Spending $350M to make less than $500M (before everyone gets their cut) wouldn't be considered a solid performance by anyone. This is really a disastrous outing.
Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania
- Thread starter silentorphan
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Spending $350M to make less than $500M (before everyone gets their cut) wouldn't be considered a solid performance by anyone. This is really a disastrous outing.
- Location
- Melbourne, Australia
- Pronouns
- She/They
So I finally watched the movie now that it's on streaming. I hadn't been planning to, but a couple people invited me to watch together and then they fucking fell asleep 20 minutes in and left me to suffer through it on my own those motherfuckers.
So uh yeah it's not good, but what was interesting was the way it wasn't good. I went in thinking it was going to be another Thor: Love and Thunder situation: incoherent plot with a barrage of overly indulgent bad jokes. Instead, I ended up getting reminded a lot of Multiverse of Madness. Both movies feel at their best when they're shifting towards a sort of thriller/horror tone: with Multiverse of Madness that's the entire back half where Sam Raimi just kinda gets to do his thing, but Quantumania there's just this constant drip of little bits here and there that kept making me go "Hey, this movie might be getting good!" only to get disappointed each time.
Obviously there's Majors' intense performance as Kang, though praising that feels a little awkward given the recent allegations, but there's also moments like the 'probability storm' sequence that are actually kind of creative and affecting and more than a little terrifying? It's spoiled a little by how it's resolved because The Wasp/Hope comes in to save the day and seemingly has no issues with the quantum fuckery, which sort of just reminds you that she basically has nothing interesting to do for the whole movie despite her name being in the fucking title.
Like it's actually insane that half the movie is about Ant-Man's relationship with his daughter and the maternal side of things is barely looked at? The dynamic between Hope and her mother also mostly doesn't exist because the latter mostly just serves as an exposition dump. I dunno, the MCU has been really stressing its diversity/representation chops in the post-Endgame Phases and yet it still had to make Ant-Manand the Wasp a very basic father-winning-over-his-daughter-also-the-wife-was-there story.
MODOK is also just hugely wasted potential. I actually like the background they gave him of being basically the random throwaway villain from the first movie who got his body completely warped by malfunctioning quantum technology. There's a very brief shot when they're revealing that backstory where they actually show what he looked like before he got put in the suit and, like, if they'd really emphasised that instead of being all "lol baby legs lol don't be a dick lol his name's Darren" then they'd have had a really cool body horror concept that Majors as Kang could probably have done great work with.
But at the end of the day the main narrative of the movie is just a mess. Someone posted an article earlier in which a critic complained that they didn't understand "why the sub-atomic universe is special", which is a pretty dumb and mildly sociopathic criticism. A universe shouldn't need to be 'special' for people to want to save it. The real problem is that the quantum setting and society doesn't really have any character. Instead, we get a barrage of different CGI vistas and a handful of cool-looking resistance characters, but there's no aesthetic coherency to any of it beyond "wow lots of stuff" and none of the quantumverse characters exist outside of their gags and fight-scene filler segments.
Like, how do you describe the quantumverse setting on a rough aesthetic/genre level? The Guardians of the Galaxy movies have like a space opera kitchen-sink aesthetic: you have your criminal scum city worlds and your big space prisons and your alien metropolis worlds and also your kinda outback sparsely populated desert/wilderness worlds, and also, you know, space. That makes sense. The Thor movies are largely doing a sci-fi riff on different classical pantheons and mythologies, though Ragnarok leaned much harder into the Guardians setting. Multiverse of Madness, like most MCU movies, basically just plays around with present-day Earth.
What the fuck is the setting of Quantumania? There's a slick sci-fi evil empire, but that's a foreign element that Kang established. What were things like before? In the flashbacks, Kang and Janet just seem stuck by themselves in like a cave or something with weird wolves. Where was everyone else back then? Then there's like this Max Max desert with nomads and shit. Then the resistance has a bunch of random fucking aliens (would you still call them aliens?) including a fucking robot. In the 'space' segment of the MCU, I can grok very easily that the galaxy is a melting pot of cultures with people travelling around in spaceships and mixing with each other. But what's going on in the quantum realm or whatever it's called?
