BEFORE: Yeah, I'm a bit late getting to this one. It was in theaters in February, and I guess I must have been very busy working then, in addition to watching romance films. Perhaps I didn't see how this film was going to fit into my chain then, or perhaps I saw how many horror movies on my list it linked to - "Freaky", "Jeepers Creepers", "The Haunting", "What Lies Beneath", "Coma" and "Ghostbusters: Afterlife", just to name a few. So maybe I figured this film would come in VERY handy in October to link whatever - only now I've got a solid-ish plan for October, and I don't need it for that. OK, so when it came time to build my three-month post-July 4 summer chain, then it became a high priority to get to this one, somehow. Second in priority was "Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3", which is coming to Disney streaming on August 2, and I've programmed it for about August 17, just to be on the safe side. (Online predictions about when movies will debut on which platforms are still a bit hit-or-miss, which is why I had to catch "Asteroid City" before it vanished from theaters...)
Tom Hiddleston carries over from "Conspiracy", where he had a very minor role as the Nazi who worked as the phone operator at the Wannsee Conference. This was apparently one of his very first film roles, and he was in that film with Kenneth Branagh, who later directed him in the first "Thor" movie. It's all about who you know, I guess.
FOLLOW-UP TO: "Ant-Man and the Wasp" (Movie #3,049)
THE PLOT: Scott Lang and Hope Van Dyne are dragged into the Quantum Realm, along with Hope's parents and Scott's daughter, Cassie. Together they must find a way to escape, but what secrets is Hope's mother hiding? And who is the mysterious Kang?
AFTER: Well, this one COULD have been a lot worse, since every superhero film lately seems to be about the multiverse or messing with the timestream, and everyone from Spider-Man to the Flash to Scarlet Witch to, umm, the other Spider-Man ends up learning the same lesson, that it's probably better to not mess around with the multiverse/timestream in the first place. The only time it's EVER worked out for the better was in "Avengers: Endgame", which took all the remaining heroes on a cross-dimensional trip to get a second set of Infinity Gems so they could take on younger Thanos for a second time (his first?). Yeah, it was complicated but most of the heroes survived or came back, and the actors who wanted their MCU careers to be over got what they wanted, too.
So from what little I knew about this film, namely that Kang was scheduled to be the villain, I thought we'd be looking at a similar attempt by a hero to "fix" things using time travel, namely that Scott Lang regretted missing five years of his daughter's life - not because he disappeared in the "blip" but because he got stuck in the quantum realm when everyone else blipped out, and time passes differently there, he felt like he was only gone a few days. (Wait, is that right?). And the discoveries he made about traveling through the quantum realm led to the ONLY time that time- or inter-dimensional travel made things better, not worse. But this was a whole different storyline from what I was expecting. If anything, the hitches in this story came from Scott's mother-in-law, the original Wasp, being stuck in the quantum realm for 30 years herself. (Time definitely passes differently there, because somehow Janet Van Dyne, played by Michelle Pfeiffer, looks younger than her character's daughter, how is THAT possible?)
You've got an inside track here if you watch the other Marvel properties, the TV series - just like if you watched "Wanda/Vision" you got an inkling of what was going to happen in the second "Dr. Strange" movie, here if you watched the TV series (is it a TV series or an internet series?) "Loki", then you've already seen who Kang the Conqueror is, and what he's about. Or I should say a version of Kang, because the whole point of the "Loki" show was to deal with variants, heroes and villains who have different versions of themselves across the various realities. Loki met several different versions of himself, even a female one, and an alligator one (?) but the original MCU Loki appears here in a cameo at the end of the movie, along with his pal from the Time Variance Authority, investigating a version of Kang in the 1800's. This, apparently, was a teaser for the second season of "Loki", coming this fall. (I just finished "Secret Invasion", and was a bit underwhelmed. The only Marvel series-es I haven't watched are "Ms. Marvel" and "What If?", maybe I should get to one of those before I go back to full-time work in late August.
If you've read the Marvel comics for a few decades, like I have, you also might have an inside track in knowing who Kang is. Of course, many writers have contributed to his ever-changing story over the years, but the important thing to know is that he's a time-traveler, a frequent enemy of both the Avengers and the Fantastic Four, and he's also had several incarnations over the years - the Scarlet Centurion, Pharaoh Rama-Tut, and also Immortus. You see, time traveling creates a bunch of narrative problems, and also it apparently created a bunch of duplicate and alternate Kangs over the years. This has less to do with the spaghetti-strand theory of timelines seen in "The Flash", but more that in the Marvel Comics, every major decision or event creates an alternate reality where the other decision was made, or the event in question had a different outcome. And a time-traveler, as you might imagine, would create chaos by going back into the past, changing something and then creating a divergent point, and by extension, another Kang (or Immortus). (They're doing something very similar now in the "Venom" comics, where Eddie Brock/Venom is fighting future incarnations of himself, named Bedlam, and then another one from further in the future named Meridius.)
(It's also been teased in the Fantastic Four comics that the person who became Kang was a descendant of Reed Richards, or perhaps Reed's father, many generations later that guy found an old Sphinx statue, put a time machine in it, and went back to ancient Egypt with future technology and became a pharaoh named Rama-Tut, who then later went by the other name, Scarlet Centurion, then Kang as his powers grew. But who knows now, the story's always changing, after all. Anyway, there are thousands of Kangs across the multiverse, and sometimes they all get together and have conventions or something.)
