Early reviews for Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania aren’t inspiring much hope in fans.
The bulk of reviews report a movie that doesn’t quite know which tone it prefers, and lump it in with other lackluster Phase 4 films like Thor: Love and Thunder and Multiverse of Madness. The release is currently rated “rotten” on Rotten Tomatoes, with a measly score of only 52 percent. This makes it the second-worst reviewed Marvel Studios release, just ahead of Eternals, which maintains an embarrassing 47 percent on the site.
One of the least popular elements of the latest Marvel flick appears to be the character of MODOK, who is almost universally reviled by those familiar with the character, as well as newcomers. MODOK makes his debut in Quantumania, but most people are far from pleased with his character design.
MODOK, or Mental Organism Designed Only for Killing, is a former technician turned villain, after an experiment altered George Tarleton into a massive-headed, supremely intelligent being. In Marvel comics, he’s typically depicted as a monstrous mutant with a disproportionately large head, which forces him to use a hover chair to get around.
Qunatumania‘s take on the character is certainly ugly, which suits MODOK just fine, but not in the way fans were expecting. Instead of digitally altering the character to make him look properly inhuman, it seems Marvel Studios simply decided to slap a weird, uncanny-valley-like face onto MODOK’s classic exoskeleton and call it good. It is, and we cannot emphasize this enough, very much not good.
Fans are finding themselves horrified by the MCU’s take on MODOK, and not for the reasons they were expecting. Most fans anticipated an unsettlingly ugly character, on par with his comics counterpart, and instead they found George Costanza in a weird headpiece.
People were soon littering Twitter with their takeaways, poking fun at Corey Stoll’s attempt at the character and even laying out examples of what MODOK should have looked like.
Despite rampant complaints, some fans are pointing out that viewers likely wouldn’t have been happy either way. MODOK was always going to be a challenging character to adapt, and — while he doesn’t look quite like his comics counterpart — there’s no denying he’s ugly. He may not be the ugly people were expecting, but Marvel didn’t entirely fail at making the character hard to look at.
Complaints about Quantumania go far beyond MODOK’s questionable appearance, but we’re holding out hope that the film’s biggest flaw is an overly human-looking villain.
Quantumania releases to theaters on Feb. 17.