The unspoken motto of the "Ant-Man" movies is "think small," which has paradoxically made it stand apart from other sectors of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, which tend towards the grandiose. "Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania" plays around with that idea by shrinking Ant-Man/Scott Lange (Paul Rudd) and the other major characters to a subatomic size ten minutes into the story and dispatching them to the Quantum Realm, which looks like James Cameron's Pandora reimagined as the cover of a 1970s jazz fusion album, and keeping them there for the rest of the film as they battle an exiled supervillain named Kang (Jonathan Majors). The result is simultaneously the biggest and smallest of the Ant-Man films, a neat trick.
Is it a must-see? No—the middle hour is fun in that patented easygoing "Ant-Man" way. Returning director Peyton Reed and screenwriter Jeff Loveness let the characters wander around the Quantum Realm, which is like a psychedelic sci-fi cartoon version of those jungles in 1930s serials where a clueless Western explorer would misinterpret a gesture and anger a local tribe, or get dunked in a river by an elephant, or be grossed out by the prospect of eating snake meat until they had a bite and realized it tastes kinda like chicken.
Here, the tribe includes a guy with a flashlight for a head and one with a transparent, gelatinous body who is obsessed with how many "holes" humans have (the comedic peak of Rudd's performance is the pause he takes while Scott counts in his head), and a telepath (William Jackson Harper) who is cursed to constantly hear the bizarre and/or filthy thoughts that race through others' minds. Instead of elephants, there are houses that look as if Fred Flintstone's home mated with the Pillsbury Dough Boy, and that are alive and can walk and defend themselves in war. There are also gelatinous bugs and other critters, shrubs and trees modeled on fungi and lichens, and a mitochondrial thing scaled like Godzilla.
They're all seemingly modeled on photos of "small worlds" of varying magnification levels. That the designers have grouped these microscopic and subatomic things because they're "small" is part of the fun. It's like something a kid threw together for a science fair, hoping that sheer charm would compensate for not having any actual science content. Too bad that, for all its amusing jokes, the world onscreen mostly looks like a Marvel screen-saver. Bill Pope, who shot the "Matrix" films and multiple Sam Raimi and Edgar Wright movies, is the cinematographer here, but not so you'd notice. There's not much for a cinematographer (or director—even Ryan Coogler has seemed tamped down by Marvel) to do to show individual personality on these projects when so much of the running time is pre-visualized by effects companies; and when Marvel studios boss Kevin Feige, who seems determined to keep art to a minimum for fear of gumming up the content machine, wields an aesthetic veto pen.
