Quantumania that make absolutely no sense

Image via Marvel Studios

Warning: Spoilers for Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania Consequences.

Look, we get it; When it comes to superhero movies, or most genre fiction (hell, most fiction), some things just won’t make sense. Picking at a film in bad faith is not a way of consuming media, and there’s a fine line we should all walk when it comes to it.

That’s not to say that fiction is uncritical, of course, and if there’s anything a film likes Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania proved that we just can’t afford to slack off with criticism when Phase Five has that in store for us. In fact, Marvel’s problem of sacrificing the flesh of current events for future ones has only gotten worse Quantumaniaand today we chose keyboard violence.

Here are 10 things that make absolutely no sense Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania.

1.) Baskin Robbins Paul Rudd in Chance Storm

This whole scene pulled us out of the movie pretty well, but no aspect won the cake quite like one of Scott Lang’s many choices, appearing in a Baskins Robbins outfit. Explain it in quantum mechanics all you want, but you fail to convince us that Scott could have possibly appeared in a Baskin Robbins uniform up to this point in the film. Where did he keep that thing anyway?

Marvel’s penchant for comedy is all well and good, if mediocre, but a lackluster joke isn’t worth sheer tonal dissonance.

2.) All the ant people and wasps suddenly disappear during the probability storm

Convenience seemed to be the name of the game Quantumaniaand the Probability Storm thereby proved doubly culpable.

Again, the many unknowns of quantum mechanics might excuse this, but since “unknown” is the key word, we simply cannot escape this one. The dead weight of Scott and Hope’s opportunities suddenly disappearing as the two touched hands was just the miracle they needed at this point.

Again we get it; Quantum mechanics could make many events possible. What is interesting, however, is how all of these events play out in favor of the plot.

3.) MODOK’s exchange with the Ant family after each defeat

Krylar ingests the cake for the most useless character Quantumaniabut at least he had the grace to be irrelevant.

This was not the case with MODOK – who was reinvented for the MCU as a rehabilitated Darren Cross – who was forcibly sent to the Quantum Realm during his defeat in the original ant man. Angry comic fans notwithstanding, this was a perfectly valid path.

Unfortunately, you could point to almost every moment of MODOK’s screen time and find an equally valid critique, but we’ll continue with two exchanges the character had with Cassie and Scott as the least sane MODOK moments.

Without being overly agitated by the performance, Cassie’s “don’t be a jerk” back-and-forth with MODOK was friendly in the unnerving way a commercial could be, but it paled in comparison to the emotions Marvel was trying to evoke during the movie’s death scene Figure; The awkwardness with which Scott handled the exchange likely required no action from Paul Rudd.

4.) Kang is taken by the ants

Just before falling victim to the seemingly immense power of eusocial insects, Kang dismembered adult, partially armored soldiers and rebels with a flick of his wrist. Only moments later he became less useful than a can of Raid in the pest control department.

Twitter is going to tear this movie apart better than we ever could, but for a movie that aimed to showcase Kang as the MCU’s next big threat, the fact that industry pundits thought this was a definitively cut-worthy outcome makes absolute sense no sense.

5.) The surprising technocratic ant company that had the know-how to beat Kang

This one is almost too hilarious to give much flak, and if it had been the main premise of an entirely different film instead, we might have gotten on board this train entirely.

Still, it was a pretty lewd way of giving Michael Douglas something to do in the film, and since it played a tremendous role in turning Kang into a laughing stock – which only added to the storm of nonsense these six-legged troops were Part of – we don’t have it.

6.) Cassie’s five seconds of combat training and the subsequent threat she somehow posed

If one of Quantumania‘s stars were caught up in the film’s script, it had to be Kathryn Newton. Marvel veterans like Rudd and Evangeline Lilly have at least had the experience of sidestepping the occasional lackluster comic book script, but it looks to Newton like she rolled snake eyes in her Marvel debut.

But her character, Cassie Lang, certainly seemed capable of holding her own in a fight after only a brief pep talk from Scott. Maybe that’s just the power of a father’s love, but we’ve seen far too little of Cassie’s combat experience to judge just how much damage she could do.

7. Kang’s thousands of variants that have been around all along and never interfered before

This one is more of a result of Marvel’s exponential ambition coming back to bite him; If the Kangs had intervened in a realistic way, there would be a whole lot of nothingness on Earth 199999.

Indeed, as Marvel’s reach grows, so do the threats of omnipotence and omniscience, to the point where writing around them should make as much (non)sense as their inaction so far. It might have been a near-inevitable trap, but we think if you’re biting off more than you can chew, you might want to bring in a few fingers pointing your way.

8. Every single hero present and accountable at the end of the film

Before you dismiss this point as another obsession with the deaths of great characters, let’s not talk about how the characters were able to survive from a contextual perspective; The fact that everyone managed to escape alive doesn’t seem to be a problem in that sense.

But what doesn’t make sense is how a team of creatives as lucrative as Marvel’s somehow still think these Hollywood endings are the way to go.

With Quantumania, Marvel had a real opportunity to set the tone for their next multi-movie antagonist while also setting Cassie up for an intriguing character arc, both of which would have cemented the MCU’s next big trajectory as the intriguing paradigm it should have been . We’ll have an article on “how it should have ended” soon enough to get into that, but for now we just want to know what the studio is capable of in order to make these decisions (that’s rhetorical; we know there’s money is).

9. Kang’s army is so easy to defeat

Marvel really flipped a coin when deciding the moment-to-moment durability of Kang’s loyal minions. One minute they’re like mighty oppressors that can take a beating, and the next minute they’re popping like fascist balloons.

And the next minute in question happened to be exactly where it was most convenient, when the denizens of the Quantum Empire stormed Kang’s stronghold at Cassie’s battle cry. To be fair, we imagine our bodies would suffer a similar fate if Jentorra attacked us like she did the Kangtroopers, but those troopers folded a bit too easily for our liking.

10. Scott’s second thoughts on whether or not he was actually victorious

Aside from the fact that Scott’s eventual nonchalance was a final slap in the face at the stuttering threat of Kang, let’s not forget that Scott was the one who hatched the plan to recover the Infinity Stones Avengers: Endgame; When it comes to the quantum realm, Scott knows his stuff to a fairly respectable degree.

Guessing himself isn’t just a creative foreboding copout for him (which the mid- and post-credits scenes could have done on their own), but just characterless enough that we’re giving our thumbs down once more in the end credits.