Some thoughts I have about Ant-Man Quantumania, where it went wrong, and how to fix it / avoid the same pitfalls in future movies.
[] The socialist ants at the end of the movie would've been better received if their only mention before it happened wasn't 2 sentences at the 11 minute mark at the beginning of the movie.
[] "Show, don't tell" is a common saying in movies, but Ant-Man Quantumania didn't show, didn't tell. 45 minutes in, and all we know about the main antagonist is he is called "The Conqueror." This was definitely a movie for people who follow every bit of news and rumours about the movie, not average movie goers. When we finally meet him, we're (Ant-Man & Co.) not fighting him, we're not running away from him, we're helping him cus he threatened us. This is terrible, cus our first impression of Kang on the big screen is him needing the help of our heroes. First impressions matter so much.
[] Just cus you're using The Volume when filming, doesn't mean you need to constantly fit everyone into the screen and show their feet is connected to the floor as much as possible. The sets are always flat, and its very easy to see where it ends and where The Volume begins cus you can tell where all the actors avoid standing. It's distracting. Just use traditional camera angles, stop forcing full body shots.
[] Political messaging should be more subtle, cus otherwise you're reminding us this is written by people from our world, with our problems, and it breaks immersion. Political messaging and agendas has always been part of media, stop treating your audience like idiots, let the message play through the actions of the characters, not forced dialogues. This just shows how little thought you put into the story and how your political view is actually related to it. If you need to spell it out for the audience, it wasn't clear/a strong enough metaphor enough to begin with. If your movie's plot was never a good metaphor for your political agenda, then shoehorning your message in will only annoy people who didn't agree with you in the first place, and make people who agree with you cringe.
[] On the topic of spelling things out for the audience, this point should be applied to all MCU films. Your audience is not stupid, stop adding lines like "She's disappointed in you" (when Casey was disappointed in Scott Lang for not wanting to help the Quantum people,) we can see that for ourselves. It's like you don't trust your storytelling or your actor's ability to communicate with to the audience their feelings. Why did you even hire them, then? [Another example of this type of stupid movie lines was from a different film, Wakanda Forever, where Riri asked Shuri how we'd know if she succeeded in recreating the herb, and she replied "if it glows." Please. We're not stupid. You can cut that out, and from their reaction alone, we can figure out that it worked. Trust your actors, trust the audience!!!
[] There was a scene where Hank met Modok, and said "Darrek?" Modok immediately responded with "I AM MODOK!!!!" Absolutely not. That is not how you write those type of scenes. You destroyed any sense of tension from thay interaction. Usually when you film a scene where a character have an angry emotional outburst like that, you usually allow some moments before it for the tension to build. To bring to mind the character's history, to show the tension between the two characters, and create a sense of impending danger. This way, you can better establish him as a real threat to the characters, not a joke, and not a big floating man head baby on a tantrum.
[] "Show, don't tell" is a common saying in movies, but Ant-Man Quantumania didn't show, didn't tell. 45 minutes in, and all we know about the main antagonist is he is called "The Conqueror." This was definitely a movie for people who follow every bit of news and rumours about the movie, not average movie goers. When we finally meet him, we're (Ant-Man & Co.) not fighting him, we're not running away from him, we're helping him cus he threatened us. This is terrible, cus our first impression of Kang on the big screen is him needing the help of our heroes. First impressions matter so much.
[] Just cus you're using The Volume when filming, doesn't mean you need to constantly fit everyone into the screen and show their feet is connected to the floor as much as possible. The sets are always flat, and its very easy to see where it ends and where The Volume begins cus you can tell where all the actors avoid standing. It's distracting. Just use traditional camera angles, stop forcing full body shots.
[] Political messaging should be more subtle, cus otherwise you're reminding us this is written by people from our world, with our problems, and it breaks immersion. Political messaging and agendas has always been part of media, stop treating your audience like idiots, let the message play through the actions of the characters, not forced dialogues. This just shows how little thought you put into the story and how your political view is actually related to it. If you need to spell it out for the audience, it wasn't clear/a strong enough metaphor enough to begin with. If your movie's plot was never a good metaphor for your political agenda, then shoehorning your message in will only annoy people who didn't agree with you in the first place, and make people who agree with you cringe.
[] On the topic of spelling things out for the audience, this point should be applied to all MCU films. Your audience is not stupid, stop adding lines like "She's disappointed in you" (when Casey was disappointed in Scott Lang for not wanting to help the Quantum people,) we can see that for ourselves. It's like you don't trust your storytelling or your actor's ability to communicate with to the audience their feelings. Why did you even hire them, then? [Another example of this type of stupid movie lines was from a different film, Wakanda Forever, where Riri asked Shuri how we'd know if she succeeded in recreating the herb, and she replied "if it glows." Please. We're not stupid. You can cut that out, and from their reaction alone, we can figure out that it worked. Trust your actors, trust the audience!!!
[] There was a scene where Hank met Modok, and said "Darrek?" Modok immediately responded with "I AM MODOK!!!!" Absolutely not. That is not how you write those type of scenes. You destroyed any sense of tension from thay interaction. Usually when you film a scene where a character have an angry emotional outburst like that, you usually allow some moments before it for the tension to build. To bring to mind the character's history, to show the tension between the two characters, and create a sense of impending danger. This way, you can better establish him as a real threat to the characters, not a joke, and not a big floating man head baby on a tantrum.
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