Try to imagine a movie that doesn’t understand its main character, a movie that was created for a different protagonist, and only serves as an introduction to the villain,  nothing more. That’s Ant-Man and The Wasp: Quantumania.

Marking the beginning of Marvel’s phase 5 Ant-Man and The Wasp Quantummania was released on February 16 introducing the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s new big bad Kang the Conqueror, as well as Ant-Man’s successor Cassy Lang.

From the director, Payton Reed of Yes Man comes what could possibly be the worst movie in Marvel’s history, as it becomes evermore clear that the MCU has run out of ideas. This movie was the classic algorithm of bad jokes, childish main characters, an underdeveloped story, and disappointing character development. The only thing that tries to rescue this movie is Jonathan Majors’s great performance as Kang the Conqueror, but not even that is enough.

This movie’s fauna and biomes weren’t any better, as Marvel tried to depict an alien-like world in the quantum realm by combining Star Wars, Dune, and Rick and Morty. Boring. Not only were the sets repetitive but also the characters found in them underwhelming. Instead of using their infinite time and resources to make a decent alien language and decent-looking characters, like Avatar, Marvel had the characters drink a magical potion to help them understand everything the aliens say sounds like English. It doesn’t help that half the quantum creatures just look like regular humans, and when the movie addresses this, the character just says “sort of human, sort of not” and never brings it up again.

The story killed the character. Paul Rudd is an amazing actor, funny, takes his roles seriously and in previous movies, had played the role of Ant-Man decently. Ant-Man as a character is very complete and has a lot of potential due to his similarities with Marvel’s most beloved superhero, Spider-man. As both heroes gained their powers through science, and both have a strong sense of responsibility to use their abilities for good. This character’s bland, underdeveloped display will be terribly disappointing to any fan.

Ant-Man’s entire character is mostly defined by his ability to shrink down and size up when the situation calls for it. In Ant-Man 1, this ability is displayed creatively by using real-world objects like cars and suitcases to show the sense of scale. In this movie, the ability to shrink down is only relevant to the plot one time, when the crew is taken to a different dimension, and at no other point is the ability to shrink down a relevant ability. At this point, you could replace Ant-Man with any other superhero, and the movie would remain the same. By having the main character irrelevant to the story, the viewer loses focus on the heroes and shifts attention to the infinitely more interesting character, Kang.

Kang the Conqueror is the only redeemable part of this entire movie. Jonathan Major’s enthusiasm and excitement for playing the character is obvious in every scene because even through a terrible plot line he manages to demonstrate the ruthless and dominating personality that defines Kang as the biggest threat the Avengers have ever faced. Using many traits that made Thanos so feared, Kang has the possibility to become a great villain due to their similarities in their fixed objectives and the fact that neither could be reasoned with. Kang the Conqueror leaves us with high expectations for what we will see in future projects, as in this movie they just begin to scratch the surface of what he is really capable of.

The rest of the main cast is severely underutilized. Ant-Man’s Love interest, and former Ant-Men Hank and Janet are so replaceable, you would be forgiven for forgetting they’re even part of the movie.  The most underdeveloped character in the entire movie is Ant-Man’s teenage daughter Cassy Lang, a character devoted to helping people. When the group finally reaches the quantum realm she is faced with alien people who have been dominated by Kang, and she has to help. It is the only thing that defines her. Very similar to Forrest Gump’s personality of always doing the right thing, the difference is that Forrest Gump didn’t understand the complexity of different situations. Overall Cassy Lang is your classic forgettable character of a young person trying to stand out and be the person who seeks constant change.

The CGI in the movie was dismissable and ranged from bad to decent, never reaching good at any point. The evil MODOK is a great example of this. An argument could be made, that a floating head is supposed to look goofy. However,  if a character’s design is so poorly implemented that it actively distracts me from either the character’s personality or the main story, then it was not well done.

Ant-Man and The Wasp: Quantumania is a forgettable continuation of a character who deserves a feature role in their own movie, not playing setup man for this phase’s latest Marvel villain.