Most of what I think of Ant-Man and the Wasp has been repeated by other critics, including the other write-up here. The consensus was that after the cultural monument that was Black Panther, and the epic big-budget spectacle of Avengers: Infinity War, the third Marvel entry for 2018 was slight, despite being in its own right a big budget movie full of star power: Paul Rudd, Evangeline Lilly, Michael Douglas, Laurence Fishburne and Michelle Pfeiffer.

On the whole, the movie is rather light-hearted, with a series of chase scenes and comic interludes that manage to simultaneously both deliver what the audience is expecting, as well as subverting them. When you watch a car chase scene in a movie set in San Francisco, you are probably thinking to yourself: "They are about to go down Lombard Street, aren't they? They have to include Lombard Street..." and, Spoilers, they do indeed include Lombard Street. The movie introduces enough technology, characters and concepts that despite being predictable, it also manages to be surprising.

The most interesting thing to me is how much Marvel has managed to do, popularly and even artistically with one of its lesser known properties. I liked Ant-Man and Ant-Man and the Wasp more than I liked Spider-Man: Homecoming. I liked Spider-Man, but as the third iteration of the series, and as a well-known property, we all have expectations for what a Spider-Man movie should be. But even long time comics fans probably don't have too many expectations about what should be in an Ant-Man movie. Michelle Pfeiffer as a long stranded cosmic traveler? Laurence Fishburne as a Bill Foster with several surprising twists? A cameo by Rover, Hank Pym's vehicle from his West Coast Avengers days? Card tricks? A monologue about why Morrissey is popular in Mexico? A Hot Wheels car carrier that turns out to be full of shrunken, actual cars? A villain who insists that his truth serums aren't truth serums because "truth serums don't exist"? A lot gets thrown into this movie: it might be true that several months later, I can't remember what the plot was, or wasn't, but I remember lots of individual scenes. The lack of a spotlight on the character, and the fact that hosts of fans aren't going to be angrily indignant about changing Ant-Man continuity, has seemed to give the creators of the film more leeway in creating this movie, and I think the end result is entertaining, and maybe in its own way, significant.