Warning: Spoilers for Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania to follow.
Look, we get it; when it comes to superhero movies, or most all genre fiction for that matter (hell, most all fiction), some things simply aren’t going to make any sense. Picking away at a film in poor faith is no way to consume media, and there’s a fine line we should all be drawing with respect to that.
This is absolutely not to say, of course, that fiction is beyond critique, and if there’s anything that a film like Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania has proven, it’s that we just might not be able to afford slacking on critique if this is what Phase Five has in store for us. Indeed, Marvel’s problem of sacrificing the meat of the present events for future ones has only exacerbated with Quantumania, and today, we’ve chosen violence via keyboard.
Here are 10 things that make absolutely no sense about Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania.
1.) Baskin Robbins Paul Rudd in the probability storm
This whole scene did a pretty apt job of taking us out of the film, but no aspect took the cake quite like one of Scott Lang’s many possibilities rolling up in a Baskins Robbins outfit. Explain it away with quantum mechanics all you want, but you can’t convince us that there was any possible way that Scott, up to that point in the movie, could have conceivably shown up in a Baskin Robbins uniform. Where was he even keeping that thing?
Marvel’s penchant for comedy is all good and fine, if mediocre, but a lackluster joke isn’t worth sheer tonal dissonance.
2.) All of the Ant-Men and Wasps suddenly disappearing during the probability storm
Convenience seemed to be the name of the game with Quantumania, and the probability storm proved doubly culpable as a result.
Again, the many unknowns of quantum mechanics might excuse this, but with “unknown” being the key word, we just can’t give this one a pass. The dead weight of all of Scott’s and Hope’s possibilities suddenly vanishing when the two of them touched hands was exactly the miracle they needed at that point in time.
Again, we get it; quantum mechanics could enable a lot of events. What’s interesting, however, is how all of these events happen to go in favor of the plot.
3.) M.O.D.O.K.’s exchanges with the Ant-Family after each defeat
Krylar takes the cake for the most useless character in Quantumania, but at least he had the decency to be inconsequential.
This wasn’t the case with M.O.D.O.K. — who was reimagined for the MCU as a rehabilitated Darren Cross — who was forcibly sent to the Quantum Realm during his defeat in the original Ant-Man. Angry comic fans notwithstanding, this was a perfectly valid route to take.
Unfortunately, you could point to just about any moment of M.O.D.O.K.’s screentime and find an equally valid gripe, but we’re going to go with two exchanges the character had with Cassie and Scott as the least sensible M.O.D.O.K. moments.
Without getting too winded by way of exposition, Cassie’s “don’t be a dick” back-and-forth with M.O.D.O.K. was unnervingly friendly in the way an advert might be, but it paled in comparison to whatever emotion Marvel was trying to evoke during the character’s death scene; the awkwardness with which Scott handled the exchange probably didn’t require any acting from Paul Rudd.
4.) Kang getting bodied by the ants
Moments before Kang fell to the apparently awesome power of eusocial insects, he was disintegrating fully-grown, partially armored soldiers and rebels with a flick of his wrist. Only moments later did he become less useful than a can of Raid in the pest-ridding department.
Twitter will tear this one to pieces better than we ever could, but for a film that aimed to introduce Kang as the MCU’s next big threat, the fact that industry professionals thought this was a final cut-worthy outcome makes absolutely no sense.
5.) The surprise technocratic society of ants that had the know-how to beat Kang
This one is almost too hilarious to give much flak, and if it had instead been the main premise of a whole other movie, we might have fully boarded this train.
Nevertheless, it was a rather unmannerly way of giving Michael Douglas something to do in the movie, and given that it played an enormous role in turning Kang into a laughingstock — which itself only compounded the storm of nonsense that these six-legged troops were a part of — we aren’t having it.
6.) Cassie’s five seconds of fight training and the subsequent threat she somehow posed
If any of Quantumania‘s stars were trapped by the film’s script, it had to be Kathryn Newton. Marvel veterans like Rudd and Evangeline Lilly at least had the experience to work around the occasional lackluster comic book movie script, but for Newton, it looks like she rolled snake eyes on her Marvel debut.
But her character, Cassie Lang, certainly seemed capable of holding her own in a fight after nothing more than a quick pep talk from Scott. Maybe that’s just the power of a father’s love, but we saw way too little of Cassie’s combat experience to buy into how much damage she was able to cause.
7. Kang’s thousands of variants being around this entire time and never interfering before
This one is more a result of Marvel’s exponential ambition coming back to bite it; if the Kangs had interfered in a realistic manner, then there would be a whole lot of nothing in Earth-199999.
Indeed, as Marvel’s scope grows, so too do the threats edge closer and closer to omnipotence and omniscience until it gets to a point that writing around them would have to make just as much (non)sense as their inaction up to now. It may have been a quasi-unavoidable trap, but we think biting off more than you can chew should earn a few fingers pointed your way.
8. Every single hero being present and accounted for by the film’s end
Before you dismiss this point as another obsession with big character deaths, we aren’t talking about how the characters managed to survive from a contextual point of view; the fact that everyone managed to escape alive doesn’t seem like a problem in that sense.
But what doesn’t make sense is how a team of creatives as lucrative as Marvel’s somehow still think that these Hollywood endings are the way to go.
With Quantumania, Marvel had a real opportunity to properly set the tone for their next multi-film antagonist, all while setting Cassie up for a fascinating character arc, both of which would have cemented the MCU’s next big trajectory as the intriguing paradigm it should have been. We’ll have a “how it should have ended” piece out soon enough to expand on this, but for now we just want to know what’s possessing the studio to make these decisions (that’s rhetorical; we know it’s money).
9. Kang’s army being so easy to defeat
Marvel really flipped a coin when deciding the moment-to-moment durability of Kang’s loyal minions; one minute they seem like formidable oppressors that can take a few hits, and the next minute they’re popping like fascist balloons.
And the next minute in question just happened to be where it was most convenient, namely when the denizens of the Quantum Realm charged Kang’s fortress upon Cassie’s rallying cry. To be fair, we imagine our bodies would meet a similar fate if Jentorra swung at us the way she did at the Kangtroopers, but these soldiers folded a bit too easily for our liking.
10. Scott’s second thoughts about whether he really was victorious or not
Putting aside the fact that Scott’s eventual nonchalance was one final slap in the face to the sputtering threat of Kang, let’s not forget that Scott was the one who hatched the plan to retrieve the Infinity Stones in Avengers: Endgame; as far as the Quantum Realm goes, Scott knows his stuff to a pretty respectable degree.
For him to second guess himself is not only a creative copout for foreshadowing (which the mid- and post-credits scenes could have done on their own), but just out of character enough to make us turn our thumbs down one more time before the end credits.