might not be well after all and that's the end of the film now I know what you're asking platoon isn't this meant to be a review of the new Ant-Man film why are you describing the plot of Tron legacy well we're about to find out it's never an especially good sign when you come into a sequel like Ant-Man and the white Anglo-Saxon Protestant in the Quantum of Solace to find that you have to Google the plot of the previous film I have if I do say so myself a very good memory which makes me dangerous to drink with but I don't remember the first film because it's Ant-Man and Ant-Man is what we might once have called a passenger tier hero that's not to denigrate him by the way the first Ant-Man debuted at the close of phase 2 and provided some necessary relief as the franchise began to make its move toward a darker and more serious turn lowering the stakes before the MCU ramped them up again believe it or not there was a time when humor in the MCU could be classed as a relief and a family-focused family-friendly Small Time superhero provided a necessary shot of the local and the familiar as the Galaxy around it went to war even when the second film came out with bigger stakes and a more mind-boggling plot its placement after the impressive bleakness of infinity War again made it something of a comedic foil compare narratively happy and light-hearted and once again a friendly a face in a collapsing Universe it's indicative that despite his films providing the time travel or bad writing mechanic that allowed endgame to function Ant-Man himself remained largely irrelevant to that story I don't know anyone who came out of endgame with Scott Lang at the top of their mind the quantum realm itself seemed only to exist as the most useful of all contrivances Ant-Man gets locked there in the post-credits of his second film re-emerging to move the plot of endgame forward and we are coming back to that believe me but establishing a mechanic doesn't make the character himself particularly useful phases one to three of the MCU were built as you might expect on a three-act structure the three acts didn't quite correlate with the three phases phase one charts the rise Phase 2 begins the second act full but that doesn't culminate until phase three's Infinity War the third act resolution then is endgame's Phase 3 close the three-act structure has been pretty much the default narrative form roughly since the days of Aristotle and each of phases one to three and each of the films within phases one to three tended to use some approximation of it introduction conflict resolution setup set back pay off three acts within three acts within the three-act structure of the overarching infinity Saga then with phase four things went catastrophically wrong for all the reasons documented on this channel and elsewhere in beginning a new saga it might conventionally have been thought wise to treat phase 4 as the First Act of that Saga but conventional wisdom has not been the Hallmark of the mcu's Disney era and so phase 4 which should have Strode confidently onto the screen to establish our new set of Heroes and the stakes in the next conflict more closely resembled Stevie Wonder drunkenly stumbling across a Minefield of explosive diarrhea and this put modestly poses problems evidencing its essential nothingness phase 4 was the first MCU phase not to end with or even include some big tie-in event of the Avengers type which is actually incredibly important the cynic might see it as an excuse to get all the money Bringers on the screen together but tie in events in a property like the MCU give the whole thing a narrative cohesion they show that individual stories are not in fact independent of each other everything built towards something and something is usually building toward something else when you have such a large and varied cast bringing them and their stories together to create an overarching plot allows you to clearly establish relationships between characters between characters in the world between characters world and plot the stakes might increase each time but they become more clearly understood you couldn't have a plot featuring Thanos finger snapping out half the universe without the tie-in events that show us the tangible consequences of that act so having botched its introduction having failed to craft even the semblance of a through line in its plot having thrown a bunch of new characters on screen with varyingly shite levels of establishment and having left off with absolutely no connection between any of the preceding phase 4 leaves phase five in a position we might call abysmal it has all the work to do and with flagging interest in and tolerance for the franchise as a whole it also has to contend for the first time since phase one with an audience that isn't really invested in what passes for its story meaning Phase 5 had to get off to an incredible start just to make up for lost time and instead it began with Ant-Man and the WASP quantumania now on to its terribly original plot that has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with the Tron legacy summary at the top we begin in some darkened Eerie corner of definitely not another Multiverse with Janet Van Dien observing some bright star burning through the sky then getting attacked by some Eldritch creatures and discovering a wounded and Confused Kang the Conqueror reminding us all of the gaping Chasm where his character should have been throughout phase 4. I speak as one of the vast majority of people who didn't think it worth bothering with Loki and I vaguely recall being promised that people wouldn't have to subscribe to Disney Plus in order to understand the mainline films quite obviously a lie at the time but what I mean nonetheless to hold them to this is for all intents and purposes our first introduction to the villain who is supposed to Anchor the entire franchise Allah Thanos and so the guy who's been conspicuous by his absence thus far ask a normie who Kang is and they likely couldn't even tell you the franchise he's a part of we're then back in what is supposed to be a present-day San Francisco but which quite clearly is not because there are no homeless people defecating in shut Scott Lang delivers a bit of cheerful exposition of the type we'd have never needed if the character had been I don't know Tony Stark my life doesn't make sense I am a divorced ex-con who's a time traveling Avenger Etc because the film recognizes that there is a good chance that much of the audience like me has a hazy at best memory of this recently promoted character to its credit the film makes a joke of this Scott is recognized but not everyone actually knows who he is for example one shop owner refuses to take his money because he's a hero but bids him farewell with goodbye by Spider-Man a joke that lands far better than Doctor Strange's bug-themed superheroes commented Multiplex of ninjas because it actually acknowledges Scott Lang's often irrelevance next to the more recognizable Heroes rather than serving as some smug cynical matter comment excusing the plot's failure to explain the absence of other Heroes who would have been immensely useful to it the overall tone of the introduction mitigates what might otherwise have been some fairly affronting Exposition this is more of my backstory this is Hope whom I was very lucky to meet Etc because it does manage to blend in some of Scott's quirky Small Time origin story an honorary award from the manager of the ice cream store he got sacked from in the first film for example this is the film at its strongest an Ant-Man as a character at his strongest with the same local appeal as Spider-Man not a universe saving hyper-powered superhero but an ordinary guy with a familiar backstory and entirely recognizable roots of course the film won't stick with this because the MCU is Crossing into every imaginable universe and dimension in the vein hopes it will find a story somewhere so we learn that hope now owns her dad's old company and is using the Pym particles to achieve Global change much like the wakandans didn't with their vibranium she's saving the world in all the ways Hollywood people like talking about and achieving on the screen but never in reality affordable housing reforestation Etc all fashionable all tedious Scots on a book tour telling kids to make mistakes and take chances because there's always room to grow which could serve as a meta defense for phase 4's faux experimental nonsense but that if I were to break the habit of a lifetime and stop being a cynical ass is a nice enough message I suppose God that's really unnatural coming out of my mouth my tongue feels weird he's called away because his daughter a now grown-up Cassie has got herself arrested Cassie is now a bratty teenager which means she will probably be the moral center of the universe going forward her introduction sees her sardonically berate and arresting office for firing tear gas at peaceful protesters in a park the early signs are that Cassie Lang will be given a marginally more fulsome introduction to the MCU than any of its recent female Heroes Hugo Chavez and Riri Williams had no introduction at all besides being on screen as props so any introduction counts as a better introduction than theirs but the early signs also indicate that she's going to be an insufferably smoke know it all with a power and knowledge set Beyond what's justified by her experience which might leave us wishing she too was a mere prop and not a sincere attempt at character writing by people who think that college girls are the unimpeachable epitome of weird and Brilliance things don't get very much better where she's concerned she justifies her apparent attack on the police by saying that they were clearing out a homeless Camp not something San Francisco police is known for and it's not their fault they're homeless they lost their homes in the blip nobody can afford rent unless there's some trust fund and so on and so on reality intrudes to remind us that it's probably the affordable homes policy Hope's been pushing for let's play the big part in making rent unaffordable but our in-universe observation must be wait what we're doing the blip again that's that's funny because we've been told quite recently that the MCU has moved on from the blip that was the defense of it for she-hulk's failure to account for it but She-Hulk was not the only phase for entry guilty of that failure almost every phase 4 entry failed even though the original line deployed was that phase 4 was all about accounting for the consequences of endgame gee it's almost like they had no plan we're to take it from Ant-Man and the white Anglo-Saxon Protestant in the Quantum of Solace that Sam Wilson telling a senator to do better did not in fact solve the problem well Colony