Dammit. I haven’t been to the movie theater in months, and I succumbed to temptation and went out last night. Unfortunately, it was Marvel movie time.
This one is about people shrinking into the “quantum realm,” which the writers interpreted to mean like a teeny tiny kingdom full of weird stuff and ants. It’s basically 100% CGI. It’s a Marvel movie, so the conclusion involves saving the multiverse with a punchy-kicky hand-to-hand fistfight.
I couldn’t enjoy it because the whole time I was watching the subatomic-sized people running around I couldn’t help but wonder, “what are they breathing?”
Someday I’ll learn that these movies aren’t worth anyone’s time.
Marvel films are despite the astronomical costs less entertaining than many of the cheap B-films you can see at Youtube. There are some gems there that were made on a shoestring and are genuinely entertaining, if you don’t mind 1980s hairdos.
Others panned it, but I thought Black Adam was ok. Isn’t that DC? I stopped early on in the Marvel-verse, put off by Iron Man thinking the Black Sabbath in the trailer meant it would be dark and gritty. Nope. Dark Knight with Bale went there. I saw the first Avengers where the Hulk body slams the Loki bastardized from Norse myth. Thor was ok, but mostly because Portman.
I haven’t gotten carried away with DC either.
A friend told me The Boys is ok, but it’s on a streaming platform to which I don’t subscribe, the one subsidizing Bezos’ ridiculous yacht.
I would enjoy these movies a lot more if they just called it magic rather than quantum BS that feeds into popular misconceptions and scamster versions of quantum theory.
FWIW. Stephen Baxter did write a really good hard~ish SF novel – the title of which escapes me right now – set inside a neutron star – which answered that question :
With pig farts.. at least for some (small! Very small!) part of the time and for certain, very loose values of “pigs” & “farts” .. Raft maybe?
Typing off top of head & vague memory so could very well be wrong..
Ever read much Stephen Baxter BTW PZ? Would recommend FWIW.
Thanks for the review. I had been having some uncertainty regarding this movie.
I’m going to go see Cocaine Bear in 3 days. The trailer looks berserk. The characters seem to act sensibly and in character (always a movie killer when they don’t) from that 2 minute sneak peek. It looks to be the kind of movie that gives it all away with the title and poster, but that can be just fine. I am looking forward to a fantasy where a human enhanced/poisoned bear/killing machine rips a few hapless humans to pieces. No Oscar bait smiling through tears rubbish thanks!
@4
Steve me neither, but those neutron star tiny thingies evolved really quickly !
Forward’s Dragon’s Egg .. I think?
^ Yes :
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon%27s_Egg
I gave up on the MCU after Avengers Endgame. Just have felt no incentive to watch another film in the series. Even if they were decent, the fact that there’s now all the shows streaming on Disney that are also part of it means that if you don’t obsessively watch everything, the plots are becoming more and more alienating due to how interconnected everything is.
Then there were shows like Wakanda Forever: the lead actress is a massive anti-vaxxer and from reports a pretty awful person all around.
“Someday I’ll learn that these movies aren’t worth anyone’s time.”
What’s taken you so long? As far as I can tell, I saw one Iron Man (3???), and never read a single Marvel comic.
I suspect that if you shrank living organisms to the “quantum realm” (whatever that is), they wouldn’t need to breathe anything. Breathing may be the least of their problems.
I’m not watching any more “Ant Man” movies, both because of the sheer silliness in their premise, which PZ summed up in that four-word question; and because that particular character just isn’t as interesting as most of the others in the MCU.
Also, I like Marvel’s “origins” movies much better than the big-climactic-battle-to-save-the-universe movies such as “Endgame,” “Infinity War,” “X-Men Apocalypse,” etc. The former develop unique and interesting characters and present each of them as unique HUMANS with believable human stories; the latter just use all those interesting characters as cannon-fodder in big-time-final-conflicts that have absolutely no connection to the human-scale worlds where real people live and strive. (Also, the latter kind of movies all end up looking and sounding the same anyway.)
I remember Asimov talking about the hurdles he went through to turn Fantastic Voyage into scifi. He was commissioned to write the book after the movie concept. He had arguments with the studio on aspects of the movie that needed to be changed in the book, and they didn’t understand ANYTHING. Finally, he said that if he couldn’t put this in the book, he wasn’t writing it. So, yeah.
