MOVIE REVIEW: Can ‘Men in Black III’ Compete with the Action-Comics Genre?

Summer 2012 seems to be the season of the "Wrath of Titans", "Battleship" and "Avengers" for mostly the late adolescents, younger adolescents, their parents

and movie enthusiast in general. Seldom does senior citizens joined the viewing community these days because of the television, DVDs and perhaps the You Tube. The aforementioned three films are clustered as one because of similarities in gigantic digital budget (in 3D) and thematic formula of the good fighting the "terapower" enemies. Wrath of the Titans and Avengers are battles of humans against the gods of the heavenly realms while aliens are the bad attackers of humans in the Battleship. These three were handsome male dominated movies.

These terapower movies do not rouse their audience to scream and shrieks but the digitalized cuing speed is heart pounding and to some, stomach panting. The awesomeness of these films pulverized the Filipino movie industry to mere residue with no recyclable value. How sad that the Filipino film makers cannot even compete with their Indian counterpart.

The no-point-of-comparison logic remained the sole consolation of the Filipino movie industry but among the Hollywood action-comic genre, Men in Black III (stylized MIB 3) was shown towards this last few weeks of the Philippine dry season. The dark glasses of the "Blues Brothers" was revived when this Steven Spielberg initially produced MIB 1 was beamed worldwide.

Who can match the digital genius and novelties of a Steven Spielberg then? In fact, major show gadgetry of the latter terapower comic-action seems to be started by Spielberg. Who popularized the alien terapowers in the first place? The MIB sunglasses and the Will Smith-Tommy Lee Jones towering stature is so influential, no less than President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo and his economic team posed in a lifestyle magazine then donning an all black outfits and in uniform sunglasses. That was cool!

It is a disappointment that while MIB 3 now is totally unique from the three action-comics recently shown, nothing impressively new was offered. This is the price perhaps of producing a series. If drama and the acting of Josh Brolin are considered a Spielberg novelty in competition with the three action-comic terapowers, then MIB 3 is a stand out. How it faired at the box office is another story.

Agent J (Will Smith) travels in time to MIB alien monitoring agency early years in 1969, to stop an alien from assassinating his official partner Agent K (Tommy Lee Jones) and changing history. Back in 1969, he saw a 29 year old Agent K acted by Josh Brolin who can imitate Tommy Lee Jones’ poker face, movements, speed in speech and antics. Josh Brolin was impressive.

It was in 1969 when Agent J saw and realized that Agent K took care of him after his father was shot by an alien, Boris the Animal (Jemaine Clement). The scene was a tear jerker.

MIB 3 is not a love story obviously the fight scenes are funny; the whole family can safely watch it, despite the disappointment.*