Quantumania reminds me of The Dark World...

tl;dr -- it has the wrong plot for its characters (or the wrong characters for its plot)

slightly longer tl;dr -- the need to give all five (well, not so much Hope) Lang/Pyms stuff to do, gets in the way of the "rebellion against Kang" story idea, but "rebellion against Kang" is a strange follow up to the personal, almost family drama, stylings of AM and AMatW (especially given Cassie and Kang literally have comics history to draw on that could easily fit an AM/AMatW style film)

Full post below the line:

---

Quantumania is a weird film, right?

It's a story about stopping a time travelling bad guy where the bad guy doesn't time travel. Not even once. That's weird.

Or maybe it's a story about a revolution against a foreign tyrant... which takes place almost entirely from the perspective of other foreign travellers. That is also weird.

Neither Kang nor the Pym/Langs make sense in Quantumania. It's fundamentally weird that the story that Quantumania has involves any of these characters.

The way I see it is this... if the film is meant to be about Scott Lang's participation in a rebellion against Kang, then neither Hank nor Janet should be important characters in the film. Instead, the basic arc of the story should be something like:

1. Cassie does something reckless and gets trapped/teleported etc
2. Scott recklessly follows her and Hope follows him
3. Due to quantum, when Hope arrives even Scott's been in the Quantum Realm for a while and he stops her being captured
4. Cassie's been a prisoner/slave for some time
5. Scott & Hope try to rescue Cassie, but Cassie's learning about Kang's tyranny from the perspective of the indigenous population
6. Cassie refuses to leave without helping the rebellion succeed

There are some similarities to Thor: Ragnarok's Sakaar section there, which might be why they didn't play it that way.

Alternatively, if the film is meant to be about Kang, then the story should focus on Iron Lad and be set almost entirely on Earth, presenting itself something like a "dad is suspicious of sketchy boyfriend" film, which helps daughter and step-mother grow closer, while drawing a parallel between Scott and Hank. The twist for comics fans is that Iron Lad actually is evil.

There are many similarities between that movie and the first two Ant Man films which were by far the least financially successful MCU films post-Avengers and pre-Covid. So, that might be why it wasn't played that way.

Quantumania reminds me of Thor: the Dark World because it seems to me that both films have mismatched casts and plots. With TDW I definitely think the problem is trying to keep Selvig and Darcy around, but I'm honestly not sure if Qmania would've made more sense changing the plot to fit the characters (making for a film in keeping with the previous two) or changing the characters to fit the plot (a la what I'd do to fix TDW).

submitted by /u/FrameworkisDigimon
[link] [comments]