I’m excited to see Ant-Man and The Wasp tonight and bring back my findings for you all in a review, but going in, there are a few pressing questions on my mind that I’ll be keeping an eye out for:
Just … everything about the Quantum Realm. Everything.
In Ant-Man, Marvel introduced its movie audience to the Quantum Realm (known as the Microverse in comics, a name they couldn’t use because the film rights belong to Micronauts at Paramount). We learned that, 30 years ago, Hank Pym’s wife, Janet van Dyne, vanished into the Quantum Realm, never to be seen again. Hank assumed that she was dead and spent the subsequent decades researching the Realm, but it remains largely a mystery. As he tells Scott Lang, the main thing we know about the Realm is that it is an alternate dimension and “a reality where all concepts of time and space become irrelevant as you shrink for all eternity.”
At the end of Ant-Man, the shadow of Janet’s original Wasp is glimpsed when Scott enters the Realm, and we know Ant-Man and The Wasp will at least partially center around the search for Janet, played by Michelle Pfeiffer. That Janet has survived in the Realm for so long is clear. How she did—and whether time has passed for her in any similar fashion as it did in the outside world—is unknown, as is how the team hopes to navigate the Realm to find and retrieve her. I have a feeling that, if and when Janet is reunited with her family, it will seem like no time has passed for her, while her daughter, Hope, has passed a lifetime without her.
The Quantum Realm likely matters a lot in the MCU’s next stages. It’s been speculated that the Realm will be a big part of how the Avengers reverse the effects of Thanos’ snap. When time and space are irrelevant, what’s to stop you from traveling backward or forward in time to change everything before it happens?
Marvel Studios co-president Kevin Feige just recently teased the Realm’s importance going forward, saying, “There are things that you see back there that [Ant-Man and The Wasp director Peyton Reed] has put in there. Where and how they pay off in the near term and the long term remains to be seen.“ We’ve also heard that in Avengers 4, “Our beloved heroes will truly understand how fragile this reality is.” Sounds pretty Quantum-centric to me. It’s also possible that the Realm will factor into Captain Marvel’s standalone story. I hope that Ant-Man and The Wasp gives us some much-needed answers as to how things work in this unexplored universe.
What happened to Scott and Hope’s budding love affair?
One element of Ant-Man and The Wasp that I was looking forward to was seeing a team-up between two romantically involved superheroes. At the end of Ant-Man, Scott and Hope’s chemistry turns into a kiss, but according to The Wasp herself, Evangeline Lilly, the two had a pretty bad break-up in subsequent years. As CBR reports:
“They finished the first film in a kiss, in an embrace and then they carried on to have a relationship off-screen — sorry fans — and then they became estranged,” the actress said. “And so we pick up the second film where they are at odds, where they aren’t speaking, and they haven’t spoken in years. And Hope is once again not pleased with Scott.”
Ouch. While it’s hardly out of character for Scott Lang to find a way to disappoint the people in his life with a harebrained decision or twelve, this sets up the new movie in a very different fashion than what I’d been expecting. Now, we’ll have to work through Hope and Scott’s estrangement so that they can find a way to work together again. As to whether they’ll rekindle that relationship, this remains a burning question indeed. I have a creeping bad feeling about its current prospects, because …
Will we see what happens to take Scott and Hope out of the game for Infinity War?
Ant-Man and The Wasp is said to take place just prior to the events of Avengers: Infinity War, which explains why our heroes can run around in a pre-Snapture world. In Infinity War, Black Widow mentions that both Scott and Clint Barton’s Hawkeye agreed to terms from the U.N. to live under house arrest for the sake of their families post-Civil War. As Inverse puts it, “These two superheroes prioritized being super-dads.”
But when we last left Ant-Man‘s family, his young daughter Cassie Lang was living with Scott’s ex-wife and her fiancé. (Scott reconciled with the adults in the end and hoped to be more present in Cassie’s life going forward.) Does something happen so that Scott has to take full custody of Cassie and thus accept the U.N.’s house arrest offer? And even if Scott simply decided it was the better course of action not to be a rogue superhero violating the Sokovia accords at this point in his daughter’s life, why would that take Hope off the board for Infinity War?
The two might be partners in crime-fighting, but Hope is an independent woman and a hero in her own right. It’s possible, however, that she’s kept her abilities under wraps so as to avoid taking sides in the whole Sokovia mess in the first place. Or maybe she ends up staying with Scott and taking similar house arrest terms.
I will be very curious as to how this movie ends and whether it provides hints of where we’re heading in the MCU, since Feige has confirmed that the sequel “connects directly to Avengers 4.”
Hopefully, I’ll be able to answer these questions and more by tomorrow—what else is on your mind about Ant-Man and The Wasp?
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