Latest Reviews & Buzz for
Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania (2023)

This is 31st Film in the MCU. That is a lot of films and long list of expectations. Ever since Endgame every MCU film feels not as necessary or as serious in its execution.
Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania is not the worse MCU film, nor is it great. It gets the job done of entertaining us but doesn’t really use Ant-man’s shrinking premise cleverly in the plot at all.
This film feels more like a Star Wars film than an MCU film. The uniqueness of Ant-man 1 and 2 is gone with the interesting side characters and heist themes all lost in the quest for making a grand film.
Let’s get into some details without spoiling anything.
The Story:
The plot and premise of the film is extremely generic. They did not put a lot of effort into the premise of the film. Which is, ‘Scott Lang and his whole family gets sucked in the Quantum Realm by some mysterious powers’.

The Execution:
The film is full of new and weird sort of creatures and people. In that way it feels like a Guardians of the Galaxy film. There is a LOT happening visually in every frame of the film. So much so that the eye gets exhausted taking in all the new technology and creatures visible. Sometimes simple is better, but just because they can, they have gone completely overboard on the visual aspect of the quantum realm. Not to mention the MCU comedy often gets in the way of a serious or poignant scene. It’s getting difficult to take any character seriously as everyone is a quippy, sarcastic and humorous character. They really need to make films which can be grim without making jokes every 15 seconds. The jokes in this one was long overdrawn and lost it’s fun factor after 5 or so repetitions of the same sort of jokes.

The Characters:
Scott Lang’s Ant-man and Evangeline Lily’s Wasp are completely sidelined in the proceedings. With Hank and Janet both in the film, along with Scott’s daughter there are now 5 main characters to keep track of and this makes the film rather unfocussed.
Not to mention, the shrinking ability is rather useless in the film. It doesn’t play much of a significant role in the film’s plot. Because of this, both the named lead characters are now much more useless and irrelevant. Most of the major plot points are solved by fisticuffs anyway. There is never a scientific or clever solution to a problem except to use brute force.

The film’s new villain, who will be the villain in one form or another for the entirety of Phase 5 and 6 is nothing interesting as compared to Thanos. They are over using this villain and it will end up in a ‘been there done that’ sort of vibe, which the villain also gives out. He and his variants have done everything in the MCU timeline, so even if one dies, another one comes. This makes every single villain very non-significant and the film he is villainizing in, rather pointless.

Overall :
The ending act is once more a MCU typical ending with lots of things and explosions happening all over the place. This larger is better approach takes a lot of the human drama away from the film.
As an example, (no spoilers). It doesn’t matter if there is an army of 1000s fighting on the ground, its ALL noise till we have one person to focus on, someone to give drama to the scenes. (Remember Thor’s entrance in the Wakanda Battle?)

So, making a grand all in one fight like even Shang Chi had in its end becomes just a CGI fest with nothing to root for or give any sort of feeling or emotion to any scene.
The reason the CGI fest ending fight worked in Endgame is because it started small (Thor vs Thanos, then Cap joined in, then ALL the Avengers joined in. Every frame of that fight had someone’s favorite superhero punching a bad guy or doing something extremely cool.
In Ant-man 3, there is just so much cannon fodder who are dying and killing that the eye starts to wander.

Rating:
6/10.
Despite how negative my review might be, this is a fine one time watch at non premium rates. I paid premium price (Rs 600) for the FDFS Imax show and despite how good the screen quality was, it felt a little overpriced. If seen in normal 3D with a ticket price ranging from 200 to 300, this is a time pass entertainment film.
It doesn’t add much to the MCU, but it’s definitely better than Wakanda Forever. I liked Shang Chi first half a bit better, second half is about the same quality as this film. This film is slightly better than The Eternals. So, if you are an MCU fan, this is worth watching either in regular 3D or when it comes to OTT.
This is nowhere near as atrocious as Black Widow or Thor Love and Thunder (a film which made me actively grind my teeth in anger).