Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania (2023) officially kicks off phase 5 of the Marvel Cinematic Universe and sadly, this was not a very good start. Although I have very high hopes for the next stage of the MCU, this movie in particular really missed the mark.
Scott discovers his daughter Cassie has been working with Hope and Hank Pym in the hopes of studying the Quantum Realm. They also chose to keep this a secret from Janet, who is the only character to have ever been there for an extensive period of time. This experiment obviously goes terribly wrong and the whole family find themselves trapped in the Quantum Realm with something or someone out to find them.
The plot is a mess and leaves all the characters second best to its overwhelming and overachieving visual affects. This film is colourful, vibrant and defiantly introduces a few thrills but the only stand out was Jonathon Majors as Kang. This film should have simply been titled, ‘Kang’s Arrival into the MCU’ because the whole story was setting up his character journey and introducing him to the audience. Ant-man was a secondary character in his own film and that was one of the biggest misses for me, Paul Rudd is easily one of the most engaging and relatable characters in the MCU. Scott Lang feels the most human out of all the Avengers, yet in this movie he was filler, coasting through with the same poorly written jokes and minimal effort to reinvent his character or bring anything new to his story. In saying that, Paul Rudd was nowhere near the worse element to this movie, far from it actually, Rudd, Majors and Douglas carried this film from beginning to end.
Kathryn Newon is a great actress which makes me wonder what went wrong? Cassie is suppose to represent the next stage of the MCU, she is the future of the franchise but she was emotionless and brought very little to the story. Her execution of the character was mediocre and she had as much personality as Paul Rudd has in his little finger. The character all felt and looked like they didn’t want to be there, something felt really overworked and simply boring.
Sure, the visuals were impressive but did we need them? No. Did we need another Marvel movie with 99% special affects, no story and lacklustre characters? No. We need originality, stop trying to hold onto franchises without reinventing them or adding some genuine personality to them. This was not an Ant-man movie, this was not as good as it should have been. A true disappointment from the Marvel team and I hope they notice these films are not for children, these films need something more than stylise visuals to distract us from the bare and bland story underneath.
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