Ant-Man and The Wasp Quantumania Movie Review – Kang and Marvel Phase 5
You’re an interesting man. Scott Lang You’re an Avenger. Have I killed you before Welcome back, everyone. It’s Charlie. Marvel is releasing Ant-Man and the Wasp Quantumania and I had a chance to see it, so this will be my review. There’s so much we have to talk about. Make sure you go see this movie as soon as possible. Do not wait. If you felt disappointed with what Marvel was doing in Phase 4, this movie is the beginning of what everyone has been waiting for. I’m doing an IMAX ticket giveaway for the movie. All you have to
do to enter is be a subscriber. Just post your favorite moment from the trailers in the comments. And since I am posting this video a couple days before the movie comes out publicly, please don’t post spoilers on the video. Anything from the trailers they’ve released publicly is considered fair game. My full Breakdown. Easter Eggs Post-Credits Scene videos will post later this week after it comes out, but the movie is what I would consider the true beginning of the post Avengers endgame era of Marvel. Even Kevin Foggy is kind of building it that way like this.
This is the beginning of everything. The whole idea during Marvel sagas is that there’s meant to be clear villains, overarching goals that everything is building
Ant-Man doesn’t stop him, he could potentially destroy all of reality and win the Kang Multiverse War, which they set up with the events of the Loki series. So there are a lot of connections to everything in Marvel because the movie is meant to set up Avengers five, Qing Dynasty, Avengers six, Secret Wars. They pretty much everything. They’re doing during this saga of Marvel, the multiverse saga as they’re calling it, And it’s meant to be Marvel putting the smallest guy literally and metaphorically, Ant-Man against their most powerful villain, is like Leroy Jenkins, the movie The Other
Avengers. This is why you don’t try to solo The Boss through this. Well, and Marvel Phase four was mostly meant to be, then trying out totally new concepts and characters like the phase of Let’s Try a Thing. We had such a successful run with the Infinity Saga movies, Avengers, Infinity War, Avengers Endgame were so intense. Let’s just chill out for a moment and try some stuff. Cut to a couple of years later, they tried some stuff out and now it’s time to get going again. Like Marvel’s version of Get In, Losers were wrecking the multiverse.
There were a couple of solid Marvel Phase four movies like Spider-Man, No Way Home, the Shang Xi movie. A lot of stuff was solid, a lot of stuff. There’s all kinds of reasons wound up being kind of mid, though. So if you’re disappointed in a movie like Thor, Love and Thunder, which felt like it was all over the place with its comedy in its serious moments, or when it tried to be serious, Ant-Man and the wasp Quantumania is sort of the antidote to that. It’s meant to be the beginning of Marvel Phase five. It has
this propulsive force to it. Thanks mostly to the efforts of Jonathan Majors as Kang the Conqueror. There’s so much we can say about his character. He is so fantastic. He’s done a bunch of other good stuff. He’s also releasing Creed three relatively soon, and he’s going to be wrecking Michael Jordan Killmonger versus Kang, if you want to think about it that way. He’s been blowing up all over the place like he was fantastic as the he who remains version of Kang during the Loki series. He’ll also be coming back as other variants of Kang during
Loki Season two. In this movie, he is meant to be playing the worst variant of Kang the Conqueror across the entire multiverse, and it’ll remind you what it felt like seeing Thanos walk right over the Avengers during Infinity War. Like, just completely roll all over him. But what if Marvel decided to do that back during Marvel Phase one instead of just teasing Thanos? Like, what if they did a Thanos movie in phase one and just called it something else, like an Iron Man movie? All the actors were fantastic. Paul Rudd as Ant-Man has been great
in all his Marvel movies. He’s great is non Marvel movies too. It almost seems like he’s aging in reverse too. Like there’s some secrets he’s figured out that we don’t know yet. But the real star of the movie is Jonathan Majors as Kang the Conqueror, and I feel like he’s going to be the thing to turn a lot of people around on Marvel who were down on Phase four. He takes Josh Brolin’s villain performance as Thanos to a whole new level. Not only is he just amazing to watch, one of the most fun things about
him is that he plays most, if not all, of the other variants of Kang, and each one is meant to have a very distinct vibe and personality. Really good example. That is, during the Loki series, he’s playing more of like a Willy Wonka crazy version of the character. In this movie. Kang is meant to be just like a full blown Thanos level villain version of the character. One of the big things that sets him apart from Thanos, that makes him feel so different as a villain is that he is as much at war with other
variants of himself, like he’s very literally and metaphorically at war with himself as much as he’s at war with the other Avengers like he’ll do for what they all do together after a while where Thanos only really cared about The Avengers. So Kang in this movie hates the other variants of Kang almost as much, if not more, than he hates all the other versions of The Avengers from different universes. Taking the concept of self-loathing to a whole new level, we’ll continue to see many other variants. Like I said, during Loki season two other Marvel movies
