Ant Man & Ant Man: Quantumania


Starring: Paul Rudd, Evangeline Lilly, Michael Douglas, 2 different Cassies, Michelle Pfeiffer, Corey Stoll, Jonathan Majors

Appearances by: Judy Greer, Bobby Cannavale, Michael Pena, David Dastmalchian, Anthony Mackie, Bill Murray, Katy M. O'Brian, William Jackson Harper, Randall Park


Ant Man, Part the First


I'm starting to fear I will eventually have to at least do a quick rundown on every damn one of these. I made the wise decision to watch the Disney+ clips that provide catch-up you might need for any character in an upcoming movie before watching "Ant Man 3" and I would have been LOST without it. Because it turns out the only thing I remembered about the first movie was the part where Scott learns to use the suit and has to shrink all the way to quantum level while fighting the big bad at the end of the movie. But I forgot who that big bad was. Turns out that was important.
Chrissy: So was Black Widow's introduction in "Iron Man 2", but you were very insistent on NOT recapping that one.
Diandra: And we have managed, haven't we? They reintroduced her and Hulk in "The Avengers" because they were better at acknowledging that not everyone had seen all the movies leading up to the team up at the time, so it worked.
Chrissy: Sure. Keep telling yourself that.

Anyway. I really don't think I need to do a full recap of either of these, so...here we go. Quick version.

In 1989, when Howard Stark looked like John Slattery and Michael Douglas did enough movies that the CGI team has plenty of reference points to airbrush the living hell out of his face, Hank Pym confronts Howard and an aged Peggy Carter about the fact that a defense lab is trying to copy his Pym particles. He vows that as long as he lives, NOBODY will get their hands on his formula. After he marches out in a huff, Howard assures everybody that he KNOWS Hank and knows he is not a threat unless they "make him one."
Chrissy: Let's just put him on this project building an intelligent robot. Ultron is it called? There's no way he can do any harm there.
Diandra: Yeah, we know they had "Back to the Future" movies in this universe, but did they have "Terminator"?
Anyway. Yes, this is probably some sort of acknowledgement of the fact that Hank is more often the villain in the comics.

In the present, Scott is let out of prison, picked up by Luis, who it is established he met while serving whatever sentence he finished. He's determined he's going to go straight now because of his daughter and his degree in electrical engineering should totally help people look past his conviction to hire him. And he does get a job right away, at Baskin Robbins. Which is of course immediately depicted as degrading and beneath him because the only customer we see doesn't understand that they are not Dairy Queen and they just sell ice cream. Except even that job he got by not telling them about prison, which gets him immediately fired even if the boss does praise him for "sticking it" to the billionaire CEOs.

Because as it turns out, Scott was fired for "blowing the whistle" on a multi million dollar overcharging scheme by the company. He went to prison because he decided to play Robin Hood and hack into the system to funnel all that money back. And post all the boss's bank account numbers online. And drove one's expensive car into a swimming pool.

But here's the important part and the reason I needed to backtrack to this movie: Hope is working at daddy's company for a guy named Darren Cross. This name is recognizable to comic book fans as the villain Yellowjacket, an identity also used at one point by Hank. He provides the science-y-sounding mumbo jumbo that is Ant Man tech: they are able to change the space between atoms and increase density and strength. He wants to use it for military purposes because the enemy would literally never see them coming. Except Hank spent the past few decades gaslighting people into thinking the Ant Man never existed and was just Cold War propaganda. But Darren was determined, so he made a suit that could alter a person's size that he dubbed...uh...yellowjacket. And he plans to sell it as a military tool.

Hank is freaked out, because he buried that tech for a REASON. Turns out Hope is his spy and she is reporting everything Darren is doing back to him. She says he hasn't figured out how to shrink a human subject (as evidenced when he uses a shrink ray to turn a guy who voices objections to his plan into goo later) (and a cute little lamb even later) and begs dad to get her a suit so she can finish him before he does. He refuses to do this on the grounds of he doesn't want to risk his little girl. But he has no compunctions about risking this rando ex-con who...also...has...a little girl. Whatever. One thing that should be noted is that the Pym particle science, like Tony's arc reactor tech, seems to change with every movie in whatever way it needs to to service the plot. Changing the space between atoms should make going subatomic impossible, but that changes before this first movie is even over.
Chrissy: There you go again. Expecting a dumb action movie based on a comic book to be grounded in LOGIC.
Diandra: Is it really too much to ask that the universe's own internal logic be consistent? Never mind. I think I already know the answer to that.

