As part of our 20th wedding anniversary celebration, my wife and I saw Men In Black III last weekend. Overall, I thought it was an excellent movie, almost as good as the first and much better than the second. I highly recommend it.
I was dubious about yet another time travel movie/television episode/novel–to name a few, Star Trek: Enterprise (the series is premised on the temporal cold war), Star Trek IV, Star Trek VIII, numerous episodes across all the Star Trek series (what’s the plural for series, seri, serieses?), Back to the Future trilogy, the Terminator franchise, episodes of Futurama, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, Flashforward, Contact, Clarke’s Time Odyssey novels, and The Time Machine. I’m not saying any of these works are flawed. They certainly handle time travel differently, at times in interesting ways. I am saying that I’ve seen and read a lot of it already and worried that lazy screenwriters were using the trope as a crutch.
To my delight, the movie was enjoyable. My “crutch” fear was unfounded.
My only criticism is that Agent J’s (Will Smith) complaint of Agent K’s (Tommy Lee Jones) unfeeling attitude. I agree we’ve seen it in the first and second movies. However, for this movie it came off as telling rather than showing. They had time available. I would’ve preferred to see 5 or 10 more minutes of screen time where we saw a specific situation for ourselves.
It’s funny how I analyze TV shows and movies from a storytelling perspective as I’m being entertained.
I’m an author living in northern Virginia with a wife and a cat. In the late ’80s, I worked on the International Space Station project. I recently retired from managing a group of software engineers to focus on writing science fiction and speculative fiction. Learn more.