BEFORE: Just 18 days until Comic-Con, and I've looked ahead on the list and realized I'm not going to make it. I may be done with sci-fi by then, but not superheroes - not if I drop in a couple films I want to see on the fly. Oh, well, if I have to leave for San Diego in the middle of a superhero chain, I can work with that. They screen films at the convention center, and I usually don't take advantage of that fact, but maybe I should this year. If I have five days in San Diego to catch "Iron Man 3" and/or "Man of Steel", maybe I can turn that to my advantage. Speaking of superheroes - linking from "Prometheus", Charlize Theron was also in "Hancock" with Will Smith (last seen in "Bad Boys II").
THE PLOT: Agent J travels in time to M.I.B.'s early days in 1969 to stop an alien from assassinating his friend Agent K and changing history.
AFTER: I've spoken before about how much I love time-travel plots, but only if they're done well. What do I mean by that? Well, I've read many stories about it, and thought at length about it, and have determined that there are certain rules about it. There have to be, as we live in an orderly universe, or so we'd like to believe. So I really dig movies like "The Time-Traveler's Wife" that follow the rules, and even end up making a few new ones.
Some of the rules dictate that history cannot be changed. So if you want to try to go back and prevent the Kennedy assassination, you'd be wasting your time, because not only is this a fixed event in history, it's also the thing that's motivating you to time-travel, so if you do change history, you'd also be removing your motivation to do so, so therefore you won't do it. If you succeed, then there will be no need for you to try, therefore logically success is impossible.
It's also possible that in trying to prevent the JFK assassination, you'll accidentally end up causing it, and then, boy, won't you feel stupid. You'd be in a bar talking about how someone's going to shoot JFK from the Texas book depository, and not realize that the guy in the next booth is Lee Harvey Oswald, who now gets the crazy idea to kill the president in exactly that way, and in the booth on the other side is a cop who then puts you in jail for talking about killing the president, so you're not free to prevent it.
Some people use this as a reason to surmise that time-travel will never be invented - because if it gets invented in the future, then we'd see evidence of time-travelers walking around now, or we would have seen them shooting a couple of Arab guys before they got on the planes on Sept. 11, 2001, or trying to prevent the Holocaust. Unless they're very good at covering their tracks, or unless they've already changed the timeline to be the best that it can be, which considering all the suffering and disasters in the world, is a pretty bleak prospect as well.
So let's say you want to kill Hitler as a baby, a very popular noble notion. You succeed in doing so, but then you return to the present and find out that an even greater disaster took place somehow because of how you changed the timeline. Now you've got to go BACK to talk to yourself and convince yourself NOT to do this - but the problem is, you don't have a memory of ever being contacted by a future version of yourself, telling you not to do it. Nevertheless, you go back - you can't kill yourself before you kill baby Hitler, because that younger version of you has to survive and become the older version of you. You see where I'm going with this? If you kill yourself, then there's no you to kill yourself. The paradoxes are so maddening that it's probably best to try and avoid them altogether. (Just wait until I watch "Looper" next week...)
I envision a line of time-travelers standing outside the hospital just after Hitler's birth, all debating each other over what to do. "Family Guy" did a riff on this last season, and the Marvel comic book "Age of Ultron" as well - in that story Wolverine had to travel back in time to kill scientist Hank Pym before he created the evil robot Ultron, but when that made the timeline even worse, slightly-older Wolverine had to go back to that same moment and convince slightly-younger Wolverine NOT to kill him. At the end of the conversation, there were two Wolverines, so one had to kill the other. This wasn't handled particularly well, because if you think about it, younger Wolverine had to survive to become older Wolverine, and older Wolverine had to return to his timeline to star in more comic books. So either way, the character should have disappeared in a paradoxical puff of smoke....
Anyway, let's table this and discuss "Men in Black 3". A vicious alien killer breaks out of prison and wants to get revenge on Agent K, who locked him up 40 years ago. Instead of killing him in the present, which would be too easy, Boris the Animal travels back to 1969 to kill him as a younger man, which apparently succeeds because K disappears from the timeline. Now, do you see where my paradox comes into play? If he travels back and kills the young K, then K is erased from the timeline for 40 years, thus also removing the motivation for Boris to travel back and kill him. Changing the timeline also changes the NEED to change the timeline.
The film gets around this by calling it a "time fracture" - Agent J remembers Agent K, but no one else does - so he's the only one who can travel back to 1969 and put things right again. Will the presence of a 2nd time-traveler who's attempting to put things back the way they belong make things better, or worse? You've seen "Back to the Future II", what do YOU think?
There's another "out" when it comes to time-travel, and that involves multiple timelines. The film also introduces a character who can see ALL the timelines at once - ones where Agent J succeeds, ones where Agent J fails, and (presumably) ones where it isn't even an issue. This secondary character is what enabled me to relax and enjoy the film, because it meant that history CAN be changed. If you change something in the past, you merely put history onto another "track", like a train changing destinations, and it's one of an infinite number of futures with infinite combinations of people and events. This is great, because this means you can keep messing with the timeline until you find the combination that works best for you.
I'm probably taking this all a bit too seriously - the movie is a comedy, after all, and thus is free to not worry about these things too much. It's more concerned with showing us the backstory of the characters, and in fact setting up the first "Men in Black" film in ways that are perhaps all too convenient. Think about how "Star Wars: Episode III" felt the need to telegraph the events of Episode IV - all of them. Because we as an audience apparently needed everything spelled out for us.
This is still a fun film, and a (mostly) enjoyable continuation of the franchise, except for when it gets bogged down in its own mythology. Josh Brolin is fantastic in his spot-on impression of Tommy Lee Jones while playing a younger version of him. Maybe I just couldn't get out of my own head-space to fully appreciate it because I get so caught up in the rules of time-travel.
Also starring Tommy Lee Jones (last seen in "Natural Born Killers"), Josh Brolin (last seen in "The Mod Squad"), Emma Thompson (last seen in "In the Name of the Father"), Jemaine Clement (last heard in "Rio"), Alice Eve (last seen in "Star Trek: Into Darkness"), David Rasche, Michael Chernus, with cameos from Bill Hader (last heard in "Hoodwinked Too!"), Nicole Scherzinger, Will Arnett (last heard in "Despicable Me"), Joe Gannascoli.
RATING: 7 out of 10 bowling pins
Just wanted to say, I thought this was a pretty good film. Josh Brolin was exceptional in his role, and I was impressed that Tommy Lee Jones was able relinquish the role (I would think other actors would greatly object to being replaced). All the nods to the 60s greatly added to the film, especially the look of the 60s aliens.
ReplyDeleteStill, I could have done without the alien bad guy's disgusting insects that ran in his hands. Also, it was rather dumb to have his projectiles presented as being an incredible weapon, where as a gun of any sort would be more of a threat.
Still, it was lacking (in a completely unpreventable way) from the Men in Black concept. What was so fascinating about the first film was Jay's discovery that everything he though was bullshit (national enquirer, etc) was actually real. Outside of the fascination of discovering a new world (kind of like Harry Potter's introduction to the wizarding world) the first film was pretty simple plot wise.