Another thing that changed? The way Cassie's (or maybe I should say Cassie #1's) mom and stepdad treat Scott. Because they are almost hostile in this first movie. Justifiably, really, given that he's a convicted criminal struggling to pay child support since he can't find work because he's a convicted criminal. Also because stepdad is a cop.

Darren tries to get Hope to come to the dark side. Or whatever. By appealing to daddy issues he assumes she has and ignoring the possibility that her issues in this particular iteration might be more in line with Disney: a (presumably) dead mother.

Scott gets desperate and goes back to Luis et al, which is when we introduce Luis'...special form of storytelling before doing an ode to "Ocean's Eleven", breaking into a safe that turns out to be Hank's and stealing an Ant Man suit, complete with Pym particles loaded into the belt. He tries it on, pushes one of the little red buttons embedded in the gloves curiously and goes on a frantic "honey I shrunk the ex criminal" adventure before accidentally figuring out how to expand himself again.
Chrissy: I forgot how much that looks exactly like the introduction to powers sequence in Doctor Strange.
Diandra: Which was a year later. Yeah. Micro and macro, but same basic ideas.

Hank talks to him through the coms the whole way, chortling that he can keep the suit and Hank will contact him shortly. Scott breaks back into the safe to return the suit because WHAT THE FUCK MAN? I WANT NO PART OF THIS BULLSHIT. Aaaaaaaand of course THAT is when he is caught by the police. Hank visits him in jail, claiming to be his lawyer and also demonstrating how good he is at stalking and manipulation. He basically arranged for Scott to steal the suit. And he arranges for some ants to bring the shrunken suit right into his cell and fly him out. He passes out en route and wakes up to Hope glowering at him like 'this is the guy dad would rather have use the suit than me? This idiot? Really?'

This is when Hank reveals that he's been watching Scott as a potential protégé ever since he stole from a business with security so high tech that that should have been impossible. Also, he can control ants via olfactory pheromone whatever bullshit. He takes Scott into his torture dungeon...sorry...lab and exposits about how his former protégé Darren turned into a villain and now he needs a new one to defeat him. And to incentivize, he promises he can get him his daughter back. If Scott helps him steal the tech Darren has and destroy the data.

Unfortunately he is JUST too late as Darren has figured out he CAN make the tech work so long as the subject is protected in a glass case or something.

These were the early days of these movies making connections to each other, so when Scott suggests calling in the Avengers, Hank grumbles that he's spent his life trying to prevent "a Stark" from getting his tech because it's too dangerous. Apparently he feared Tony would be like Darren. Also, have you seen how they handled their last two team ups? Hope tries one more stab at begging daddy to let her do it, but he refuses on the grounds of it being too dangerous physically and mentally.

She apparently hears this or understands on some level as she helps train Scott to use the suit. And beat him up regularly under the guise of teaching him to fight while demonstrating every chance she gets that she would be more capable of doing the job. Eventually, the future couple have a heart to heart over father daughter relationships and she helps him learn how to communicate with the ants.

Hank warns him against messing with the regulator on the suit lest he end up in the Quantum Realm where "all concepts of time and space become irrelevant as you shrink for all eternity."
Chrissy: Speaking of things that will change with each movie.
This is followed...eventually...by him explaining how they lost Janet: when she turned off the regulator to disarm a missile during a mission. And he's spent the past ten years trying to understand the Quantum Realm and the payoff on that will be in the second movie and it was more important which is why I recapped that one and not this.

Scott's first test run as Ant Man involves breaking into a Stark warehouse (which he doesn't realize Tony has turned into the Avengers compound) to steal some tech Hank invented back when he worked for SHIELD, which is conveniently a thing they need for the Darren mission. This is when he had the run in with Sam, which starts with him asking if he can pretty please just borrow the thing for a few days and ends with him disabling the Falcon wings from the inside and Sam telling somebody that it's "really important" that "Cap never finds out about this."

