ANT-MAN AND THE WASP: QUANTUMANIA

ANT-MAN AND THE WASP: QUANTUMANIA. Peyton Reed, director. Jeff Loveness, script (based on characters from Marvel Comics). Will Htay, production design.[1] USA: Marvel Studios (production) / Walt Disney Studios (distribution), 2023.[2]

SF/Fantasy sequel to ANT-MAN (2015) and ANT-MAN AND THE WASP (2018) — which see at internal links — with the relevant aspect the images.

(QUANTUMANIA is also "recombinant cinema" with extra entertainment value for "sci-fi" film fans with visual and maybe one or two or more musical allusions to earlier films, primarily STAR WARS films, definitely A NEW HOPE.)

Early sequence with descent to quantum world: Note for initial location in a high-tech electronics laboratory and the technologically-mediated Descent to the Underworld: in this case a fantastic "quantum" world in the tradition of The Lost World, Hollow Earth, and Worlds Within the Atom, plus distance shots of "THE WONDER CITY OF THE FUTURE," highly metallic: cf. and contrast the Galactic capital of Trantor in Isaac Asimov's Foundation Trilogy.

In the quantum world, the inhabitants frequently meld the organic with the metallic or plastic (or whatever: we're in alien territory), often combining living organisms with high tech. Rule of thumb: hard surfaces and robotic, bad; flexible if not downright squishy, good. Of obvious interest are combinations of the mechanical with the insectoid or insects, with visual contrasts of duplicating Ant-Men behaving like army ants and robotic soldiers in formation, both contrasted with swarming armies of actual (in this "quantum" world) highly-evolved ants that are melded with high-tech, most relevantly for a climactic battle scene, military technology.

One fairly straight-forward cyborg: M.O.D.O.K.or MODOK [3]. The name as unpacked in the movie stands for "Mechanized Organism Designed Only for Killing,"[4] although in the film a comic character who meets a somewhat sentimental end, where he can "stop being a dick."[5][6]

QUANTUMANIA should also be of interest for the politics of SF film and where Marvel and Disney fit into those politics: the politics of gender, race, and economics — ants and socialism get a positive nod from the character played by Michael Douglas, "The Ragaman's [Grand]Son".[7] More subtle and perhaps unintended — although little is unconscious with so much CGI — is the politics of flexibility and valuation (positive or negative) of the violation of boundaries. Literal borders and figurative boundaries on cultural categories are political matters, very much so with the Disney corporation and sexual/gender categories in the U.S. "culture wars." Just on the esthetics of boundary violation and merging, contrast the ALIEN movies and H.R. Giger's disturbing biomechanicals, and Cronenberg's THE FLY (1986).

RDE, finishing, 19Feb23