and theories. Kevin Foggy said one of the reasons why they cast Jonathan Majors and particularly to play this character, is because he could pull off all the different versions and make them feel so distinct. He said. His performance in this movie as this Kang is mostly inspired by Julius Caesar, Alexander the Great, Genghis Khan, Napoleon in Exile, because we’re talking about him being trapped in the quantum realm, great rulers, conquerors, each in their own right. To some people, they were heroes. To some people they were also monsters. He really tows the line in this movie,
but they do want to remind you. No, no, he is actually a villain. Marvel started to get a lot better with the way it writes its villains to remember all the Thanos was right. Memes after Avengers, Infinity War in Avengers Endgame. The whole idea with the best Marvel villains is that even if you condemn what they’re doing, like erasing half of all life in the universe, you only understand where they’re coming from and see their point. Like, terrible person has said something that you agree with. Technically, you’re trying to help the universe survive, but you
are definitely a monster. It’s the same vibe with this Kang the Conqueror. Marvel wanted to establish their new Thanos level overarching villain. That’s who he’s meant to be like the villain of the MCU. Now, even though we’re talking about the multiverse, I still use the term MCU. You should really think of it as the Marvel Cinematic Multiverse because of what’s happening with Spider-Man, No Way Home, and all the other Fox Marvel movies being canonized to the MCU. They do a good job in this movie of making you understand why he would want to win the
Kane Multiverse war and kill all the other kangs, erase all the other timelines but his own. They do a good job of getting you to root for the character like you will be cheering for Kane to do Terrible things, even though they are definitely terrible things. They get just you wait. After Avengers five Qing Dynasty people will be saying Kang was right, and ultimately I think he’s going to come off being a better character than Thanos was. Like Thanos great villain in the MCU. Great characterization. I think Kang will be even better than that. Even
though a lot of the movie is dedicated to setting up Avengers five Qing Dynasty, Avengers six Secret Wars, it didn’t suffer from the classic Iron Man two problems where Marvel used to get criticized for hijacking their movies, turning them into glorified teasers for other spinoffs and future movies. It still felt very much like an Ant-Man movie, which is a lot of larger Avengers level stuff going on in it. The director, Peyton Reed, even said that we wanted this to feel like a big Avengers level event. Paul Rudd did a fantastic job, as he always does,
balancing comedic moments with the really hard drama. Really good example of that is this scene here from the trailers. I’m an Avenger, but everywhere I go, people ask me the same thing. How many holes do you have? Seven holes. Oh, and everywhere I go, people tell me the same thing. Thank you, Spider-Man. At the core of the movie, it’s all about his relationship with his daughter Cassie, and what he’s willing to do for her next to Kang. I would say Cassie Lang is probably one of the biggest newer characters that Marvel reintroduces in a bigger
way, not only because they recast the actress from Avengers Endgame, Emma Furman with Kathryn Newton. They pulled an Iron Man two like they did with Rhodey, recasting him with Don Cheadle. There’s no multiverse trickery going on there. It’s just a simple recasting. They also gave Cassie Lang a huge upgrade, just in terms of her role in the larger MCU. She’s meant to be the Stinger version of the character from the comics in a lot of her arc in the movie. It’s meant to set up Young Avengers. I don’t know if Marvel plans on doing that
as a Disney Plus series or a movie, but you probably notice them slowly setting up the young Avengers with all the different comic book characters that were on that original roster. Kathryn Newton did a great job. She’s meant to feel like a chip off the old block, so her personality is very similar to Scott Lang’s. She’s meant to be a budding engineer like he is too. If you didn’t remember, Scott Lang is an engineer. He’s meant to be really smart. They just usually use him for comedy in like her father. She gets into trouble all
of the time, causing a lot of the problems that they had to solve in the movie and that she’ll continue to have to solve in future Marvel movies and series. We call that a Spider-Man problem. Wouldn’t be Spider-Man movies if he didn’t cause all the problems that he has to fix during his movies. Did it work? No. Pretty much all the other main characters had way more to do than they did in previous movies. Like everyone gets way more action Scenes, even Hank Pym and Janet Van Dyne in for a long time comic book. Fans
of the wasp, Michelle Pfeiffer steals a lot of this movie as Jennifer. And not only is she just fantastic actress The wasp also a really cool character. I still think that Jonathan Majors is probably the best in the movie as his version of Kang, but Michelle Pfeiffer comes pretty close. There’s so much new law in Easter eggs in the comics because a lot of the movie does take place in the quantum realm, and they treat it like this whole alternate universe that we’ve never really seen before in detail, and they just barely get into it.