They end up bringing in Scott's "team" of Luis, the Russian and the other guy for that final smash and grab. Except Scott gets captured in ant form by Darren, who Hope claims has been driven insane by the Pym particles and could possibly be a good guy deep down. Darren is like 'nah, maybe in a couple movies' and tries to kill Hank. They all get out before blowing up the building with a bomb that somehow sucks in all the resulting damage. Darren finally puts on the Yellowjacket suit and he and Scott have a ridiculous extended fight sequence that somehow ends up in Cassie's room and involves accidentally blowing up an ant and Cassie's Thomas the Tank Engine train. And Scott ultimately has to disable the regulator and go "subatomic" to get inside Darren's suit and make it collapse in on itself. With him in it. Yeah, all this turns out to be important for the third movie. And then thanks to the power of fatherly love or something, Scott is able to fix his suit inside this movie's version of the Quantum Realm and return back to the real world where Cassie's parents are now willing to protect him from whatever authorities would punish him for his bullshit. Also, Hank starts to contemplate the possibility that Janet is still alive and Scott and Hope very suddenly become a Thing.

And in the mid credit scene, Hank gives Hope the new Wasp suit he and Janet didn't finish.

The post credit scene is just straight up the scene from "Civil War" where Sam thinks to call in Scott.

Something like four movies, a whole new Marvel theme and a bunch of changes to how everything works later...

Ant Man 3: Quantumania


This entire movie centers on the idea of exploring Janet's time in the Quantum Realm. In order to address questions like "how did she eat for thirty years down there and also why was it even thirty years for her because you literally have her saying it exists outside of time and space", we start by, as always, manipulating the rules to fit the needs of the current story. So it turns out there's a WHOLE WORLD down there (which is probably true) and it operates by the same rules and features a whole population of humanoid characters (what now?). Nothing really makes sense and only some parts of it are relevant.

Scott runs down everything that happened between movies. He's now famous...sort of...although some people think he's Spider Man, so he wrote an autobiography that we are forced to listen to parts of. Hope is running the company and getting humanitarian awards and basically becoming the female Stark, I guess. When she's not still playing superhero and sheering off ALL her hair. Or participating in trucker rallies throwing tantrums about COVID protocols.
Chrissy: I'm impressed it took you that long to say something about that.
Diandra: Yeah. Unsurprisingly, she's still treated like a fandom darling while Letitia Wright is treated like a pariah for vaccine hesitation like black people don't have a very good reason to be wary of that sort of thing. DID NONE OF YOU SEE FALCON AND THE WINTER SOLDIER?

Cassie has a whole new actress and is getting in trouble with the law in the manner more in line with her generation: by protesting and mocking law enforcement for their treatment of the homeless caused by the Blip. She also followed in the family tradition of researching Quantum science and ants while everyone was dusted and she made something grandpa describes as a subatomic Hubble telescope for exploring the Quantum Realm. Only nobody ran any of it by Janet, who freaks out just slightly too late to stop them from all getting sucked in via quantum bubble or something.

Like "Guardians of the Galaxy", this world is populated by bizarre creatures out of someone's fever dream and include a slime creature obsessed with orifices whose "ooze" acts like a Babelfish when drunk. And also Bill Murray for some reason. Because of all questions about Janet's time in the Quantum Realm, the writers felt it was most important to address her sexual needs and reassure us that she was fucking Bill Murray. But hey, there's also telepathic Chidi, some badass chick that we're apparently supposed to pretend wasn't on "Agents of SHIELD". And Darren, who has been Frankensteined into MODOK in a way that makes me think of a recurring skit on "In Living Color."
Chrissy: DETECTIVE HEAD! That's what he reminds me of! Thank you!
You know...in hindsight, this might have actually helped make MODOK a little less weird.

