Ant-Man and The Wasp (2018)

Cassie: [to Scott] You can do it. You can do anything. You're the world's greatest grandma.

I'm not really going to bother "reviewing" Ant-man and The Wasp.  It was fine. It lives up to all the other Marvel movies. It made me laugh. It me my expectations which were vaguely positive.

3.4 out of 5 stars.

Done.

But what I want to talk about is something stranger. How do you go about power down a series without making people hate it? I talked about this before in a post about Jurassic World: Power Creep. The next biggest, baddest, scariest thing has to be out done by the next next biggest, baddest, scariest thing. Monster movies that induced vomiting in audience in the 1950s look like laughable children's toys to modern viewers.

Referencing a different medium entirely: When Magic: The Gathering (MTG) released a block of 3 sets that basically broke their game -Urza Block in 1998-1999, it was a problem. It was fun to have the power of the gods, but it was unsustainable. The sets to be release in 1999-2000 could not get more powerful with being ridiculous and destroying their very business. So, their solution was to radically power-down the following sets in an attempt to restore balance.  Basically, they made 3 pretty bad sets on purpose. And it worked. -sort of.  MTG survived 1999-2000 and continues today. But those 3 sets are considered today to be so terrible that the cards are worth basically no money to collectors and no one plays them.

The above was MTG's solution to the same problem facing the MCU. How do you power down the expectations of the audience after Infinity Wars?  We just came from a movie that ended on the powerful note of half the universe was destroyed. What universe+1 issue can you find to carry on being impressive?  Marvel's answer seems to be Ant-Man: smaller budget, smaller cast, tiny terror, no sense of mass destruction, but with big dose of size-based comedy.

Will it work?  I think the film stands on its own, just fine. But it remains to be seen if it worked to reset audience baselines before going back to Infinity War II