Men in Black (1997)

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Overview

Men in Black is a science fiction film directed by Barry Sonnenfeld, who at the time was coming off of the widely successful and critically acclaimed Get Shorty, and stared the mismatched pair of Tommy Lee Jones, who until now had mostly been known for only taking dramatic rolls, and Will Smith, a young comedic and musical star on the rise. The movie was a huge success and spawned an animated series that ran for four years, as well as two sequels.

Creation

Men in Black started its life as a comic book, published by Aircel Comics, who were later bought out by Malibu Comics, who in turn were bought out by Marvel Comics. To this day Marvel still owns the rights to the comic book rights for the series. Only three issues of the book came out in 1990, followed by three more in 1991 under the Malibu title. It was created by Lowell Cunningham and illustrated by Sandy Carruthers. The series had a much darker tone to it than the movie, where the operatives would use any means necessary to keep their whereabouts hidden, including murder. Two other differences between the comic and the movie is that while in the film the agents only dealt with aliens, in the comic they dealt with any type of paranormal activity, and while Will Smith played Agent J in the movie, in the comics he was a white character.

Plot Summary

When a truck full of immigrants is stopped at the Mexican border, a group of INS agents are interrupted during their investigation by two men clad in black. They pull one of the immigrants aside and have him remove his disguise to reveal he is an alien. When one of the INS agents spies on him and sees the alien, it attacks and Agent K tells his partner, Agent D, to shoot the creature. He can't fire in time so K has to do the job and stops the alien just in time. K uses a small flashing light device called a Neuralyzer to wipe the memory of the INS agents so they forget they ever saw the alien. However Agent D can't forget how he screwed up and he realizes he has just gotten too old to be an agent, and so he retires by having K neuralyze him.

James watches as he suspects his perp isn't quite human

Meanwhile in New York, a member of the NYPD named James Darrell Edwards is on a massive foot chase with a perp. He follows the suspect further than any other officer and eventually chases him to a building, which the suspect them procedes to climb on his hands and feet, defying gravity. James chases him up the stairs and when he finally emerges he sees the suspect standing at the edge of the building. He gives James a vague warning, blinks with two sets of eyelids, and then falls to his death. Back at the station nobody believes James, that is until K arrives and asks him what he saw, only to neuralyze him afterwards and then asks him if he would like a new life. He gives him his card and tells James to meet him at that address the next day.

The next day James arrives and is put into a room with soldiers and veterans, a room full of the best of the best, each one a fellow candidate and each one sitting far more stiffly than he is, implying much more discipline and training than the young officer has experienced. James draws quite a bit of attention to himself during the written part of the exam when he interrupts the entire room to pull a screeching table across the room to his side so he can write on it. But where he really surprises everyone is in the shooting range, where each candidate is given a room full of alien cut outs moving from one side of the room to the next and have to shoot as many as they can in the allotted time. James only manages to shoot one, and it was a cut out of a little girl holding science books. When asked why he did it, he breaks down each alien he saw and shows why they weren't actually committing any crimes. But then he says that the little girl was just hanging out with a group of aliens in the middle of the night, holding science books far too advanced for her, clearly she was up to something. This combined with K standing up for him and saying he saw him chase down an alien nobody each could have caught, sell the agency on recruiting him.

While this is going on, a farmer in the middle of nowhere is having an argument with his wife, only to have it interrupted by a crash in his backyard. The farmer, Edgar, goes outside to investigate. He is quickly sucked into the pit created by the crashed object. He emerges with his skin now hanging lifelessly off his body. He asks his wife for sugar water and then shocks her so much by pulling his skin back that she faints.

"You know what the difference between you and me is? I make this look good."

