The first Ant-man movie is one of those Marvel movies that puts humor at the front, like Thor Ragnarök. Ant-Man and the Wasp did the same thing, with maybe a touch less humor, but still an enjoyable movie. This third installment had humor, but the story was definitely meant to be more weighty. I’m not sure it fully delivered.

The movie started out feeling very Ant-man like, besides the flashback of Janet in the quantum realm. I’ll get to that. Scott Lang is carefree and happy, living his life. We get a quick montage of his life, post Avengers Endgame. He’s written a book, people love him, and he’s content with focusing on being a dad to Cassie. I loved the older cafe worker who thought he was Spiderman. Classic Ant-man humor.

Cassie Lang isn’t content to sit back and watch, like her dad. We first see her in jail, having shrunk a cop car after the police were rounding up homeless people who lost their homes in the Blip. I like seeing more of the consequences of the Blip and the snap that brought them back. Things still aren’t all roses for the rest of the world.

We also learn that Cassie is quite smart. She began dabbling in quantum realm studies during the five years Scott was gone, and once Hank Pym returned, she managed to create a device that could send a signal to the quantum realm. This, however, freaks out Janet who tries to destroy it, to everyone’s dismay. But, it’s too late. Someone tracked the signal, and managed to open the device to send Scott, Cassie, Janet, Hope, and Hank to the quantum realm.

The quantum realm is quite beautiful, with many strange creatures, creating an alien-like world. The explanation for why it didn’t look like that in the first movie was rather vague. Something about not going deep enough (yeah, yeah). A lot of the backstory and information given is similar. Rather vague or rushed. Janet’s story about the villain, Kang the Conqueror, had potential, but felt like it could’ve shown more. Likewise, we were told Janet was fighting Kang for years and on the run from him. Yet, we hardly see her fight. And how would she have been able to send those coordinates in the second movie to Hank and Hope if she was also on the run. It just felt like they added her backstory without contemplating how it affected other parts of the story.

The quantum realm has quite some fun characters. Since it’s basically an unknown entity, the producers, editors, everyone was able to come up with some fun looking characters. Best standouts are the broccoli shaped thing, the gelatinous blob that creates ooze that Scott and Cassie drink, and the buildings that are alive and give me Studio Ghibli vibes.

I enjoyed the explanation about everyone understanding each other. Scott and Cassie drink the ooze and Hope and Hank drink shots, made from I’m guessing the same ooze, which allows them to understand the language being spoken.

The movie keeps the two groups (Scott and Cassie vs. Hank, Hope, and Janet) apart a good bit of time, allowing them to interact as family members. While Scott and Cassie have some good development, especially with Cassie showing her potential to really help the little guy, the Pym family seems a bit messy. Janet hid a lot of secrets about her time there, which is what caused all this mess in the first place. Another instance of hiding things to protect people, which never works. A lot of the scenes is just Hope demanding answers and Janet being vague, which got old quickly.

Kang is revealed to be the person who Janet met in the flashback shown at the beginning of the movie. Not sure why we needed the flashback there because they showed it again later. Kang claimed to be a traveler and his power source for his ship broke when he crashed, so he and Janet worked to fix it. When they were able to, Janet had some sort of vision about Kang and his real motives. Killing other timelines, basically what we saw in Loki.

The general motives for his actions are never really clear. This was one big issue I had. Kang explained that there’s multiple Kang variants out there, and he was exiled because the others were afraid of him. Now, I’m not well versed in Marvel comic lore. But it seemed like we were told Kang is bad, and that’s that. He’s the next big bad for the Marvel universe, but apparently not this particular one, since he dies. Maybe. That’s left up in the air.

One of the best scenes is when Scott jumped into the energy core that Janet exploded (didn’t get how that worked), and encountered every probability version of himself, including one who worked for Baskin Robbins still. Scott tried to retrieve the core to get Cassie back from Kang. Did anyone really expect Kang to keep his word? The scene reminded me of Doctor Strange, and while it was very cool, it was not original. That’s the general theme of the movie. Cool scenes and CGI, but not original.

We also got to encounter Darren, the villain from the first movie. Now as a really freaky floating robot head thing, calling himself MODOK, or Mechanized Organism Designed Only for Killing (should be MODOFK like Scott said). This bit of fanservice (maybe he’s in the comic like this, but I don’t know) was funny to see, but also felt a bit forced in regard to his sudden switch to the good side (thanks to Cassie saying don’t be a dick. I’m serious).

The story was overall, a rebellion story that our heroes fell into. They helped defeat Kang and the rebels could live in peace. All good for them, but we didn’t spend much time with them to really feel their pain or their happiness when they were free. This movie seemed mainly to be a way to introduce Kang officially as the next villain, and to give Cassie her own suit. We did meet Kang in Loki and we got to see a small snippet of Loki in an end credit scene that basically is setting up Loki season 2. The other end credit scene gave us a view of the other Kangs out there, plotting something. Again, it’s not really clear what the Kangs are planning or why. I know they will give us more about the motivation (or at least I hope so), but for the big introduction movie of Kang, I felt it was lacking in that backstory that helped build up Thanos when we finally met him.

The movie was fun and cool to look at, with some good humor, but was lacking in much substance and didn’t really deliver with Kang’s big introduction. Will the quantum realm play a role at any other time in the Marvel universe? Was there a better way to showcase Kang? Why did Hope’s entire arc consist of complaining about her mom and managing to rescue Scott by chance? Why was the blob thing obsessed with holes?

Also, I would pay to see a movie just about the ants that saved the day.