Quantumania’s MODOK And His Horrifying Face Go Viral

This week, Marvel has decided to unleash a new series of character posters for Ant-Man And The Wasp: Quantumania, including many of its sub-characters. That also includes secondary villain MODOK, played by Corey Stoll, who was only glimpsed in trailers, but now that he’s been fully revealed to the world, uh…wow.

I’ve seen the movie, and let me tell you, as bad as this looks in poster form, it looks infinitely worse in motion with the CG they used to stretch Stoll’s face across MODOK’s egg-shaped frame.

While I understand that a signature of comic MODOK is having a distorted, ugly face, it feels like there was a right way and a wrong way to do this, and the MCU chose a very, very wrong way in Quantumania. Every time he was onscreen during my showing, there were literal gasps from the audience as if to say “are they serious with this?”

They did in fact try to play MODOK off as pure comic relief in the film, dramatically altering his origin story so he’s a Kang-rescued version of Yellowjacket from the first Ant-Man film, and his arms and legs (and butt, as the movie shows) were shrunk as he descended into the Quantum Realm, but his face remained large and horrifying.

This is…nothing like MODOK’s normal backstory from Marvel Comics, nor similar to another recent piece of media that actually did MODOK pretty well, Marvel’s Avengers, where as the leader of AIM, George Tarleton gets more and more progressively deformed as he attempt to increase his intelligence and abilities.

Here, MODOK is played purely for laughs, including an entire sequence where Cassie tells him “not to be a dick,” which he takes to heart, ultimately betraying Kang. But the way the character was handled and the sheer horror of his face overwhelms everything else.

I’m just not sure making MODOK look like this was the right call here, as it spotlights an issue that Marvel has already been having lately, the strain they’ve been putting on the entire VFX industry with their constant superhero demands. That’s resulted in some off-putting effects in most recent projects, everything from She-Hulk to Thor: Love and Thunder, and a common complaint about Quantumania is that even outside of MODOK, the movie just sort of looks like a muddled, ethereal, CG mess.

As for MODOK himself, this poster has gone viral many times over, with those seeing the film not understanding that no, this is not a joke, this is genuinely how he looked in the movie, and I will reiterate again, he actually looked worse than this, somehow. Maybe some people thought it was bad enough to be a good joke by itself, but as for me, I’d rather just scrub the image from my mind.

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Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.