It finally happened: we somehow missed an MCU release 😔 And to make matters worse, the one we missed was actually really good fun and would have definitely benefitted from the cinema experience! Ah well, at least that means I'm okay catching it as a repeat in the future, if the opportunity arises.
Because yeah, Quantumania (love that they hit "ant man" in that title 😂) was a lot of fun. It has some slightly odd moments, mainly around M.O.D.O.K – though overall I thought they actually wove this character into the story really well, given everything about him – but I really enjoyed how they used Kang; I thought the family dynamic was good fun; there were some great jokes; the ant army moment was delightfully ridiculous; and the general design of the Quantum Realm (and its inhabitants) was beautiful. Strong overtones of Strangeworld, but I can forgive that, given that the source material has lot of similarities, chiefly "small things, now big", and because where it felt genuinely original it really felt original. The light-beam golem creature? The weird metal-faced people? The glowing gas cloud-headed race? All very cool. I'll even forgive the talking amoeba (and the deus ex babel-juice) for being a verbal Splat purely because of the "I have holes!" moment, which was a perfectly Antman payoff.
So the movie is visually stunning, introduces its new characters well, develops the existing characters nicely, and has a lot of fun in the doing of all of that. Did I need to see M.O.D.O.K's butt? Did I need our new heroine to give a stilted speech about not being a dick (a rare moment where she wasn't generally great)? Did the audience really need the extended flashback to the first film to explain how M.O.D.O.K ended up here? Okay, maybe that last one worked. And was Bill Murray's cameo a bit of a waste? Sure. Could they have done a little bit more foreshadowing with the Ant race? Definitely. Do we still need the discount Edgar Wright moments? Not really. But these are all minor gripes. It made me laugh, it made me care, and (probably most importantly) it made me give a bit more of a damn about Kang. The Loki teaser at the end is just the cherry on top of that particular pie. I'm finally intrigued where this arc of the MCU is actually going.