Men in Black 3 makes brilliantly entertaining nonsense

I recently saw the trailer of the third and latest instalment of the Men in Black franchise in which Agent J (played by Will Smith) goes back in time to 1969 to help save the world from an alien invasion. Actor Josh Brolin plays a younger Agent K who, as the trailer hints at, exhibits the same wet blanket character of the older version played by Tommy Lee Jones in the earlier two films.

The original film was a 1997 science fiction comedy film directed by Barry Sonnenfeld, starring Tommy Lee Jones, Will Smith, Linda Fiorentino, Vincent D’Onofrio, Rip Torn and Tony Shalhoub. The film was based on the Men in Black comic book series by Lowell Cunningham, originally published by Marvel Comics. The film featured the creature effects and makeup of Rick Baker. The film was released on July 2, 1997, by Columbia Pictures and grossed $589,390,539 worldwide against a $90 million budget. It was followed by a 2002 sequel, Men in Black II.

The following is the official film synopsis:

In Men in Black 3, Agents J (Smith) and K (Jones) are back… in time. J has seen some inexplicable things in his 15 years with the Men in Black, but nothing, not even aliens, perplexes him as much as his wry, reticent partner. But when K’s life and the fate of the planet are put at stake, Agent J will have to travel back in time to put things right. J discovers that there are secrets to the universe that K never told him — secrets that will reveal themselves as he teams up with the young Agent K (Brolin) to save his partner, the agency, and the future of humankind.

Most interesting is how well Brolin stepped into the big shoes of Agent K filled by Jones in the previous films. Brolin seems to have aced the role both in the physical resemblance he achieves and the consistency of character he maintains without removing the personal nuance he adds to the role. Perhaps the astounded look Agent J flashes upon discovering how much the younger Agent K remained fixed in character with age was not all acting on Smith’s part.

[Photo courtesy Tailgate365.com.]

Like most time travel stories, it is likely best to switch off higher thinking and just sit back with a big bag of popcorn in this one. Given the unlikely event of an alien invasion, much less the probability that actual alien life might look anything like anything we could possibly imagine, plus the impossibility of making time travel make logical sense in a form that makes it entertaining, MIB3 will likely dazzle with its visual effects and edge-of-seat editing in a way that will make doing the temporal math not worth the trouble.

The year 1969 was an interesting year for space travel and alien invasion stories, nonetheless. It was the year Apollo 11 landed the first man on the moon and a time when space was regarded as the future to be aspired for by the species.

[NB: Parts of this article were lifted from the Wikipedia.org article “Men in Black (film)” in a manner compliant to the terms stipulated in the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License that governs usage of content made available in this site.]

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