Ok, so Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantmania is now out, and throughout this video, we’re going to be breaking down the film, talking about some of the easter eggs, that ending, and also where it could be going in the future. This review is going to contain major spoilers, so if you haven’t had a chance to check it out, then I highly recommend that you do so now. If you enjoy the video, then please smash the thumbs up button, and if you want to support the channel, we’ve just launched a size matters Ant-Man inspired T-shirt, which will be linked in the pinned comment.
Ant-Man And The Wasp: Quantumania Breakdown
Now speaking of pushing terrible merch, after a little scene with Janet and Kang, we rejoin Scott Lang, who’s now everywhere due to the celebrity he gained by saving the universe in Avengers: Endgame.
He’s reading, look out for the little guy at book events; he’s the employee of the century; he’s running the red carpet, and this ant is upping the ante like your uncle.
We’ve got the theme tune from Welcome Back, Kotter; he’s meeting Jimmy Woo; Hope has made Pym Tech back to being a big name; it’s the perfect life.
However, he and his daughter Cassie aren’t as close as they used to be. He’s now so wrapped up in the attention that he’s taken his attention off his daughter, and she’s now following in his footsteps. She gets arrested for participating in a peaceful protest for homeless people, and this is of course a reflection of the thief with a heart of gold that Scott was in the first film.
We discover that people lost their homes during the blip and that not many people can afford to pay rent now while Scott is living the high life.
They do kind of use this idea of helping the down and out to foreshadow a rebellion storyline later on that we’ll talk about in just a bit. Scott’s whole arc in the movie is basically that he saved the universe once but does nothing now.
Now The Pyms have also been mentoring her, and along with gaining a suit, she’s also been diving into the Quantum Realm. Scott is everywhere, though, and you can’t even listen to the radio without hearing a reading from his book.
I swear it’s the radio, not…listening to his own audiobook.
He tries to guide her as well and gives a little advice to Rocket Racoon and The Hulk.
Anyway, we discover that Cassie has built a sort of telescope to look into the quantum realm, and after the family is sucked into it, the plot kicks it up a notch. You could say it’s up in the attic, like your uncle. Ey.
Either way, here we meet several new characters, including the societies that Kang has already conquered. Scott and Cassie are taken to a group of runaways that lost their home to Kang, and we even get a little cameo by David Dastmalchian, who’s playing a new character down in the quantum realm.
Janet, Hank, and Hope come across Krylar, who possibly had a fling with Janet while she was down there, and his character has some brief ties to the comics.
Krylar appeared in Incredible Hulk Issue 156, and he was someone who lived in the Micro-Verse. He was killed in the same issue, so there’s not really that much history that he has in the source material, but I appreciated the little nod to this more obscure character.
Either way, he now answers to Kang, and you can tell that he blames Janet for fleeing so that they had to fight him alone. They steal his ship, and though you might feel bad that Krylar hit it, Hank wasn’t hanking every night, as we learn he slept with a woman named Linda.
Anyway, Kangs forces arrive with Modok, and the bee guy takes them prisoner.
Modok is a big change from the comics, and the Mechanized Organism Designed Only For Killing has…yeah, that’s his name. He’s now been reworked so that he’s Darren Cross. Defeated at the end of the quantum realm, his body was distorted due to his suit malfunctioning after Scott broke it. He commands the pitheons in this early attack, and these villains pull directly from the comics and were what made up Kang’s legions.
Now he’s trapped in a CGI body that makes him have T-rex arms and a massive head.
I kind of feel sorry for the guy who had to work on this, and I actually know someone who worked on Cats, and I feel like they wake up every day completely embarrassed about what their life turned into. You even see his little butt at one point, and yeah, you know what? I loved the guy.
Now, the comics had him as George Tarleton, who had been genetically mutated in order to grow his brain, which proved too big for his body.
There are lots of different takes on the character, and I actually think that this is going to be one of the most divisive things that Marvel has ever done. It’s such a big swing that I think lots of people are going to hate it, but there’ll also be some that find this as another weird and wacky thing for the movie. Personally, I think that the character was best depicted in the Avengers game, and unfortunately, seeing it done so well there makes this feel like a misfire.