Must-watch films (muslim)
“International Guerrillas”
“Day When Sun Rises In The West; Film That Shock the World”
Must-watch films (Flat Earth): “Level”.
Must-watch films (fundies, brief cameo of Chuck Norris) “The Bells of Innocence”.
Must-watch films (anti-vaxxers)
“Vaxxed”, “Vaxxed 2”, “Plandemic”.
General idiocy: “What The Bleep Do We Know”.
Chrislawson @ 3
Ditto for stupid premises for Matrix (human batteries) and Lucy (2015) (people only using a fraction of their brains).
I keep pointing out that some clever 15-year-old kids could come up with more plausible explanations for stuff, if offered the latest cellphones as reward.
Everything in current film has to be fast and uncomplicated.
Tarkovsky’s two SF-themed films both last three hours. They are sloow but I enjoyed every minute of them. You have to be in the right state of mind, sort of like with 2001.
Such films would be unlikely to be made today, the economics of film media are quite different.
Generaĺly the film executives regard the audience as morons that can only consume simple fare.
c’mon Paul. You’re old enough to know better.
PZ – I sent your comment “what are they breathing?!” to my physicist partner, so he would have a snappy reply when his students ask him about Quantumania, or whatever.
Also, here’s a gift link (hope it works!) to the NYT article on Studio Ghibli, a vastly better source of “entertainment”: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/14/magazine/hayao-miyazaki-ghibli-park.html?unlocked_article_code=uQ-Xv55a73ywUs4hCLbEwwPopqZtPLwl3Dkaeb3CVvFevOMRdIGXnlICe9v8_H0tX9cO0lfoY3hr4vAWJUtCN7nkETVqPWKAZP0XEav2n1GnS1u_68j-eGGowaOyv9dbR9sENnz8IAAKa9zA2-K5foEIVRuCTwOjh_-6NFuRStkNIP6iZtaWIrFhE7vmb0Ja4ry8MYn5mTv0vQj1D9ihUynLL7hhsyLnZhHUIhc2WV3gAQflOKQvN7jmA-_xJ1eDhK9mh8tWvYEhfQWzo11FsRCCctvqatxObF4MST0np3d11yyOQIf4hq4WgDoZFlqeEyHhiHYaopH3f7RXdSrrq-ZG77Oq&smid=url-share
which reminds me of, decades ago, an engineer friend and I saw the movie Ghost, and after seeing the ghost unwillingly shoot through walls, etc., asked, “How is he able to stand on the floor?”
I remember checking Rotten Tomatoes for the review score of Quantummania in the early hours of last Wednesday, and they hadn’t had a single review yet. If a movie studio thinks that the movie will be well reviewed, they’ll let the reviewers see it weeks early, to build up the marketing buzz. No advance reviews means that even the movie studio thinks that it will be “meh” at best.
birgerjohansson@16–
Yep. The Matrix battery premise was incredibly silly. Some apologists have claimed that it’s not what the Matrix really uses people for, it’s just what some characters believe, but then that makes these characters pretty damn stupid and they’re meant to be our heroes! I still liked the first film despite its flaws, largely because of the great performances by Hugo Weaving and Joe Napolitano. But the series has exponentially diminishing returns. I couldn’t even get past the first half-hour of the one released last year.
Never saw Lucy. The trailer had some character regurgitating that “people only use 10% of their brain” malarky which put me right off.
Oops, I meant Joe Pantoliano. Apologies.
hillaryrettig1 @ 20
When it comes to ghosts in general, I’ve often wondered why the spirits of the dead have clothes. It’s not like shirts and pants were ever alive to have formed their own souls with regrets.
My view is that we live in a bizarre comic book world now (look at politics with imbeciles and religious fanatics everywhere) so I have no interest in any thing like a comic book or movie. There is a lot of good factual info on the internet and there is a lot of good printed Science Fiction available. The ‘real world’ isn’t and for the most part it sucks now.
