Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania | Review, 5 things I liked and disliked about it

Trailer 1 Review
Trailer 2 Review

Plot:

The movie starts with Scott Lang (Paul Rudd) living a happy life and narrating the heroics of the Avengers and himself about how all of them defeated Thanos (Josh Brolin) and his army to save the world and how they traveled back in time to collect the ‘Infinity Stones’ to bring all the people who got blipped. Meanwhile, Hope Van Dyne (Evangeline Lily) has started using her father’s research, Hank Pym (Michael Douglas), of Pym particles and has started her own company and has become successful in her life. Meanwhile, Hank Pym and Janet Van Dyne (Michelle Pfeiffer) are living their loved life as Janet connects back with her family after spending 30 years of her life in the Quantum Realm. On the other hand, we see Scott get a call from Police Department as Cassie Lang (Kathryn Newton) gets arrested by the police for protesting against the government for removing the homeless people who lost their homes during the blip.
Later while they have family time, we see Cassie discuss her invention which she later shows to everyone. The machine Cassie invents is a satellite that sends and receives signals from and to Quantum Realm. As Janet knows about the dangers that reside in the Quantum Realm, she pulls the plug to shut off the machine. But the malfunction caused by abruptly ending the session of the satellite pulls everyone inside the Quantum Realm and we find that Cassie and Scott are separated in the Quantum Realm from Janet, Hank, and Hope.
Now all the members face the challenges present in the Quantum Realm so that they can get together and leave the Quantum Realm safely. But on their journey to get together, they meet Kang the Conqueror (Jonathan Majors). Everyone in the Quantum Realm is afraid of Kang and his powers, and when Janet tells everyone about Kang’s past and his objectives for his future, we realize how dangerous Kang is not just for the universe but the entire fabrication of the multiverse. We see that Kang was exiled beyond the continuity of time and space by some group of people because of his behavior and objectives.
Now, everyone needs to make sure that they leave the Quantum Realm and return to their world and make sure that Kang stays in Quantum Realm and never leaves.

Review:

Marvel returns to the big screen after a decent break after the ending of Phase 4 and comes back to begin back its story in Phase 5 with ‘Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania’. Although there were many promises from Marvel Studios and Kevin Feige that their stories will be returning to their basics and get better with stories, instead it seems like they need to put more effort into their stories to get back to the top standards that they have set. But first, let’s get to the review.
The third installment of the Ant-Man movie was a lot different from what we have seen from Marvel Studios and the director from the last two movies.

The movie starts off slowly. We first get the introduction of the main characters in Ant-Man – Scott, Hope, Hank, Janet, and Cassie. For the first 45-50 minutes, the movie’s pace remains slow even after the characters get sucked into the quantum realm. Even the very known and famous actor Bill Murray, who played the character of Krylar, hardly had any role to play in the movie and felt like his talent went under-utilized.
After Krylar’s betrayal of Janet, Hank, and Hope, we see the entry of Kang the Conqueror. And from that point onwards, the movie takes a huge leap toward getting more intense as Jonathan Majors absolutely nails his role to perfection. After we last saw Jonathan Majors in ‘Loki Season 1‘ as ‘The One Who Remains’, from playing a character who was humourous, fun, and caring to playing a character in Ant-Man 3 who is brutal, greedy, and is somewhat crazy, Jonathans Majors shows his entire spectrum of acting talent.
Although the movie struggles to grasp and entertain in the audience in the first 45 minutes, but Jonathan Majors pumps up the movie with his talent and makes the entire movie light up. The music in the movie is used decently. The cinematography remains good. But where the movie struggles are in its VFX, there are many shots in the movie that looks fake and feels like the background is not connected with what’s happening in the front focus. The action sequence remains good and the final battle between Ant-Man and Kang the Conqueror is the highlight of the action sequence in the movie.

As for the movie itself, Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania kicks off Phase 5 of the Marvel Cinematic Universe which will end with ‘Daredevil: Born Again’, ‘Captain America: New World Order’, ‘Thunderbolts’, and possibly ‘Spider-Man 4’ as well. Although there is a lot to be anticipated from this Phase, but the start was not that good enough. But if we compare it to how the stories were narrated in Phase 4 except for a few projects, then Ant-Man 3 was definitely better than them.
I do expect Marvel to gradually get better as even Kevin Feige says that Marvel Studios will be focusing on quantity over quality and they will be spacing out their content, which means that we will get less content to watch from Phase 5 onwards than we got to see in Phase 4, where we basically got one project after another.

Mid and Post Credit Scene:

Yes, there are mid and post-credit scenes in the movie. So, let’s get to them.
In the mid-credit scene, we see many past/future versions and variants of Kang talking about the death of ‘Kang the Conqueror’ we see at the end of the movie. The variants of Kang we see are – Rama Tut, Scarlett Centurion, and Immortus. And later, we even see the ‘Council of Kangs‘.
These 3 variants of Kang discuss that as Kang the Conqueror is dead, the timelines have started touching each other and they multiverse is about to collapse.
And those are the hints that soon we will start to see incursions happening that will destroy and collide the worlds together.