Now, it’s also during this time that we meet Kang.
In case you don’t know, Nathanial Richards was born in the 30th century, and he lived in a technologically advanced utopia that had flourished for years and years. His backstory has been changed up several times over the decades, with new incarnations that play with the structure; however, there is one key theme going through them all. Richards got bored with how perfect life was, so he decided to travel back in time. Now, some versions had him instantly becoming a conqueror in the past, and in many instances, he traveled back to ancient Egypt, which is where he became Rama-Tut. We meet Tut at the end of the movie, and this Pharoah ruled over the ancient society for several decades. However, when the Fantastic Four were displaced from time, they ended up taking him down, and thus he fled into the time stream once more.
In Kang: Only Myself Left to Conquer, we watched as Nathanial went back and encountered an elderly version of himself who brutally trained him. The young Nathaniel was in his Iron Lad guise, and wanting to do good, he vowed to take out his older self after he killed one of the many forms of Ravonna Renslayer that he would end up falling in love with.
This threw him into a time-traveling war against many versions of himself, and he encountered several of the other incarnations of Kang along with reincarnations of Ravonna. In the end, war destroyed him, and he ended up becoming the very thing he sought to eradicate. As a bitter old man, he encountered the younger version of himself that the comic book started off with, and the cycle once again repeated itself. It’s an incredible story that I definitely recommend you pick up, as it explores the tragic backstory of Kang whilst also showing just how much of a threat that he is.
In the movie, we learn that the version of Kang we encounter is known as the Exile and that he was cast out from the council of Kangs.
In the movie, he even talks about taking revenge on those who banished him, and it’s clear that he was too unyielding to be among them.
One of his most dangerous incarnations, he’s an incredible threat that gets beaten in his first movie by… Ant-Man and The Wasp. However, we do get some of his past touched upon, and we learn that at the very least, this is a Kang who managed to kill a Thor variant.
Now we meet this version in the opening scene of the film when we catch Janet stuck in the quantum realm. She sees a ship come crashing down, and weird creatures from the quantum realm end up attacking her, but Kang saves the day. Throughout the film, we learn what went on with the pair and why she’s so terrified of traveling into the quantum realm.
Now, I kinda saw this as a bit of a plot hole, because at the end of the last Ant-Man film we watched, she was happy to send Scott down there, but here, she’s basically like Jamie Lee Curtis in Halloween. Still, Michelle Pfieffer gives an incredible performance, and she’s definitely one of the strongest members of the cast.
Either way, we discover that Kang had a ship that could travel the multiverse and that he and Janet attempted to fix it. He promised to help her get her time back with hope, but she learned of his true nature via a neural network that she connected to on the ship.
Kang And Janet In Ant-Man And The Wasp: Quantumania
It’s the best scene in the movie for me, and I kind of wish that the entire film was like this. We learn that he destroyed worlds and entire timelines across space. It’s possible that he who remains is somewhat a variant of him, as we know that he too likely had to do this in order to create the sacred timeline we see in Loki season 1.
At one point, he talks about how he knows what’s coming at the end, and he also sets up just how dangerous the council is. They eventually cause endless incursions, which eventually lead to the multilateral war that we’ve been teased towards.
I feel like we should’ve started phase 5 with a solo Kang movie that showed this, and we could’ve followed him destroying worlds before getting exiled to the quantum realm.
After confronting him about it, she ended up stealing the drive and f**king with it, which left them trapped down there. However, she’d given Kang enough power to at the very least get his suit back. Thus, he started conquering the quantum realm. Janet ended up running away, and she feels like she left everyone down here to live an oppressed life.
Since she left, he’s used his telekinetic powers to dominate, and now everyone fears him.
