Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania

It's entirely possible that the most memorable part of this movie is going to wind up being the title. Which is awkward.

Look, there are a number of specific problems with Quantumania that I could enumerate. Like, for example, how the main conflict entirely hinges around a character who has very little reason to withhold vital information deciding to withhold that vital information to disastrous effect. In fact, she has good reasons to be involved with the events preceding the movie in a way that would have prevented the entire movie from occurring, and the reasons presented for why she did not do that seem to contradict the character we saw in the last movie. Which makes the entire film feel incredibly contrived.

But I'm not going to step through all of the reasons Quantumania fell flat. Instead, I'm going to summarize why Ant-Man, the first one, and to a slightly lesser extent Ant-Man and the Wasp, worked so well in the MCU. Because with that context it's going to be pretty quick to summarize Quantumania.

The fact that this was as close as they got to a truly minimalist poster is also among the myriad issues with the film.

Now, to a certain extent I can just point you to my prior reviews for this context, but I'll summarize here in case your time and attention are just too precious to read more than a few hundred words at the moment. Ant-Man was a huge success, and frankly a much-needed breath of fresh air in the MCU, because of its format. Ant-Man was a superhero movie, sure, and it was a comedy, yes, but it wasn't the best of either of those things at that point in the MCU. No, what made Ant-Man special was that it was an ensemble heist movie.

It did all the heist movie things, painted them up with superhero clothes, and because of that it felt entirely new versus the superhero movies we'd already seen. Ant-Man and the Wasp was a very similar bag, with the qualification that there are multiple heists in that movie as opposed to a single main heist. But the format of the movie was still very much the same. This genre-bending tendency made the first two movies feel new, and helped them to stand out against a growing sea of good superhero films.

Quantumania is just another drop in that sea.

There's no heist in Quantumania, and while the characters and their humor persists from the first two movies, that was never what really made those memorable. Quantumania is a generic superhero movie in the worst sense, by which I mean it falls into the same bucket as Iron Man 2, and will rank very close to that movie on my list. That means that its worst trait is that it's forgettable, and by some metrics that's worse than being actively bad. As a starting point for the MCU's phase 4 and the cinematic introduction of Kang, the main antagonist for this phase, this isn't great. Has Marvel finally, after all these years, jumped the shark?

Probably not. It's hard for a franchise consisting of so many disparate creative minds granted essentially full control of their individual pieces to cohesively "jump the shark", as it were. Also, I haven't seen Guardians 3, but it's been reviewing well and reception seems to be generally positive. But suffice it to say the MCU is hardly immune from weak entries to the franchise, and Quantumania is certainly one of them.

And weirdly, it feels like a lot of the issues could have been solved by figuring out some way to work Luis into the plot. Like the blob guy obsessed with holes was pretty funny, but... I dunno, it sorta feels like Luis is the unofficial soul of the Ant-Man franchise.

Him missing made the movie feel kinda soulless.