As the superhero comic book publisher with the firmest commitment to continuity, Marvel occasionally felt obligated to start an issue with a clarifying caption that placed the story therein on the vast fictional timeline. Something on the page that’s not quite synching up with other titanic tales currently filling the spinner rack? That’s easy to explain, true believer: Events in the periodical in question take place before Captain America #180, so that’s why Steve Rogers is still donned in red, white, and blue. For example.

With that in mind, it seems important to note that Ant Man and the Wasp — which is essentially Marvel Cinematic Universe Part XX — takes place before Avengers: Infinity War, its immediate predecessor on the studio’s release schedule. Some other cinematic effort will be charged with picking up the pieces scattered by Thanos and his special bejeweled glove. Tonally, that’s not really where the movies featuring the practitioners of Pym Particles are at. This is the frothier corner of the Marvel Universe, where the charming absurdity of superhero science is met with a grin and a wisecrack.

As the film opens, Scott Lang (Paul Rudd) is under house arrest, a repercussion of his excursion to tangle with other costumed do-gooders on foreign soil. He’s also fallen out of touch with Hank Pym (Michael Douglas) and Hope van Dyne (Evangeline Lilly), but he initiates contact again after experiencing a strange vision associated with his previous excursion into the microscopic quantum realm. That sparks the adventure to life, and the stuffed script (credited to five writers, including Rudd) brings in a supervillain called Ghost (Hannah John-Kamen), a quest to find Hope’s long-lost mother (Michelle Pfeiffer) in the quantum realm, evasions of governmental authorities led by FBI agent Jimmy Woo (Randall Park), and nefarious thugs (led by Walton Goggins, speaking with full Boyd Crowder loquaciousness) who want to steal Pym’s technology.

Director Peyton Reed juggles the abundance of material admirably. Not everything has the same zing and a couple major dilemmas are solved with suspicious ease, but the film builds energy as it moves along. As the title promises, Hope has donned the Wasp suit presented to her at the end of Ant-Man, and Lilly remains the true standout in the series. Invariably, the performers can start to feel like mere cogs in the machine in the Marvel movies, but Lilly imbues Hope with an unyielding sense of purpose. Others can feel like they’re tumbling in for movie moments, but Lilly is grounded. She lives in this world and reacts to its outlandishness accordingly.

At a time when the characters from the various Marvel movies are romping freely across the boundaries of individual films, Ant-Man and the Wasp is blessedly self-contained. It’s clear that Scott, Hope, and the gang will be roped into the greater cataclysm soon enough. For now, though, it’s satisfying to see them doing their own thing, racing around the streets of San Francisco and dealing with challenges a little more modest than threats to the very fabric of the universe. Staying on brand, Ant-Man and the Wasp succeeds in part because of its attention to the small stuff.