As everyone who is reading this probably knows, I go to the movies every weekend, and many weekends, I go more than once. Generally, I have a good idea on if I think the movie is going to be good or not when I go, and even when I am disappointed, it does not typically make me feel down, but for some reason this was different. Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania was disappointing, and when I left it honestly made me feel down. Going into the movie, I had heard that the initial reviews were not that great, so going into it, I knew that the movie was not going to be great, but even with that knowledge, I was let down.
The movie starts with Kang landing near Janet before she was able to escape the quantum realm, and his ship was broken, so he was not able to leave. Fast forward some years, and Scott, Antman, and his family are doing normal family things, his teenage daughter, Cassie, is getting into trouble, and he is butting heads with his family in a loving way, but then Cassie says that she has made a special invention to map the Quantum realm, but Janet freaks out, and then everyone is sucked into the realm. Scott and Cassie end up in one part, and Janet, Hope (Wasp), and Hank are sucked to another part. They go on a search trying to find each other, and they learn that there is so much more to the Quantum realm than they ever thought.
Scott and Cassie find a group of rebels trying to overthrow the ruler of the realm, who we find out is Kang, and the other group, led by Janet, who knows that Kang is in charge, is actively trying to hide from him, and she tries to make an old connection with a friend, but it leads to them almost being captured by Kang. Cassie and Scott end up running into MODOK, and he captures them, and he brings them to Kang, who tells them that Janet had broken his traveling mechanism, and so he has been stuck in the Quantum realm. This gave Kang plenty of time to conquer the entire realm. Kang provides Scott with an ultimatum, either he gets the traveling device out, or Kang will kill Cassie.
From the opening scene of this movie, the CGI is glaringly bad. It is clearly taking place in a world that is not our own, but it is so clearly fake and grainy, it set such a bad tone for the movie. For Marvel movies, or other movies that seem like they will have grand set pieces of action, I try to seem them in IMAX or RPX, which costs extra money, and so the time for this worked out well for me to see it in the RPX theater, but on the bigger than normal screen, I think it made this worst. It made it more obvious that much of the movie was a total CGI fest, and it was not a good CGI fest. From the previews, it was obvious that it was going to be a lot of generated images, but I did not think Marvel would have it look this bad. What makes this worse, is that a movie like Avatar: The Way of Water just came out a couple months ago, and it was basically all CGI, and it was stunning! Also this morning I watched Edge of Tomorrow, a 2014 Sci-Fi actions film, and it looked amazing too, and that came out nine years ago. If you cannot make it look good, then do not do it!
Also this movie had a tonal problem. Ant-Man movies are known for their comedy, Marvel movies in general have a light tone to them, but Ant-Man especially so, but then they decided to introduce Kang into this film. He was being played by Johnathon Majors, and he was incredible, and he was also very serious. Majors is one of the premier actors in the world right now, and it just does not feel like he fits in this movie. He gives by far the best performance in it. None of the other actors really stand out, except for William Jackson Harper as Quaz. He only had a short list of lines, but they provided some of the real humor for the movie, but the main Ant-Man cast were not that impressive.
By far the weirdest part of the movie came from MODOK, who was originally Darren Cross, also known as Yellowjacket. He was in the first Ant-Man movie, and he was sent to the Quantum realm. The journey down deformed him, and he ended up having a massive head, little arms, and little legs. Kang took him in and turned him into a weapon, now known as MODOK. There was a video game I played on the Wii growing up called Marvel’s Ultimate Alliance, and you got to play as different heroes and go to different places to fight villains, and one of the villains was MODOK, and I remembered thinking he was cool, because in the game, you had to answer trivia questions to beat him. So when I heard he was in the movie, I got excited because I thought made he was going to have some trivia questions for Scott, so that he could save his daughter or to help him find the special traveling part for the ship. Instead, he was just a dumb hunk of junk that provided little value to the movie, and he was ultimately thrown in the scrap bin at the end, as they tried to give him a tiny redemption arc. Disappointing like the rest of the movie.
Now to place this into the timeline of the larger MCU. So in Loki, Kang was first introduced, and this whole idea of time lines and universes really came into play. At the end of Loki, the Kang he was fighting, knew everything, and he had traveled through all time and space, so he was never going to die, unless he chose too, and let’s be honest, once you have lived forever and done everything and know everything, life has to get boring at some point. So he falls, and Kang the conqueror takes over.
Where things get confusing is that the Kang in the Ant-Man movie does not seem to know everything, and he gets taken down by Ant-Man and some ants. It does not seem like he is some ultimate God powered know it all character. I also went into this movie thinking there was going to be some hopping around from universe to universe, and that there would be more talk of divergent timelines, but it was pretty limited. So these movies like Spiderman, Doctor Strange, and now Ant-Man seem to be promising that this idea of the multiverse coming into play and is going to happen, but they have really failed at presenting this idea, and even more so as really presenting it as this world ending threat.
So this movie really let me know. I do not know if I would classify it as bad, but it is definitely borderline It was two hours of bad CGI and a plot that was fine, and characters that provided a few laughs, but that also felt out of place at times. Majors gave an excellent performance that just did not fit the movie, and it ultimately feels like the MCU did not move anywhere with this movie, which would be fine, if the actual movie itself was compelling. I left feeling down, because not only was this mediocre, but it did not really have that uplifting superhero feeling, it was the rare surprising bring down in a comedic hero-based movie. I gave it 2.5 stars, and I do not know if it needs to be seen, but if you did see it, it does not deserve the extra IMAX dollars.
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