So uh yeah it's not good, but what was interesting was the way it wasn't good. I went in thinking it was going to be another Thor: Love and Thunder situation: incoherent plot with a barrage of overly indulgent bad jokes. Instead, I ended up getting reminded a lot of Multiverse of Madness. Both movies feel at their best when they're shifting towards a sort of thriller/horror tone: with Multiverse of Madness that's the entire back half where Sam Raimi just kinda gets to do his thing, but Quantumania there's just this constant drip of little bits here and there that kept making me go "Hey, this movie might be getting good!" only to get disappointed each time.
Obviously there's Majors' intense performance as Kang, though praising that feels a little awkward given the recent allegations, but there's also moments like the 'probability storm' sequence that are actually kind of creative and affecting and more than a little terrifying? It's spoiled a little by how it's resolved because The Wasp/Hope comes in to save the day and seemingly has no issues with the quantum fuckery, which sort of just reminds you that she basically has nothing interesting to do for the whole movie despite her name being in the fucking title.
Like it's actually insane that half the movie is about Ant-Man's relationship with his daughter and the maternal side of things is barely looked at? The dynamic between Hope and her mother also mostly doesn't exist because the latter mostly just serves as an exposition dump. I dunno, the MCU has been really stressing its diversity/representation chops in the post-Endgame Phases and yet it still had to make Ant-Man
MODOK is also just hugely wasted potential. I actually like the background they gave him of being basically the random throwaway villain from the first movie who got his body completely warped by malfunctioning quantum technology. There's a very brief shot when they're revealing that backstory where they actually show what he looked like before he got put in the suit and, like, if they'd really emphasised that instead of being all "lol baby legs lol don't be a dick lol his name's Darren" then they'd have had a really cool body horror concept that Majors as Kang could probably have done great work with.
But at the end of the day the main narrative of the movie is just a mess. Someone posted an article earlier in which a critic complained that they didn't understand "why the sub-atomic universe is special", which is a pretty dumb and mildly sociopathic criticism. A universe shouldn't need to be 'special' for people to want to save it. The real problem is that the quantum setting and society doesn't really have any character. Instead, we get a barrage of different CGI vistas and a handful of cool-looking resistance characters, but there's no aesthetic coherency to any of it beyond "wow lots of stuff" and none of the quantumverse characters exist outside of their gags and fight-scene filler segments.
Like, how do you describe the quantumverse setting on a rough aesthetic/genre level? The Guardians of the Galaxy movies have like a space opera kitchen-sink aesthetic: you have your criminal scum city worlds and your big space prisons and your alien metropolis worlds and also your kinda outback sparsely populated desert/wilderness worlds, and also, you know, space. That makes sense. The Thor movies are largely doing a sci-fi riff on different classical pantheons and mythologies, though Ragnarok leaned much harder into the Guardians setting. Multiverse of Madness, like most MCU movies, basically just plays around with present-day Earth.
What the fuck is the setting of Quantumania? There's a slick sci-fi evil empire, but that's a foreign element that Kang established. What were things like before? In the flashbacks, Kang and Janet just seem stuck by themselves in like a cave or something with weird wolves. Where was everyone else back then? Then there's like this Max Max desert with nomads and shit. Then the resistance has a bunch of random fucking aliens (would you still call them aliens?) including a fucking robot. In the 'space' segment of the MCU, I can grok very easily that the galaxy is a melting pot of cultures with people travelling around in spaceships and mixing with each other. But what's going on in the quantum realm or whatever it's called?
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- Location
- Singapore
- Pronouns
- He/Him
I watched this movie on the plane recently. It was okay for me but I found making all the Kangs black to be a bit of a strange decision. Was quite funny hearing how the ants created a Kardashev level 2 civilization under a socialist government. I feel like they didn't make Kang feel dangerous enough in the end. And Giant-Man feels inconsistent in terms of how much damage he can take.