Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania

As we approach the holiday season, trailers for next year’s films are coming through—not least of which being Marvel’s first 2023 entry, Antman and the Wasp: Quantumania.

The trailer begins with an instrumental version of Elton John’s “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road” (1973)—just the piano part, offering an easy listening environment for Scott Lang (Paul Rudd) to catch the audioviewer up on events post-Avengers: Endgame.

There’s a bit of synch happening already with the click of the camera at six seconds in and the high-five at 0:09, but nothing particularly consequential—that being said, it’s reminiscent of the type of music one might hear on, say, an advertisement for medication where the character directly addresses the audience. It’s a certain kind of schtick. There’s a comedic pause in the music at 0:14 for the one-liner (“thank you, Spider-Man!”), which also serves as a bookend for the introduction. At 0:18 the music resumes, but only lightly in the background—and fading away once the plot takes a dramatic turn.

At 0:36, the music changes entirely, except arguably in a descending melodic motif with the basic notes of the tune over an hyper active rhythm. At 0:48, that motif is completed, revealing itself to be a fragment of “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road” on synthesizer, in tandem with the Marvel title card montage and our first look at the quantum realm.

There’s an intertextual argument for “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road” as well; the lyrics are about Elton John’s desire to get “back to the farm” and away from the disorienting spectacle of proverbial Oz. That the quantum realm is by analogy a similarly feeling place seems obvious enough. Then there is the music itself: the fact that the melodic and harmonic composition is full of intermodal twists and turns, careening between F major and Ab major and making one second-guessing one’s sense of direction over and over again. It is, in other words, the perfect musical companion to the quantum realm, as one would imagine it, not unlike the Upside Down of Stranger Things.

Cassie’s question of ‘where are we” is answered by a run through of an appropriate verse. At 1:16 an arpeggiated synth chord with obligatory half step at the top lends a dimension of sci-fi dread to the tune, alongside standard epic fare in the percussion. At 1:25 the two-note motif from earlier returns, a descending minor sixth that’s strongly identifiable enough as a fragment of the melody (mapped to the word “road” in the song’s chorus) to hold its own. Similarly, the downward arpeggiation appears one more time at the very end, just before the release date title card. Notice also how Kang knows Ant-Man by name—particularly noteworthy in the requisite turn phrase position as a dramatic counterpart to the first part of the trailer, where he’s mistaken to be Spiderman.

While Goodbye Yellow Brick Road is used for this trailer both as a straight cover and in a trailerized form, it’s the addition of a melodic fragment (the descending sixth) and the new addition of an arpeggiated chord that further elevates this trailer’s edit. More than a rote application of a cover song, the editors effectively leverage and emphasize the eerier harmonic and melodic characteristics of the tune.

Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania is due in theatres February 17th, 2023.

— Curtis Perry