The first MCU film I remember seeing on the big screen and adoring was, believe it or not, Ant-Man. I fell in love with this genuine character, his relatable flaws, his quirky superpower, his silly action scenes, and his wholesome dynamic with his daughter. I thought it was all just deeply enjoyable and left the theater with a huge smile on my smile.

These days, the MCU has become too massive for its own good.  Each film these days attempts to one-up itself stakes-wise, going from threats to the world to threats to the universe, and now, to threats to the multiverse. But the thing that made Ant-Man one of my favorite MCU flicks was how small-scale it was. It weirdly felt grounded in reality in a way other MCU movies weren’t, and the fight scenes were just plain fun. I mean, come on! You’ve got this tiny, ant-sized guy just demolishing people. What’s not to love? So when I heard Ant-Man’s third film would be introducing the villain that might define Phase 5, I was nervous. I didn’t want Ant-Man to be some all-important superhero! He was just the guy who could get really small! And unfortunately, my skepticism about this film was justified. Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania is a boring sludge of a film that took everything that made the first film entertaining (though admittedly not groundbreaking) and decided that combining it with ultra-high stakes was the best idea ever. Spoiler alert: it was not.

The biggest issue with this film is the script. Don’t get me wrong, the biggest issue with most MCU projects these days is the script. However, the cliché cheese factor present in every MCU film was turned up to 19 for this bad boy. I swear, every other line each character says was ripped straight from some terrible Hallmark or Netflix movie everyone forgot about the day after they saw it. It’s serviceable, sure, but it just feels so aggravatingly lazy. The jokes are mostly pretty terrible, since I think jokes are supposed to have punchlines or at least be amusing (neither of which describe any attempts at humor this film makes). The character writing is also abysmal, as no one is fleshed out or grows throughout the film. In particular, Kang is so underwritten that not even Jonathan Majors can save him from being terrible. This is the villain that’s defining Phase 5? Yikes. Maybe his character writing gets redeemed like Thanos’s, but I stopped having hope for the MCU a long time ago. 

This movie is also so uninteresting to look at. The quantum realm feels exceptionally boring, and every design in it feels like someone closed their eyes, made a random doodle, and decided that was enough. No shade to the VFX people or the production designers or anyone involved in its creation, as I’m sure they were overburdened and did not have much to work with! Alas, it’s still such a shame that a concept that sounds cool on paper is so lazily developed visually. Additionally, the color palette is incredibly bland. The fight scenes are CGI monstrosities that are so over-edited that I stopped paying attention to them at some point. Though, if I’m being honest, I didn’t exactly care about the film when there weren’t fight scenes. It’s just a nothing burger of a movie.

I shouldn’t be putting so much thought into an Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania review, a film that will probably be forgotten in about a month, even by MCU fans. Nonetheless, I’m deeply tired that MCU films can be so fundamentally lacking in any sort of creative vision and then still make hundreds of millions of dollars. I know that films like this “need to come out” so that theaters stay alive and can afford to show smaller films, but my gosh. Could these people at least TRY to make an original movie?

Babylon deserved so much better.

2.5/10