Scott Lang saved the world, along with the Avengers, then wrote a book and now lives by it. His daughter Cassie, on the other hand, is an activist who isn’t afraid to get in trouble with the police. She is also a science genius and with the help of Hank Pym and Hope Van Dyne she has devised a system to probe the quantum realm. Janet Van Dyne, who prefers not to talk about her long imprisonment in the quantum realm, is unaware of it and when she finds out it is too late to stop Cassie: her experiment ends up transporting everyone to this fantastic dimension, where she is also… …the Conqueror!
Very different from the previous two chapters dedicated to the hero, Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania is an adventure in a strange and lysergic world, as well as the beginning of the new Phase Five of the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
The Lang/Pym/Van Dyne family spans three generations, has a grandmother with many secrets, but finds themselves united in fighting the tyrant from another dimension. The new Ant-Man moves into a register that, in the Marvel world, is typical of the Fantastic Four – still absent in the Disney version. Although we have become accustomed to the quirks of an entirely computer-generated place – with a decent quality, but certainly much lower than that of Avatar – the film is inventive in terms of creatures and characters, costumes and assorted monsters, weapons, and technologies.
It ranges from sentient palaces to living cocktails, from creatures without “holes” to the grotesque M.O.D.O.K. Looking at it, one understands why the screenwriter Jeff Loveness had the brazen and unhappy exit of comparing Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania to the unrealized and unrealizable Dune by Jodorowsky: both seem to be parts of a mind on acid and above all have a villain in common with a deformed body, overflowing and floating in the air with anti-gravity systems, like Baron Arkonnen.
Its Marvel equivalent is M.O.D.O.K., in a different version from that of the comic in the genesis but not in the absurd form, with a huge head attached to small legs and arms, capable perhaps of giving some nightmares to the little ones. Incidentally this M.O.D.O.K. it has absolutely nothing to do with that of the stop-motion animated TV series, scheduled for 2021 and soon cancelled. It is here an old acquaintance of Scott, who changed in this form has completely lost his sanity and lives reckless fantasies of revenge. At the same time, however, he is only a lackey of the fearsome Kang the Conqueror, the villain who travels through space and time and who will be at the center of this and the next phase of the Marvel Cinematic Universe.