It’s a shame because they set him up as being a massive threat, but Kang just forgets to use them for the final battle, even though he could’ve mopped the floor with Scott. Instead, he relies too much on his army, and we get the by-the-numbers fight scene that most Marvel movies tend to devolve into. It’s a shame because I think the core fights work really well. For example, you had Shuri vs. Namor on the beach, which was great, but they also had to have the dumb stuff on the boat. We also had the father-son fight in Shang-Chi, but then there was the dumb underdweller thing happening on the island. I kinda hope the movies move away from this, as the best finales for me don’t involve this sort of thing.
Now Kang holds Cassie hostage and promises to kill her in front of him and loop the moment so that Scott has to witness her death over and over again for eternity. All he has to do to stop this is help him, and thus he sets out on a quest to get the device Kang needs to repair his ship.
This includes traveling into the multiversal engine, which contains a probability storm in which every moment creates a branched moment. As they say in the film, this is Schroedinger’s box, and he’s the cat.
We watch him split out and even get a Baskin and Robbins guy going under the name Jack like he was in the first movie. This was actually a reference to Paul Rudd’s real-life son, who’s called that.
Those that get near the device end up dying, but when they focus their thoughts on saving Cassie, they all come together to build a giant ant hill, or is it a small ant hill?
He falls into the pile after failing to shrink the device, which is when he’s saved by Deus Ex Wasp. This is kind of her entire character in the movie, just showing up at the last second, and for someone whose name is in the title, she doesn’t really get to do much.
Eventually they shrink, and after Janet arrives, Modok attacks Hank on the ship, calling back to their old rivalry. Now speaking of rivalries, Kang hints at the council and the others that banished him. The council itself is made up of several members, including Rama-Tut, Immortus, and another version. In our video yesterday, we talked solely about the two post-credit scenes, and in those, we said that the third member was possibly the scarlet centurion due to his name appearing in the leaks, which later turned out to be pretty accurate.
However, it’s now been said that isn’t the case and he could just be a new creation for the film. There is the possibility that he’s the Beyonder version, who it’s rumored will appear as the villain in the Secret Wars. Now in the comics, the three main versions were known as theTrio,” and they made the majority of decisions for the rest of the council.
They were headed up by Immortus, whom we also see in this scene.
He’s the oldest version of Kang, and most that live long enough end up becoming him. In the comics, he actually had a master plan to take out the rest of the Kangs, and he actually created the council to bring them together so that he could destroy them. In the comics, namely the Avengers Forever storyline, Kang and Immortus were duking it out throughout time, which I think this multiversal war may lead to. Immortus secretly led to infighting amongst the council, and in the end, all that was left was a character known as Prime Kang. Immortus revealed that he actually wanted to become the ruler of all time, and this could lead to him becoming the one who remains in the MCU.
In the end, the Kangs are happy that the exile has been killed, but there is also the possibility that he was just sent further into the Quantum Realm. Either way, they believe that the heroes of the MCU are getting closer to stopping them and that they have to be taken out so they can rule over the multiverse.
Ant-Man And The Wasp: Quantumania Ending Explained
I think that this will be where Kang Dynasty takes us too, with the council ruling over everything before the Kang infighting leads to a civil war between them that happens in Secret Wars.
We actually get a direct nod to the comics in the final shot with the chorus of Kangs cheering. This is a direct nod to their first appearance in Avengers issue 292.
Either way, the Council is a big addition to the MCU, and from the exile, we know that there are versions of Kang that want to destroy it.
Anyway, Hank is saved by some ants, and we learn that some were brought into the quantum realm when they first went into it. Through time dilation, they’ve been down there for thousands of years from their perspective, and they’ve built a whole civilization.
When being escorted to a cell, Cassie breaks free in the classic cliche prisoner transport escape scene and rescues some rebels. Kang puts out a broadcast, but Cassie hijacks this and basically does the speech from the end of Andor, telling everyone to mount up.
Scott arrives, and an attack is launched on Kang’s city. Modok is beaten, and mate, you need to stop being a d**k.
Kang seems to be handling it all pretty well until the one thing arrives that he didn’t appear for.
Ants.