whatever the opposite of shocked is at this point the biggest superhero in the MCU will be the guy who manages to get San Francisco to let more houses be built kazi's tone and general demeanor and unjustified skills and unjustified knowledge that is a problem with this film specifically she has her own suit now by the way and we know she's hyper talented because she tells us she is and everyone accepts it as a given by contrast that the film's attempts to invoke past events prove jarring is not a problem specific to this film that's a problem with the MCU as a whole world building doesn't work if you only do it when it's convenient and otherwise forget all about it you cannot move on from the blip and then invoke the consequences of the blip to explain the present State of Affairs you leave the audience wondering just what about the past they're expected to remember or pay attention to and asking just what the hell is the point of that investment if the past is only relevant for about five minutes and then forgotten all about and contradicted Again by the way I said recently over on the desolate Soul Studios podcast Link in the description that the blip should have been the ideal excuse to localize the narrative again to kick-start the next Saga with small-scale stories that allow us to familiarize ourselves with our new set of Heroes the new problems they face the new relationships that are forming from whence we could have built as phases to info treated into a bigger Galaxy spanning adventure and this kind of small-scale localized building is what characters like Spider-Man and Ant-Man in particular would have been well suited to but instead well instead we're gonna get all of this back home from prison all the families having pizza and we learned that Janet hasn't told anyone anything at all about the 30 years she spent in the quantum realm nothing at all as in absolutely nothing remember Kang yo we are coming to that believe me for now though no she's told nobody anything because because she doesn't want to that's the reason she wants to live in the now but the now includes a family that wants to know what she did during her 30 years in the quantum realm is neither here nor there she's decided that living racked with guilt and full of secrets and earning the animosity of her loved ones by telling them nothing despite them occasionally asking her is what constitutes living a normal life right Zio then I I'm sure this won't become relevant again in a couple of hours Hank let's slip that Cassie has been arrested before an argument ensues Scott is apparently the only person who cares that Cassie gets herself arrested she you see is absolutely in the right when she says at least I'm still trying to do something with my life everyone just quietly accepts it when she belittles Scott's role in Saving the universe from Thanos at least we're still trying to do something that matters she says and everybody accepts that this is right because it transpires most of the and fam is involved in whatever that something might be this film is ostensibly set around the time of wakanda forever that means that Scott's been back from the quantum realm for quite some time comfortably more than a year in fact and his mum's been back even longer the problem is the film struggles to convey this finding it much easier to act as if next to no time has elapsed Scott has no knowledge of Cassie's arrest record nobody's made any serious attempt to discuss the past with Janet beyond the occasional vague harvash question and Scott's been kept entirely out of the loop during the creation of quite a big and complex and presumably time-consuming experiment set up by half his damn family in his damn house meaning we've got three separate instances of shoddy characterization Scott's unfamiliarity with the present it marks a lack of curiosity about Janet's past and Cassie's seemingly unearned ego the first and third should be fairly easy to fix and it'll be interesting to see if the film tries to fix them which is to say it'll be interesting to note how the film avoids trying to fix them of the first Scott needs another more present reason for an entire different kind of absence something that's distracted him from becoming reacquainted with his family in the more than a year he's had to do that that alas is going to be hard to achieve given the thrust of the preceding argument is that he does nothing with his time anymore safe Hawk books and his own professed Soul interest in family life which we heard about in the opening narration Cassie on the other hand will need a chance to show what skill she's learned but also and crucially those skills will have to be shown to be unformed and frequently insufficient providing a check on her pretty insufferable ego and allowing Scott the chance to teach her things there is frankly no way to fix the Janet issue at this point and the film is shortly to go on to break it even further so we can look forward to that things don't improve when we learn what the experiment in the basement is Cassie explains that during Scott's five-year absence she started reading Hank's journals and so became obviously a complete genius where the quantum realm is concerned Hank encouraged her in this endeavor though he takes care to say that she did all the work herself Jannah it though was kept in the dark comfortably more than a year has elapsed since end game and I must remind you because the film pretends that that is not so more than a year during which an entire lab was constructed and an experiment conducted in the family home under the nose of two members of that family which to say the least strains credulity Janet asks why nobody ever consulted her about the experiment hope says that she tried but the Janet never wanted to talk about it nobody apparently thought to show Janet the experiment in a bit to Spur her interest and make her open up even though all the fam is apparently very keen to do both of those things Cassie and Hank but really just Cassie because this is the modern MCU and because Hank tells us as much built to use Hank's phraseology a subatomic Hubble telescope in the basement a device that lets them map the entire Quantum realm without ever needing to go there because we don't have enough inexplicable girl bosses in the MCU already now a defender of girl bosses might counter but Tony Stark did all sorts of crazy he solved time travel in about five minutes and suddenly on the latter point I would partially agree as is almost always the case with time travel end game magic did into being as a lazy contrivance and it's one of those things you sort of have to forgive and forget to avoid collapsing the plot of that film the difference though is that Stark had a fully fleshed out character an established genius shown at several intervals but one which dovetailed with profound character flaws he was the acknowledged Tech wizard billionaire playboy Genius of course but he was also a selfish who had an awful lot to learn both about the technology he was working with but especially about being a decent human being this creates a rounded character skills and deep deep flaws and the skills could never fully compensate for his flaws as a human being he had to go on an arc the modern tendency though is to have school girls with no character history be able to mimic his technical skills exactly while demonstrating not only none of his personal adults but no character flaws at all as has been said many times it is this and not some mythical sexist bogeyman that's led to the poor reception of the mcu's Latter-Day female entrance nothing has been done to justify their talents and the absence of meaningful flaws precludes the possibility of character arcs the MCU is entirely forgotten that flaws are what make characters interesting not Perfection empathy and sympathy is what drives the audience to invest in them not Applause and acclimation yet we've been told explicitly to cite just one example that plots must be bent out of shape to exclude male heroes in order that female heroes are a soul recipient of that Applause and that acclimation Black Widow was especially guilty of this she couldn't be allowed to seem reliant on male Heroes left unsaid is that male heroes are always reliant on each other and indeed the entire universe relied on black widow's sacrifice in endgame and this Mutual Reliance the complementarity of character and skill sets is what base take things like relationships are built off of we learn about and invest in characters through the interplay of their flaws and their accomplishments clashes of Personality that lead to defeats the overcoming of that Strife leading then to the ultimate Victory through sacrifice hence everybody loving Natasha Romanov and even wonder before she went evil and the MCU demanded that we applaud her for that as well hence too the reason nobody gives a damn about America Chavez or Riri Williams or Jennifer Walters or now Cassie Lang Scott of course gives Cassie the due Applause and acclimation but Janet is alarmed to hear that the device Cassie's built works by sending a signal down to the quantum realm she freaks out and unplugs it she says there's something I should have told you but before she can finish the device turns itself back on and it starts sucking things ants and eventually all of the fam down into the quantum realm remember the ants by the way you see them for perhaps one and a half seconds they will become very very relevant at the end of the film but they will not be mentioned until that point this is the MCU so of course a long and mind-bending CGI sequence follows and it's amongst long mind-bending CGI sequences that we're going to spend pretty much all the rest of the film well everything we've seen so far looks amazing you know so much of this film is all about the quantum reality it seemed like a little bit what can you tell us about shooting there I mean the scenery they did a lot of practical effects in World building we had dirt like actual dirt at our feet that were walking around in and then you have a blue screen around you too so I'm actually going to see a lot of stuff for the first time and I'm really excited about that as well but even though the film is doing Tron legacy as you should by now have gathered with its setup and even though it had a bigger budget and undoubtedly a bigger and more advanced VFX Department than that film had it's various CG horoscapes don't display an ounce of the Innovation or the unmistakable style displayed by the thing that it's stealing so much of its plot from already and will continue stealing from in future Scott and Cassie are in one place hope Hank and Janet are in another we learned that the quantum realm has changed a lot since the last time anyone was here for one thing