Quantumania Spoiler Thread

This topic has 7 replies, 6 voices, and was last updated 1 year, 10 months ago by garjones.

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Topic

Moderator

February 14, 2023 at 10:22 pm #105979

Out this week.

Reviews are very mixed so far. Currently at 56% on Rotten Tomatoes, and the early reviews on these movies tend to be the most generous.

Viewing 7 replies - 1 through 7 (of 7 total)

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Martin Smith
Participant

February 17, 2023 at 3:59 pm #106045

Just back from this. I enjoyed it. I can see why people down on Marvel may not (even before you factor in that people tend to be sniffy about Ant-Man films). I thought Jonathan Majors did well as Kang, both here and in terms of differentiating him from Immortus in Loki. I thought they made MODOK work too, which is not something I ever expected the MCU to touch.

A few jokes don’t work, Hope doesn’t quite have enough to do and there’s one moment in particular where they don’t give enough scale reference for people being big to have any weight, so to speak (which is odd, because other moments work really well), but those are minor quibbles for me.

Oh and I was pleasantly surprised to find I’d managed to go in almost completely unspoilt. Didn’t watch the trailer, successfully muted everything. I think the most I knew was that Kang was in it and Cassie had a suit. I thought a Marvel Legend listing I saw yesterday for “future Ant-Man” had revealed something, but I guess that was a comic figure. I suppose that speaks to lower hype/interest, but that’s fine with me.

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njerry
paul f
Moderator

February 17, 2023 at 9:01 pm #106054

I was mostly disappointed. There’s never any real sense of what the stakes are, the characters are just trying to reunite, and don’t have too much trouble doing it. Kang’s plan doesn’t have much to it either. The heist scene with all the Rudds didn’t work for me, and I don’t ever believe that Kang wouldn’t have found some way to retrieve his macguffin in the decades he was there, given all his technology and people working for him.

Majors was good, even if he didn’t really fit the tone of the movie. He’s very serious, and it weighed everything down a bit. I hope some of his variants are less speechy.

I have even less of an idea of the scale and geography of the Quantum Realm after this movie. Janet seemed to have been alone for years before meeting Kang, and never met anyone else in that time, but then spent the rest of her time there getting to know everyone in the universe? I also hated the look of everything there, it just looked needlessly expensive and nothing feels tangible. When the characters grow to giant-size it’s hard to tell because there’s no scale for anything.

The Bill Murray scene was awful. I imagine they would have dumped it if they hadn’t advertised Murray being in the movie; I assume he was supposed to come back later in the film and they cut it.

Hate the trope of the heroes coming in and managing to topple a massive regime in a few hours when the rebellions against him have failed for decades. There also only seemed to be about a dozen rebels, and they’re the people Scott and Cassie first meet? The rebel leader was very by-the-numbers, and William Jackson Harper was wasted.

Hope gets so little to do, even compared to the other movies. She and Scott don’t even feel like a couple; it’s more like they’re brother and sister, given how he and Cassie have more of a relationship with her parents than with her. I don’t get why it wasn’t her project to scan the Quantum Realm, given it makes absolutely no sense for Cassie.

MODOK was fun enough, and got more laughs than anything else. I was spoiled on it, but it was nice to see Stoll enjoying himself.

I’d be surprised if there’s more standalone Ant-Man movies after this, and I don’t need there to be.
garjones
Keymaster

February 18, 2023 at 2:08 pm #106070

I’m closer to Martin. It’s an enjoyable mid level Marvel film and I don’t quite get the RT score being the lowest behind Eternals. It’s a lot better than something like Thor 2.

The Kang stuff is fun for the nerds and I don’t particularly mind the ‘setup’ nature of it, Marvel films being a longform narrative is more the way now and building him up for the later Avengers movies should pay off.

I do agree with the criticism on the scale thing though, particularly when Scott is first revealed in Mega Giant Man mode there is no context initially which blunts the impact, we only see it later when he’s knocking down buildings.

Hope had more to do than appeared in the trailer but it’s also fair to say that she is behind Cassie and even Janet in importance. Pondering it though I don’t really care, she’s never been a very interesting character.
Todd
Participant

February 19, 2023 at 12:41 am #106100

I enjoyed it way more than I was expecting to.

It was the most visually interesting movie I have seen in a long time. The Quantum Realm looked truly alien and surreal. The only visual “miss” for me was unmasked MODOK. He looked like a badly done effect from the 1970s. Other than that, everything looked fantastic.

The story moved at a brisk pace and I never felt bored or impatient. The performances were also quite good.

I will say I’ve enjoyed the previous Ant-Man movies. They were enjoyable, fun, and entertaining. Nothing profound, just fun. This was in the same class.

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garjones, Martin Smith, njerry
Christian
Participant

February 26, 2023 at 2:17 pm #106257

I did like it less than the first two Ant-Man movies, and the second one was already diminishing returns, so…
Look, you don’t do an Ant-Man movie without Luis, is the main thing here, okay? Whoever greenlit that must’ve been on crack. Luis is what made those movies shine, and not including him would clearly knock any attempt at making a good movie down a tier or two.

Other than that… all the elements for an enjoyable movie were there, but it just didn’t quite work. The dialogue wasn’t sharp enough (and sometimes downright dumb), the plot was too predictable, the daugher-father conflict just being tired and the same as in a thousand other stories, Janet refusing to tell the others what the fuck is going on for ages without any reason whatsoever, and there were too many elements that were just thrown in pretty randomly (Darren, sci-fi ant civilisation, Bill Murray)… even the editing seemed sloppy at times. Some of the stuff that was supposed to be funny worked, some fell flat, some was just all-out what-the-fuck weirdness (a lot of MODOK moments).

It was still entertaining enough, I wasn’t bored or anything. And Paul Rudd did fine. But it was another pretty weak Marvel movie all things considered, and I am not sure how many more of those they should allow themselves, especially now that the DCU is shaping up to become an actual rival.

Speaking of which, let’s hope Guardians 3 at least holds up.

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Rocket
Ben
Participant

May 29, 2023 at 5:18 pm #109465

From the way the discourse is around this film I was expecting far more of a dud. It’s far from that, it’s pretty much your standard Marvel product of a fun way to spend a couple of hours.

It was also more ambitious than I expected. As a start of phase film, a certain amount of set-up is on the cards but this only really did that to a minimal degree. Instead of Kang escaping, he gets taken out and the other Kangs notice it. I doubt that will play out as anything other than messy, dictators don’t work well together.

It also manages to make the more obscure Marvel characters work, which Kang is, and MODOK definitely is.

I also liked that they didn’t go with Kang fooling Scott, instead opting for coercion from the off.

Ok, onto Guardians 3 in probably three months time or thereabouts.
garjones
Keymaster

May 29, 2023 at 5:39 pm #109468

Ben wrote:

It’s far from that, it’s pretty much your standard Marvel product of a fun way to spend a couple of hours.

Yeah it is pretty much.

I think, not unfairly in some respects, there is a reaction to a lot of whatever phase of MCU this is right now being a step down in quality and stakes from the previous one, which in some ways is kind of inevitable. Comics have the same issue as they tend to narratively build to a crescendo.

Ant-Man 3 is fine, could have been better but not bad at all. Guardians 3 is one to look forward to.

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Ben