More important is the guy who created MODOK, who those of us who saw "Loki" recognize as He Who Remains and now finally gets the name comic fans know him as: Kang the Conqueror. And here is where Janet's expository dump is important. She met him as "a scientist" who crashed...somehow...in his ship that can travel the multiverse. She befriended him and helped fix his ship's "energy core", at which point because the ship was "neurokinetic", she was able to "see" his memories and all the worlds and timelines he destroyed before someone "exiled" him to the Quantum Realm.
Chrissy: What a convenient expository device.
Diandra: Ugh.

He tried to win her over by offering to manipulate time so that Hope would never have lost her and promising he won't destroy her world in particular. Janet, not being a moron, stole the core back off the ship and - after a brief fight with him in his comics accurate outfit - slapped four Pym particle discs on it, which made it explode/expand to the point where it is unusable and trapped them both. But he still had advanced future tech, so he was able to build an "empire" and she spent the next couple decades or so dodging him, becoming a resistance fighter or something before Hank showed up to pull her out in the last movie.

Meanwhile, Kang has captured Scott and Cassie and has a baffling conversation with Scott about whether or not he's killed him before. Because he killed a LOT of Avengers. As far as I'm concerned the unintentionally best part of this whole thing was that it coincided with a change in TikTok (or maybe YouTube) policy where "violent" words like "gun" and "kill" were bleeped equally with the usual profanity. I had no idea this had happened, so when I saw a video talking about how Kang had BLEEPed Thor and actually he had BLEEPed every Avenger several times over I had a VERY different image in my head.
Chrissy: To be fair...as a fanfiction writer, that's usually the image you have in your head.
Diandra: Haha.
Chrissy: You should write that fic.
Diandra: Stop it.
He gets Scott briefly confused with Thor, which Scott lies happens a lot. He also says something about not living in linear fashion and knowing what happens "at the end" because he just skipped right to that, which prompts a knee jerk "SPOILERS" response from me. Anyway, he threatens to kill Cassie if Scott doesn't help get him out of the Quantum Realm. Scott goes into the expanded multiverse engine and we get another trippy sequence that's closer to "Doctor Strange" than the first "Ant Man" because he keeps fracturing into potential alternate versions of himself, all confused as to which of them is the "real one".
Chrissy: Again, don't do drugs kids.
Diandra: Or at least figure out a way to get paid for doing them.

One of them tries to pull a Leroy Jenkins and gets torn apart trying to giant himself. Hope, having made it to the same location by that point, dives in to save him and also fractures into a bunch of potential alternates. Cassie tries the same trick of calling to him that worked the first time around and all his alternates form a human pile for him to climb like ACTUAL ANTS so he can get close enough to fire a shrink disc inside the core. Which doesn't work because otherwise what was the point of sending Hope in there? She flies him into the core as all of their alternates disappear, both of them firing enough discs to successfully shrink the core.

MODOK Darren tries very badly to kill Hank. Because he's batshit crazy. This kind of...goes nowhere and Hank eventually reconnects with Hope and Scott to present the latest insanity: the fact that the ants that were dragged into the Quantum Realm with them somehow experienced time dilation in the goofiest of ways and formed an advanced technological civilization after a thousand years of evolution.
Chrissy: I'm...not sure that's how any of that works.
Diandra: Aren't you always reminding me that I should be suspending disbelief with these things? WHAT FUCKING EVER.

Meanwhile, Kang pulls Janet aside for an exposition dance somewhat similar to the one he did at the end of "Loki", but this time he's talking about incursions and trying to impose control on a chaotic multiverse that was "dying". So he and his variants "broke" time. Janet translates this as taking out anything he deems a threat and making war. They have a little debate about whether this is for the good of all those realities to "burn" the "broken" ones and start over and he's really not that different from Thanos in a lot of ways. Just...on a different scale. Which is very in keeping with comic book villains. Oh, also this is kind of her fault because he wouldn't have had all this time to build an army to fight whoever banished him if she had just let him escape the first time.
Chrissy: Sure. Blame a woman. Of course.