there's a Quantum spaceship scanning for them from which they have to hide Scott gets attacked by a giant fiery jellyfish of some sort Cassie attempts to act it doesn't go well they then get pursued by a goop monster and then saved by a Motley collection of quantum people with a robot that shoots lasers from its face three months it's been three months I think since I last reviewed an MCU product it's um yeah it's it's really it's really good to be back Janet apologizes for not telling Hank and hope about all of this in the year plus she's had in which to do that but notably her apology does not contain any new information as yet her sorry I didn't tell you is markedly less useful than her saying right sorry I didn't tell you this place was different but here are all the really important ways it's different that you really need to know if we're going to survive all of this she has no apparent incentive not to tell them more immediately given their stated objectives of finding Scott and Cassie and escaping alive but I guess we've got two hours left to fill so so nah we have to keep the mystery even though the character involved in it has every incentive to demystify it for us because if she were to do that now we couldn't justify the run time she does inform Hank that the reason he never discovered any of this when he was down here is that he couldn't look deep enough she explains that there are worlds within worlds within worlds in the quantum realm outside of time and space confirming that yes we do indeed have a second Multiverse on our hands or perhaps it's it's the same Multiverse that by the way is a distinction without a difference your ability to comprehend and understand the stakes in one Multiverse is infinitely impossible so who cares if they've doubled Infinity this as I said near the top is exactly the opposite of what characters like Ant-Man are ideally used for we've got Doctor Strange in his Multiverse of Badness we've got the Guardians hopping all over the Galaxy likewise Thor and with nothing as yet to tie them together the MCU already has too much of this kind of thing like Spider-Man Ant-Man is a character pretty well suited to the task of putting us back to something local and comprehensible at the very least doing so is what makes him and his role in the MCU just distinct from anybody else's even if you disagree with me on the merits of localizing narratives and if you did you would be wrong I think you'd have to agree that there are uncounted numbers of problems with having all of your characters off in spaces too vast to be realizable amongst those problems what's the difference between them where's the Goddamn contrast why should we care the quantum people take Scott and Cassie back to what appears to be the Hall of melted sex toys Cassie tells Scott that he has to drink some Ooze from one of the sex toys meanwhile the rest of the fam who we left as they were walking through the quantum jungle have seemingly teleported into the middle of a Quantum desert where they too are requested by some Quantum people in a caravan of quantum balloons yes and Janet says she'll handle this whatever this is the head of this tribe of quantum people would appear to be some sort of um thing and Yannick Cuts its arm off and stabs it so then they hug because they know each other and offer friends they get some new outfits and a ride on a generic CGI monster something to note at this stage you might recall Janet's recently told us that the quantum realm this realm within a realm within a realm is outside of time and space yet this film is going to proceed as though time in this dimension of the quantum realm has proceeded in exactly the same way along exactly the same lines as time in the real world she knows these people she met them in the past that's how they know each other so the quantum realm is not outside of time and space the quantum realm has our time in space for narrative purposes it's one of those Concepts that writers really should just avoid unless they're prepared to actually explore the consequences speaking of inconsequential Hope Has thus far been a complete passenger in this script she's present but she's not at all involved this half of the story belongs entirely to Janet Hope just stands around gormlessly throwing in the odd line like after you but being otherwise denuded of all agency now it's never especially easy to balance a story with five protagonists ordinarily splitting them up which allows you to split the narrative and so the focus helps in this endeavor someone who might Fade Into the background in a group of five will should be more present in a group of three thus far though the script is deployed that function but without reading any of the rewards the Janet Hank hope Arc is just the Janet Arc with Hank serving as the expository foil and hope standing around with her Vulcan haircut and emotional range which absent characterization might have been forgivable had her replacement Janet not being another shallow girl boss type throughout this opening act she's essentially a much older version of Cassie hyper-competent hyper knowledgeable a strong and talented Fighter the second of these is of course explicable the film is rightly taking this opportunity to flesh out a character who's only really been a MacGuffin in previous installments but who has unique knowledge of this realm born of her long experience but as is always the case with the modern MCU it's refused to share out its skills there's no complementarity between its characters in evidence thus far this is basic Dungeons and Dragons stuff your party each has a specialism the best party has the best range of skills between them individually they might be doomed but together they function as a unit adopting that approach in this film would see Janet specialize in knowledge Hank in Tech and application and hope in physical fighting ability they all rely on each other to escape but that's not what's happening so far we've had Janet with knowledge Janet with strength Janet with Innovation Janet with fighting ability Hank serving his excuse for her to expose it her knowledge and Hope just kind of watching as Janet deploys her only useful skill set in this scenario being a competent fighter it's the ray Skywalker conundrum again if your hero is perfect at everything what even is the point of the sidekicks meanwhile the Ooze is ceremonially brought to Hank and he is forced to drink it after which he's suddenly able to understand the assorted creature features it's Babel ooze I guess that's a reference we know this because a strange creature tells him that's what's happened before proceeding to ask if he won once more ooze in his holes and asking him how many holes he has and apologizing if that's a personal question which I did almost smirk at except that this style of humor really isn't that different from I don't know every other MCU film at this point again proving that one of its defining flaws at present is that it's all just indistinct you can't have a comic relief character if every character does comic relief the leader of this tribe is inevitably another badass girl boss who pushes the plot Along by saying that Scott and Cassie come from above like him and he will build the world to find you he is the Conqueror you see the rest of the fam flies on a manta ray to the highly mechanized Quantum people base of some sort I don't know one of the creatures looks like broccoli we know this because Hank tells us holy okay looks like broccoli Janet takes them to definitely not the Star Wars Cantina and also definitely not the Tron Cantina where they too drink some goo they drink it as shots though one kind of wonders why translation goo is served in bars here but let's not because there's a long way left to go broccoli flirts with hope which at least affords hope the chance to speak in this film for a change she says oh God and um that that's it that's that's her line Janet comes back and tells broccoli boy to off Janet explains that she was a freedom fighter while she was here they've come to me to contact of hers even though they've only just got here and she only just asked to see the contact about 10 seconds ago a Quantum spaceship arrives and off steps Bill Murray which is a real shame because I've got a near 100 record of liking every film Bill Murray is in and so far I really don't like this one by the way the editing here is really quite peculiar you'll notice if you actually go and see the film and I wouldn't blame you for not the Bill Murray never actually shares a shot with anyone he's talking to save for Janet which looks incredibly suspicious because the dialogue is quitty and fast paced meaning the camera snaps back and forth and back and forth back and forth incredibly quickly Hank says a single word the camera is on him and him alone Bill Murray says a sentence the camera is on him and him alone hope says something it's on her Bill Murray responds it's on him it's janky and disjointed and it feels distinctly plastered on as though all of this was added much much later in production pieced together from existing shots it's not how the rest of the film is shot either meaning it's distinctly possible The Cameo was finalized and added very late on the actors involved just never really standing in the same room together back with Scott we learn that his group of quantum people has been nearly destroyed by the Conqueror several times they are Rebels Chief garboss explains all of this and Cassie offers to help them fight for reasons but Scott refuses meaning of course that Cassie gets to bad temperedly put him down for being self-absorbed and careless and lazy and too cowardly to help and you just know you just know that the person who will eventually learn the lesson that corrects their attitude will be Scott and and not Cassie because Cassie is right and Scott just doesn't realize it yet Bill Murray seems quite salty that Janet left everyone down here to suffer under him him meaning Kang and teases her about not having told her family about any of this yeah we are still going to get to that just just there with Bill Murray though Bill Murray now works for him he's a traitor don't you see because he's basically Zeus from the bar in Tron legacy and he informs the ant found that all the ant farm will be taken to him including Scott and Cassie who he heard about because that's that's what the script demands happened even though there's been absolutely no indication that that's even possible and he the Conqueror has sent the hunter to go pick Scott and Cassie up so you know they might just be dead even though we know they're not Bill Murray says everything could have been avoided had Janet just given him what he wants and he explains his portrayal of whatever cause they used to fight for