Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania: Not fANTastic, But a Fun Ride!

Going into this movie, I was a bit nervous.  As many of you know, lately I've been feeling that Marvel has lost its mojo.  I was extremely disappointed with Doctor Strange In the Multiverse of Madness and also with Thor: Love and Thunder.  The shows have been more misses than hit for me, too.  The reviews started to come out for Quantumania and they weren't good.  I began to get worried.  At this point, I wasn't excited to see a Marvel movie, which was the complete opposite of where I was a few years ago.  They used to be events for my friends and I.  When I saw the reactions coming out I got a little bummed.  Is this movie as bad everyone has been saying?  Or is this another case where I disagree with the critics?  That's what I'm here to tell you.

Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania is directed by Peyton Reed and stars Paul Rudd, Kathryn Newton, Jonathan Majors, Evangeline Lilly, Michelle Pfeiffer, and Michael Douglas.  When Cassie Lang (Newton) builds a satellite into the Quantum Realm, her, her dad Scott (Rudd), Hope van Dyne (Lilly), Janet van Dyne (Pfeiffer), and Hank Pym (Douglas) get sucked in and must find a way out.  In addition to escaping, they'll have to deal with Kang (Majors), a ruthless emperor who will do whatever it takes to escape the Quantum realm.  With all of that out of the way, let's dive into the review!

To answer the question in the beginning, yes, I do think that critics are being a little to harsh on Quantumania.  It is by no means a masterpiece, but it's leaps and bounds better than the last few Marvel projects.  I've always had a soft spot for the Ant-Man movies.  The first one I think is very underrated.  I just love the idea of this convict who genuinely wants to spend time with his daughter, but to do that, he has to do what landed him in jail in the first place.  There was so much heart in those first two.  For the most part, that continues here.  Paul Rudd, again, crushes it as Scott Lang.  When we first see him in this movie, he's bathing in the adulation of being an Avenger.  He's written a book about everything that happened in Endgame and is enjoying being a celebrity.  Underneath it all, though, he still cares about being there for his daughter.  The movie did a great job continuing this character beat from the previous films.  It can be argued that everything Scott has done in these movies has been for Cassie.  He just wants her to love him.  Unfortunately, thanks to Thanos, he wasn't there for another five years of her life and we get to see that play through here.  As usual, Rudd brings the humor with the heart but never in a way that is over the top (Thor: Love and Thunder I'm looking at you).  This movie solidified Ant-Man as being one of my favorite characters in this universe, thanks to Rudd's charm.  As I mentioned earlier, the emotional heart of these movies is Scott's relationship with Cassie.  That gets explored more here.  When we first see Cassie in Quantumania, she is just getting out of jail for protesting.  I guess the apple doesn't fall too far from the tree.  In a way, she's an interesting parallel to Scott himself.  Plus, she's also got a super suit, too.  In Endgame, we got to see her briefly but she was played by an actress named Emma Fuhrmann.  In this movie, she's been replaced by Kathryn Newton.  I felt bad for Fuhrmann because she found out when all of the fans did, at a Disney Investor Day in 2020.  No reason was given.  While I think that Newton did a good job (for the most part), I wanted to see what Emma was going to bring to the table as I loved her brief scenes in Endgame.  Continuing with the characters, we are introduced to the MCU's new baddie, Kang.  Jonathan Majors crushed it as this character and really made me interested to see where he goes next (after all the next Avengers movie is called Kang Dynasty).  Majors plays Kang in such an interesting way, too.  He's like a powder keg.  We know that he's evil, but he acts calm.  When he does erupt, it's brutal.  There's times where he says he'll do something and you just know he isn't bluffing.  I wouldn't go so far to say that he's as bad as Thanos, but he's a pretty brutal guy.  With that being said, this is the first time the audience is seeing him.  This time around Pfeiffer has a lot more to do as Janet.  We saw towards the end of Ant-Man and the Wasp and briefly in Endgame.  To see her actually doing something was good.  Here, she's sort of like a guide, not just to the heroes, but for the audience as well.  Her relationship with Kang is also pretty interesting (no spoilers).  

What fascinated me about this movie when reading the reviews was that people were saying this was a lot like Star Wars.  In a way, it was.  The Quantum Realm is full of wacky creatures and locations.  There's sentient buildings and even a character that has broccoli as a head.  You could tell that the artists had a field day making this place become a reality.  I'm hoping that we get to see more in future films.  With the past couple of Marvel movies, I have talked about how the effects were bad, mainly because of how the artists were being overworked.  One of the things I loved about the first two Ant-Man films was the creative ways they used the visual effects.  I was worried this wouldn't be the case with this movie.  They're actually pretty good here.  Yes there are times when it looks a little wonky (one character in particular who I'll get to in a bit), but it looked really cool.  Hopefully, they can keep this momentum going for the next movies.  The humor also wasn't as bad as I was fearing.  There's a few glaring exceptions, but I found myself laughing quite a bit. 

