By Michael Marano

Ant-Man can no longer call out comic book movies for their bullshit because, as purveyor of prologue for the Marvel movies that will follow, the character is now too irredeemably full of bullshit himself.

Paul Rudd as Scott Lang/Ant-Man and Jonathan Majors as Kang the Conqueror in Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania. Photo: Jay Maidment

Central to Marvel’s new Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania is the profound love a family feels for each other.

Also central to the film is those same family members keeping incredibly important secrets about incredibly dangerous things from each other. This allows said family to encounter those dangers throughout the runtime of the film, because those secrets, the keeping of which is contrary to the love for each other this family supposedly feels, are needed to move the “plot.”

Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, hereafter called Ant-Man 3 for simplicity’s sake, is not a movie. It’s a prologue for the rest of Marvel’s next phase. Emotional consistency is not important given that the whole movie is just exposition for the movies that will follow. Keep in mind, comic book movies that lay the foundation for comic book movies that follow do not, of necessity, have to suck so long as the emotional core is there. Spider-Man: No Way Home not only introduced the concept of the “Marvel Multi-Verse” that back-boned the subsequent Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness and Ant-Man 3, it also had so much genuine heart that it retroactively made the previous ultra-crappy Andrew Garfield and Tom Holland Spider-Man movies better, along with the appalling Spider-Man 3.

With few exceptions, I loathe prologues in movies. The exception is Galadriel’s soliloquy at the start of Fellowship of the Ring, because it was narratively and visually interesting. But too often, like in the Divergent movies, the prologue just tells us who to root for. Why? Because audiences have no dog in the fight and the screenwriters can’t be bothered to create an emotional context for them to actually have a dog in the fight.

This is what the entirety of Ant-Man 3 is — nothing but prologue, with no genuine emotional investment, as suggested by the aforementioned secrets through which family members imperil each other. The emotional investment that Ant-Man 3 counts on is not between the audience and its characters. It’s between the audience and the Marvel brand.

And speaking of corporate and plutocratic fuckery, Ant-Man 3 spouts some pretty despicable Orwellian doublespeak. The movie introduces the next big, bad villain who will hound the Marvel heroes over the next batch of movies, Kang the Conqueror… a nemesis whom I, as a lifelong comic book geek, adore. My first exposure to Kang was when he killed an Avenger and that Avenger stayed dead, which blew my mind when I read Giant-Size Avengers # 2 at the age of 10. Kang, as you can imagine from his epithet, Conquers people. He’s really good at it. He does a bang-up job oppressing populations and creating diasporas and refugee camps and displacing people.

This comic book–level villainy is conflated in Ant-Man 3 with the very real oppression and displacement of people victimized by gentrification and corporatization. We never actually see these people in the movie because the sight of them suffering might offend the greasy-fingered popcorn-munchers in the Heartland, or the costal NIMBYs who, much like how Ant-Man himself does at his favorite San Francisco cafe, drop 12 bucks for a coffee while people a short distance away have no roofs over their heads. The threat of displacement, and the creation of refugee camps, is addressed through what is jokingly described and depicted in Ant-Man 3 as a “socialist, collective action.” The idea that such a message could be delivered via such a soulless corporate product packed with corporate product placement in which the heroes are the very technocrats who are making San Francisco unlivable is grotesque.

Ant-Man 3 does have some things going for it. Jonathan Majors of Lovecraft Country is great as Kang, capturing notes of melancholy along with Genghis Khan–levels of despotism. Michael Douglas, God bless him, manages to do some actual acting standing in front of giant green screens. At its best, the design not only captures the feel of Marvel comics, but also Heavy Metal from the late ’70s and issues of Valérian and Laureline in which the panels are populated by freaky aliens.

Too bad the movie is cut in such a way that we can’t really drink in all that cool design… but… whatever.

What had been refreshing about the first two Ant-Man movies and the Deadpool movies is that they were funny and not ponderous. Even waaaaaaaaay back in the remote days of 2015 and 2016 when the first Ant-Man and Deadpool movies came out, we, as a culture, were overwhelmed by comic book movies. The humor of the Ant-Man and Deadpool films was that they poked fun at comic book movies, right down to narrative beats. Before Paul Rudd became so inextricably recognizable as a superhero that he could shill Heineken 0.0 during the Super Bowl, the idea of him playing a superhero was hilarious. The first and best joke of Ant-Man in 2015 was the poster, with the goofy guy from those Neil LaBute movies wearing a shiny red leotard. Ant-Man and Deadpool offered us, blissfully, escape from the escapism of comic book movies, by calling out comic book movies on their bullshit.

But, with Ant-Man 3, the Ant-Man series has been gentrified. The plutocrats have occupied the franchise for corporate ends. Rudd’s Ant-Man is now operating without his multiethnic gang of buddies, who provided the funniest and most heartfelt moments of the previous two movies. Ant-Man can’t call out comic book movies for their bullshit because, as purveyor of prologue for the Marvel movies that will follow, the character is now too irredeemably full of bullshit himself.

I hope that’s something Deadpool can make fun of in his next movie, because the thought of having no escape from our escapism anymore is kind of depressing.

Novelist, writing coach, editor and film critic Michael Marano‘s sister’s boyfriend found a copy the above-mentioned Giant-Size Avengers # 2 at the laundromat, and passed the issue on to Mike. The Avenger Kang killed in that issue was The Swordsman, and the panels in which The Swordsman breathed his last (see below) are etched in Mike’s frontal lobes forever. www.GetOffMyLawn.Biz