Hogan Reviews

MCU’s fifth Phase kicks off with a film high on fun CG backdrops but low on actual fun. It cements Kang the Conqueror and his variants as a big threat, which given what’s come out about Jonathan Majors in the months since releases sucks because he is so good in it… Basically, it’s a mixed bag but certainly is more of a big flashy MCU movie than an Ant-Man movie, which is a shame given Paul Rudd’s comedic timing. Let’s take a deeper look, anyway…

Quantumania opens up with Ant-Man himself Scott Lang (Paul Rudd) loving life as a celebrity, doing book signings and the like, while enjoying time with his new family unit of girlfriend Hope / The Wasp (Evangeline Lilly), her parents Janet Van Dyne and Hank Pym (Michelle Pfeiffer and Michael Douglas) and his daughter Cassie (Kathryn Newton), who is now a teenager due to the snap, meaning Scott missed out on a lot of her growing up. It’s a talented lead cast, though I will say Douglas phones it in somewhat across the whole film and Cassie is barely developed beyond her single character trait of “wants to stick up for the oppressed” but overall they’re a good unit. Cassie has taken after her sort-of adoptive grandad in Hank and developed a piece shrinking technology that can send signals and scan the quantum realm but as Janet panics and tries to shut it off the whole lot of them get sucked down into the Quantum Realm themselves and to everyone bar Janet’s surprise there is an entire multi-cultural world of intelligent species and mega-cities in there.

Cassie Lang and Hank Pym, the future and the past of the Ant-Man legacy. I assume, anyway!

It’s here where the film shines most as I really enjoyed the artistic side, the crazy backdrops, the weird architecture and some of the alien designs were all done really well. We’re soon introduced to the villains of the piece, that being Kang the Conqueror (Jonathan Majors) and his underling M.O.D.O.K, who finally makes his MCU debut after countless years of people saying his design is too weird to work in the more realistic live action MCU… I mean they ended up correct, but hey. Sadly it could’ve worked as when M.O.D.O.K is flying around his its metal face-mask on it looks fine in the weird world of the Quantum Realm but it spends a lot of the film with the mask down, revealing the weird enlarged head of Corey Stoll back as Darren Cross from the first Ant-Man film. I like the idea of following up on that plot-thread (admittedly a thread I was happy to consider done with…) but they should’ve had him with the mask on the whole time, maybe revealing the head as a last-minute sight gag at the end. Ah well.

Majors, as mentioned in the opening paragraph, was once again great as a central antagonist which in a post-seemingly-legit-allegations world is extremely frustrating as he’s most likely cocked it up for us and himself by being a knob in real life. Kang, as hinted at in the Loki series, had a falling out with other variants of himself and was exiled to the Quantum Realm, a place where time and space aren’t comparable to the “real world” and therefore his tech can’t get him free. He met Janet during her time stuck there and they worked together to start with only for her to find out about his destroying of whole timelines just to conquer more of the multiverse and kind of went off him a tad, sabotaging his ship and making sure he remained. Kang built up an empire within the Quantum Realm and rule it with an iron fist. It’s this “Empire” that Janet was afraid of when Cassie activated the device and it’s also the key reason for the rest of the film to happen, as Scott and Cassie end up meeting a resistance force (of completely forgettable characters) while Hope and her parents try to run from Kang using Janet’s knowledge and contacts (including a high money short role for Bill Murray, oddly…)

All things considered it’s a really accurate Kang costume, really.

I’ll get to the specifics of the ending later but overall I’d love to be contrary and say “people are down on this film but I really like it” but sadly the film was just sort of… flat. The big budget, nearly entirely CGI world with a powerful supervillain isn’t really what I’ve come to expect from the Ant-Man series, which has always been more down-to-earth despite the concept of a shrinking and enlarging suit, obviously. Scott and his relationship with his family is still the focus of him and Paul Rudd is still great in the role, so I can’t completely hate it (especially as I did enjoy a lot of the eye candy) but at no point did I feel gripped or really interested in what I was seeing…

Overall Thoughts:

One of the many fun sweeping CG vistas.

While it had some pleasing visuals and Paul Rudd and (retrospectively sadly) Jonathan Majors are on fine form Quantumania still managed to fall flat for me. I just didn’t find myself engaged in anything and as such the film just… moved along and then ended. Can’t put my finger on what exactly went wrong but something did, it’s not a bad film, it’s not a good film, it’s firmly in the extremely mundane middle…

Kang captures Scott and Cassie and forces the former to retrieve the part of his ship Janet had ruined (by making it massive) and he eventually does with the help of Hope, despite a weird effect where all possible decisions the two could take took form and so they were surrounded by countless copies of themselves. Hope, Scott, Janet and Hank take off and Cassie manages to both escape and inspire the rebellious forces of the Quantum Realm to attack Kang’s base, leading to a CG fight fest as Kang’s army battles the weird denizens of the Quantum Realm, while eventually Scott faces off with Kang himself. Meanwhile M.O.D.O.K. gets bested by Cassie, who has her own shrinking/enlarging suit, and is told “not to be a dick” and apparently that’s all it took to make him change sides and try to take out Kang. He dies trying, but hey… That was certainly an unearned bit of character “development” and the couple of jokes as he died were kind of off-set by his still really weird massive head. *shrugs*

Nice to have a superhero couple story not feature a break up storyline right after they got together, like so… so many before them!

The battle against Kang himself is pretty one-sided in his favour but the villain is seemingly defeated by Hank’s super intelligent ants (which fell into the Quantum Realm alongside them) but just after Hank, Janet, Cassie and Hope got back to Earth Kang reappears and begins beating Scott pretty badly until Hope pops back in to distract the villain as Scott overloaded his machine and it… sucked him into some sort of energy thingy. He’s dead, anyway… Scott and Hope embrace and before we even get a chance to wonder if they’re trapped as the portal closed behind them during the battle Cassie just… opens it up again. Handy! The Langs/Van Dynes are all happy on Earth but in a multiversal nexus point a gathering of thousands of Kang variants takes place (including the MCU Immortus!) setting up the next big Avengers-level threat, though due to some multiversal glitch I’m sure they will stop looking like Jonathan Majors…

Oh and Loki and Morbius from the Loki TV series appear in a mid-credits scene, also searching for Kang variants. Looking forward to that at least!