Direct sequel to "Ant-Man and the Wasp," kind of a sequel to "Avengers: Endgame" as Ant-Man appears in that.

Ant-Man (Paul Rudd) is happy with his life: he fought with the Avengers, and that was enough to allow him to write a successful book. Life is grand. His daughter Cassie (Kathryn Newton) is a scientific genius whose curiosity is being fed by living with the original Ant-Man (Michael Douglas) who's another tech genius and very happy to work with her. When she builds a device to remotely explore the Quantum Realm, the original Wasp / Janet van Dyne (Michelle Pfeiffer) freaks out ... just before they're all pulled into the Quantum Realm.

This is an excuse to let their character creators go wild, as (according to the MCU) all kinds of wonky plants, creatures, and sentient beings exist in the Quantum Realm.

Logic and consistency go right out the window:

• Previous advice said you HAD to be fully enclosed in your suit when you miniaturized, which now doesn't matter at all.
• In "Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness" the ability to travel across the multiverse was portrayed as incredibly rare - now it's common.
• Janet van Dyne was in the Quantum Realm for 30 years, and she aged 30 years ... she appears to have been the only person who hasn't experienced time distortion there.
• Somehow Cassie's signal into the Quantum Realm was a trigger for Kang ... but none of the activity in "Avengers: End Game" was noticed by Kang?

I could go on ... A friend said recently (about another superhero movie I was complaining about): "It's a COMIC BOOK. Why are you concerned about the logic?" I acknowledge his point ... but at the same time, the earlier movies-from-comic-books felt like they only broke one or two rules, only retconned one thing at a time. Now it's more "what'd'ya wanna do? We'll retcon the shit out of this thing to make it work ..."

And then of course there's the reason Janet wanted to avoid the Quantum Realm: that's Kang, and if you haven't seen the Marvel TV series "Loki," you may be kind of in the dark about him. He's played (in all his many incarnations) by Jonathan Majors.

Some of the visuals and fights were fun, but the over-abundance of characters, poor logic, and reliance on tropes and stereotypes was awfully tiresome. Once again, instead of writing a relatively "small" story (one in which our hero family of Anty-people fought a villain or two in their own neighbourhood with skills on the same scale as their own), the MCU brass are pushing for not just world-destroying, not even galaxy-destroying, but a multiple-timeline-and-universe-destroying villain of "epic" proportions. Because this isn't a movie, it's merely a tiny episode in their never-ending multi-billion dollar-making galaxy-spanning superhero daytime soap opera. This is the episode that introduces the multiple evil twins.