I don't want to give too much away here, but the Kang seen in this movie probably isn't the same Kang that was seen in "Loki", this one was exiled to the quantum realm, and since Janet Van Dyne was there for 30 years, it seems only natural that they might have crossed paths - apparently they were friends, possibly more, then had some kind of falling out. This information takes a LONG time to emerge in this film, every time somebody asks about it, Janet either quickly changes the subject or there's an emergency that tables the question. This becomes somewhat annoying after a while, because really, it should take about five seconds for her to say, "Oh, I knew this guy named Kang, we worked together for a while, but then I found out he's a very dangerous villain." But instead it's always "I'll tell you later..." or "I can't talk about it now..." or "Look, there's a much more urgent thing we need to deal with..."
And this is unfortunate, because when the whole blended Lang/Pym/Van Dyne family gets sucked into the quantum realm, along with a number of intelligent ants (don't forget this, even when it feels like the movie does...) this knowledge about who Kang is and what he's all about really could have come in handy, and now everyone needs to learn this the hard way. I guess this is for the people in the crowd who didn't watch "Loki" or read any of the Avengers or FF comics with his back-story in it.
I think I kind of liked the depiction of the quantum realm here, it's kind of based on a few Marvel storylines from the past, like this time Hulk got shrunk down really small and visited a sub-atomic Micro-World, and fell in love with a green warrior woman named Jarella. The best Marvel movies kind of pick and choose elements from various past comic sagas and mash them together, so I wonder if the Jentorra character here is a nod to Jarella. The Fantastic Four also occasionally used the Pym particles to shrink down and visit what they called the Microverse, and fought a villain there called Psycho-Man. And of course, the original Ant-Man in the comics used to go sub-atomic from time to time.
I don't know what this all says about our own universe, whether life actually might imitate art - the theory that there might be something tinier than atoms, what in fact is going on at the quantum level. Science used to think there was nothing smaller than an atom, that atoms are the building block of molecules, but the current atomic theory is sometimes called a "planetary" model, namely that electrons orbit an atom in a method similar to the way that planets orbit a sun. Wow, what could THAT mean? Could electrons somehow BE tiny planets, with little lifeforms on them, and ecosystems too small for us to see or even be aware of? And then take that in the other direction, what if planets are also electrons, and our solar system is like an atom, and together with all the other solar systems they form a galaxy, which is like a molecule? What do all the galaxies together form them, some kind of organism or universe-sized object that we can't even begin to comprehend, because we're stuck at our scale and that means time moves only at a certain speed and the distances between solar systems are so great that we'll never really understand this on a cosmic scale? Also if we're all just riding on an electron that's part of an atom that is part of some giant cosmic being's toenail, what happens to US when he cuts off that toenail?
These are the things that I worry about, for no reason and to no real purpose. But at least this movie takes Ant-Man's storyline in a different direction, because let's face it, "Ant-Man and the Wasp" was a bit too much like the first Ant-Man movie, if I recall it correctly. The solution to every problem was to shrink something or make it bigger, or for Ant-Man to shrink himself or make himself gig-ANT-ic. That's kind of a one-note power, well, that plus the ability to control ants, which somehow always seemed to come in handier that it should. So I guess I appreciate them not sticking with what worked before, and spending so much time in the quantum microverse was something different, at least. It's just a little too bad that what our characters found there was just like Earth, only mixed together with the cantina sequence from "Star Wars IV" and also Disney's "Strange World" (I haven't seen that yet, but it's coming up in the chain...) and of course, the battle planet from "Thor: Ragnarok".
Anyway, while no fourth "Ant-Man" film has been announced, this isn't going to be the last we see of Kang, as he's destined to be a major villain in an "Avengers movie" - some form of him, anyway. And I'm also looking forward to the second season of "Loki" now, because that also may pick up some of the dangling threads from this film. Now I've got "Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3" to look forward to, and if I can get there, I'll be halfway to September, and then just 20 or so films until the horror chain kicks off in October, and after that, well, the year's almost done, by then. Just 92 films to Christmas, after all.
Also starring Paul Rudd (last seen in "The Object of My Affection"), Evangeline Lilly (last seen in "Avengers: Endgame"), Michael Douglas (last seen in "Earthquake Bird"), Michelle Pfeiffer (last seen in "The Family"), Jonathan Majors (last seen in "The Harder They Fall"), Kathryn Newton (last seen in "Ben Is Back"), Corey Stoll (last seen in "The Many Saints of Newark"), Bill Murray (last seen in "Air"), Katy O'Brian (last seen in "Sweet Girl"), William Jackson Harper (last seen in "Midsommar"), Jamie Andrew Cutler (last seen in "Kick-Ass 2"), Randall Park (last seen in "Always Be My Maybe"), Sam Symons, Grahame Fox (last seen in "Mission: Impossible - Fallout"), Russell Balogh (last seen in "The King's Man"), Ruben Rabasa, Gregg Turkington (last seen in "Tenacious D in the Pick of Destiny"), Mark Oliver Everett, Mike Wood, the voice of David Dastmalchian, and cameos from Owen Wilson (last seen in "No Escape"), Patricia Belcher (last seen in "Kajillionaire").
RATING: 7 out of 10 pieces of birthday cake
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