@24 HidariMak and @20 hillaryrettig1, Then there is the old question; if they pass through walls and solid objects all the time, what keeps them from sinking through the floor toward the center of the earth!?!?!
@22- chrislawson
One saving grace of the Matrix is that its redpilled dudebro fans are unaware they have been surreptitiously led into the subverting clutches of evil French post-structuralism, though that guy was not a fan.
And: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZJmp9jfcDkw
As I recall, The Wachowskis have stated that their original premise was that the imprisoned humans were wired up to form a giant hive mind or neural network to enhance the computing power of the Matrix, or some such. The studio execs apparently couldn’t grasp that, or felt that their audience couldn’t grasp that (Narrator: the studio execs couldn’t grasp it), and the Wachowskis changed it to ‘batteries’, which was easier but dumber.
Watched In Bruges last night. Pretty good! Had a bit of Coen Brothers/Guy Ritchie flavor, but with Irish accents. Best supporting actor was Colin Farrel’s eyebrow prothetics. If they were?
I am no longer giving money to comic book, star wars, or remake movies. It’s the only way to signal the studios to please stop turning the crank.
chrislawson:Yep. The Matrix battery premise was incredibly silly.
It’s a metaphor for the hollywood media system: it’s powered by megacorps that are wiring people into brainfeeds of pablum.
Shows like The Last Of Us are just as cinematic as movies were a couple of decades ago.
If you want to see good sci-fi films, hie thee to the independent theater, the one that could probably really use your dollars.
As far as good sci-fi films go, I’d recommend Don’t Worry Darling, Source Code, The Following Year and Red River Road (the last two are real indies, which means you will probably not be able to find them on most cable or streaming services, unfortunately).
The Winter Soldier and Civil War had something to say, the other Marvel movies not so much.
The cinematography on Matrix Resurrections was genius. There are a lot of CGI easter eggs as well that are worth watching/seeing. I thought the a lot of the CGI on Resurrections was beautifully done, which is not usually the case.
Is Quantumania any dumber than a whole host of other “concept” movies? I remember a whole rash of movies where the basic plot was that you had to shrink people & some sort of submersible craft down & inject them into a human body, usually with some kind of time limit. Why doesn’t the offgassing of human respiration give the host human the bends when the CO2 bubbles get deminiaturized or whatever? It’s certainly no worse than the entire run of the X-Files.
I will never understand people who want to find reality in fiction so badly, especially in a work of fantasy. If I wanted realism (and I don’t, reality sucks, at least for me), I’d watch a documentary or a biopic.
PS: I haven’t watched any superhero movies since the pandemic started, which obviously includes this one, so I’m not defending it in particular. Perhaps the plot is so, so bad that it distracts from the fantasy too much. Still, I stand by my comment.
Eh, if I remember correctly it was suggested on the webcomic pvponline that the logical thing for the AIs in The Matrix was to use cows, not humans, as bio-batteries. The required simulated world was just an endless grassy meadow, to be called The Moootrix (da-bum tish).
As for Marvel movies, forget it. I’d say that while a certain kind of silliness is ok in comics, it goes down real badly in movies. It’s quite a pity to see vast resources and the work of good actors being squandered in generating such forgettable kipple.
My personal requirement to see a move is an IMDB rating of 7+ with at least 1K votes. The latter is important because unscrupulous moviemakers of bad movies will inflate their ratings on new releases by having the cast/crew/friend/family stuff the 10s, but it usually falls off sharply before 1K. So far the crowdsourcing has rarely let me down.
This one’s no exception, currently sitting at 6.6 with 34K ratings, so I will be giving it a pass.
nomaduk @28: That’s what I heard as well. Of course, the first Matrix film is really a metaphor for being transgender that was told in a way that was acceptable to late 90s studio executives (the other three are a metaphor for how corporate greed ruins good films).
Magic plays a role in the universe if not this particular film (I haven’t seen it). Dr. Strange is a sorcerer after all.
That was answered in the movie. Ghost presence is memory and what the memory expects. One of the characters (the crazy guy on the subway shouts it “What? You think you have fingers? You think this is you?”). …. Okay, I didn’t say it was answered well.
