LOS ANGELES, Feb. 14 (UPI) -- Ant Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, in theaters Friday, is an odd miscalculation of how to apply this hero to different genres. Both the sci-fi and the comedy of the film fundamentally misunderstand the genres in which they are dabbling.
Quantumania gets off to a promising start as Scott Lang's (Paul Rudd) life returns to relative normalcy after Avengers: Endgame. Scott has written an autobiography and coasts on the fame, but his daughter, Cassie (Kathryn Newton), wants her father to find new ways to be heroic.
Cassie has been working on Quantum Science with Hank (Michael Douglas) and Hope (Evangeline Lily). An accident sends them all to the Quantum Realm-- Janet (Michelle Pfeiffer), too.
The Quantum Realm is the subatomic space mentioned in the first Ant-Man and became the key to undoing Thanos' snap in Endgame. As the setting of a whole movie, it just becomes a generic backdrop.
Instead of bringing comic books to life, Quantumania turns live-action into comic books. Visual effects are a given with fantastic superhero movies, but when everything surrounding the actors is animated, nothing is tangible.
No matter how creative the artists working behind the scenes are, the Quantum Realm is just different versions of a blank void. Compare it to Avatar's Pandora, which still feels like a real planet, even though it is also created entirely digitally.
The second Avatar may have narrative issues, but the landscape of Pandora is not one of them.
When sequences fill the entire IMAX frame, the Quantum Realm can envelop the audience. That's because most normal sequences still look like the usual computer-animated backgrounds in modern blockbusters.
Scott and Cassie are separated from Hank, Janet and Hope in the Quantum Realm. Scott and Cassie have to ingest quantum material to understand the residents, but everyone Hank, Janet and Hope meet already speaks to them in English.
Everyone in the Quantum Realm also shoots laser guns like Star Wars and Star Trek. The humans also visit the Quantum Realm's version of an alien cantina, so it's just a remix of the same formula.
As the humans meet the Quantum residents, they are fish out of water, but that paradigm really does not work when they're in a fantasy realm. There's no culture clash when the culture the protagonists encounter is entirely fictional.
It would be like if Crocodile Dundee went to Mars instead of New York. The culture shock would cease to be humorous when anybody from Earth would be out of place there.
Both parties encounter groups of people who deliver exposition about what danger they're in and why the Quantum Realm is in the state it is. Janet actually met Kang the Conquerer (Jonathan Majors) when she was stuck in the Quantum Realm in previous movies, but don't worry, every character in Quantumania explains why he's bad.
Majors makes the most of Kang -- persuasive and calmly threatening. He's still just another bad guy who wants something that the heroes have to stop him from obtaining.
Ant-Man and Wasp's powers feel particularly irrelevant in the Quantum Realm. They can shrink and grow, which has advantages in the physical world, but it's all relative in the Quantum Realm.
There's plenty of shrinking and growing to give the fans what they want, but there are no stakes. If the Quantum Realm is the subatomic universe, nothing is normal size there.
There is one fun sequence in which Scott meets other possible versions of himself. Without spoiling it, that sequence has an innovative concept and execution but is the sole invigorating spot.
Since Ant-Man appeared in Endgame and Captain America: Civil War, maybe his solo movies should just be Ant-Man movies. A generic "superhero saves the city" movie would be preferable to this frustrating attempt at sci-fi and metaphysics.
Fred Topel, who attended film school at Ithaca College, is a UPI entertainment writer based in Los Angeles. He has been a professional film critic since 1999, a Rotten Tomatoes critic since 2001 and a member of the Television Critics Association since 2012. Read more of his work in Entertainment.
