Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania (3 Stars)

I'm writing this review with a heavy heart. After the last few disappointing films in the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU), I expected "Quantumania" to turn things around. After all, the last two Ant-Man films were brilliant. I was excited as soon as I saw the posters hanging at my local cinema. Strangely, no trailers were shown in the months leading up to the release.

It's interesting to see Kang the Conqueror appear in the Quantum Realm. It's a strange place to find him, but the story is that he's been exiled by the other multiversal Kangs who consider him a threat. Couldn't they just have killed him? They should have known that any of their alternate selves would be ingenious enough to escape. Kang's skin colour is wrong, but racial mistakes are something I've grown used to in Marvel films. It's more important to have racial diversity than to make good films.

Kang's history is confused, even in the comics, due to different writers adding their own details over the years. When Kang first appeared in Avengers #8 he was a super-villain from the future. He was born in the 30th Century, but he travelled into the past to become the pharaoh Rama-Tut, and then he travelled to the 40th Century, where he conquered the Earth. He became obsessed with wanting to conquer Earth in the 20th Century, foolishly forgetting the temporal paradoxes that would happen if he succeeded. Even so, as future writers showed us, every time he travelled into the past he made changes that created new branches in the timelines; i.e. Kang himself became the creator of most of the alternate universes in the multiverse.

The Kangs from different branches of the multiverse came together to form a council. Some of the Kangs are considered inferior and destroyed. Kang in the MCU is being built up to be a big bad villain more powerful than Thanos. That makes me groan. In the comics Thanos is more powerful than Kang even without the Infinity Gauntlet. It's a problem that the MCU has to deal with. Now that Thanos is gone, a bigger threat is needed to keep the viewers entertained. Then a bigger threat, and an even bigger threat, etc. The MCU can't return to simple villains like Doctor Octopus and the Kingpin. I was annoyed that the Loki TV series belittled the infinity gems, saying that the Time Variance Authority used them as paperweights. 

And what about MODOK? He's a perfect example of the MCU's mix and match approach to making films. He was shown in Tales of Suspense #94 as the leader of AIM. The MCU has made him Kang's creation. I'm clenching my fists in rage.

The Quantum Realm is the name given to the Marvel Comics microverse, where the ruler is the Psycho-Man. Okay, I admit that he has a silly name. I've never claimed that Marvel Comics were perfect, and even the great Stan Lee had his off days. Sometimes he didn't think far enough about the logical consequences of his stories. Writers in the following decades tried to make changes to correct his errors, but they usually made things worse.

"Quantumania" isn't the MCU's worst film. That honour is reserved for "The Eternals". But it's the MCU film that has disappointed me the most. It could have been so good, but the end result is average at best. I doubt the MCU will ever get any better.