Men In Black 3 (2012)

You know what I love about these movies? Aside from the song by Will Smith that roles with the credits, that is. I like that they follow their own logic. The rules of physics apply, as we currently know them, until they're not convenient anymore, and then J or K, usually K, pulls out or acquires some gizmo that they need to get the job done in a way that is not explained by science. It just does whatever needs to be done, with as many steps before it as necessary to fill up the movie. I'm not even being critical about this, I dig it. This is sci-fi comedy, or as I like to think of it, sci-co. See what I did there? With the play on sounds? Huh? Oh. I thought you weren't laughing 'cause you didn't get it. But, you're just saying it wasn't funny OR clever. Gotcha.
I'm writing this particular version of the post because it most likely leads to the possible future that one thing happens that I really, really want to happen; unless this is the time that you get the phone call right in the middle of reading this and never get back to it and end up taking that job in Tuscaloosa where you end up putting on a lot of weight because you're depressed for some unknowable reason and eat to fill the gaping hole left by not finishing this post; or the other one with the power outage that happens right after you finish the post and it ruins your refrigerator and on your way to get a new one you get into a fender bender with the woman with two small children and the youngest child, her daughter ends up becoming an automotive engineer instead of a research epidemiologist and therefore never develops the serum to protect most of humanity from the plague that starts the zombie apocalypse. If those two things come about, I guarantee I have not ended up with what I want. That's the crazy thing about time travel and timelines. Movies always deal with the big things that are typically in a very clear causal line back to an event that we'll call event-prime that needs to be changed or prevented from changing so that the horrible outcome won't occur. A lot of these same movies have all kinds of things happening with the time travelers that end up not effecting anything. Event-prime to the horrible event or to the happy event is always A then B then C, rarely anything more than 3 steps, too. In this case, event-prime is saving an alien from being murdered by another alien. If successful, this leads to Agent K in direct conflict with the assassin, and if K is successful, we get the happy ending. If the event-prime goes sour, the secondary even never takes place and so we get the horrible outcome. But, even if event-prime goes well, the secondary event can still go bad. Sometimes the movies present with a false event-prime. We know it's false because it is always a missed opportunity, and not one that fails.
But, is this what really is going on in the movie? No, I don't think so. I think it's more like the story version of a Rube Goldberg device. Event-prime happens - and it's almost always before the time travel occurs - starts a complex and often convoluted chain of events that lead to the desired outcome. I'm tempted to go all meta and say that by the very nature of movies, i.e. that they are prepared in advance for our viewing pleasure, prevents it from being anything but a carefully crafted series of events that have to go the way they do. Instead I will just look at it in terms of the movie reality. In other words, I'm saying that the failures have to happen in order to get the desired outcome. In this movie, if J had made it on time to stop the first murder, he likely would have been killed because he didn't know how much of a bad-ass Boris was nor did he have a way to use his time travel device. It had to be as difficult between J and K in the beginning as it was so that they would get the satisfactory emotional outcome later. In movies, everything happens for a reason. Everything. Are there different ways that things could have gone that would have led to the desired outcome? Most likely, yes, but there was some drawback to them, like having the movie be only 20 minutes long instead of 100 minutes long; or maybe more serious like the desired outcome is achieved but Detroit is accidentally blown up.
If this is the reality for someone knocks on your door in three, two, one, now. Don't answer. That so-called organic cleaner is a scam.
The addition of Emma Thompson as O who is the new director, is brilliant. If there is anything that lady can not do or do and not look sexy doing it, I don't know what it is and neither does anyone else. I hope she comes back for MIB4. I also liked David Rasche as X. Remember when he was Sledgehammer? I have these vague memories of that show, mostly my thoughts that it was awesome, because like Max Headroom, it was on later than my mom normally let me watch t.v., but for some reason I could watch it if I didn't let my little brother know. Sorry, bro. I guess the secret is out. For the record, mom also let me watch Hogan's Heroes while you were in Headstart, and Magnum P.I. while you were still in grade school and I was at the junior high. Based on my experience with tracking down an episode of Max Headroom in the last year and discovering that it wasn't terribly good, I suspect Sledgehammer will not be what I thought it was as a kid. Oh well. I'm perfectly content to let 10 year old me have those shows as cherished memories and adult me to think they kind of suck and to have both of these things occur simultaneously. I bet a lot of those shows totally sucked - like Automan, Manimal and Rip Tide. Actually, I happen to know that Rip Tide was on for four seasons, so it most likely sucked in a different way, the way that the Fall Guy sucks to the grown up me, the suckage from having shows only being remarkable by who the guest star is this week. Can you say A-Team or Buck Rogers (or the Electric Kid)?
Damn that Gil Gerard, he almost made me forget to mention Josh freakin' Brolin. Fortunately a future version of myself has traveled back in time to take care of this. Brolin was awesome. He was more Tommy Lee Jones than Jones was. It's just like when he played the Prez in W. He nailed the accent and the mannerisms so completely that you forgot who he really was. Kudos, Mr. Brolin.
Oh, and surprisingly, I didn't hate Bill Hader in this movie. Huh. First times and all that.
Also, I love that chocolate milk is what people who have experienced a timeline fracture crave. Moo.

Men In Black 3 on IMDb