Ant-Man and Wasp: Quantumania

Ant-Man and family return to the quantum realm to battle a new villain.

Sometimes the movie overdoes the self-awareness in that unfortunate MCU way—such as by having a character confirm that a weird thing just happened by saying, "That was weird," or announce that another character is cool, both of which happen here. One element that does intrigue: Kang seems deeply, furiously sad, in a way that echoes one of the most powerful lines from "The Sopranos," "Depression is anger turned inward." [Avengers: Infinity War](/reviews/avengers-infinity-war-2018)" or the middle hour of " [Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom](/reviews/indiana-jones-and-the-temple-of-doom-1984)." The filmmakers need him to be a fearsome and all-powerful villain (he's essentially Thanos in a new wrapper: a genocidal madman) and to be introduced in this movie so that he could quickly be positioned as the Big Bad for the next Avengers team-up. There's not much for a cinematographer (or director—even [Ryan Coogler](/cast-and-crew/ryan-coogler) has seemed tamped down by Marvel) to do to show individual personality on these projects when so much of the running time is pre-visualized by effects companies; and when Marvel studios boss [Kevin Feige](/cast-and-crew/kevin-feige), who seems determined to keep art to a minimum for fear of gumming up the content machine, wields an aesthetic veto pen. The result is simultaneously the biggest and smallest of the Ant-Man films, a neat trick.