Smaller is better

Rating: 9/10 (18 July 2015)

I know that, for many Marvel fans, the Avengers movies are the pinnacle of the MCU. Yet I find them over-wrought and, subsequently, lacking in both focus and viewer involvement. For me, they are, largely, unsatisfying.
Ant-Man, if you will excuse the obvious pun, succeeds because of its scale. It's not trying to be a world-shattering blockbuster and, instead, depends heavily on character development. in that, it shares much with the first Iron Man (in my opinion, the best film of the entire Marvel universe). With a single thread, it mixes humor, family, the struggle to do right in a world where doing wrong is always a temptation and a simple plot together in a very compelling package.
The dialog is snappy, the sidekicks are charming, the villain actually has a bit of depth and the lead actors are all very well cast. The effects serve to support the story rather than become it.
Finally, the main plot theme (to prevent the spread of the technology) almost seems to me to be a correction of the mess that Marvel has made of Iron Man, namely that anyone can put on an Iron Man suit, thereby diluting the unique nature thereof.