The third film in the Ant-Man trilogy is also the first film in what is Marvel’s Phase Five of the MCU. Whilst Phase Four didn’t have an Avengers team up movie, it laid the groundwork for many new characters and the idea that there is a multiverse in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
Phase Five kicks off by further playing into these other universes and takes a big step to establish the new big bad to follow in the footsteps of Loki, Ultron and Thanos as the next great threat to the Avengers.
Ant-Man and the Wasp Quantumania is a good film, but it’s not a great film. It works hard to establish Jonathan Majors as the new main villain known as Kang the Conqueror, but in doing so doesn’t deliver all it should as an Ant-Man movie. This short term sacrifice may pay off in the long run however as the film does lay a lot more groundwork for there to be a pre-established rivalry between one of the Avengers and the big baddie. By the time that Thanos came to earth the only characters who had met or interacted with him were Gamora and Nebula so Marvel had to work hard to create some personal heat between Thanos and the likes of Tony Stark. With Kang we have a pre-existing feud with Janet van Dyne and this film gives Scott Lang AKA Ant-Man a lot of personal beef with the Conqueror as he took his daughter Cassie. Hope, AKA the Wasp and Hank Pym would also be less than friendly towards Kang the next time they meet.
But this said, the work to establish Kang comes at the sacrifice of the usually fun and lower scale hijinks of the first two Ant-Man films. There’s no sign of Scott Lang’s ex wife or his band of petty criminals in this. Luis in the first two films was my favourite Marvel side character and there was not role for him in this as it’s set almost entirely in the Quantum Realm.
Also the soundtrack is very different to the last two films who only snippets of the sneaky sounding Ant-Man theme. The biggest loss in this film is that it being set mostly in the Quantum Realm means that you don’t get any of the usual Honey I Shrunk the Kids style scenes where you see Ant-Man and the Wasp very small against normal household objects. There are ants in the film, but these aren’t as much of a thing as previous films either.
Something that has become a theme in recent MCU films and shows has been the weird downgraded next generation of superheroes. The new Hawkeye isn’t a soldier like Hawkeye and is just someone who is a fan of Hawkeye, Iron Heart is just a genius teenager who somehow can make a suit better than actual Iron Man, and whereas Captain Marvel is a trained soldier Ms Marvel is just another kid that somehow can master powers because of…reasons. This film does the same thing again and suddenly Cassie, who in the first film is just a regular kid with a Thomas the Tank Engine set is now able to create devices that send messages to and from the Quantum Realm.
This bugged me in particular as it’s a big change from how she was presented in the previous films. Scott is an unintelligent but likeable criminal who Hank Pym selected to be the next Ant-Man. He’s often in jail and then whilst Hank, Hope and Janet are blipped by Thanos, Scott spends five years in the Quantum Realm. But despite these hard life circumstances for some reason Cassie was studying Hank’s works to create Quantum Realm communication devices that Hank himself couldn’t. Makes no sense.
But enough of some of the critiques and let’s get onto the good stuff. Well…after we’ve dealt with MODOK. So, in what seems to be a happy accident, when the villain of the first Ant-Man film was defeated, the character, Yellow Jacket was shrunk down with his body shrinking before the head did. This created the opportunity to have the character become the MCU villain MODOK which is a machine only designed for killing…or some variation of that. MODOK works with Kang as the secondary villain and has near Scorpion King levels of bad CGI. I honestly don’t know how they thought it looked good as he just looks like a stretched face of the actor who plays Yellow Jacket. Still, as distracting as the CGI is, the character is actually quite fun and they give him a satisfying ending.
The Quantum Realm isn’t the barren wasteland we may have always thought it to be and instead it turns out there are cities and people there, which kinda works, but also kinda is stupid. Instead of Janet being stranded in an infinity of nothingness it was just like she was on another planet like you’d see in Guardians of the Galaxy or Thor. It did actually feel more like one of those movies than an Ant-Man film. The supporting cast of rebel characters include a dude who can read minds, a powerful chick and a weird blob thing…oh and Bill Murray pops up. This may have been the biggest disappointment of all as he’s only in the film a few minutes and doesn’t hit the comedy levels you’d hope Bill Murray in an Avengers movie would.
The action in the film is fun and we get some of growing and shrinking Ant-Man, Wasp and Ant-Daughter, as well as Kang doing vicious attacks with force fields and lazer beams.
Surprisingly, the film ends with a note of Scott wondering if he may have made things worse for the universe and this helps tease what is to come, and my hope is that we’ll see Scott and Kang face off some more. If there should be an Ant-Man and the Wasp part 4 I do hope we get more adventures on Earth that has fun with the ant sized people in the real world which was missing from this film.
Quantumania does get some bonus points for it’s nod to the growing Pizza from Back to the Future Part 2.
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