Anyway, they swarm him, and Modok shows up and says he’s not a d**k, finally embracing his Darren Cross side. He breaks Kang’s shield, ants carry Kang away, and Modok dies saying that at least he’s an avenger now..which, yeah, might not be on the lightning box mate.
They go to leave, but Kang arrives once more. He’s trying to get to Earth, and Scott makes it his mission to stop him from leaving, even if it means he has to lose too. It’s Kang vs. Lang in a kang bang that
At this point, hope arrives once more and saves the day by smacking him into the multiversal engine.
The pair are seemingly trapped down there, and according to the original leaks on the film, they were going to be stuck there, which would end the movie. They were pretty spot-on on the other parts of it, but it looked like something changed along the way, and Cassie used her device to open a doorway for them to travel through. Earlier in the movie, she stated that if she had something like that when he was gone, she could’ve saved him, and this is very much her making sure that she doesn’t lose her dad.
Now the ending of the movie very much brings the beginning full circle, with Scott once again narrating his life. He picks up a birthday cake for Cassie, and even though it’s not actually her birthday, he’s making up for the ones he missed.
Made by his former Baskin-Robbins boss, Scott seems to be back on top, but something plagues his mind. Kang promised that others were coming, and Scott fears that he’s doomed the world.
However, they don’t need to worry about that right now, and we end with Scott taking a bite of the cake and gagging.
Was his boss really a Kang varient? Is he dead? Nah, probably not, but it ends the movie on the idea that not everything is sunshine and rainbows and that this sweet ending has a bitter aftertaste.
It shows Scott hasn’t really learned anything, and he’s gone back to looking the other way and just focusing on the good instead of dealing with the fact that something bad is coming.
This is reflected in the first post-credis scene, which we’ve already discussed, and we get more teases of Kangs coming down the line in the second.
Here we catch Loki and Mobius at a theater in the early 20th century, where we see a presentation by the Kang variant Victor Timely.
In the comics, Kang ended up traveling back to 1901 after another humiliating defeat, and here he founded a town filled with factories and businesses. He built up the town of Timely around himself and even became its mayor, using his knowledge of the future to build himself up.
The name “Timely” is also a nod to the comics, as before Marvel was Marvel, it was Atlas Comics, and before that, it was Timely Comics.
Victor built androids and duplicates of himself, and he even took on the name Victor Timely Junior and pretended to be his own son, just like Kingo.
In the scene, Loki is terrified of him, whereas Mobius doesn’t seem that bothered. However, I do think it teases at what the second season of Loki is going to be about, and I can imagine it’s going to be a buddy copy thing where they’re hunting down Kang variants.
The first season was about hunting down Loki variants, and therefore, that makes the most sense to me in terms of what could be happening.
Now that we also have the fact that the Fantastic Four are coming soon, I actually feel like they might interact with the council at some point, and this will be what brings them out. In the comics, Reed Richards ended up creating the Council of Reeds to stop Kang, and it is possible that they do something similar in the MCU.
Now as for my thoughts on the movie, I thought this was the greatest film of all time, and Marvel’s done it again. Shilliam Shatner is back, and after saying I was disappointed with Phase 4, I’m happy to accept that Marvel money in exchange for positive reviews.
Woop woop.
Nah, I think this film was fine and that it’s pretty much exactly what you’d expect from a middle-of-the road Marvel movie. Made by committee, it’s just one of those adventures where things happen but nothing really progresses, and we just have moments on screen to kill two hours.
Now, I don’t think that it deserves its rotten rating, but I also don’t think that it does anything memorable or ground-breaking.
It feels about as deep as a Targaryen gene pool, and there are so many things that are badly handled in it that they override the actual good aspects. Firstly, there’s no real stakes to it, and I really went into this film thinking that Kang would win. However, when he’s beaten by Ant-Man, it doesn’t make it feel like he’s going to be the big threat that he should be. I think Jonathan Majors is the best part of this movie, but even then, he doesn’t feel like he’s as fearsome as he should be. It was the same problem that they had with Gorr, and whereas the comics had him massacring gods across the cosmos, the movie dumbed it down to where we just heard about it. It’s the same as what happened with Kang, and I think that they should’ve actually shown us some of the things that he did rather than just telling us.
