Marvel Studios kicked off 2023 with "Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania," pitting the ever-growing Ant-man family up against Jonathan Majors' Kang the Conqueror - who promises to be the mega-franchise's next Big Bad. Unfortuantely, in setting voyage for the Quantum Realm, the smallest Avenger's newest film left behind everything that made the first two installments endearing and ran smack into a brick wall of the Marvel Cinematic Universe's biggest problems.
When we are reintroduced to Scott Lang (Paul Rudd, who has at the very least thankfully not lost any of his charm in the role), things seem to be going great. He's retired from heroics and is traveling the country peddling his new book about how he helped save the world. It seems like a pleasant-enough jumping-off point. But it's all downhill from there. Reader beware - there be spoilers beyond here!
Very quickly, the problems become apparent. The Ant-man franchise was never running at the top of the MCU stable, but it had some very specific things going for it: A strong family dynamic, intimate, small-scale stakes and innovative shrunken-world set pieces. All of that is unfortuantely thrown out of the window almost immediately. Cassie's mother and step-father are completely absent from the film, as are the scene-stealing Luis (Michael Pena) and Scott's other Ex-Con friends. While they initially attempt to set up a new family dynamic as the central conflict with Hank Pym (Michael Douglas) and Janet (Evangeline Lilly) encouraging Scott's now-teenage daughter Cassie (Kathryn Newton) to pursue super-heroics against her father's wishes, that narrative is quickly abandoned as the family is broken up with little fanfare and hurled into the Quantum Realm.
The Quantum Realm has been billed over the last two Ant-man films as an unearthly, mysterious place, but the team beyond bringing it fully to life apparently lacked the budget for added creativity. The briefcase battles and toy train set-pieces of the first two films are replaced with generic "SciFi World" CGI sludge, quickly jettisoning the franchise's other saving grace almost as soon as we've accepted the fact the family element isn't returning. With neither of these distinguishing traits intact, the film vanishes into forgettable, generic superhero tropes we've seen a million times before.
The new take on the franchise isn't without its merits. Jonathon Majors returns to the role of Kang the Conqueror after stealing the show in the final episode of 'Loki,' and he certainly makes a strong case to contend with Thanos as the MCU's next Big Bad. But it isn't enough to carry the weight of an entire movie, much less justify why he's in THIS movie at all. Almost nothing has changed for the protagonists by the time the credits begin to roll. The film, as a whole, seems to have little purpose but to further the broader storyline of the MCU.
A brief, trippy Vortex sequence offers a glimpse into the innovative visual story that could have been told with this venture into the Quantum Realm, but the movie seems throughly disinterested in doing anything memorable. Bill Murray shows up and is immediately discarded. A scene in which Scott and Cassie go giant-size together for the first time is undermined by the lack of real-world anchors to remind us of any context for their size-changing powers. But perhaps the most pointed representation of all that has gone wrong here is... MODOK.
Corey Stoll's performance as Darren Cross in the original Ant-Man film was something special. He delivered one of the few Marvel villains with actual menace, a 'banality of evil' corporate type with a sick suit design who suffered a shockingly gruesome demise. Now he's back, re-imagined as M.O.D.O.K. and BOY is it bad. It's bad enough that his character design makes no sense with the established lore and that his previous nature as a serious villain is sacrificed for cheap jokes. But what makes this transformation so jarring is the absolute minimum effort put into his CGI. He falls far closer to Mr. Electric from 'Shark Boy and Lava Girl' than to Thanos. It's an utterly awkward character development that drags the story to a halt every time he appears on screen.
MODOK embodies the struggles that weigh the MCU down in a post-Endgame world - They've over-stuffed these new stories with universe-building while the IP across the board has been dumbed-down and conformed to match a very specific, targeted style they hope will make everyone happy, but ultimately leaves all but the most devoted fans shrugging in apathy. If the MCU hopes to survive for another decade, they need to return to what made these movies work in the first place. To succeed - embrace the individual eccentricities of these characters and don't be embarrassed of the source material. Prioritize individual stories over corporate synergy. This is what elevated the franchise to the top of the box office. But if the suits calling the shots continue this course, the future looks grim for our favorite heroes.
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