(Still it’s better than the stupid Star Trek NG episode where LaForge and Ro are phased out of tangibility. They toss a Romulan (equally out of phase) there the starships wall into space where… he suffocates… Um, how can I not question what they stand on or what they breath when the walls can keep air in and out but not the people? Likewise how can I not question inverse cube law in “Honey, I shrunk the kids” when the show the characters falling from a spoon to a bowl of cereal through a distance over 60 times their height? Unharmed.)
But that wouldn’t need to answer the question. The humans never are on the star (obviously) and the indigenous life forms that evolved on the star don’t breath in any sense of the word.
“What are they breathing?”
It’s comic book science! Who cares?! Why does it matter? Is picking apart movies the way you have fun? If that’s the fault in the movie you want to harp on, it must have been pretty good otherwise.
It was a great movie with some of the most creative creature concepts I’ve seen in a while. You can tell there were some issues caused by the pandemic and it would fit in better if it was released in Phase 4 rather than introducing Phase 5 with the themes of dealing with a father who’s coasting on past success and not doing things new while the child is picking up their job of making things better. Or does that hit a little close to home?
What are they breathing? That was a question I asked myself about 50 years ago when I saw the Incredible Shrinking Man on tv . Hey I don’t watch Marvel movies for the science. Speaking of disappointment, Black Adam was boring ( but Dwayne Johnson is still good looking ) but one of my kinfolk had a bootleg so it at least didn’t hit my purse
At least for all its faults, The Matrix did answer that particular question.
“You think that’s air you’re breathing now?”
I’ve read the Wachowskis lifted the idea for The Matrix from Grant Morrison’s The Invisibles where the central character is considered both the second Coming of Christ and an incarnation of the Buddha.
Relax, it’s just a movie. It’s not meant to be taken seriously!
Some entertaining low-budget films: Highway to Hell, Night of the Creeps
and Hardware.
An unusual time travel film is The Sticky Fingers of Time.
And I have not even started with the “so bad they are good” films.
@ 34 Kreator P
Hear, hear! Imagine going to watch a superhero movie and complaining it’s… unrealistic. :-/
@ 40 Alverant
Exactly. The whole point of superhero movies is they’re the modern equivalent of ancient Greek or Norse mythology. The heroes are symbolic. I mean how many times now has PZ posted a gif of Captain America punching Hitler? But all of a sudden we’re supposed to think it boring for superhero movies to include fist fights?
@ 44 WMDKitty — Survivor
Hear, hear, again.
It’s fantasy. With just enough of a veneer of realism (YMMV) to enable suspension of disbelief – but absolutely nobody thinks it’s remotely plausible so what’s the point of the criticism. You like kitchen sink dramas? Watch kitchen sink dramas. It’s allowed.
@ 33 silvrhalide
Oh bollocks. Black Panther had themes of colonialism and whether it would be moral for Black people to take revenge against white people. Infinity War had the dilemma of whether it would be moral to cull the population to prevent a Malthusian disaster. Black Widow had themes of whether it is possible to be redeemed having been a brainwashed assassin. Captain Marvel critiqued the ‘war on terror’ where the Skrulls, thought to be merciless killers, turned out to be refugees simply trying to survive who had been propagandised as villains by the Kree empire. I could go on and on and on (but I’ll spare you). Like mythology of old, MCU movies are shot through with moral quandaries and political commentary.
It’s absolutely okay to not like Marvel movies. It’s fine to hate Marvel movies with every fibre of your being. I don’t like brussel sprouts. But you know what I don’t do? I don’t denounce people who like brussel sprouts or call for grocers to stop supplying them. So what’s up with this shit?:
@ OP
@ 30 Marcus Ranum
I have an alternate suggestion. How about letting the millions who enjoy a universe that’s been going for about 30 movies now; who enjoy a rich interconnected universe; who are excited and looking forward to phase 5 & 6; how about you let them decide for themselves what’s worth their time? How about instead of stopping the crank while millions are enjoying it you just… watch something else and let the crank keep turning? Ever think of that?
You should’ve also asked “how are they seeing?” When they shrink smaller than the wavelengths of the visible spectrum, everything should be black, right?
If you compressed their matter enough, wouldn’t they form a black hole?
