Ant-Man and The Wasp: Quantumania Review

Theatrical review

Do you remember life fifteen years ago? George W. Bush was finishing his second term as president. Facebook and Twitter were still in their infancy. The housing bubble burst. And a little film called “Iron Man” came out, launching the Marvel Cinematic Universe. This week, Peyton Reed’s “Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania” became the thirty-first movie in the franchise. 

Scott Lang (Paul Rudd) is happy to be back to his regular life. Hope (Evangeline Lilly) is successfully running her father’s business. Hank (Michael Douglas) and Janet (Michelle Pfeiffer) are thrilled to be reunited after thirty years apart. And Cassie (Kathryn Newton) is working with her grandfather on a little basement project to better understand the Quantum Realm, the subatomic world where Janet spent decades.

When Cassie’s project goes awry, the entire family is swept into the Quantum Realm, where a mysterious conqueror has been wreaking havoc. When they finally meet Kang (Jonathan Majors), Scott must decide if he will help Kang to save Cassie or risk the entire world.

This movie really seems to have divided critics and I can see that. 

The cast does a really excellent job in this movie. Both Newton and Pfieffer in particular give heartfelt performances, and I’m anxious to see what the MCU does with Cassie. And of course Majors is just a breakout star in every way right now. Kang is hugely menacing while also having a sense of pathos. When the MCU does a villain well, they really do it well. 

Overall, the effects were solid. Don’t get me wrong, I would love to see them pivot to at least a few more practical effects (there is no reason why some of this couldn't have been real to improve the interaction between characters and their environment), but the CGI looked good. MODOK (Corey Stoll) felt a little off to me, but I think that could just be my expectations more than anything else.

My biggest issue with this movie was that it felt like it wasted the first hour. This is a short movie by Marvel standards, coming in at just past two hours, and Kang isn’t revealed until the second hour. But rather than building tension by actually telling us stories about what he has done and the danger he poses to the rest of the multiverse, we just get people refusing to say his name, vague comments about him being evil, and Janet putting off telling us what she experienced, followed by a seven minute exposition dump and the end of the movie. We meet a ton of characters in that first hour, and honestly, I remember almost nothing about the world Ant-Man is supposed to be saving. 

In one scene, Ant-Man is drowning in a sea of a million other Ant-Men, and that metaphor feels a little on the nose. The weight of the future of a fifteen year franchise was set on this movie. I think it was able to deliver a win for them, but if there’s some unease at the end of “Quantumania,” it’s not without some merit.

This review originally appeared in The Dominion Post on February 19, 2023.