In the post-credit scene, we see a teaser of ‘Loki Season 2’ where we get a glimpse of Loki (Tom Hiddleston) and Mobius (Owen Wilson). The duo is surely sometime in the past visiting Victor Timely, another variant of Kang who goes to the past to build his city of Chronopolis in comics, and later becomes ‘The One who Remains’.
From here we could get to see the origin story of ‘The One who Remains’ and how he could be the one to save the multiverse, or even if he will live enough to save it. Let’s wait for ‘Loki Season 2’ now. We can expect to see many variants of Kangs.

5 things I liked about the movie:

The movie was not as bad as it was rated by critics. The movie had its fare-share of pros and cons. But first, let’s check what were the things that I liked about the movie.

1. The Marvel Studios projects finally gets a bit better with their story-telling. The story gets more serious as people and critics, and even various different celebrities like Seth Rogen complain that Marvel is aiming for children and activists with their storytelling rather than their fanbase. The story comes back and sticks to its roots of comics, does not try to please any group of activists, and felt like a typical Marvel movie that builds the tensions for what lies in the future. But even if Marvel decides to bring a project supporting any idea for the people, I hope they make sure they have the best writers who write a script that speaks for itself and not a single character forces it on the faces of its audience.
2. The post-credit scene of the movie was much better. Unlike Marvel’s Phase 4 projects’ post-credit scenes which led to nothing for the future, Ant-Man 3’s mid and post-credit scenes were much better. We will soon be getting to watch the implications of how the entire movie affects not just the 616 Universe but even the multiverse.
3. The storyline of Scott, Janet, and Kang was beautifully built and developed. Scott has taken retirement from being a superhero and now is narrating the story of his victory over Thanos through modes of Books, Podcasts, and Interviews. Janet who is spending most of her time with her family after spending 30 years in the quantum realm, who is hesitant to talk about her life in the quantum realm as she is aware of the dangers that exist in it and does not want to reveal it to others.
4. The people living in the quantum realm had a short role in the film but they had a really good and fun storyline in their brief role. There were many hilarious scenes between Scott, Cassie, and people who were living in the quantum realm along with the living houses. Even in the final battle, we saw the people of the quantum realm fighting for their freedom with Ant-Man and the Wasp along with Cassie, Janet, Hank, and ants that sucked inside the quantum realm as well.
5. The open-ended defeat of Kang the Conqueror can become a huge deal for the 616 Universe. Although there are many fans saying that Kang is dead and even we saw that in the mid-credit scene. But after following the scoopers and reading many speculations, I think that Kang the Conqueror got sucked into the ‘Beyondverse’ and he will return back in ‘Avengers: Secret Wars’ after taking the powers from Beyonders.

5 things I disliked about the movie:

Now let’s get to the part where we can talk about the things that I did not like and could have been improved.

1. The storyline and screen time of Hank, Hope, and Cassie could have been improved in the movie. Although they are the main characters in the life of Ant-Man’s life, these characters hardly had any screen time and importance to the main plot of the movie. As the main story revolved around Janet, Kang, and Scott, the writers and director should have tried to include others more. And even the role of MODOK (Corey Stoll) was merely used for cracking jokes, one of the best villains of Marvel Comics has gone to waste.
2. There were some scenes in the movie where the VFX was horrible if we compare it to the standards of Marvel Studios. Due to the new technology of LED Displays used to film the background of the current movies, it felt like the background shots in the movie were unreal. And since the beginning of Phase 4 of the Marvel Studios, there have been many instances where people have had complaints about the characters and scenes looking unreal and cartoonish, like in She-Hulk and even the character of Riri Williams’ Iron Heart suit in Black Panther: Wakanda Forever. I have personally been a big fan of the first Iron Man movie where we could see every bolt moving in Tony Stark’s suit. I hope Marvel brings back that kind of effort in the movies soon.
3. The pacing of the movie in the first half felt really slow. The director somehow drags the plot of the movie till the characters reach the quantum realm and even till the time they meet Kang.
4. The starting plot could have been made even more interesting by adding the characters from the previous movies like – Luis (Michael Pena) and Kurt (David Dastmalchian). The lack of characters from the previous two Ant-Man movies and continuity for them as we have not seen them seen since ‘Ant-Man and the Wasp‘ in 2018 and now it is the year 2025 in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. The two, especially Luis is the characters that the audience absolutely loved and adored what they brought to the movie. I hope in some time we get to see their story of being blipped through the narration style of Luis.
5. Even though Ant-Man and the Wasp won against Kang and vanished him somewhere that is not known to us yet, but we could have got to see about the people of the quantum realm and what happened to them after winning against the army of Kang.

It’s Review Time rating of
Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania
6/10