After watching a bunch of silly, huge superhero movies in which the universe is at stake, everyone doing impossible things, and CGI skybeam/faceless army battles dominate the entire third act in an increasingly unreal dreamscape stand-in for reality, it is nice to finally settle down and ground yourself within the Marvel universe by reminding yourself that this is supposed to be an extension of the real world - the place you live, but now with superheroes flying around saving the day from villains. Ant-Man has naturally filled that role, by having a normal guy find himself in this strange situation while trying to navigate real-life struggles with his family and job. So when this movie came around, obviously, they chose to make it ... a CGI shitfest set in the green screen rooms of Hell.

The movie is emblematic, in fact, of one of the biggest problems this entire latest phase of Marvel movies has had. In the older movies, of course huge CGI fights and stupid unreal shit happens. But they are also tethered to reality in some basic ways. They are people who live on Earth, and the citizens of Earth see them, and they have jobs and relationships and a lot of what is happening is their receiving and coming to terms with their powers. So many are origin stories, so they must almost necessarily start pretty small and grounded, as regular people (or at least, regular billionaires). There are human costs associated with their actions and they visit human places. Lately, though, that is no longer the case - Eternals is "on Earth" but it is almost explicitly divided from the normal course of human life. Dr Strange 2 takes place almost entirely in CGI Magic Nonsenseland. GotG 3 and Thor 4 take place basically entirely in CGI Magic Spaceland. Even Black Panther 2 is almost divorced from "normal" human society instead so that it can take place underwater and in the CGI Magic Futureland of Wakanda. It's certainly partially due to everyone being on their 2nd, 3rd, or 4th movie, and the pressure they must feel to exceed their previous appearances, but they don't seem to understand why this is a problem.

This movie in particular is the worst of the bunch* in this regard. What if we made the Whole Thing out of the stupid boring CGI fight scene at the end that no one cares about? Wouldn't it be cool to have these characters walk through scenery that feels like they are not even slightly there at all? In a place that could never possibly exist? Wouldn't that be awesome? What if we just added a bunch of random aliens of increasing unreality? I know, we can use the world's worst CGI - a high school student's first attempt at computer graphics - to create and waste MODOK on a comic relief throwaway character whose entire visual appearance is so distractingly awful that it's hard to concentrate on the rest of the film! I can think of no better way to spend $200 MILLION dollars. And it's just a little worse because it's Ant-Man, the character who was set up as the relief from all these others, before.

Instead of a real world we get a fake, bad version of a Star Wars Prequel (complete with the evil empire of faceless goons with terrible aim, rebel alliance lead by a warrior princess, and a cantina full of zany scoundrel aliens). In fact, it's remarkable just how much this movie is like the worst of Star Wars. At some point I gave up and starting humming the Imperial March as Darth Kang's empire showed its a wide shot of his Droid Army. There is this entire fake world down here, for some reason, but it's all just Bad Star Wars. They even don Star Wars clothes to "blend in" for no particular reason. There are whole scenes that are weird parallels of existing Star Wars scenes. Possibly worst of all, they don't even have the decency to show this civilization at all - you see that it exists, and are immediately sucked away from it to go fight more CGI battles instead of seeing what life might be like down here. But hey, at least we get Bill Murray thinking he's Jeff Goldblum when he definitely is not.

This movie is just so bad. It might even deserve a 1, if only there wasn't a special place in movie hell reserved for movies with that score. This one is ultimately a little too forgettable for that and does at least feature some comical villain over-acting from Kang to move it all the way up to a whole 2 points. I guess I shouldn't complain about trying something different right after complaining that Guardians 3 refused to do anything but make the same movie a third time, but... not like this.

*worst of the bunch so far

Score: 2/10

IMDb: Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania

PS: I don't think I have mentioned how much I hate all movie stories that are predicated on someone just briefly communicating some basic facts about the situation and instead insisting that they don't have time to tell them, or they don't ask some basic clarifying question, or any other extremely artificial-feeling form of non-communication. No, we can't talk about [the critical details of the thing we're currently doing] we have to slowly meander around talking about nothing in particular!