by explaining that he the Conqueror can be very persuasive and I have a crushing feeling that's all we're gonna get and yeah indeed it is because because the iron farm escapes there's a shootout Hank enlarges some kind of jellyfish thing it glumps Bill Murray to death and he's still not shared a shot with any of his fellow actors I mean how do you waste Bill Murray The Anthem steal his luxury yacht ship thing which device quirky charismatic actor often featuring him where's Anderson films appearing to play himself only to get bested and see our heroes Escape in his luxury yacht seems suspiciously like Thor Ragnarok to me and yeah also Tron legacy have I mentioned this the basic plot structure is basically you know Tron legacy and they're now doing the solar sailor sequence back with Scott Chief girl boss tells one of her generic CGI friends to take he and Cassie as far away as possible because if they're looking for Janet then he the Conqueror is looking for them I'm still not sure how that works by the way if he could track their descent from our world why is it taking him so long to pick them up if he couldn't track their descent from our world how did he know where Scott and Cassie were given they've never encountered anyone liable to dub them in maybe he does doesn't know whether he already knows where they are no sooner has Chief girl boss said he's looking for you then some Quantum spaceships appear in the sky and start gunning everybody down massacring the quantum people tribe everybody panics there's action there's lasers Chief girl boss beats the out of the assailants but gets captured only for girl boss in training Cassie to finally remember she's wearing an Ant-Man suit and so she miniaturizes and goes to rescue her happily genuinely because it goes some way toward achieving one of the conditions I set out near the top Scott does step in to save her at one point and he does teach her some of his moves after she up the timing that is the good the bad is that the sequence is really just an excuse for bog standard Marvel quipping meaning we now have to keep an eye on whether the film revisits it with a more Earnest lesson later on or whether the unfunny skit was the object and the lesson merely incidental humor or character development hmm well this is the MCU so the answer will be humor nine times out of ten but you know there's still a chance this film will be the one an inexplicable Lull in the fighting and by lull I mean everything just kind of stops and the evil robot attackers just disappear for a bit prestiges the arrival of a big bad Quantum ship thing that destroys damn near everything including the flying dildos the quantum people tribe were using as Escape shuttles the evil ship lands and it turns into this the this is this is what we get this weird monstrosity is Darren crust from the first film apparently though now he's called mechanized organism designed only for killing or Modoc according to the film though I think I'm gonna call him catastrophically rendered antagonist person so crap remember phase four remember how the CGI in that often looked like absolutely abysmal and Astrid's projection in Thor love and thunder was so badly done you had to hope it was deliberate because the alternative is that whoever designed it was worked so hard that he had a stroke while at his computer well this this might actually be worse than that and I think we're beyond the point now where it's bad deliberately is like a legitimate excuse it's totally jarring as well we've just seen innocent cutesy little aliens getting mercilessly slaughtered and now in the next scene we get this it's like going from a scene in platoon and then cutting away to a shot of Ronald McDonald on the gunship grinning maniacally as Slaughters villagers trap serves Kang no other film could have done though it could have just not done this there was no need for it besides some masochistic need to flood the internet with memes you could have cut crap out of this film entirely and had Kang make his entrance here slaughtering all the quantum people and showing himself to be a bad that would have been efficient it would have shown Kang to be a ruthless evil bastard to be feared and loathed in equal measure but no no instead we got crap over with the rest of the ant farm hope tries to get Janet to go rescue Scott and Cassie but she says Nah hope accuses her of hiding something from them which she is because she still hasn't told them anything about what's actually going on down here there are better be a damn good reason for this film a really really good reason and then finally Janet decides to tell Hank and hope about Kang here's how it goes she explains and we see in the flashbacks that she found him in the quantum realm while she was trapped there he said he was a scientist and an Explorer he had a magic spaceship capable of traveling the Multiverse they worked together to fix it because it was broken she says Kang felt so lost and they couldn't find a way to recharge the ship so they stayed down there together and became friends in a flashback she tells Kang that she thought she'd have more time with her daughter so Kang offers to give her time telling her that time is not what you think it is he describes time as a cage but says that you can free yourself from it he promises they'll get out of the quantum realm together and eventually they do manage to recharge the ship via means the film doesn't even attempt to explain what it does kind of explain because it's essential to move things along as quickly as possible is that the ship is neurokinetic and connected to Kang's thoughts so when Janet touches it she sees his mind she sees all the many worlds and peoples and even entire timelines that is wiped out for reasons at this point and he hadn't crashed in the quantum realm he had been exiled there by someone Janet explains that they sabotaged his ship and trapped him here but now she's accidentally set him free he offers to help her Escape anyway because she saved his life and she says nah she asks him what he'd do once he'd taken her home and he says win and he morphs into armor Kang I I guess having got his armor back he now has many of his powers back as well he offers to bend time to make it so she never even left hope to begin with and promises that whatever he does next he won't blow up her Earth but she says Nah again she won't let him leave and she goes all anti and steals the ship core then she blows up the ship core with her Pim device whatevers and traps them both in the quantum realm but because he's armor Kang now he's hugely powerful and he built an empire in the quantum realm she ran and hid then Hank and hope eventually saved her but she didn't deserve it because of the monster she Unleashed and then here's The Clincher that question we've been asking from the top why hasn't she mentioned anything about any of this to anyone before despite it being the most important information she possesses well her excuses I'm sorry I never told you I just wanted to forget I just wanted to be your mum again that's a direct quote and everyone just accepts that hope says I'm sorry you had to go through all that alone but you're not alone now I mean what's in the Ranger's name of holy is that film well God where do you even begin in the first place why couldn't they find a way to recharge the ship until the plot decided they could recharge the ship they don't try anything new on it the whole charging process is just Janet holding some sparkly sticks around it doesn't work and then it does work because reasons why did the film steal age of ultron's villainy reveal by having her touch the ship and see his plans I mean couldn't they come up with anything new why does having your mind linked to a ship mean that anyone who touches that ship can read your thoughts why did it show these thoughts in particular is it that he thinks about nothing besides plot relevant information or was it pot luck that she didn't touch it while he was thinking about what he'd have for breakfast could he read her thoughts when she touched the ship well apparently not because if he had he'd have killed her pretty much instantly why given he must surely have known what would happen did he let her touch the ship to begin with was there no way he could have prevented her from doing that some lie he could have told or even just you know standing in the way why like a lemon did he hang around and tried to convince her to go with him after he'd got his powers in his magic ship back even assuming his ship that can travel through multiverses couldn't travel through the quantum realm on its own and needed something that she had in her possession to escape that's an excuse I've just made up in a bit to explain his actions by the way it's not actually in the film well even then why did this all-powerful not immediately knock her out and take whatever he needed why did whoever Exile him Exile him with his ship why didn't they kill him to begin with plenty of people have been in and out of the realm without a ship anyway wasn't leaving him alive and exiling him with a broken ship just asking for trouble what was to stop him finding a way to fix it himself if his powers are tied to it sending him down there with his ship in any state is exactly the thing you wouldn't want to happen why does Armor Kang have powers normal Kang doesn't and why is his armor tied through his ship isn't that like a needlessly vulnerable mechanic for anyone to invent like saying you could have the powers of Superman unless your Alfa Romeo broke down and why the shuddering Thug knowing all of this having explained all of this understanding the Multiverse ending threat that she's Unleashed didn't Janet tell anyone about it I'm sorry but I just wanted to forget it is not an adequate explanation darling that's like inventing interdimensional Mecca Hitler and just not telling anyone about it because you can't be bothered I'm sorry darling I'm sorry I didn't tell you I just created interdimensional Mecha Hitler and gave him control over time itself so he can go on a multiversal holocaust I just wanted to live a normal life as your mum it really need to know anyway it's not like you know you and my son and my husband are scientists who like about with the quantum realm as a weekend hobby I never thought it had come up honest you could put infinite monkeys in a room with infinite time and they would never come up with this because they take too much pride in their work Jesus Christ film and of course it goes further by the way because we will learn at the end of the film that Kang was exiled by the Council of kangs and the Council of kangs is shown to be hyper precious about their status as rulers of the interdimensional Multiverse by hyper pressures about it I mean that