The vibe is a little bit like, Honey, I shrunk the Kids mixed with Alice in Wonderland in a Wizard of Oz, with Kang being the Wizard in that first trailer. They even use Elton John’s Goodbye Yellow Brick Road. And one of the other things I really loved about the movie is that it wasn’t afraid to get super weird in comic book. We like super deep cuts. We’re talking modok They weren’t afraid to go there where normal movies would just avoid doing a character like that. And I feel like they pulled that character off pretty well.
Just in terms of the pace of the actual movie, The first act takes a little while to get going. They spend a lot of time catching you up with what’s happened to Ant-Man, the other since Avengers Endgame. He’s basically leveraged his celebrity from endgame, saving the world. It’s become public knowledge, like most people around the world know what the Avengers did, and he’s been able to use that to earn a lot of money. Like he’s written this book, Look out for the little guy. They use that for a lot of comedy early on in the
film. Also, the idea that even though he’s earned a lot of money, most people don’t really care about him because he’s such a small, metaphorical, literal character, like the old man confusing him for Spider-Man just because Spider-Man is so much more popular in real life and in the MCU. A lot of those funny moments, too, like taking the piss out of the character, is meant to set up the stakes for the rest of the film. Explain why he’s literally, metaphorically, the smallest avenger facing the biggest villain. Kang He’s like the Leroy Jenkins of the MCU
in this movie. The original score, the music was great. I love Kane’s theme music. I hope Marvel uses some of it again when we see other Kang variants and Loki season two other Marvel movies like Each Kang Variant has similar sounding theme music, but each is a little different just to suit their alternate personalities. Generally, the movie is going to be a breath of fresh air. For those of you that are wanting Marvel to show some real direction in their movies, an overarching plot like Yay, Finally things are getting started. Things are actually happening. This
is the true beginning of this next Avengers saga and you will be cheering for Kang and all the other Kang variants to just continue wrecking the MCU in the biggest possible way. Like I cannot wait to see the mess that they’re going to make of the MCU the next couple of years. It does feel like a lot of the overall Marvel hype will come back heading into Avengers five and Avengers six after this. The same way that that first Iron Man movie was so solid, did such a good job of hyping people up for the
first Avengers movie. There are two post-credits scenes Do stay after the credits, just like a normal Marvel movie. They’re both great and I will do a full Post-Credits scene video later this week and a full breakdown and Easter eggs for the entire movie. Because there is so much stuff to talk about. There are so many cool Easter eggs in here. Like I said, it doesn’t overburden the movie though. Do not wait to go see it. And once you do have a chance to see it, post your reactions in the comments and please don’t post spoilers
or at least anything that wasn’t in the trailers. We’ll get into all that in my full videos later this weekend. I’m still in the middle of working on a bunch of Super Bowl trailers because there were so many. I’ll post those as soon as possible. The next one should be my Mandalorian Season three trailer video and that will be like the next big series that I do. Episode videos for everyone. Click here for my Guardians of the Galaxy Super Bowl trailer video and click here for my flash trailer video. Thank you so much for watching.
Everyone stay safe and I’ll see you guys in the next one.