Back at the agency James has now been accepted into the Men in Black, and K explains to him that they are a secret organization that police alien lifeforms here on Earth and fund themselves by selling inventions created by these aliens. He meets Zed, the leader of the MIB and is told that he now has to go put on the last suit he'll ever wear. James has his identity erased, along with his fingerprints and all other traces of his existence. He is then given his black suit uniform along with the new code name Agent J. From here K takes J out on a training day to show him the ropes. His first stop is preventing an alien couple from leaving their designated area. K talks to the husband and learns that they were leaving to get his wife to a hospital since she was going into labor. J delivers the baby as K starts to learn that there was more to his reason for leaving than he let on.

They start to investigate any leads he can find, including several Weekly World News parodying newspapers that report on aliens and the supernatural. J believes these papers are a joke while K tells him they are the only papers out there that actually do any real journalism and find out the actual truth. They learn about a crashed alien ship on a farm and go visit the place where Edgar was taken over. They meet his wife, neuralyze her, and investigate the area. K tells J that what crash landed was a bug, a massive and terrifying creature that must have come here for a mission. They eventually learn that an ambassador from an alien planet was murdered by the bug and his body along with his cat were taken to the local morgue. On the way to investigate, K gives J his weapon, a tiny pea shooter named the Noisy Cricket, which J assumes is being given to him as a form of humiliation. There they meet Dr. Laurel Weaver who sees the body of the ambassador open up to reveal a tiny alien inside that tells him the galaxy is on Orion's Belt.

K shakes some information out of a talking pug

Back at headquarters they don't know what this message could mean since the constellation Orion does not contain a galaxy. They go to shake down some information from their local informant, a talking pug that runs a newsstand named Frank. The dog tells K that he doesn't understand, that a galaxy doesn't have to be huge, that size isn't everything. They quickly realize that Orion was the name of the cat that would not leave his master at the morgue. They hurry there but Edgar has beaten them too it. He takes the small galaxy that was hanging around the collar of the cat, along with Dr. Weaver. As they leave J fires off the Noisy Cricket, learning that it is actually very powerful as it fires him back and blast a hole in a car. Edgar gets away and they are left to neuralyze everyone who saw J fire off the gun.

The duo return to headquarters and try to think of where Edgar might be going, when they learn that an alien army is outside of Earth's orbit and is willing to blow up the planet if they don't get the galaxy back, fearing what it could do if it falls into the bug's hands. Now with a deadline the MIB shut down every form of transportation aliens have off the planet, but J realizes that there is one place they overlooked. K had told him about what had happened when aliens first came to Earth and K had met them, before there was an MIB and he was just a kid on his way to give flowers to his girlfriend. They took the alien ships they found that night and hid them in plain site as the observation towers at Flushing Meadows.

Agent J and K shoot down Edgar as he takes off

They head out to the ships and shoot them down just as Edgar is taking off. The two agents engage in a fight with Edgar in his alien form, which is a giant cockroach. Edgar swallows K's gun, causing K to walk up to the monster and dare him to eat him, telling J to keep him busy. Edgar swallows K and starts climbing up to the second disguised space ship in order to leave, but when J spots a bug on the ground he gets an idea. He steps on the cockroach, causing Edgar to take notice. He crawls back down and J starts goading him on by stepping on more bugs. Right before Edgar attacks J, K shoots his way out from the inside of his stomach. K reveals that he got the galaxy and tells Zed that they can call off the countdown with the alien fleet. However Edgar isn't dead yet, he is about to attack again when suddenly he is shot and killed by Dr. Weaver.

After the world is saved, K tells J that he is tired of this and he's ready to retire. He entrust things to J and tells him he'll see him around, to which J replies "No, you won't." He then neuralyzes K and lets him retire. The film ends with J picking up a paper and seeing a story about a local man waking up from a coma after decades and reuniting with the girl he loves, and on the cover of the paper is a picture of K with his arm around the woman he was taking those flowers to the night he joined the agency. J then gets in the car with his newest partner, Dr. Weaver, now going by the name Agent L.

Critical Reception

Men in Black received high praises from critics, scoring a 91 on Rotten Tomatoes. But what was even higher praise was the reaction from audiences. The film, which was shot on a budget of 90 million, pulled in over five times its budget.