this film or you know its mid-credit scene which is the only thing you actually need to see to understand what happens next is going to go on to establish that the Council of kangs is prepared to go to war with the Multiverse to maintain their control of the Multiverse yet I can't help but remember in Multiverse of Madness the Illuminati killed a variant of Doctor Strange because even though he'd save them from Thanos he'd done it by pissing about with the Multiverse meaning that the Illuminati handed out a far harsher punishment than a council of genocidal supervillains whose sole motive is maintaining their multiversal Dominion the they just exiled the biggest known threat to their entire existence while the Illuminati killed Doctor Strange for keeping them in existence do you ever get the sense that these films don't really connect because nobody involved in making them actually thinks through what they're doing anyway Kang introduces himself to Scott and Cassie we learn he's killed all the Avengers at various points in various timelines and he's bored by it he's so bored by it he doesn't even remember which Avenger is which which is a far bigger head than the film has time to explore if he's been locked down here for 30 years with Janet then he was locked down here before the Avengers formed except that there probably is a timeline in which he was never locked down here or a timeline in which they were formed far earlier and given their infinite timelines the answer has to be both in which case there are infinite kangs out there wiping out the Multiverse yeah or no is he the only one in all the cosmos who's doing that is this the only timeline in which akang took issue with other kangs and got himself exiled but he if he's wiped out the Avengers in several timelines to the point of being bought by it why is he even doing it what's his motive anymore if there are infinite kangs in infinite timelines then he's irrelevant if there's one Kang but infinite timelines then he'll never destroy them all so why should anybody care it's like they've taken all the bollocks from a time travel device and multiplied it by all the bollocks of a Multiverse device and not even bothered looking at the answer before they put it on the screen for us Kang tells Cassie he doesn't experience time in a straight line and when you don't experience time in a straight line it's hard not to skip to the end so if they want to stop what's coming they have to do what he tells them even though that doesn't work because he can just wipe out the timeline in which they stop what's happening while in any number of infinite alternate timelines it never happens and oh my God I don't care I don't know why I'm thinking about this the film didn't credit whether it's due Jonathan Majors the actor is putting in a reasonable performance he has presence he conveys Menace he doesn't have to do much but then giving what's necessary is much more important than giving everything he has the managed to put off a very good fit in but the MCU needs to establish Mechanics for this villain if his villainy is to really mean anything to the audience I get the sense what they're really doing is just a rehash of Thanos except instead of half the universe it is timelines being expunged taking an already unfathomable premise and making it utterly incomprehensible the advantage the writers of phases one to three had is that you didn't need to comprehend the loss of half the universe you only needed to see the local results the loss of half of our heroes half the population of our planet with timelines that's very difficult to replicate because humans don't really conceptualize timelines to begin with and the premise of the Multiverse is that there are potentially infinite variations of any Heroes we are seemingly going to lose who could just pop back into existence at any given moment tldr I mean what the hell is Stakes now Cassie asks him what's coming and Kang says me a lot of me but he also offers to get them home if Scott steals something for him and it's not really clear what he expects them to take from all his information this is pretty meaningless to them it's the informational equivalent of teasing Scott says no so caring threatens to kill Cassie and make Scott watch it again and again in time endlessly though and it could be that I've just lost my mind at this point but I do seem to recall his issue being trapped down here is that he is out of time and so cannot control time because the quantum realm doesn't exist within time but never mind I guess he tortures Cassie a bit not that you could tell from her acting so Scott says okay I'll do it so he has to go to the center of the exploded ship core some sort of multiversal spaceship core I don't know to retrieve whatever the well conveniently Janet and Co arrive in their Quantum yacht at pretty much the same time Scott has to go into it to find it and resize it and crap explains that the longer he's in there the more his mind will come undone much like mine watching this film Scott says goodbye to Cassie and Dives on in we get another long generic CGI sequence that's entirely lost its effect because we've seen it several dozen times already he reaches the bottom and then he does indeed start to go a little bit mad so there's two Scots now crap explains that he's in a probability storm and he keeps splitting into multiple versions of himself the extensible mechanic is that every choice he could make exists here all at once so all of his many versions start arguing with each other I mean it's it's creative-ish on the highest level of course it's impossible to actually depict this on the screen you can only do your best The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy does improbability infinitely better than this but that's a radio show it's also clever and actually funny which this isn't but again you can only do what you can in this medium unfortunately though even that half-hearted defense of this scene is well undermined because this too has been done before what we see in this sequence is essentially the architect's room from the Matrix combined with World's End from Pirates of the Caribbean all the many Jack sparrows in David Jones's Locker being faintly comical with each other but without any of the charm to complicate matters further the yacht arrives apparently neither can nor anyone in his Empire of Highly Advanced Quantum Japs spotted it despite it being on the other side of the thing they're all staring at and an hour and 10 minutes into the film Hope finally gets a chance to do something jumping into the core after Scott who she heard over the radio conveniently there's not a huge amount of Point describing the nonsense that follows with all the Scots and temporarily all the hopes it's not supposed to make sense after all at one point Scott gets trapped under his infinite selves only for Cassie to radio and tell him to come back which makes all of his possible selves act like Anson Unison in concert to help him up because what the film is trying to convey is that Cassie is his top priority in all possible lives and all possible iterations of lives even though that technically breaks what passes for this mechanic because there's always the possibility that he or any one of his infinite selves either didn't think this or thought it but imagined a different way to achieve it or wasn't listening or was panicking too much to pay attention you know there's all of these possibilities that was the mechanic right every possible action existing in the same time in space so no I mean I like what it's trying to do but it doesn't just doesn't work the only result from this has to be chaos you would never get all of your possible selves acting in concert like this anyway admitting that that is just what happens Scott climbs to the top of his mountain of selves but when he tries to shrink the core it doesn't work and so he starts to fall but then in a moment we might as well just call Meta hope arrives and she lifts him up and for no good reason all his possible selves immediately just disappear and they fly up together and shrink the core after all I mean it's even worth evaluating the choices here Janet Hope and Hank know and Scott knows some of the likely consequences of what they've just done the choice they're actually presented with which the film doesn't seem to have quite understood is do we the ant farm get out potentially at the cost of Kang destroying whole timelines or do we stay and sacrifice ourselves here but save the Multiverse they've chosen themselves which is odd not least because Janet refused to even mention Kang to anyone because of how dangerous he is and because she wanted to live a normal life you could forgive one character forgetting this or being so strongly motivated to return to their family in our world that they are willing to take the risk irrationally but the films ensure that no such motivation can exist because all the ant farmer down here together and because all the ant farmer down here we're meant to believe that not one of the five of them thought nah you know what we are not worth more than the entirety of the existence of the Multiverse this risk is too great to take and then on top of all of that not one of an infinite number of possible hopes and Scots thought that in the earlier scene which would have ruined the entire operation my God I hate multiverses it does finally re-enter Janet's mind she pops up and when Scott tells her that Kang has Cassie so he has to help Kang Janet says she promises they'll save Cassie but he cannot under any circumstances give Kang the core which yes is probably the correct answer finally even if it should have precluded her even arriving here to say it keep in mind she has known all of this since the beginning of the film the subtext of this exchange is that she is prepared to sacrifice anything including her own granddaughter to prevent Kang getting the means to Escape recall then that they are only down here because she didn't warn her family about all of this to begin with because she didn't want to I don't know that there's in any way of reconciling this incredibly Stark contradiction she is prepared to sacrifice her family to stop Khan but she wasn't prepared to sacrifice her own relationship with her family by telling them about Kang thereby ensuring that they would never accidentally encounter him this this um it doesn't really make sense Kang pops into the scene at this point and tells Scott that Janet can't be trusted because she sometimes changes her mind real real persuasive argument there my dude of course what the film is trying to do is make us realize and to make Scott realize that Janet's promise about saving Cassie is just a ruse which we already knew the narrative use for this