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Reviews
Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania (2023)
Boring
This movie had awkward visuals and storytelling, and let me feeling mostly bored throughout. I'm struggling to find anything I liked about it.
Pacing: the changes in pacing were weird and whiplash inducing. It starts off fast, with little-to-no introduction of Cassie. They are immediately thrown into the quantum realm. They struggle to get their bearings in a forest, they cut away to other characters, and when we return to them, they're in the middle of a desert being surrounded by alien-like creatures. The film then finally grinds to a halt for the backstory (exposition) the film has been heavy-handedly hinting at. From then on its an endless fast-paced slog of "and then this happens" story beats with no interesting developments.
Characters: I don't feel we got a proper intro to any of the new characters in the film. Cassie is quickly introduced with expositional dialogue as a strong-willed, scientific genius, social justice warrior, with experience using the pym tech suit. The huge cast of outlandish rebels are introduced in the same scene that they're attacked and routed. Kang is the only new character that gets any kind of proper intro. The way the new characters were introduced combined with the fact they were CG monstrosities made it hard for me to care about or remember any of them.
Pointless plot lines: Movie wastes time with a couple plot lines that could be removed without affecting the movie at all. Throw out the distracting Bill Murray bar cameo and MODOK redemption arc and free up some time for stuff that matters.
Bad writing: Why does the lead rebel fight robots with a spear? Why doesn't Kang confiscate Cassie's suit while imprisoned? Why can giant Scott withstand focused laser fire from a fleet of ships? Why don't Kang's arm lasers disintegrate Scott and Cassie like everyone else he shoots? I could go on.
No stakes: Not once did I feel there were any real stakes for giant CG Scott, CG Kang, the CG rebels, or the CG world they live in. All the action falls flat.
Action: the action is a generic punching/kicking, jump-cutty, CG slog. The CG quality and animation in some scenes were noticeably bad, that is when you could see it long enough to understand what was happening. Kang is omnipotent with disintegrating lasers and Jedi force powers until the plot needs him to lose.
Bishôjo senshi Sêrâ Mûn Crystal (2014)
Amateurish visuals
I couldn't get over the low quality animation and incongruous styles. The quality is inconsistent; in some episodes/scenes the visuals look decent, in others it looks amateurish, like the characters were drawn in Microsoft paint or taken from a middle schooler's how-to-draw anime sketchbook. Sailor moon is frequently drawn off-model, with her nose and mouth practically between her eyes. The proportions of the character's faces and bodies are often wonky and inconsistent; hair too big/small, limbs too thin/long, facial features too large/crowded.
The blurred shading and water-color-like backgrounds don't match the hard lines of the foreground and characters. The terrible CG transformations don't match the conventional animation.