@46 Marvel movies certainly introduce themes, they just seldom actually develop those themes, plotwise. I liked the world building and costuming in Black Panther but I’m not sure that people who have superior technology and resources but refuse to share them with anyone else in the world are actually the superior ones. And while I liked the themes of grief, loss and mourning in Wakanda Forever, they were tossed aside pretty quickly in favor of an action plot. Also, Shuri has a serious case of Darth Vader Boyfriend, which kind of ruined the movie for me.
With all the money and resources the Marvel movies have, why are their stories better told in graphic novel format than on the screen? (I say this as the possessor of an original signed copy of God Loves, Man Kills, which is basically the source for most of the X-Men movies.)
Boiled Brussels sprouts are terrible and no one should have to eat them. Roasted with apples, walnuts and bacon, they’re pretty tasty.
@40 I don’t have a problem with comic book science as such, so long as it has internal consistency. Star Trek science is ridiculous on the face of it but it has internal consistency, so I’m fine with it. It’s when the stupidity becomes so great that it’s impossible to maintain the willing suspension of disbelief. Case in point, the original Stargate movie. Stupid stuff, like bringing a tac nuke suitcase but not bothering to bring any Racal field suits, antibiotics, nothing. AND the Stargate explorers immediately start eating unknown wild plants (not a good idea in reality), start playing with wild animals (ditto) and oh yeah, several thousand years of divergent evolution has strangely not produced ANY microbes that would make the alien humans so much as sneeze, much less produce a devastating disease to a naive population like the way European colonizers introduced smallpox into native American populations. And Interstellar was even worse.
I love Michelle Pfeiffer’s work and the miniaturized cop car was pretty funny but that’s not enough to save the movie. Watching Michelle Pfeiffer and Michael Douglas explain what they did in the 30 odd years apart was kind of the highlight of the movie for me. Also, does anyone who gets zapped into the quantum realm automatically wind up in the equivalent of Newark International airport? You’re telling me that no matter where you are on Earth (or elsewhere in the MCU), you automatically wind up in the same landing spot all the time? There is literally an entire quantum realm out there but somehow all the bug people wind up in exactly the same spot that Hope Van Dyne wound up in 30 years ago? Marvel could have made a movie about exploring and meeting all sorts of alien characters and world features; instead they are dropped into the equivalent of Newark International and the fight scenes immediately ensue, because everyone knows everyone else and no one has moved or changed in the last 30 years. I guess it really is a small world.
Quantum air, duh!
Eh. I’m fine because the movies are working with stuff that has been in the comics for decades. Very little about zombies (why do we never see zombies stuck through rigor mortis?) or vampires (if you can see them, they have reflections damn it) make sense but I still enjoy a good zombie or vampire movie. Most science fiction, fantasy, and horror need impossible things to make them work, otherwise we’d just be watching realistic dramas and comedies all of the time and while those are good too, I’m willing to ignore impossible nonsense to have a good time.
People also seem to forget that other movies are still being made. It’s not Marvel or nothing. If people are still enjoying Marvel movies, that’s okay. The worst thing to come from them were ill-fated attempts by other studios to create interconnected cinematic universes, but those were either botched (I’m not sure starting with an already Batman was a good idea, and jumping into the Justice League so quickly was silly) or just a straight up bad idea (looking at you, Universal Monsters).
When I saw my first ad for the new Ant Man movie my thought was it seems like basically the same plot of the recent Doctor Strange movie, only with the quantum realm replacing the multiverse. Not that I’ve seen either film.
Don’t like current superhero films? There’s all sorts of old genre stuff on Youtube. Watch a Zatoichi film or two and see some different tropes.
@48. chigau (違う) : “If you compressed their matter enough, wouldn’t they form a black hole?”
Yes, I think so. Memory-serving. Very tiny ones that would also be short-lived and quickly evapourate in Hawking radiation going out with a small bang – or at least flash. Hmm .. Is Flash one of those superheroes?
FWIW. I’m still a sucker for the Star Wars ‘verse among others. Corny and flawed and messed up as it may be. Thought the Mandalorian was pretty good & Obi Wan had its moments & hoping to see The bookof Boba Fett soon.