reveal is that it should shatter Scott and Janet's relationship and Trust in each other because Scott now knows that Janet is prepared to sacrifice his daughter for her cause potentially massive stuff that be a shame if the film went on to do absolutely nothing with it meanwhile crap flies up and confronts Hank in the spaceyard which of course makes it impossible to take any of this seriously I mean talk about a borked tone we're jumping between the potential death of all existence in all timelines the potential death of daughter the potential sacrifice of Daughter by grandmother and crap in a space battle with Hank crap causes the yacht to crash but can kidnaps Janet before she can go and help Hank and they walk back into the evil Quantum City though the film kind of forgets this is what it's done because while they walk into the portal together in the next moment in the next scene despite no time having been implied to a past she is brought to the throne room to meet Kang who was lounging on his fancy chair like he's been there for hours he asked her what she saw when she touched his mind this is his chance to explain his motive which is that only he can see that time is broken he explains that he broke it all his many versions throughout the Multiverse playing with time-like children he says he saw their ends their chaos spreading across realities universes colliding endless incursions he saw the Multiverse and it looked tiny all because of his alternate selves miscontrol and so he took control Janet implausibly Reasons from this that his motive is therefore to start a war to wipe out any universe that's a threat to him which is not really what I would have thought you would take away from the preceding argument but okay she tells him that's what monsters do he says it's what conquerors do and the broken worlds and create new ones he says she has no idea what he's lost and Promises to and I quote burn them out of time his alternate selves that is by wiping out the entire timelines in which they can be found thereby murdering trillions this can only be described as pure unadulterated shite versions of himself are going around up timelines and he doesn't like that he's doing that so he's going to go and kill himself in his alternate selves not by tracking them down and wiping them out but by expunging the timelines they're in for the crime of making those timelines a bit messy there are literally infinite problems with this premise but I think most of them can be neatly summarized with the question why why is he the only one of him that doesn't like himself messing with time why is wiping out timelines preferable to pissing about with them why is he the only one who can see them all why is wiping out timelines better than just wiping out the versions of himself how many timelines and versions are there what's to stop other kangs wiping out the timeline he's in if there are infinite timelines and infinite hymns what's the point anyway if the people who exiled him are him why would they have exiled him with the ship they must have known would give him all of his powers why did they Exile him and not wipe out the timeline he was in thus having done with it and so on and so on and so on why why why and why again I also can't help but note the similarities between his motive reveal and wonders motive reveal both characters essentially excuse their meddling in the Multiverse the cause of the injustices they've suffered Kang's you've no idea what I've lost could well have been cut and pasted from Wanda's excuse making in Multiverse of Madness I don't hear anybody trying to pretend that he's justified in his actions nobody's saying they've no idea what you've sacrificed for them or agreeing with him when he bleats about the unfairness of being cast as a villain we are all quite sure and we are all supposed to be left in no doubt that he is a dick even if this particular deck might eventually be dwarfed by a bigger harder dick but I'm genuinely not sure that's the point in the film's favor I never thought I'd find myself praising Multiverse of Madness but by comparison with Kang Wonder actually has a strong and intelligible motive mad this driven by the desperate loss of her children that's not the skirt around the essential nonsense of that bloodline wonders nonsensical villainy strangest bizarre decisions the non-involvement of any living Avenger who might have been able to talk her down the entirely unnecessary fixation on finding two versions of her children among an infinite number of universes with infinite numbers of those same children etc etc but it is to point out that I'm evil because I want kids is orders of magnitude better as a premise than Ein evil because the essential similarities in the premise also harks back to the profound missed opportunities in Multiverse of Madness as I said after my thought of and Thunder review a natural and potentially captivating course for the Multiverse Saga could have done something new for the MCU as well taken a hero in Wonder and shown her slow descent into madness her gradual absorption into and then by the Scarlet Witch her emergence as the principal antagonist of an entire phase of films if not for the Saga as a whole through her experimentations with the Multiverse we could have been exposed to it gradually and always anchored in the clear and present Stakes of known character and tragic motive you could have played it in any number of ways Wonder presenting is increasingly sad and desperate but still on the side of the Avengers initially albeit with some unseen foe causing ever more chaos and destruction incursions from other universes resulting from her secret manipulation of it with the dark old the ultimate reveal then being that it was her all along as the Scarlet Witch if she's a sag along villain the reveal at the close of phase 4 could have been our first glimpse of her villainy form the legacy cast who no one loved her best like Hawkeye and vision could have tried to bring her back from the brink fighting to save her from herself she could have teetered on the edge then been forced to kill one or both of them providing a tragic end for those characters and the tragic birth of the Scarlet Witch ascendant who then escapes into the Multiverse to Mastermind events through phase 5. or she can be defeated in this form at the close of phase 4 but her meddling with the Multiverse is what alert alarms the Council of kangs who emerge for phases 5 and 6. as at the end of the Thor video I'm literally just taking a premise and running with it here I've not planned this out it actually doesn't take much effort to imagine any number of full Saga plans that actually Builds on established characters and relationships rather than throwing them around randomly killing time until Kevin feige flips a coin and decides that now is the time for Kang but in the event that's what we got meanwhile Cassie is being marched from non-descript plays to nondescript place because the film couldn't think of another setup for her impending Escape nobody thought to steal her gadgets from her so she escapes then and just just go with me on this one we learned that Hank got rescued from his crashed Ship by some ants that fortuitously fell into the quantum verse with them remember remember how we saw that for about two seconds at the beginning of the film he's been picking up their signals throughout the film it turns out but this is not just ants ex machina no it has to get more and convoluted than that they fell through some time warp that let them live thousands of years in a day building a whole Advanced scientific civilization in the quantum realm no I'm not making this up and and I'm still not making this up they are socialists they are socialist ants Hank tells us this he says we could learn a lot from the Socialist ants originally stratified Society with a queen at the top useless and sick ants killed and disposed of and used to build walls around nests everyone blindingly following the chemical skid marks of other ants yeah yeah we've got a lot to learn from these socialist ants absolutely film I mean answer a monarchy which would be the obvious joke to make because they have a damn Queen except that monarchy is unfashionable and socialism is hyper fashionable so screw the internal logic of the joke the a in AOC is ants now mind you you could tweak it slightly and refer to this system as anti-socialism which would make it much more palatable should we leave it there nah nah I don't think so because Hank explains that the ants have created a type 2 civilization in the quantum realm according to the old kardashev scale the human race isn't even a type 1 civilization a type 1 civilization is capable of harnessing all the energy on its own Planet a type 2 civilization is able to harness the energy of an entire star through the building of Dyson rings and Dyson spheres and such that's an unfathomable level of technological advancement compared to our present state of being now you might be wondering why is all this science nerd stuff relevant well because it means that Hank Pym is able to cross in and out of the quantum realm he is able to commune with even control ants ants who have achieved a type 2 civilization this gives Hank Pym the theoretical ability to bring a type 2 civilization and all of its Science and Technology out of the quantum realm and into our own meaning essentially that Hank Pym could in one moment Advance the human race using the old kardashev scale by something like 3200 years in a day you think Tony Stark's Arc Reactor was impressive well that's like Paleolithic tools next to the science Hank Pym and his ants now have at their disposal it's hard even to begin to conceptualize the profound Universe altering consequences of this single line of dialogue happily though it's the MCU so we probably won't have to I'm sure we'll never hear about it again the ants and the Ant Farm had to plan to save Cassie Cassie herself is busy rescuing Chief girl boss from prison so why she's still alive is a total mystery as are many of her fellow tribes people come to that even though Kang was explicitly billed as a genocidal Maniac I guess he just kind of forgot about that because if he killed everyone like we've been frequently told he wouldn't does how could we then have an uprising scene later in the film honestly it's quite something to have minimal plot and minimal characterization and still managed to set them at war against each other the plot meanwhile is doing Tron legacy again Kang shows Janet the huge Army he's been building and that he plans to take with him through the dimensions and into the human world to invade he even gives a holographic speech to his minions all are the catastrophically generated image of Jeff Bridges Cassie interrupts