Quantumania is COVID Filmmaking At Its Worst

when coveted lockdowns hit the United States in early 2020 many industries were hit hard and among them was the Disney Dream Machine the way movies were being made and consumed was being changed for the better part of two years if not forever Marvel Studios was at its height just before the start of the pandemic they were Fresh Off in-game in 2019 which became the highest grossing film of all time people were wondering how or if they could ever top it and that's when the pandemic brought everything grinding to a halt slowing and complicating production and hitting the box office hard this impact can be seen across all of phase four from Black Widow having a day-and-day release on Disney plus causing actress Scarlett Johansson to threaten to sue Disney for loss of box office royalties or maybe another example is the generic third acts of many of the pandemic films with rumors attributing this to the finales being worked on before even having a locked script or sometimes even a director this resulted in conclusions that feel out of tone in style from the rest of the film as can be seen as Shang Chi's out of nowhere where Kaiju conclusion to what is mostly a martial arts movie up until that point or maybe black widow's more grounded spy Thriller having this bizarre overblown fight on this Flying Fortress that just came out of nowhere one could blame a general dip in quality of the post-in-game films to covet issues but that may be giving them maybe too much leeway however I don't think any film shows the issues of covid filmmaking quite like Ant-Man and the WASP quantumania now the Ant-Man franchise was never the most prestigious in the MCU but those films had their place as these fun light-hearted comedy romps between the big events that served as something of a palette cleanser the first few minutes of this film recaptures that tone again nicely but quickly falls into kind of this mess of CGI Corner cutting in his third film Peyton Reed is trying for something bigger more expansive to give Ant-Man his own big event film comparable to something like Iron Man Thor or Captain America yet despite those race Stakes quantumania still tries to hold on to a sense of comedic fun as hit and miss as this franchise can often be with that it certainly is ambitious and I can respect that ambition probably more than I respected the last movie in the franchise which played it very very safe that second entry kind of just spent most of its time cracking jokes between a game of hot potato with a shrunken lab as a film shot during covid though Reed's attempts to grow this franchise Beyond its quaint comedic Roots may have been ill times the movie follows Ant-Man who has been slacking on his hero duties in favor of writing his own puff piece biographies when his daughter Cassie unintentionally sends signals to the warlord Kang in the quantum realm they are shrunk it down and pulled into his world Kang attempts to coerce the family into freeing him from the quantum realm so he can then continue his War across the Multiverse They Don't Really spend much time getting to the meat of the story and are rushed into the quantum realm within the first 10 minutes or so of the movie and this is where the covet filmmaking style becomes blatantly apparent everything and I mean everything seems to be shot on a small Sound Stage where the actors stiffly stand on their marks and read their lines blocking in General on these Hollywood CGI heavy films has been taking a hit in the recent years for a while but here I think we're starting to see it get a little ridiculous I read reports that this film was made using the mandalorians volume but where that show manages to create a great illusion of space and setting here it just looks like the actors are on this limited Warehouse Panorama and told to stand perfectly still and just stare up with their mouths open so that they don't do anything to make the effects artist job more difficult than it already is and the biggest issue is once I noticed it it was all I could see it's seeing the man behind the curtain in every single set piece as a result Quantum media's narrative it goes in this repetitive series of events stand and listen to Exposition tell a joke run from blob of CGI and repeat if I was to Hazard a guess the actors are not really given the proper space or knowledge to interact with their environment or even know what it is they should be reacting to so I find it questionable how much they were actually using the volume compared to just regular green screen as the actors seem to have almost no clue what they're looking at half the time and this is a common problem for Marvel movies they have a history of not having pre-visualization done before the cameras even start rolling let alone have it done in time to be used as the backdrop in the volume and maybe I'm not giving them enough credit even if it was done I'm not sure how these actors would have reacted to the shapeless blob that is the CGI in the quantum rail which lacks any real cohesive and distinguishing Vision but poor design work in lackluster visual effects aside it is the Sound Stage feel that plagues this entire movie it reminds me of watching like a cheap episode of Doctor Who but where that show its cheapness is sort of part of its charm here Disney has all the money in the world and not really any excuse why is every scene comprised of an actor walking into a very cheap confined and min minimalist set with bad costumes and slightly out of focus CGI panoramas that tries to convince you that it's any bigger than say my living room additional covid restrictions made it harder to shoot with large crowds in these bigger films and Blockbusters you could even see it on smaller TV shows such as the Umbrella Academy which really