I don’t know a lot about Star Wars, but I know a Star Wars rip-off when I see one, and I saw one when I finally watched Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania. While it has its highlights, mainly in the portrayals of some of the main cast, the stories, the world and the surrounding characters all felt lifted from a different franchise. While the first two movies in the Ant-Man trilogy focussed on comedy, heists, and Paul Rudd’s rugged charm, the newest in the trilogy, which introduces the MCU’s newest Big Bad, Kang the Conqueror, punches far too high above its weight in an effort to live up to this introduction, while trying to keep in touch with Ant-Man’s comedic roots.
It opens with a comedic montage of Scott Lang AKA Ant Man enjoying his life post-Endgame. He wrote a book! But oh no, not all is perfect, as his daughter, Cassie, who was like seven in the last two movies, is now a freedom fighter, often ending up in jail.
It’s Cassie who brings in the fun gadget that sends her, along with her father and the Pym/Van Dyne family into the Quantum realm. Quantum, quantum, quantum. Are you sick of that word yet? Because by the end of this movie you will be. The quantum realm is a tiny, microscopic universe that lives inside of the larger world.
The quantum realm, let’s face it, is at least heavily inspired by Star Wars. There are absurd creatures, cantinas with strange liquids, lots of strange, but striking spaceships, and an overruling dominant empire, oppressing a lower class.
Half the movie involves the family trying to navigate this realm and quite frankly, it’s boring to watch, except for the scenes with MODOK, which are just plain stupid and cringeworthy.
When it really spices up is when Darth V- I mean Kang the Conqueror appears. There’s a backstory as to how he ended up in the quantum realm, that involves Janet aka Michelle Pfeiffer, where she and Kang, played by the total unit that is Jonathan Majors meet. These scenes they share are sweet and show even in his earliest of stages that Kang is complex, and Majors plays his emotions like a fiddle, you can literally see the pain, the sadness, and then the fury rippling over his face.
Then, later in the movie he takes on full on Baddie mode, his intentions made clear, he’s coming, and not just for the Quantum Realm, but for everything outside of it as well. With the power of his half-repaired spaceship, and his iconic suit, lifted straight out of Marvel comics. These things allowed him to create an empire that really… Strikes back.
Majors’ fury is palpable and when he fights you feel shivers. Never did I feel that when that purple nutsack-chinned Thanos was around. Kang fights not for some righteous ideal, but for revenge and power.
I could talk about how great Kang was for pages and pages, but that would be boring, just like the rest of this movie.
Michelle Pfeiffer’s Janet Van Dyne is another force that holds the movie up. She was absent from the first two movie’s but this third one really utilised her range and talents. You see her journey from Kangs reluctant friend to his mortal enemy in the Quantum realm. Not to backpedal but their scenes together are some of the best in the movie.
It might seem harsh, but it’s quite possible that I, and every other reviewer apparently, am suffering Marvel Fatigue. As the MCU gears up for the Kang Dynasty, its next great epic, people are already tired. There’s been 30 plus movies. The original line up is decimated, and we don’t know who’s coming back. The uncertainty of it all really throws it up in the air as new ideas are thrown around. So maybe that’s why such a highly conceptual movie seems wrong.
I usually don’t write so critically, I usually write about what I love, but I just couldn’t let this one fly. If ever there was a marvel movie to skip and then watch on streaming later on this is the one. However, if you are a diehard MCU fan there is the introduction of a major villain and his backstory, and two post credit scenes that, for once, are actually pretty important.
Ant-Man and the Wasp Quantumania may be a miss, but hey, Black Panther Wakanda Forever is now playing on Disney +.