Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania

I enjoyed watching Quantumania. It's a mostly solid and fairly entertaining movie. But relative to MCU standards, it's a bit underwhelming and feels like more of a throwaway movie than something memorable I will keep coming back to.

My biggest issue is that I wasn't fully engaged for at least the first half of the movie. I was enjoying it but I wasn't locked in. The story was unfocussed. When the villain becomes prevalent, the movie jumps a level. But it doesn't completely make up for the much weaker first half.

The other thing that surprised me was not being mesmerized by the visuals. It's very creative and I didn't notice poor CGI like some others. But it didn't wow me like it frequently does. Maybe we're just getting spoiled with the visuals in movies like Doctor Strange 2 and more recently Avatar 2.

There is still a lot of good here. It's pretty funny but doesn't overdo it. This is the second movie in a row where the MCU seems to have dialed back on the "insert joke here" strategy. It's probably a result of the negative reaction from the cartoonish Thor 4. Also, I love the villain. I won't say who in case you're smart (and crazy) like me and don't watch trailers. But he's so damn awesome.

As someone who loves almost everything in the MCU, Quantumania is near the bottom of my MCU rankings. And it's making me a little nervous that it comes only two movies after Thor 4 which is below it (5 stars). But I still have faith and am not joining the MCU doom and gloom crowd. Phase 4 has three of my favorite entries in the entire MCU (Shang-Chi, Loki S01, No Way Home) and I only disliked two (Eternals, Thor 4). They just need to be more consistent while also not playing it so safe.

(3 viewings, opening Thursday IMAX 2/16/2023, IMAX 2/28/2023, 10/5/2023)

As a huge fan of the first one, and almost as big a fan of the second one, I decided to go all out and see this one in 3D with the 4DX motion and sensory seats. What a let down; sure, sitting in the nicest seats for the best visual, motion and sensory experience was great, but I felt like I was watching a Looney Tunes story, instead of any type of story that is part, or compliments the MCU timeline. This was literally one of Marvel's dullest and most unnecessary movies to date. The entire story was cliched and predictable, and there was more CGI than there was any type of interesting story, let alone one with any substance. Even the normally awesome and hilarious humor in the previous installments was absent in this one. Almost the entire film is taking place inside a CGI story, so there was no need for any movie sets or locations... this was all green-screen nonsense. It's a very generous 6/10 from me, only because I still enjoyed the fun ride in my upgraded seats, although the money spent would've been more fun at an amusement park.

Ant-Man's 3rd solo outting. Doubling down on the sci-fi elements of the MCU. Overall the humor was like the rest of the previous movies. The cast was all stellar. Doesn't really dive that deep into Kang's story, but what we did get was sufficient. Johnathan Majors portrayal was excellent, just wish he had more substance to work with. The visual effects were definitely spotty. Blue screen overload, wish they took more time blending in the effects with with actors. This leads into Modok, as a concept. I didn't mind his backstop changing, just wish they went more practical with his design. Overall Quantumania was a pretty fun movie, but for setting the tone of "PHASE 5", Marvel will definitely need to step up their storytelling, and start getting more into detail with these characters, and concepts.

No wonder all those "creative" people in so called creative businesses and crafts are afraid of AI - no doubt, in the not too distant future, AI will do the work - cheaper and better than humans can do. At least if Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania and such movies (and books, comics, whatever, quantity beats quality these days - in all fields) are the best human mind can come up with. The first Ant-Man movie was a nice one, the second one was okay, but if you take away all the (finally by computer generated) visuals and effects, there is maybe enough story left in this third chapter to employ two or maybe three and a half brain cells of the viewer. The rest of the neural network goes quickly into stand by and sleep mode. I like the production and a few scenes, this is the only reason why this one does not crash totally. But in the end, this is at best mediocre and sometimes even really bad.

New Ant-Man is not a bad movie, but it's repeating current trend that been plaguing new Marvel productions. Main character is just an excuse to introduce few new characters that are definitely going to have their own stories. That makes Paul Rudd's character less important. You don't feel that this is his story. He is just there. And the story is not even that good. You can feel the lack of great characters from previous movies. They were setting the tone of story and we don't even know what happened to them after previous movie. It's hard to believe that the director is the same person who made two prior movies. Adding Kang definitely made this into Kang movie that have Ant-Man in it.