Men in Black 3

Let's go back in time for a moment. Shortly after Men in Black 2 was announced, I knew I had the perfect plot outline. A vicious alien breaks out of prison and comes to Earth to murder the man who put him away: Agent K. Agent J needs to save K, but since K doesn't know that he was ever an Agent, J has to do it without K knowing.

Then Men in Black 2 came out... and it was a tired retread of all the fun moments of the first film, run relentlessly into the ground.

So, when Men in Black 3 came out, I wasn't too excited. I heard it was better than 2 (but then, it'd kind of have to be), but I still wasn't straining at the bit to see it.

Well, I finally did... and it's the movie I was hoping to see all those years ago. A vicious alien breaks out of jail and is after the man who put him there, and K has to save him despite the fact that K doesn't know who he is and has no memory of everything they've done together... because it hasn't happened yet. Ok, I didn't think of the time travel aspect of it.

This film gets everything right. We have just enough connections to the first film for it to feel tied into the franchise. We have the walk through the lobby, the interrogation of the unwilling alien, the worms do something funny, famous people are aliens, and we even get a brief callback to Frank the talking Pug. But the movie isn't about those things, and it doesn't dwell on them. This isn't a retread of MIB greatest hits.

What this movie is about is interconnectedness. Interconnectedness between events, certainly... but mostly about interconnectedness between people. It's really about friendship. This gets a little ham-fisted at moments, such as when J is about to do the time jump and Jeffrey says "You must really love this guy." Yeah, that might be true, but it also might be about the giant fucking alien jellyfish that are eating the city. So, yeah, a little much at times.

But for every time the film tries to club you over the head, there are a dozen wonderful moments. The time jump itself is surprisingly awesome. If he had simply fallen back in time, it would have been cool, but the idea that the works more like a bungie jump... that you go WAY back and then drop off at the designated recoil point... back and then forward to your destination— that's just brilliant. The butterflies released in the Factory as Griffin talks about the near infinite possibilities was a lovely way to bring in chaos theory.

Really, everything involving Griffin made me happy. He could have simply been a plot device, pushing the Agents into making the right decisions, or a theme device to talk about the potential in each moment, but Michael Stuhlbarg's performance made him a character I wanted to see more of. Griffin is the last of his kind, and there is sadness there, but there is also a sweetness and a generousness of spirit to the character that is has been missing from the franchise.

It isn't just Griffin though. Will Smith brings some real love to Agent J, with him seeming close to tears at multiple points near the end of the film. You truly understand what K has meant to him over the last fourteen years, and how desperately he wants to connect with his mentor, partner, and friend. You see how much K's reticence has hurt him.

Throughout the film, the question is asked: What happened to K. We get a little bit of it at the end, but I don't think that the film expects us to tie K's personality change to that one event. Rather, we see the young Agent K begin to make decisions that hurt, to lose people that he likes... in time this will close him off more and more. I appreciate the idea that K had been watching J long before he recruited him. I like the implication that over the next few decades, K would slowly realize who that boy is growing up to be.

Ok, I've expressed my admiration enough. Let's quibble. Time travel stories are troublesome at the best of times, and pretty much every writer trips over their own feet. Really, only two things bothered me with how MIB3 treated time travel. The first is the time travel device only had controls for date, month and year... and even the son of the inventor lacked a sense of how to really fine tune it. So... how did J get it to take him only 30 seconds back in time? Also, how did he remember what just happened but Boris didn't? And why weren't there then 2 Agent Js and 3 Boris'?

The second thing is that K kills Boris. Why? By killing Boris, K creates a time paradox. The moon prison now will never be built, and J will never need to go back in time to prevent the failed assassination. K never needed to kill Boris. If he had arrested him again, the plot would still have failed and everything would have still gone back to normal. Not that it matters, because when J gets back... all the recent events in K's life seem to have happened anyway... down to phone calls that were precipitated by Boris' attack. 

Thematically, did we need to see that K was going to do things differently from this point? Maybe. But it didn't have to be by having him kill Boris. We don't ALWAYS have to kill the bad guy at the end. We really don't.