For those Marvel fans out there, the Marvel Cinematic Universe,commonly referred to as the MCU, has been going down a spiral ever since Avengers: Endgame came out. The movies have been getting progressively worse and worse, with some exceptions here and there.

Last month, the MCU released its newest movie which seems to be heading in the right direction – Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania. This movie did a fantastic job of introducing us to what the MCU’s next main villain will be in the line of Kang the Conqueror.

When you take a close look at the reviews for Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, you can see that they are mixed. The poor reviews come mostly from the actual movie critics, while then good reviews come from the audience. In this case, I believe it is more important that the audience enjoyed the movie rather than the movie critics.

Ant-Man was not necessarily the star of the show. He had his moments, but screen time was split pretty evenly between characters. Marvel movies typically end in threes, but this movie feels more like a start of something rather than the end. This movie sets up many things for the future of the MCU. Jonathan Majors, the actor who played Kang the Conqueror, played his role extremely well. He shows his character’s broad range of anger throughout the film. He can be seen as very calculated by the way he shows his rage. Majors played a version of his character back in season one of Loki, but in this movie the character is completely different. In Loki, his character was more of a comedic character, and in this movie he plays a much more serious character.

There are some parts of the film that can be considered as uncanny valley moments, where things do not work for some of the people watching the film. The audience was able to enjoy the movie more due to the lower critic scores. It seems that people went into the movie expecting it to be not as good, but they ended up enjoying the film because their expectations being lowered by the critic reviews.  The creators of this movie do a good job at making this movie work even if you have not seen the first two Ant-Man movies.

You cannot miss this movie; it is an important part of what comes next in the future of the MCU. Thematically, communication is an interesting theme for this movie. From where Scott Lang begins this story and his journey into the quantum realm, communication is an important aspect of this movie.

Audiences should go into this movie expecting something sillier. If you go into it with that expectation and let go of the things that you might normally cringe at, you might end up really enjoying this movie. It lives up to the jokes of the first two Ant-man movies.