the transmission though and sends a message to the brave Rebels instead and incites an uprising Kang orders crap to go kill Cassie but she breaks the inexplicably unmered prisoners out of jail and there's a fight slash chase scene instead Kang finally decides he's been pissing about and wasting time and inserts the core into his evil doomship which he could and should have done ages ago and only didn't because the script needed him not to do that yet giant Ant-Man then just marches in from the middle of the huge City no idea how he got there and how nobody noticed him but whatever we're now into what I hope is the film's final battle which is just standard MCU fare flying around spaceships laser shooting the natives in their dildo ships and flying fish monsters turn up just like the rise of Skywalker because that's where the bar is set now and we settle down for the obligatory bangs and whistles and flashy lights and explosions the stupid monster thing from earlier revives the whole's joke and by revives I mean it buggers the corpse of it oh can goes to launch the ship because he still hasn't done that yet an Ant-Man struggles to get through the ship's energy Shield as is obligatory in these films the triumphant beginning hits its setback period where everything seems doomed but then the heroes Triumph staringly in this case all goodbye Cassie growing big and spatting crap in the head which occasions this now famous line I don't know what to be tell me what to be I don't know say remember how the entire Multiverse is at stake and the evil genocidal time traveling in his doomship is taking off right over there and the stakes have literally never been higher yeah we're gonna take a break from that in order to pretend that we are conveying a moral message while what we're in fact doing is rubber banding the film's emotional range we've got a teeny tiny little bit of slack that allows us to faintly register severity here sadness there tension over there but the rubber bands very swiftly snap us back into the weightless soulless center of the production a joke disguised as the shallowest and most unimaginative and cognitively untaxing moral lesson you could possibly have included don't be a dick it's never too late to not be a dick Jesus yeah I think we'll come back to that in a moment the doomship's bridge meanwhile got a little bit exploded but Kang and Janet are still alive and Janet is still a prisoner he Magneto is his way down and starts murdering natives with those powers that would have been very handy if he'd used them a bit earlier but then the ant farm turn up to confront him and he does another none of this is new to me Spiel which is appropriate given we've already had this speech and indeed we've already had this entire sequence time and time again across the MCU but then the Socialist ants turn up and invade like the Soviets pouring into Nazi Germany and raping all of the German civilians and then their descendants telling us decades later that it was them who won the war guy is not the Americans the Socialist ants have a giant Mecca ant again not sure how nobody in the city saw these guys coming and tried to stop them or even alerted Kang about it or anything but never mind the ants struggled to get through Kang's energy Shield as well but then crap turns up having been profoundly moved ostensibly by Cassie's not quite moral message but much more likely from the concussion he sacrifices himself to destroy the shield and the Ants seemingly kill can well this can anyway there are other kangs even though you know this is the only one uh actually it never mind we already know the film isn't bothered about ensuring its mechanics are consistent Kang will return probably much sooner than you think given there's still a chunk of this film left to go crap dies and once again the film cannot decide what tone wants to strike here because though it seems to want us to be sad about it but with his Noble sacrifice and all it also plays his death for Laughs repeatedly him asking if he's you know saved everyone and Ant-Man awkwardly looking away him saying well at least he got to die an Avenger and Ant-Man awkwardly looking away and on it goes despite the ship's core being broken in the earlier explosion the plot decides it can still work just one more time so Janet plugs it in and opens a portal back to the basement lab the ant farm go back through the portal but Kang returns just in time to stop Scott Kang tries to jump through the portal himself so then we get the obligatory fist fight and another bit of Tron legacy set up Kang doesn't have much trouble overpowering Scott but seems to keep forgetting that his ultimate goal is getting through the portal so he doesn't take any of the Dozen also breaks in the fight so you know actually go through the portal instead he monologues and beats the out of Scott for a bit which of course gives Scott enough time to up the portal core generator thing it does doesn't die immediately though oh no it stays open for a little bit Kang finally runs for the portal but hope emerges and shoots him she and Scott knock him back into the collapsing core which still doesn't explode but rather traps him for a few seconds rather than them running for the portal themselves hope and Scott just kind of stand there for a bit and watch until it does indeed go bang leaving them seemingly and unnecessarily stranded in the quantum Realm by the way Tron legacy which is a very flawed film nonetheless does this much better in that film it's OG Flynn his son Sam and this Ghost in the Shell extra who are trying to get to the portal clue the program Flynn created in a bid to bring Perfection to his system is the one trying to stop them the basic events are the same between the two films the fam reaches the portal clue arrives in time to yank Flynn away clue goes for the portal Flynn distracts him they have a fight clue seemingly wins but Flynn sacrifices himself to stop clue and let the farm Escape but Tron legacy actually bakes in a reason for clue to be distracted from his goal by Flynn he actually has two motives complete his programming and invade our world get back at Flynn for his perceived betrayal the whole thing's a play on the parable of the Prodigal Son Sam is The Prodigal Son returning to his father from far away clue is the older brother the one who did everything his father asked of him yet finds himself in his mind at least overlooked and cast down by the younger son's return on the bridge in Tron clue hesitates and delays because he has two conflicting motives get Flynn's disk to gain access to the portal for his armies and take personal revenge against Flynn for what he perceives as a betrayal clue did everything Flynn asked of him created the perfect system and Flynn still turned against him so clue goes for Sam The Prodigal Son in a fit of rage and he has to be reminded by Flynn of the real reason he's here get the disc which he thinks that Flynn he has a reason for delaying what would otherwise have be in his certain Triumph he's vengeful and he feels abandoned more than he feels like a conqueror Kang by contrast has no motive to stay he is a fanatical genocider he's already told us that he's killed The Avengers so many times he doesn't even know which is which And yet when given these opportunities to go for the portal he doesn't take them instead he stays behind and even goes out of his way to rail on Scott and Shout at him a bit paying off a motive that simply isn't there Scott should be nothing to him he said as much in the film already and yet Kang acts In This Moment Like Scott is everything to him hope and Scott have a lovey-dovey moment in which neither of them seems especially fussed that they're trapped here as far as they know for eternity and their daughter is unreachable to them it is again a strangely short moment it's celebratory in tone even though there's a huge big qualifier that they might never see their daughter again you know even though they could have if they just run back through the portal rather than standing around like gomless idiots for about 30 seconds and The Scene goes on and it goes on and they don't acknowledge their situation once because it turns out though they couldn't really have known this it certainly wasn't a safe assumption Cassie it turns out can just open the portal again from the other side in a matter of seconds so they get to go home after all incredibly lucky that the device didn't break or malfunction when it was hacked from the quantum realm at the beginning of the film basically destroying the lab by sucking everything into itself in a mini implosion we wrap up then with a very similar sequence to the one with which we began Scott wandering around narrating but then he remembers that Kang said something bad was coming if he didn't get out and he has a brief but abortive existential crisis before he snaps out of it with the injunction stop overthinking it might as well be addressing me personally there Scott but with this film thinking about it at all probably does constitute overthinking it the plot doesn't actually hold up the scrutiny shocking suggestion I know of a Marvel film and that's the end except of course for the Post credits Kang Council scene with Pharaoh Kang et al yes the film really is doing we was kangs they feel very threatened that exiled can was killed by humans with knowledge of the Multiverse meaning the council has summoned the rest of the kangs to I guess go Wipe Out the humans and anyone who threatens their multiversal Dominion I hate to delay the end of this video still further but how how do they know this were they monitoring the quantum realm if they were monitoring the quantum realm and they'd been monitoring it since Exile Kang wound up there 30 or so years ago wouldn't they have already spotted that humans have been popping in and out for a while now wouldn't they have spotted that Exile Kang had his ship back and that he'd built an Empire and an Army in a bid to start a multiversal war in the near future whatever the near future means in the franchise which has decided it can't really be bothered with time anymore and just to add one final wondering what the hell was the point the stakes nominally were that Kang couldn't be allowed to escape because he'd go about destroying infinite timelines he didn't get out which means infinite timelines are still at risk because Kang because his alternate selves pose an existential threat to infinite timelines meaning this film has essentially sterilized itself it's neutered itself it's denuded of itself of all meaningful consequence what a spectacular waste of time there is by the way a second post-credits scene where old-timey Kang appears in an old-timey Auditorium before a crowd including old-timey Loki and old-timey Owen