Honestly, one of the most entertaining things about the MCU is PZ paying to see these movies time and again, only to angrily complain about them a day later. It’s the blog equivalent of Wile E. Coyote chasing the Road Runner.
“Hmmm, there’s a new Marvel movie in town. I’ve pretty much despised all of the previous ones. Welp, maybe this time, this one will be better.”
24 hours and a blog post later:
“Argggh, these movies are terrible. I hated it through and through. This whole series sucks.”
There months later:
“Hmmm, there’s a new Marvel movie in town. I’ve pretty much despised all of the previous ones. Welp, maybe this time will be better.”
I would totally watch a superhero film based on “The Authority” but I am dating myself. They go back to the nineties.
Anyway, watching Apollo and the Midnighter blow up a house if someone says anything homophobic, or the doctor dump the odd president into a volcano when said president is proven more corrupt than usual…that would be worth watching.
Jenny Sparks moving across the world using the electronic media for transport would be cooler than Superman. And did I mention they go after politicians and CEOs alongside blue-collar baddies?
The Metaverse… errrr Multiverse is the dumbest saddest plot point. One review I read is that the Marvel series just isn’t relatable anymore. I will probably see the Antman movie on streaming. Then they plan on bringing back the Fantastic Four (ugh!). They just need to give it all a rest for a few years.
@55 I believe James Gunn has ‘The Authority’ slated for the upcoming series of DC films. I’m not sure if they are supposed be the original Wildstorm roster or more like what they were after Wildstorm got subsumed into DC.
Movies like this are a (not so) guilty pleasure. I just turn my brain off and enjoy them. I get that the writing isn’t great, and the “science” is absolute horseshit. But I still find them entertaining. =)
No worries for people who don’t like them. It’s all good.
As I recall, The Wachowskis have stated that their original premise was that the imprisoned humans were wired up to form a giant hive mind or neural network to enhance the computing power of the Matrix, or some such. The studio execs apparently couldn’t grasp that, or felt that their audience couldn’t grasp that (Narrator: the studio execs couldn’t grasp it), and the Wachowskis changed it to ‘batteries’, which was easier but dumber.
The most ridiculous thing about that debate, is that there was, and is, already a perfectly plausible real-world reason for people to be assimilated en masse into the Matrix: as more and more people lived more and more of their lives online, everyone was simply forced to go along, until everyone was simply jacked-in 24/7 because that was where all the action was, both business and social. This was already starting to happen when “The Matrix” was made, and it’s been progressing from there ever since, with more and more companies working to create more and more of the “metaverse”/”cyberspace” envisioned by William Gibson and earlier. The Matrix doesn’t have to take us for either computing or battery power — we’re giving ourselves to it so it can give us what we want, or think we want, or think we have to have given what everyone else around us is doing.
“90% of movies are crap … and that is a good thing ”
https://youtu.be/B_A6WeqQycM
timgueguen, not singling you out, but your comment @52 is an example of a sentiment that’s been expressed through the thread:
The OP made it clear PZ thought he’d go to see a movie in his local movie theater, only to have that “I should have known better” feeling afterwards.
So his choices are whatever is showing there, not whatever is available on streams at home.
It’s funny how the ‘it’s basically 100% cgi’ never gets used against Toy Story.
I have seen stuff like Tokyo Gore Police and Ratfink a Booboo, and I doubt PZs concept of a really bad film would come close to mine.
Even Plan Nine From Outer Space towers above the abyss of trash that is out there. And then we have the later Steve Seagal films…
Bedbug Man and Scabies Mite Girl. Coming to a movie theater near you. Script by GPT-3. Produced by Alan Smithee.
I thought they actually answered the “how does he breathe” question in the first Ant-Man (or one of the bajillion other questions the existence of Pym’s shrink/grow ray technology should raise, like, where does the mass go/come from? What about that whole square-cube law thing Asimov was always on about?), except the answer was, more or less, “it’s complicated. Don’t worry about it”.
Which, y’know, is fine. It’s a superhero movie; the MST3K principle applies – “repeat to yourself it’s just a show, I should really just relax”. If I want hard science, I’ll read Leonard Susskind.
I was dragged to the theater for this on Sunday. That’s 3 hours I can never get back!