had to kind of shrink stuff down and make stuff really confined but not being able to shoot in large crowds could explain why the extras in this film were so sparse when they were actually you know rarely played by a physical actor most scenes seem really dedicated to trying to keep four people in the room at a given time breaking up the cast into these easy bite-sized chunks it even goes as far as to send the wasp and her parents on this pointless side quest that could be entirely cut out of the movie and lose nothing poor Evangeline Lily is given very little to work with here and it makes you question why her characters even in the title or frankly in the film at all with how restrictive and crappy this sets look it seems like this was a very very clear choice like they wanted to be able to make an entire Blockbuster on the green screen and avoid any pandemic era complications or any on location shooting this may have been a good idea at the time but we are now leaving the pandemic era slowly hopefully let's not jinx it it's going to be really clear Which films had these huge restrictions put on them that forced them to be almost in this bottle and self-contained and the results are a world that never really feels tangible like something you could reach out and touch it sucks the soul right out of the film to the extent that even Paul Red's lovable goofy grin it can't Elevate the pure laziness of it this leaves only Marvel's most cynical and formulaic elements at the Forefront but I don't want to see mine being too hard on it there are some good things here the cast is doing the best with what they are given even if the WASP is pushed to the side and Cassie unfortunately ends up being really underdeveloped and sort of bland meanwhile Modoc is reduced to nothing more than kind of one of the worst effects I've seen in a really long time and nothing more than a butt of a joke that frankly just keeps repeating itself and isn't really all that funny but again it sounds like I'm being a Negative Nancy I back to the good stuff let's look at the real big positive here Jonathan Majors as Kang carries this film every scene he is in is elevated as he's the only one who really gets to approach this material with some sort of Gravitas and the movie does a good job with his origin story almost to the detriment of everything else as much of the second act is very Kang focused and I'm not going to complain about that that much because this is the best part of the movie so far be it for me to tell them to get rid of that but I will say that sometimes his more heavy scenes conflict with the more jokey tone of the rest of the film yet it still is effective as a setup for the new Big Bad of the MCU and if nothing else I'm looking forward to Majors return in future projects and I am avoiding big spoilers for this review and I'm not going to get into any kind of specifics just to let you know but the third act does look like everything was generated in a computer because of course it was but the big problem is at this point they completely even gave up with minimal sets this is just complete computer generated eye gouging imagery that's very hard to follow and everything is boring because nothing really looks real or convincing so the stakes really don't translate that well add in a deus ex machina from the ants I think the film kind of forgot about them up until this point and it seems like another case of Black Widow and Shang CHI with Marvel going for this overblown spectacle when the fight between two normal humans just sort of you know punching each other out is far more interesting why because it has Stakes we can understand and it looks real and tangible it is actually making use of space and practical sets and its environment this is what it comes down to for me you can make a very CGI or entirely CGI movie look good the way water came out late last year and that world felt really real and lived in because the characters were all well blocked and interacted in the world as if it were real their reactions felt authentic quantumania ain't no way of water here scenes are so poorly planned out and static as if they expected the overworked CGI artist to do all the heavy lifting and make things interesting after the fact and they're trying their hardest here this is especially damning when the previous previous films in the Ant-Man series were all about utilizing the space with the shrinking and growing scenes playing off the real world environment but here in this Quantum realm there are few to no real world elements to act as a point of reference for how big or small they really are it all looks the same there is one point of the film where two giant characters run up to one another and give each other a hug and it took me a moment to remember they were giant because my brain had already frankly turned out the noise and couldn't instantly connect the visual dots now my hope is that this is the end of the line for this sort of stuff covered restrictions are pretty well lifted at this point and with luck this is the last really lazy entry from the MCU and they are now freed up to go back to form one can only hope because if the studio carries on this way I'm not sure how much longer I could stand watching something this visually exhausting but those are my thoughts on Ant-Man and the WASP quantumania if you enjoyed this please like And subscribe until next time keep those reels turning thanks thank you

Channel: A Journey Through Cinema

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Keywords: Quantumania, Review, Video Essay, Ant-Man and the Wasp, quantumania worst movie, quantumania worst cgi, quantumania worst marvel, antman adn wasp quantumania worst

Id: FfVHyL_0tQQ

Length: 10min 38sec (638 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 03 2023