Wilson but life is too short to watch Loki and once again we were told that you wouldn't have to subscribe to Disney plus to make sense of the MCU so I neither understand nor care about this scene summing up then since we have finally reached the end of the film sis Hitman and the bee and the Multiverse of quantum was certainly one of the films in the MCU it was a film that was produced and was made and then released and that appeared on our screens in the month of February in the year 2023 trying to say very much more about it than that is tricky because it feels like everything worth saying has been said now for every MCU entry since at least January of 2021. those hoping for a marked upturn in form from the apparent nadir of phase 4 will probably be disappointed Ant-Man 3 was like an Anodyne version of the last three films a milk toast very of love and Thunder's humor a desaturated version of Multiverse of sadness's world-bending histrionics a paired back iteration of wakanda forever's alleged character and family driven plotline solely by virtue of its mind-numbing mid-ness Ant-Man 3 probably avoided the most egregious flaws of those three films etima I don't think was quite so obviously forced as love and thunder its World bending wasn't quite so baffling as Multiverse his message wasn't quite so insufferable as wakanda but I'm not sure this can be called an improvement I felt a great many negative emotions after watching Thor 4 Multiverse and wakanda but at least I felt something about them yet here I am now approaching the end of this script really struggling to give anything that even vaguely resembles a about it part of this is undoubtedly a meta issue the MCU overall has been spiraling into a convoluted irrelevance for some time so its newest entries have sieged being disappointing and taken on the TDM of expectation on the level of plot nothing is really being tried that hasn't been tried already and done better both within this franchise and elsewhere and we're so very used to it getting worse that there's no longer any shock value to the disappointment working very hard this film's Defenders could say that it's a Charming story about families coming together overcoming distances and past struggles learning and growing and saving the world together but that describes a Trope not specific characterization it's a premise the film had to but didn't make distinct that premise and Trope was also present in wakanda Forever which was a terrible film but still managed to make its deployment of that Trope at least partially notable it Allied it with an attempted grief and the overcoming of loss which really presented as parodies of emotion but at least strove to achieve something emotional Shiri had to overcome the death of her brother and her mother to discover the fortitude required to take up the mantle of the Black Panther Ant-Man 3 by contrast gave us well what the pretense at Family Strife built on strategic Amnesia the film pretending that the anfam hadn't had time to solve issues and relationship problems though could have been repaired in a week never mind the year plus they actually had in which to do it it gave us aspiring girl boss daughter who had precisely half a lesson to learn from Scott Lang otherwise chastised for the distance and ignorance and listlessness that the film's introduction actively worked to show us didn't exist in his character it gave us full-fledged girl Bus Mother Janet possessor of all the knowledge and all the skills required to make use of it the film attempted to tell us that her flaw was that she wanted so much to be a normal mother that she'd hidden information from her family in a bid to move on which is an asinine read of the real floor that she didn't tell anybody about the impending multiversal genocide she's unwittingly cook what's up because she didn't want to hang Pym is reduced to an expository foil and then a mere vehicle for ants ex machina and sometime propagandist the fully automated insectoid communism Scott's loving family man drive and Persona somehow resulted in him knowing nothing at all about his family while hope simply isn't a character Cassie and craps exchange immediately preceding his sacrifice was laughably trite but it did actually serve as the film's core moral message which is a depressing realization nothing deeper or more meaningful than don't be a dick there's really not much more to the film than that its characters contradict each other and themselves without actually striving for anything we haven't seen a dozen times before in the MCU it's all much of a sameness the mcu's answer to that sameness most particularly in multi-pack of blandness and now in Ant-Man 3 is entirely superficial it rests in its new visuals not in its characters or its story but the thing about superficiality is that it's well superficial we can be kind and we can say that the visual effects in Multiverse were Innovative but once we've had supervisual innovation of that kind wacky distortions and weird colorscapes and peculiar goo monsters it becomes hard to praise it again after Multiverse what is there really to praise about ant-man's kaleidoscopic backdrops we've seen it all before we saw it just a few months ago in two or three films it's reinvented the sameness that it was supposed to be trying to break from we need something more than that differentness and weirdness cannot carry an aesthetic alone it's worth a final trial Legacy comparison because that's an example of visual design Allied to a purpose Tron legacy has a consistent internal design and a consistent aesthetic approach it's a pretty unremarkable story but that was elevated to a degree by its setting in a fully realized and unarguably distinctive world where Ant-Man 3 is borrowed from multiverses it's surreal so it's good approach to design Tron legacy accomplishes visual storytelling Ant-Man 3 like everything else in the MCU these days doesn't have a story to tell with its visuals or in any other medium given Ant-Man attempted finally to introduce the saga's overarching villain you might counter that the more came from Khan his backstory the discovery of his plan the revelations about the Khan Council and their coming multiversal war and he might have a point but it would still be an incredibly limited one yes we do at last have some vague sense of where the overall story might be going that in theory gives us a sense of direction on paper it establishes Stakes but how much of this actually exists and how much of it is new the big bat who threatens existence certainly exists now but that can hardly be called new or original the nominal difference is that the threat posed is to the Multiverse and the timelines this time and to whatever else rather than to half the population of the universe but this seems like a distinction without very much difference it doesn't actually mean anything it's not comprehensible it doesn't present meaningful Stakes because it contains its own impossibility if there are infinite timelines an infinite variation versions of that villain and all of our many Heroes you can't recreate the Thanos effect by distilling his plan into personal consequences you can't disappear half of an infinite cast of Heroes coupled with phase 4's inability to give his characters to care about or stories to invest in in the first place what really are we supposed to care about with any of this the attempted originality is ostensibly based in its World building we have a Multiverse now we have a Quantum realm the story might be fundamentally the same but it's happening somewhere else and that gives it new consequences and connotations nah no it doesn't that's that's just a facade this isn't World building this is a bid to make World building redundant the Multiverse is a non-thing the multi-qualifier references an infinity and so is practically speaking meaningless a kind of not here via negative approach that only really serves to tell you where the story isn't it's a boundless concept unconstrained by rules like linearity and structure character limits physics even time itself the quantum realm again ostensibly original is really just a partial reskin of that Multiverse it still means nothing it's still ungraspable everything about it can change at the whim of whoever writes the next film that sat there if it's depiction in Ant-Man 3 seems to make a little bit more sense than the Multiverse in Multiverse of Madness it it's only because the film chose to stick and only for the most part to one of the quantum Realms layers and even then it made it so expansive and indefinite that you could never really Place yourself or identify with any given Locale or set of peoples whereas phases one to three built off localism and tied character Stakes to familiar and Universal drives fears and aspirations from phase 4 onward the obsession has been with maximalism how can we make everything as big as we possibly can the infinity Saga showed that it was possible to blow up the stakes while keeping them grounded and realizable but it did this by recognizing the importance of individual characters stories and places if Ant-Man 3 was ever going to succeed as a major entry into phase 5. never mind as the debut film kicking off Phase 5 it would have been because it had exploited its smallness to use the obvious pan like Spider-Man Ant-Man is a character ideally suited to localizing stakes and condensing stories into a solid relatable and tangible demand game post Infinity Saga that's what the MCU should have done Begin Again build from the ground up build our familiarity with a new cast give them Stories We invest in then you increase the threat gradually expand the universe into a Multiverse if you have to but you do it piecemeal glimpsing it from the bottom up not the top down always relating it to the places and peoples that we know and love and only after you've done all of that do you part the curtains and show the hole instead Ant-Man 3 took one of the characters best suited to its First Act and just blew everything up again no characters no real plot incomprehensible stakes and yeah we've seen it all before

Channel: The Little Platoon

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Keywords: Ant Man, ant man and the wasp quantumania, ant-man 3, kevin feige, Ant-Man 3, Ant Man interview, Ant Man Endgame, Avengers Endgame, MCU Phase 4, MCU, Marvel, Paul Rudd interview, Paul Rudd Ant man, Tony Stark, Evangeline Lilly, MODOK, Ant man MODOK, Kang the Conquerer, Ant Man 3 trailer, Ant Man Quantumania trailer, Ant Man Quantumania post credit scene, Multiverse of Madness, Thor love and Thunder, She=Hulk, Ant man review, Ant Man Quantumania review, Quantumania is bad

Id: x2t7fvoRTJQ

Length: 83min 18sec (4998 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 07 2023