For example, you think about how Thanos was introduced in Infinity War and we saw him holding Thor hostage, he kicked the crap out of the hulk and then killed Loki. Just beating the strongest hero like this instantly made him a threat, and throughout the movie we constantly watched him beating people.
You could also emphasize Thanos motives, and though you might not agree with them, you could at least see why he was doing what he was doing. Kang is just doing it because he wants to rule, and I hope they re-introduce Ravonna soon so we at least get some stuff we can gravitate towards.
Now Paul Rudd does his usual, and you can tell he’s comfortable acting against a green screen. However, the others, especially Michael Douglas, just feel like they didn’t really get directed properly, and the environment in general just feels very flat due to a lack of real direction for it.
You compare this to Avatar: The Way of Water, and that feels like an actual lived-in and immersive world, whereas this doesn’t a lot of the time.
This lack of weight carried over to the story as well, with it feeling like it had the stakes of a Saturday morning cartoon. Modok is wasted, and everything just feels very surface-level, leaving me feeling like it’s filler. I had this problem with a lot of Phase 4 movies, and it feels like they made them for the sake of making them rather than having a story they needed to tell.
Even the post-credits scene with Kang in concept is something that should be massive. However, Greg from Reel Rejects and I were talking about it, and he said it was like an SNL sketch, and I couldn’t get that out of my head when watching it.
Now I always try and fill my reviews with both good and bad and it’s actually weird going from someone who gets called a marvel shill all the time to now being the biggest hater of all time.
So as for the good, again, Paul Rudd and the first act of this film work really well. There’s also, of course, Johnathan Majors and Michelle Pfieffer. These feel like they’re really smashing it out of the park, and I think if and when they’re given some great material, they’re going to shine. With Kang Dynasty being worked on at the moment, I hope that they look at the feedback from fans for this and realize that they need to step it up a bit. Majors was so good in Loki, and he completely stole the show, and based on this performance as well, I know he has the potential to do really well.
So in the end, for me, this was a dud way to start Phase 5, and I am just wanting more from Marvel. I kind of hope they stop putting out so much content and instead focus on just making the odd really great thing like they used to. I think just scaling stuff back, getting people involved with unique ideas, and moving away from this quantity over quality mentality will help them, and hopefully things change for the better.
A lot of the problems in PHASE 4 haven’t been addressed here, though, and we’ll see how the rest of the slate pans out as we get into it. It feels like it’s just a movie setting up other movies rather than being its own thing, and I think that these set-up movies aren’t really good films until years down the line once we know the payoff. Now, I know Marvel movies aren’t made to exist in a vacuum, but I think that the best ones also work on their own, and hopefully this ends up getting better with age…of Ultron.
Now you are completely free to form your own opinion, and if you haven’t seen the movie, I think you should go and see it.
It’s getting blasted online at the moment, and I think most people will come out of it thinking that it wasn’t as bad as everyone was saying and that they might actually like some of it. I hope that’s the case, as there are fun moments, it has some great jokes, and there are some key scenes with Kang that work really well.
However, the whole rebel plot is just utterly forgettable and very by the numbers.
Make your mind up for yourself, but for me, this is a
6/10
Now if you haven’t seen it, let me know your thoughts below, and I hope to see you on the next one. Take care, and I hope you enjoy the rest of your week.
We’re running a competition right now and giving away The Rocky 4K Boxset to three subscribers on March 15. All you have to do to be in with a chance of winning is like the video, make sure you subscribe with notifications on, and drop a comment below with your thoughts on the episode. We pick the comments at random at the end of the month, and the winners of the last one are on screen right now, so message me at @heavyspoilers if that’s you.
If you want something else to watch, then make sure you check out our breakdown of the perfect scene in Spider-Man: Homecoming. We break down the entire thing, so it’s definitely worth checking out if you want to know more.
With that out the way thank you for sitting through the video, I’ve been Paul and I’ll see you next time. Take care, Peace
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