While I enjoyed this movie a lot more than I thought, Quantumania has quite a few problems.  The movie handles Ant-Man, Kang, and Janet (for the most part) very well.  It struggles juggling the other characters.  Once in the Quantum Realm, all Cassie really does is yell, "Dad!" constantly.  She has one line that's just very cringey, though I blame the writing more than I blame Newton.  Cassie does stuff, don't get me wrong, but I was hoping they were going to do more.  As mentioned earlier, when we first see her, she's in jail.  I feel the movie would've been better if it had done more with this.  Maybe have Scott worrying more about her becoming like him.  We get this in the beginning, but when everyone gets teleported, this plot point is dropped.  Continuing with the characters, despite being in the title, the Wasp barely does anything in the movie.  She has a couple of action scenes and lines of dialogue but nothing more.  I know the actress had some anti-vax opinions (which I disagree with), but I don't think that was the reason.  The director even told Evangeline Lilly not to listen to the rumors she was going to get fired.  It felt like the script just kind of forgot about her.  Hank has nothing to do in this movie either, except talk about ants.  I mentioned how the movie handles Janet well for the most part earlier.  Let me elaborate on that.  In the trailers, we see Hope asking Janet, "What are you so afraid of?"  The issue is they do that thing in movies where a character knows something that's important but doesn't tell the others until much later.  She's asked several times about what she knows, but doesn't tell them.  It was extremely frustrating as an audience member.  We know that she's somehow involved with Kang, but the movie keeps stringing us along to set up this grand reveal.  I hate it when movies do this.  She could've easily told the others what was bothering her, but she doesn't until far later into the movie.  JUST TELL THEM.  There's a common criticism with Marvel movies that they're just set ups for future installments.  While I do agree, to an extent, that that's true I've always felt that the movies were able to stand on their own.  For example Captain America: Civil War had to set up quite a bit, but at the same time, it felt like a Captain America movie.  It operated as a conclusion to his trilogy.  Quantumania doesn't really do that.  I remember I read somewhere that Peyton Reed wanted to direct an Ant-Man movie where the characters were dealing with an Avengers-level threat.  I felt that was kind of odd because, for me anyways, the charm of the Ant-Man films was that they were smaller in scale (pun very much intended).  By having Scott fight the next Avengers villain, I felt that he was a little robbed in his own movie.  

As I mentioned earlier, the script has a hard time juggling all of these characters and I wasn't even talking about the new ones.  There's a whole rebel movement that, while it was interesting, didn't really grab me the way that I had hoped.  While I liked the new characters, most of them don't have much to do.  Katy M. O'Brian plays Jentorra, the leader of the rebels.  She's a cool character, but she doesn't have a ton to do.  Bill Murray is in this movie for some reason as Lord Krylar (this was made before all of the stuff about him came out).  His sole purpose is to give Hank, Hope, and Janet a ship.  He could've been deleted from the movie and not much would've changed.  This really bothers me because the characters from the previous films, most notably Cassie's mom and Scott's ex-convict friends, aren't even here.  David Dastmalchian is here, but he's playing an entirely new character.  I'm not sure if this was because of COVID or if it was a script decision.  I knew that, since this movie is mostly in the Quantum Realm, they wouldn't have as big of roles, but it would've been nice to see them.  This movie was so concerned with setting up Kang that it really kind of shortened it's first act.  We're barely in the normal world for this movie.  What was really odd was that the movie just kind of ends.  I thought it was going to reveal something but it never did.  It was sort of choppy.  I talked about the visuals earlier.  Most of them are pretty good, but there's a few aspects that were a little wonky.  I was hoping the Quantum Realm would be a little more vibrant.  Everything is muddled and dark.  This is a land of infinite possibility, have a little fun with it.  I haven't even addressed the elephant in the room: M.O.D.O.K.(I won't list who plays him because it's sort of a spoiler).  M.O.D.O.K., or Mental Organism Designed Only for Killing, is an odd character since he's just a floating head in a chair.  In the comics he's pretty grotesque, but here, it's just the actor's face stretched over a head.  It looked bad.  In a twisted way, I liked it, but the problem is that the movie has one joke with him and it's beaten into the ground.  Plus, he's disturbing to look at.  He's a great meme, yeah, but he didn't really need to be in the movie.  M.O.D.O.K. is an example of something that the MCU has been doing for a while.  They've been doing a good job with the heroes, for the most part, but when it comes to the villains they stumble.  They're not really the villains as written in the comics, but just in name only.  In Love and Thunder, Gorr is nothing like he was in the source material.  In Black Widow, Taskmaster was completely different.  I'm not sure if Marvel is just afraid of having more than one villain running around but I wish they would stop this.  As I said earlier, most of the humor works, the key word being most.  Sometimes the humor was extremely sophomoric.  The writer for this movie was Jeff Loveness, who was a writer on Rick and Morty.  I really like that show, but you could tell one of the writers worked on this film.  While one joke may work for Rick and Morty, it may not work here.  There's one that comes to mind that has to do Quaz, played by William Jackson Harper.  He's a mind reader and the movie does a bit with him that lasts entirely too long.

To sum everything up, Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania is a fun but flawed ride.  Paul Rudd crushes it as Scott, Jonathan Majors does a great job as Kang, it was nice to see Michelle Pfeiffer have something to do, and the Quantum Realm was pretty interesting.  The movie has a very hard time juggling all of its characters (Hank, Cassie, and Hope come to mind), it introduces too many new ones while ignoring the old ones, it has the task of setting up Phase 5  (which holds it back from being an Ant-Man movie), some of the effects (M.O.D.O.K.) were rough and not all of the humor lands.  With that being said, this wasn't nearly as bad as I thought it was going to be.  I'm at a place now where I'm excited about a few MCU projects (Guardians of the Galaxy please don't disappoint), but as a whole, this universe has lost its magic a little for me.  Hopefully the creators have listened to the criticisms of the fans and are trying to fix things.  It sounds like I'm tearing this movie apart, but I did like it!  If I were to rate it, I'd give Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania a 7/10.  Also, be sure to stay through all of the credits (even though one of them was weird)!