Just fair warning: if you haven’t seen Men in
Black 3 yet, and would like to, do NOT read further. There will be spoilers.
Obviously: I saw Men
in Black 3 this weekend. How could I
not? It’s MEN IN BLACK, for crying out
loud. The pairing of Will Smith &
Tommy Lee Jones is as classic as Dan Aykroyd and Tom Hanks in Dragnet (though, to be fair, an even
better pairing would have been Jack Webb and Dan Aykroyd…but I digress).
Rather than stealing scenes from other movies (see previous
blog post “Origi-NOT-ity”), MIB3 had one major flaw, and that was it
was riddled with holes like a downed 30s era mobster. First one: when the poor schmuck of a chick
brings the “cake” (OK, I lied about the plagiarism – isn’t that the same pudding
that Dobby dropped on Mrs. Mason’s head in Harry
Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone?) to Boris the Animal (“It’s JUST BORIS!”),
and we see that the crème filling isn’t so much crème as it is insectoid-symbiotic-alien-lifeform:
a creepy spider-like thing that shoots darts.
When he is finally free of his steel straight-jacket, we learn that it’s
more than just a pet….it’s actually a part of Boris, and it returns to this
mouth-pouch thing on his hand.
 |
| Talk to the hand. |
The hand…that was previously encased in a long metal tube. Now, it’s clear now that the tube was in
place in order to prevent Just Boris from deploying his little weapon. Otherwise, he would have been out long before
then, right? So where’d the thing come
from, anyway? And why did it take Boris
40 years to be reunited with his beloved pet?
Dunno. It’s never
explained. Plot-hole Numero Uno.
OK, so Boris and his girlfriend (whose name should have totally been Natasha) stride gleefully through the
jail – stopping only to end the life of one inmate. Boris dispatches the rest of the guards by
blowing a hole in the side of the jail, which at first you think isn’t a hole
so much as a portal into outer space, but then you see that the prison itself is
actually on the MOON. Boris bounces
outside – and doing a much better job at walking in low gravity than John
Carter did (but I digress) – and yells out a challenge to Agent K….which of
course should have been inaudible, as
there is no atmosphere on the moon.
That’s the thing that bugs me most in movies: breaking the
known laws of science and physics just because they are inconvenient. Granted, I know that to enjoy and appreciate
science fiction, one must suspend reality.
Ships that have faster-than-light capability, “beaming down,”
hyper-drive, lasers, phasers, photon torpedos….yes, OK, they don’t really exist, but they DO follow the
laws as we know them.
Boris? Not so
much. Apparently he can speak without the
benefit of an atmosphere. And apparently
we – the audience – can hear him perfectly well without an atmosphere. Baloney.
You know we couldn’t hear him if we were on the moon – sound doesn’t
travel in a vacuum. And you know we couldn’t
jolly well talk, either, without some air passing through our vocal chords.
There is one explanation for Boris being able to actually “speak”
without the benefit of atmosphere: perhaps he doesn’t need oxygen, or even an
atmosphere at all. In which case it was
pretty damned short-sighted of the MIBs to build a huge freaking prison on the
moon to hold him (and other undesirablres) without considering that it wouldn’t
kill him to be outside the prison. Dumb.
There’s plot-hole number two.
I’m going to diverge here from MIB and go on a little more
about breaking the laws of physics just to make a story. As I said, there is a difference between “suspending
disbelief” and “we’ll just make impossible crap happen.” Breaking laws like that leads to plot holes
so large that they have their own set of “Yo Momma” jokes. As a writer, I try to make sure that what I
write is happening could actually happen,
within the confines of the laws of the universe wherein the story takes place. Writing science fiction and fantasy gives
you some leeway (especially with
magic), but even writers who include magic in their stories have rules that
govern the use of that magic. Otherwise
it’s just deux ex machina and BAD,
BAD WRITING.
Yes, I’ve written myself into corners before, not knowing
how on earth I can resolve whatever conflict is happening between what I need
to have happen in the story and what is actually possible within the world. But a good writer will find a way to make it
happen while staying true to his or her universe. A good writer will make their world
believable. A lazy writer just expects
you to believe whatever they say. And
the worst example in the world of lazy writing has got to be the movie Starship Troopers.
I hated the movie.
Not because it was a stupid, campy B-grade comedy, but rather because it
was a stupid, campy B-grade comedy that billed itself as an epic space
adventure. No, that’s not why I hated
it: that’s merely why I was disappointed in it.
I hated it because – all stupidity and lime-green fiddles aside – it just
completely ignored about every single law in the physical universe. As well as left some egregious plot-holes
just sitting there, waiting for somebody to fall into them.
OK, this is a big one: the “bugs” launch a big-ass asteroid
toward the Earth, where it hits a densely populated area. Direct hit.
Excellent calculations on their part, wouldn’t you say? They threw that big chunk of space rock
aaaaaaaaaaallllllll the way from their solar system to Earth, without hitting
any other planets, without any other gravitational field (planet, star, etc) in
between altering its trajectory, to make it hit Earth’s atmosphere at the
precise speed and angle needed to ensure it got all the way through the
atmosphere intact (without burning up or exploding in the upper atmosphere). Wow.
