Men In Black 3 (2012)

It has been ten years since the sequel was released. Men In Black II was released 2002; this second sequel in 2012. So what is it about this movie that is the reason for its success? Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones reprise their roles as Agents J and K working under the bureau Men In Black. The headquarters itself has undergone extensive refurbishment so that we see all white instead of glass and steel. And implemented are the concepts of time travel and retrospective exploration of the 1960s.

So now there is extensive use of CGI throughout this movie--scenery, animation, photography. In fact, I can recall several instances of crash zooms, inward and outward, combined in foregrounds and backgrounds. I can also take into account the use of CGI to depict the scenes at the rocket launch where such facility would be too costly to film. And there is this scene about the time-jump, where Agent J leaps from a building to travel back in time to save the future.

So the plot involves time travel, alien invasion, the past and Agent K's aura. There is an alien called Boris the Animal ("it's just Boris!"); he is a Boglodite, a rogue alien race that consumed any planet in its path. Boris escapes from Lunar Max prison, time-jumps to kill Agent K and prevents a defense system from being deployed so that instead of dying out, his race will be able to devour the earth. Now this must be the second movie where the earth faces annihilation from an alien race but the first by an invasion.

Watching this movie you will ask yourself: if K has been dead for forty years, how come J can still remember him from last night? Well I was as confused as J himself until it became clear at the end (or so I thought). Apparently, the rules of time travel have been blatantly violated: despite the fact K was killed in 1969 and hence ceases to exist, J is still an agent and remembers him. 

A large portion of screen time dwells on the 1960s, the decade of the space launch. Here we see costumes of retrospective classics, alien designs attributed to the decade, and technology that was at its less advanced stage (although there was that special unicycle that is more or less out of place as it looks too advanced compared with the rest). We see fashion, vehicles, and the space launch of 1969; hear music of different genres of the time. It's just another way of learning history, without reading a book on it or sitting in the classroom driven down by boredom.

Some other notable changes to this movie are the absence of Newton, Jack Jeebs, Frank the Pug and Agent Z; with the last two appearing on pictures (Frank also appears on a bill board at Canvey Island). Each character has his reasons but I think Frank should not appear again after his debacle in the previous installment.

So let me go over this movie again: a woman strides down a hallway to visit her boyfriend, Boris The Animal. I have to be very honest: for a maximum security prison, security is so lousy that they do not x-ray the cake before allowing it to pass, and one of the guards actually dips his finger into the cake as if Boris anticipated his carelessness beforehand. And the response time is slow and sloppy. By the way, the woman came to the moon somehow, yet Boris was able to use this means of transport whereas he was not even briefed before about it. 

So Boris intends to rewrite history, so he pops over to Jeffrey Price's shop to use the time jump device. So lenient is this monster that he does not kill Jeffrey as he just killed his father Obadiah, nor does he kill any other agent accompanying K so that they do not interfere.

In this movie, the Arch net is revealed to have prevented the invasion of the Boglodites. Yet in the first movie, the earth was open to any other alien invasion. I did not make note of this except when noted by other reviewers.

Violations of the rules of time travel:

• Agent K is dead, so J should not be an agent anymore; yet he is still an agent of MIB, but the movie does not reveal who recruited him in the first place.
• Boris The Animal escaped and fled earth, returned home to his home planet which is 20 light years away. Yet, one time jump gear is still missing from Jeffrey's possession, he has a logbook in which Boris has recorded his jump, and Lunar Max is still on the moon. Also, Jeffrey remembers Boris even though Boris left the earth before Jeffrey's birth.
• In order to change the tide, J grabs Boris and jumps back a few minutes before receiving damage from Boris's projectiles. However, it negates the fact that there would be two of each from the time earlier. Even Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me makes better sense: when Austin returns to the scene five minutes earlier, he sees himself delivering the same line. Yet this movie MIB3 does not follow the same principle.

Agent J is as confused as we all are in this flawed series of events, yet this movie gets away with it. In fact he is so hyped up that he does not act like he was sticking with the scripts at all, but vents his genuine frustration at the distortions of logic and reason. 

As already mentioned, these violations of time travel complicate the logic of this movie. Yet the director concluded that should these plot holes be averted, the story would have ended with the annihilation of the entire earth, with J and other characters suddenly irrelevant. Speaking of which, it was stated that the Boglodites were extinct for forty years; but when Boris alters history, they invade the earth after forty years. What stopped them from attacking the earth after Boris gets the Arc Net? It is already mentioned that Boris' home planet Boglodocia is twenty light years away. This is a great single distance to cover.

And this movie is set in 2012; so it would be 43 and not 40 years otherwise it is 2009. Throughout this movie it was mentioned that J was recruited 25 years after 1969 (in 1994), 14 years later (in 2008) Boris escapes and time-jumps.  This would add up to 39 years and not 40 years: the present is set in 2008, even though the time dial states 2012. Can nobody in this movie get their measurements correct because the time dial is easy to manipulate quickly?

One other point: in the MIB Headquarters, J examines a record of alien murders. He only learns of Roman the Fabulist's murder and an incident at the Factory, but it does not mention an incident at a bowling alley. So why was it omitted from the report?

In my opinion, this movie suffers from time travel inconsistencies and ignore events of previous movies. Anyone trying to understand the story would be perplexed by the distortion of logic and reasoning. However, every aspect of this movie overshadows these faults nonetheless. In other words, this movie is overrated.