So the obligatory giant third act battle scene is between Kang and his minions and the Lang/VanDyne clan leading everyone else in this crazy ass realm. Cassie somehow gets through to MODOK/Darren in the middle of it and convinces him with her Powers of Persuasion to "stop being a dick". Yes, really. Also, Cassie goes into giant mode and reinforces her dad's running gag about it making them crave citrus. She, her dad and Hope end up facing off against Kang, which of course they can drag out for a long time despite him being able to cut down whole armies without breaking a sweat because they are Major Characters. Also because the cavalry is Hank's army of ants, which there are a metric ton of. They are assisted in swarming Kang by MODOK who has the weirdest rallying cry to date in this series: "MY NAME IS DARREN AND I AM NOT A DICK!" He also declares himself an Avenger before dying, which nobody sees the harm in humoring at this point.

Janet gets a portal back to the real world open and Scott is the last one through because of COURSE he has to fend off a still alive and desperate Kang trying to jump through. Hope has to come back through to help him and Scott slaps a combination of shrink and grow disks into the multiverse core, the effect of which isn't really clear, but Kang does get...sucked into it before it explodes or whatever. For like, a minute, it looks like Hope and Scott are going to be trapped in the Quantum Realm and then Cassie opens the portal again. Because I guess this is a thing that's really easy to do now. Whatever.

So let me just transcribe the closing monologue from Scott upon returning to the life he had at the beginning of the movie. "My life doesn't make sense. I used to ask myself a lot of questions about that. 'Scott, you just saved the Quantum Realm with your family and drank a guy without holes. Why does this kind of stuff keep happening to you? That doesn't make any sense!'"
Chrissy: Because Marvel keeps calling?
Diandra: Yeah, I feel like this is stopping just short of breaking the fourth wall now.
"But you know what? Who said life has to make sense?"
Chrissy: WE HEARD YOU THE FIRST TIME, WRITERS.

"It's been a pretty wild ride. One day you're fired from Baskin Robbins, the next you're beating a time-travelling space king. We did beat him... right? I mean yeah...that's what happened. He...he was getting out and he didn't get out.......I think. But he also said something bad was coming and that everyone would die if he DIDN'T get out." Sorry, I think I missed that part, but I'm not going back. ONWARD. "Wait. So, did I just kill everyone? Is EVERYONE gonna die because of me? Oh my god. Oh my... what did I do? What...what did...what...what did I DO?" The increasing hysteria drops right out of his voice and he decides it's "probably fine."
Chrissy: Excuse me? Doctor Strange and the ENTIRE TVA would like a word.

He finishes by speaking directly to his audience surrogate. "Like I said, life doesn’t make sense. So maybe STOP ASKING SO MANY QUESTIONS, SCOTT. Stop overthinking it." He goes to a birthday dinner for Cassie at a restaurant and consoles himself again that everything is "probably" going to be fine.

And to connect the dots back to the greater MCU we get two mid/post credit scenes. Somewhere somewhen, a pharaoh version of Kang asks if they are sure "the exiled one" is really dead. A weird future version confirms and a terrifying deadface possibly Afrasian version growls that "they" are "beginning to touch the multiverse" and might just destroy everything the Kangs have built. So he is summoning a whole stadium full of ALL the Kangs from every universe, some of which don't even look human. Which could be what the series ultimately goes with if the legal battles surrounding Jonathan Majors prove him too toxic.

Although probably the second scene was already filmed as part of his next appearance, so maybe not. This one has one of his variants in Victorian times doing a presentation about a "temporal machine" on a stage. In the audience, Loki confirms for Mobius that this is the guy he was talking about. And he is WAY more terrifying than he looks.
Chrissy: Well, thanks for that reminder of how this one trilogy went from still mostly grounded to WHATEVER, LOGIC IS FOR PUSSIES WHEEEEE.
Diandra: Yeah, that's...one way to put it. Obviously I'm only doing this because it feeds into whatever the next team up movie is called.
Chrissy: Don't they all now?
Diandra: Meh. Some more than others.
Chrissy: So which one is next now? Your ordering is confusing me.
Diandra: I'm thinking a quick run through of "Ms. Marvel", "Wakanda Forever" and "Secret Invasion", which seem to all either introduce characters that will be important later or feed into the next "Captain Marvel".
Chrissy: Yeah, at this point you are the expert in MCU timelines so I'm just trusting you to know what you're doing here, Captain.
Diandra: ............oh god, that's terrifying.