Ants!

“Did you blink?” “I didn’t blink.” “I think you blinked.”

“You talk to ants!” yells Kang the Conqueror in a line that completely defines and annihilates this family of nerds and do-gooders that stand before him.

You talk to ants.

The opening scene of the film features Janet Van Dyne (Michelle Pfeiffer) and a Kang variant (Jonathan Majors), but it should have started with Hank Pym’s ants, only we wouldn’t have known so much as guessed they were Hank Pym’s ants, made even more miniscule as they traveled through subatomic layer after subatomic layer of a quantum realm devoid of time and space, or however humans grasp and understand time and space.

You talk to ants.

What I’m screaming is that Quantumania should have begun with twenty minutes of a subatomic ant farm where all we see and hear are ants. Ants marching. Ants building. Ants anting. As it was and is and forever shall be, the opening scene played as if it were lifted from Disney’s Strange World (2022), but it should have played even stranger. It should have played like 2001: An Ant Odyssey.

“You’re neither an ape nor a girl playing with dolls — you’re an ant on the verge of a technological leap!”

If we had been talking to ants already, and trust me we had, then Jonathan Majors’ Kang variant would not have appeared on screen until much later in the film. That would have…