Another year another 3 new MCU movies to watch... and a couple shows on top of that. With Phase 4 of the MCU wrapping up late last year, the stage will be set for the next few years with "Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania". This movie is setting up the big villain that's going to be built up in the next few years leading into the next big Avengers movie. It's a big set of shoes to fill after how iconic Thanos' story arc was in the last few phases of the MCU. Kang the Conqueror played by Jonathan Majors gets his introduction into the movie side of the MCU here, and the big question is: did the movie do a good job at this?
Before I get into answering that question, I'd like to take a quick look back at Phase 4 and how it all came to a close. I didn't review most of the movies from that phase because pretty much everything in that phase was released during the pandemic. I think most people would agree that it was easily the weakest phase of the MCU so far, by a pretty big margin. The movies were pretty hit or miss, with most not really standing out too much outside of No Way Home, Wakanda Forever, and maybe Shang-Chi. Black Widow was a pretty big disappointment and felt too late. Eternals was a giant mess of a story with a lot of wasted potential and Love and Thunder wasted an amazing Christian Bale performance with a movie that tried too hard to be funny at all times. On top of that, we were bombarded with non-stop tv-shows on Disney+ that mostly were just okay, with Loki being the one real standout. It all just felt like too much and the post-Endgame stories just felt a bit flat. Thankfully, now with the new phase, things look to be slowing down a bit and taking some time to breathe. So how does the new Ant-Man and Wasp story fare?
"Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania" picks up after the events of Endgame, as all the characters seem to have gotten their lives back to mostly normal after the blip. Scott has become a big celebrity for his work with the Avengers and has put down the hero work to try to live a more normal life. Even though things are mostly back to normal, the one thing Scott struggles with is rebuilding the relationship with his daughter Cassandra after missing 5 years of her life. Cassandra reveals to her family that she's made a machine that can communicate with the quantum realm and help find out more about it without having to enter it. It all goes wrong when someone in the quantum realm intercepts their signal and opens a portal that sucks in Scott and the rest of his family. On the other side of the portal, a man named Kang awaits, whose mysteries are slowly revealed throughout the movie.
I feel like there are two sides to this movie, one that completely works and one that is a bit underwhelming. Starting with the underwhelming part is the main story of Scott and his daughter Cassandra. I think it works well for the most part, but I think it might have been a little better if the movie didn't have so many characters it was trying to fit into the story at once. While the movie focuses a good amount on their relationship, you also have Kang, Hope, Hank, and Janet all intertwined in the story as well. One of the things I thought was that a lot of the jokes don't land as much as you would hope. Not to say the movie isn't funny at times because it is, but a lot of the jokes just didn't quite land for me. The part that completely worked though, was the introduction to Kang and his story. Jonathan Majors is such a damn good actor in everything I've seen him in and this is no exception. I'm incredibly excited to see where he takes this character because he was so good in this movie and his involvement really took this story to another level.
One big part of the movie I should mention is the visuals. Unlike the previous two Ant-Man movies, this one is almost entirely in a CGI location (the quantum realm). The visuals range from pretty impressive to sometimes a little too fake looking. One character in particular (MODOK) was really rough to look at. I guess since this is coming out so close to the latest Avatar movie it's hard not to compare a little, but it's nowhere near that level. Still, it's not distracting enough to completely take me out of the story. Another thing I noticed is how strangely political this movie was, which was pretty interesting. I'll say this movie actually has a lot of good messages/lessons in it about life and I thought that was really cool.
This movie had some weak spots for sure. With the sometimes rough CGI and the story sometimes feeling like it has too many characters it's trying to give time to. The jokes didn't always land, but I think it hit more than it missed there. All that is forgotten when you see just how good Kang the Conqueror is in this role and how excited I am to see more of him. The characters are all still great from the previous movies and the newly expanded role for Cassandra worked well too. I think this movie does a great job of kicking off Phase 5 of the MCU by establishing one of the big characters that's going to play a huge role in the next few years of movies.
Overall Grade: B-