I haven’t been to the cinema since The Batman, but I thought Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania looked like fun, so I just got back from seeing on the big screen and here’s my review.
In a nutshell, it’s all just a bit too much.
I like the first two Ant-Man movies, I like how the first one was about an ordinary man getting hold of a “super suit” and then the rest of the story is a heist movie. I know it’s a science fiction film, but it’s believable.
The second one was the same, there’s a good bad guy, with a good motivation, Ghost I thought was well done and I was entertained by it. So then we turn to Quantumania, Ant-Man 3.
I won’t be going into spoilers too much, I will tag them if I need to.
The Main Story
We start with Janet stuck in the Quantum Realm, she’s there, all alone, until Kang turns up.
Cut to Scott walking down the road, doing a voice-over of how great his life is after Endgame. He saved the world, defeated Thanos, and everyone loves him. Life is good for Scott Lang.
In the Lang household, everything is just peachy. Hank and Janet are back together, Scott is with Hope, who’s doing well at dad’s business and then there’s Cassie. This is when my eyes first started rolling my eyes.
It turns out, Cassie is now a super scientist who has built a machine to map the Quantum Realm. In the first two movies, she was just a kid, but now, she’s a genius, then, she is a teenage girl. Let’s see, Ironman is a dummy compared to Ironheart, Hulk is pathetic next to She-Hulk, Hawkeye isn’t as good as Kate Bishop, you can see where I’m going with this.
I was annoyed at Cassie, since again, Ant-man has to play second fiddle in his own movie. I get that Tony Stark understood quantum mechanics in Infinity Wars, but having Cassie “somehow” understand all this stuff was just eye-rolling.
Anyway, it turns out she is sending a signal into the Quantum Realm and this freaks out Janet, who turns the machine off. The machine comes back on and sucks everyone in. Hank, Janet, and Hope end up in one place, Scott and Cassie somewhere else.
Janet knows what going on and they meet up with lots of other people in the quantum realm, and I’m talking about millions of other people. Again, this kind of annoyed me, since none of it was alluded to anywhere else.
Scott and Cassie end up meeting a bunch of people too, rebels and outcasts, who are all afraid of the big “someone”, who is obviously Kang. We also learn that Cassie has a super suit as well, coz, why not?
Janet ends up in a bar where she meets up with an old friend who can help them out. There is a good cameo here, but I won’t spoil it. If you know who it is, put a spoiler in the comments, so it’s not ruined for others.
Don’t get me wrong, I love the person doing the cameo, but it just didn’t work. They were there for a pay cheque and probably one day’s filming. Jeff Goldblum in Thor: Ragnorock really worked, and I liked him as the Grandmaster. Here, in Quantumania, this cameo was tagged on.
*mild spoilers*
We find out that Janet helped Kang, who had been banished there, I assume from Loki Series 1. I have no idea since I didn’t finish Loki coz it was, you know, boring. It turns out, Kang was banished with his multiverse traveling spaceship, which was simply disabled.
Really? There was no other way to banish him, then is his own MULTI-VERSE TRAVELLING SPACESHIP??? Sorry for the caps, but this was really stupid. Janet helps him repair his ship since he’s promised to take her home, but she gets a vision of what kind of person he is. She shirks the ship engine, meaning Kang can’t leave and she can’t get back to Cassie.
It’s about now we meet MODOK. Again, no spoilers, but I felt the casting was cheap, at best. It might have been taken from the comics, I have no idea, but for me, it just didn’t feel right.
Kang gets hold of Scott and Cassie. According to Janet, Kang needs the Pym Particle, but it turns out he needs Scott to steal something for him.
“Steal” is a strong word, he basically needs him to get something for him, the engine back for his ship. It’s behind some wall of something-or-other and only Scott can get it. Again, I’m not sure who Kang is, since I’ve never read the comics, but he seemed pretty useless since he couldn’t get it himself.
I think there was something about destiny in there, Kang knew the outcome of each and every possibility etc, but this was another problem with the script, it’s now far too complex. I’ll come back to that.
The rest of the story I found was the same as Tron: Legacy, the bad guy wants to escape from where he is and destroy the real world. The movie plays out exactly as you expect and then ends.
There are a couple of after-credit scenes, one was good, and the other was of no interest to me.
Impressions
The overall Quantumania is generally well done. I found that the story flipping between Hank, Janet, and Hope, then to Hank and Cassie, was a little disjointed, but the story flowed fairly well and Payton Reed is a fairly good job.
The cast is good, I like them all, although, Cassie was just annoying since she’s so good at everything now, which is the Disney way. Janet was kind of annoying too since she didn’t tell anyone about Kang, which would have really helped if she had done.
It also turns out Janet slept around in the quantum realm, which is played for laughs but just didn’t seem all that funny.
Speaking of the jokes, they lean heavily into the jokes and, honestly, not many of them landed. The cinema was about three-quarters full, and it wasn’t very often there was a laugh by the audience. Most of the time I was more rolling my eyes than laughing.
There were several times that the jokes were completely out of place. MODOK is giving a monologue and he’s interrupted by Scott, again, played for laughs, but it just doesn’t work.
The jokes were dangerously close to being like a Taika Waititi movie.
The effects are mixed. Most of the time, they are really well done, but now and then, you can tell that the actor is staring into thin air trying to deliver their lines to nothing.
What’s wrong with Quantumania?
Several things to be honest.
Cassie being a quantum realm scientist made no sense and was just tagged in to make sure teenage girls can feel good about themselves.
The movie was just way too over the top. As I said, the first two movies were based in a “reality” you can believe in. In Quantumania, about 5% of the movie is in the real world, the rest of it was all green screen. As I said, the effect, overall, are good, but there’s just way too much of it. Especially for Any-man 3, since the first two were more “normal”.
The complexity of the story started to get silly after a while. While Scott is trying to “steal” the ship engine, he starts to multiply, since he’s in a Possibility Realm. If you actually start to sit down and think about this, you would see the writing isn’t as clever as you think it is.
MODOK was more of a joke than a threat. Apparently, MODOK stands for Mechanized Organism Designed Only for Killing. This was weird since he couldn’t kill a teenage girl, which he had several opportunities to do, but fails.
Kang himself I couldn’t decide if he was a threat or just sad. There are times he can control things with his mind and destroy them, but there are other times when that would have been useful, but nothing is done with it.
In The Rise of Palpatine Skywalker, the end moment, where about 5 billion ships turn up out of nowhere and just in the nick of time, I actually laughed at how stupid this was. In Quantumania, this happens, twice.
The other annoyance was the woke. Cassie is now a brilliant scientist. The leader of the rebels against Kang is a woman who saves the day. And, not to spoil too much, Scott is saved by a woman. They just can’t leave it alone.
Also, Evangeline Lily’s hair was too short, it didn’t look good on her.
Overall
Quantumania was mildly entertaining, but it’s all just way too much. If Kang is coming back, are they going to have to make an even bigger movie than this? It’s already 95% CGI, I don’t think I could stand much more. It gives me a headache just thinking about it.
I feel for everyone involved with the movie, the cast does a good job, Reed does what he can, and all those poor sods that probably work for minimum wage doing 20-hour days on the special effects. All for a movie was just “meh”.
I would happily watch Ant-Man 1 and 2 again, but this one, I’m in no hurry, if I ever watch it at all. It seems all the efforts were put into the special effects, but not enough into the story.
Have you seen it? What did you think? Am I wrong?
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