Quantumania: Another Win for Self-Awareness
Ant-man and the Wasp: Quantumania Review
As the Marvel franchise has burgeoned into a sprawling empire of shows, movies, streaming specials and video games, it’s slowly grown into a somewhat divisive subject. With so many of its recent shows and movies being critically lambasted, it’s clear that patience with the expansive cinematic universe is beginning to wear thin.
Before Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania’s theatrical release, a hell-storm of condemnation had already begun to rain down on the impending action blockbuster. With critics complaining that the movie was everything from unoriginal to outright confused and confounding, I was a little leary of what I might walk into with this latest entry into the series.
But the truth is, I loved it. And I didn’t love it because it was a spectacular movie. Spectacular is hardly what I’m expecting these Marvel thrillers to be when each new one comes to theaters. They don’t need to be cohesive and utterly ground-breaking for them to be lovable adventures through time and space.
It seems sometimes that people forget that in a universe of superheroes, writing is often just a delivery mechanism for action sequences. Considering how far we’ve come in the world of CGI in cinema, that hardly bothers me. So many of the most captivating action films of the last forty years certainly aren’t remembered for their stirring dialogue.
So often as each of these new Marvel movies releases, less open-minded viewers just jump toward the same criticisms: they’re contrived, they have plot holes, there are too many superheroes, etc. But one of the greatest successes of the Marvel franchise is its awareness of some of these shortcomings and its ability to poke fun at itself for them. And having seen this latest Ant-Man with someone new to the Marvel universe, I can attest that it hardly hampered their enjoyment of the movie.
With the comedic elements incorporated throughout — even going so far as getting I Think You Should Leave’s Ruben Rabasa for a brief cameo — it’s a movie that oozes self-awareness. It falls slightly short of the over-the-top visual gags featured in Thor: Love and Thunder, but maintains enough levity throughout that it keeps the fairly standard plot points underlying the movie from feeling stale.
At this point in its long-running, ever-expanding universe, the worst mistake a new Marvel movie can make is to take itself too seriously. For an entry to come along now and expect the viewers to eat up so many of the same tired devices from its previous iterations without at least so much as a wink and a nod would feel almost criminal. There are only so many earth/universe/multiverse threatening events we can take seriously before we put our faces to our palms.
But Marvel knows that. Instead of falling victim to the self-seriousness that defined so many of the earliest Marvel movies, at this point they seem to revel in their convolution. They know that their ability to keep their movies plot-hole-free went out the window even before they began exploring time travel. And now that it’s a multi-versal, conglomerative web of madness, the films have enough humor interspersed throughout to excuse the logical fallacies in their plots.
Avatar: The Way of the Water suffered from so many of the same complications within its story, but where Ant-Man can laugh at itself throughout the entire ride, James Cameron’s latest entry appears oblivious to its most cumbersome shortcomings. While it’s certainly not the visual spectacle of the Avatar sequel that took nearly fifteen years to produce, there’s something to be said for just how much Marvel is able to accomplish in each of these new releases.
With so many of these raucous, cosmic action adventure movies continuing to pile up, whining that each new Marvel movie of the month is anything short of cohesive can seem pretty obtuse. The complaint that, “maybe the movie featuring Paul Rudd in his shrinking, engorging Ant-Man suit might not be fully steeped in reason” sounds a bit like the argument that, “SpongeBob is illogical because talking sponges don’t live in pineapples.” Thank you for your keen insight, you critic, you!
Logic is secondary in a universe with nearly as many superheroes and supervillains as there are people. Where fictional powers are involved, logical consistencies fall by the wayside. Without some holes in reasoning, even movie series like Harry Potter would buckle under the weight of its own in-universe rules. After all, if there’s a death spell and Harry’s fighting to the death, aren’t all those other spells he’s spent this series learning completely superfluous? If we can’t ignore the holes that emerge in some of the most fantastical works of fiction, then we’d be left without some of the most fantastical works of fiction.
And while it’s certainly possible for superhero movies to be well-written, it’s hardly what brings fans to the theatre. If what I get from each of these new superhero films as they release is little more than an excuse to go out, put my phone down and watch a 3D action movie with a friend, then it’s practically succeeded already. If what I get on top of that is the self-aware, humor-laden adventure through the subatomic universe that I found in the latest Ant-Man, then the movie is another A in my book.