Rating: 6/10

*Editor’s  note: Spoilers ahead*

“Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania” was supposed to be the launching point for the next big phase of Marvel, but I do not think it did a good job in doing so. 

I watched the third installment of the “Ant-Man” series on opening night at the theater. The atmosphere in theaters on opening night for every Marvel movie is pretty fun, there is usually a full house of college students, which is always a good time. 

I walked out of the movie fairly disappointed by what I had just watched. It felt exactly like every other Marvel movie that has come out in the past four or five years. 

The plot is fairly predictable: a new big bad guy seems super powerful but is eventually overwhelmed by the hero and their rag-tag group of friends that they found along the way. 

All of the actors were pretty good, Jonathan Majors was a good rendition of Kang, who will serve as the next “Thanos” equivalent of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Paul Rudd is pretty funny as usual and Michele Pfeiffer is a pretty legendary actress. 

One of my biggest gripes about “Quantumania” was the introductory portion of the movie. The conflict starts seemingly out of nowhere about five minutes in. It felt a bit rushed and there was no real character development at all. 

Another disappointing part about the movie was the apparent lack of risk that Kang had to offer. There have been a lot of rumblings about Kang and the multiverse but there did not seem to be anything threatening in this movie.

It was kind of hard to follow what was going on, besides that Kang had to escape the Quantum Realm for a reason that didn’t really make a whole lot of sense. 

Kang had amassed an army to do … something? Invade someplace? His end goal was unclear, though much of his motives are somewhat revealed in loki. However that is another rabbit hole to fall down where you have to watch a whole show just to understand one movie.

Okay, enough with the complaints, there were some pretty fun parts of the movie. 

While his character, Lady Krylar, did not end up being a super important part of the plot, it’s always fun to see Bill Murray pop up and make cameos in random movies. 

Also, M.O.D.O.K. (Mechanized Organism Designed Only for Killing) was a fun breath of fresh air in what was otherwise a pretty mundane movie. M.O.D.O.K. was a funnily terrifying being that added some comic relief. 

While I know the movie is called “Ant-Man,” I feel like the ants always bail out the seemingly doomed heroes at the end of the movie. There is just so much pressure on the little guys.

The ending was pretty disappointing as well with Kang’s death, although I would bet that Marvel is going to pull the “Whoops! The villain didn’t actually die!” card and have this movie’s variant of Kang pop up somewhere else. 

The “Star Wars” franchise uses similar tropes and it is pretty frustrating to see that no characters are safe from making a corny return. 

Marvel is well-known for the post-credit scenes, and “Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania” is no exception. This one was pretty weird, there were like 500 different versions of Kang in a coliseum talking about how the most prominently featured Kang was killed (It’s confusing, I know. I’m right there with ya.). 

Overall, this is definitely one of the lower-ranked movies for me in the MCU. I am growing tired of Marvel producing the same movie with different actors. Hopefully, they can mix up the storytelling to keep the audience interested!