Ant Man and the Wasp: Quantumania
Despite me being a lifelong fan of the Marvel universe, I was not looking forward to this film. Mainly because the past few years of Marvel content has been simultaneously boring and exhausting. And Quantumania looked to be yet another cog in Kevin Fiege’s Marvel machine. And, whilst that’s not a completely inaccurate way to describe the movie, I feel like it had slightly more to offer than something like Thor: Love and Thunder.
You’ve probably heard this before, but Jonathan Majors is fantastic as Kang the Conqueror. The movie’s primary job is clearly to get us invested in him as a villain for the future of the series and, on that front, I think they succeeded.
The movie is also a bit weirder than I was expecting (which is a good thing). For the past few years, I’ve been yearning for Marvel to lean into the strangeness of its source material and that’s exactly what we get here. The Ant-Man movies have always thrived on being the bizarre little brother to the other franchises and Reed continues that trend here. There are a few sequences that have some of the best concepts I’ve ever seen in an MCU movie. Make no mistake, stylistically this is still an Ant-Man movie. They never forget the name in the title (I say ‘name’ and not ‘names’ because Evangeline Lilly unfortunately gets nothing to do here).
However, that’s about it. Even though the movie carries over the same energy that made the first two movies so enjoyable, Quantumania (like other Marvel projects from the last few years) lacks any and all emotional depth. The first 20 minutes do look like they’re gonna go somewhere with Scott’s new found fame and the dynamic of the Ant-family, but nothing really changes by the end. Scott Lang is exactly the same at the end of the movie as he is at the start and, to be honest, that feels borderline insulting. It’s almost as if Feige thinks he can throw all the spectacle in the world at us and we won’t notice that the movie isn’t actually about anything. Seriously, I thought about it for ages and it’s not about anything.
The pacing is also downright atrocious. The first half feels like it goes on forever, as it cuts back and forth between Scott, Cassie, Hope, Hank, and Janet. For an hour, the movie feels like it’s going absolutely nowhere. Then it feels like they rush through the third act so they can wrap it up in under two hours. It got to the point where I found myself astounded at how little actually happens. And it really doesn’t help that the dialogue is less than satisfactory to say the least.
Even though Quantumania has fun characters and sequences, I still think it failed to deliver anything particularly special. And it pains me to say that the future doesn’t look very bright for this once-beloved franchise. At £15 for a ticket (I know, right?), I'd say wait for the inevitable Disney+ release in about a month’s time.