That’s pretty damned impressive…for what turns out to be a bunch of
gigantic insects on a barren planet. How
did they launch the asteroid? What did
they use to push it up to the speed necessary to traverse vast distances of
space? Where are their ships? Their weapons? Their defense fortifications? How in
the name of all that is holy did they pull that one off?
Speaking of bugs…where did they come from? What’s the evolutionary history of their
planet? The movie expects me (you) to
believe that these freaking huge insects evolved on a lifeless hunk of rock? There’s nothing on the planet except rocks
and soil…and bugs. Lots of bugs. What do they eat while waiting for shiploads
of humans to drop in from space? What
did they eat while they were evolving to the point where they could develop
their apparently incredible asteroid-throwing technology, in order to lure shiploads
of humans to their planet? Darwin’s Natural Selection might be considered
a theory, but you know damned well that he’s onto something there. Earth: all mammals have 4 limbs. All of them. It’s the design that works, and hints at the
common origin way back in the mists of time.
At some point, the 4-limb body design conferred the best adaptation for
the environment, and that’s why it stuck.
In the movie Avatar, all of
the mammals had SIX limbs, except for the Navi, who had four….but you know they
should have had six, too. (That bugged
me throughout the entire movie.) But more
than that: to have life, you have to have an ecosystem of some kind. Whatever creatures you imagine, they have to
eat something. Know why there aren’t
giant beetles on Earth’s moon? Because
it doesn’t have anything there to eat.
Nothing to consume, except rock.
Just like the bug’s planet. The
bugs aren’t eating rocks – if they were, the planet would be gone, because
rocks don’t reproduce or grow. No, the
bugs were eating the humans – but what did they eat before the humans showed
up?
Lazy writing. Ignoring the fundamental basics of life and
biology. And that’s not the worst part.
The worst part is that despite the fact that us humans on
Earth are technologically advanced enough to build ships that traverse the vast
reaches of space, we still couldn’t see that goddamned huge asteroid headed
straight for us. (If only the kid from Deep Impact had been in that movie, the entire travesty of the film
could have been averted.) Not only that,
but apparently only one ship was anywhere along the path of the asteroid to
notice it…and the asteroid conveniently hit the ship’s ONE FREAKING
COMMUNICATIONS SATELLITE ARRAY. Jesus H.
Christ, didn’t we have CELL PHONES or something? Morse code?
Radio waves? One satellite on the
stupid ship and they can’t say ANYTHING forever?
Bad writing. Lousy writing. I’m not even going to discuss the final scene
wherein the “psychic” reads the “mind” of the bugs. Just no.
OK, I’ve destroyed enough of yours and my sensibilities with
that drivel. Back to MIB3 and the third
major plot hole. It’s not so much an
example of lazy writing as it is the writers forgetting what they’ve already
written.
A good example of this is the theme song to the TV show Friends.
The writers wanted to play it on the radio too, so they added a couple
extra verses and a chorus and whammo! – a hit.
Except they forgot what they wrote in the first part of the song. Sing it along in your head. “So no one told you life was gonna be this
way….” Yeah, very first line. Next verse?
“Your mama warned you there’d be days like these?” She did?
But I thought no one told me life was gonna be this way? Which is it?
Ugh. Bad writing.
MIB does it on a grander scale, forgetting what they wrote
in the first movie. Remember Agent K? How did he get involved in the Men in Black
in the very first movie? Yeah…on his way
to see his girlfriend, bumped into some friendly visiting aliens….and wound up
sacrificing everything in his life to be an anonymous member of this new
government conspiracy agency. He
recruited Agent J – not to be his
partner, but to be his replacement – and at least once in the movie we eavesdrop
on his eavesdropping on his former girlfriend.
At the very end, you see he’s gone back to her, recovered from his
amnesia, and they are happy together at last.
Remember that? Such a sweet
ending to the story.
Then what the hell is this business with Agent O? Excuse me?
He goes back to the woman he has loved for all those years in movie one,
gets re-recruited in movie two, and now in movie three he’s mooning it over a
fellow agent he supposedly FORGOT ABOUT at the end of movie one? OK, he got his memory back in movie two…but
what about the woman he went back to?
What happened to her? She wasn’t strictly necessary to the plot….but
how could you just write that K and O have unresolved romantic issues when it didn’t
even come up in the first movie?
Plot-hole Number Three.
Big ol’ plot-hole, if you ask me.
Don’t get me wrong: Men
in Black 3 was incredibly entertaining, as well as gave you some really
good insight into K’s motivations for recruiting J. I liked that twist, and it worked well within
the framework of the previous stories.
It’s just that they wrote themselves into some corners and didn’t do a
very good job of getting themselves out.
Oh, well, I’m sure there will be a Men in Black 4 coming out soon.
Unless this is the one where I ran out of Tastykakes.
Crap.
