Men In Black II
| State of Body | Initial head trauma. Internal investigation showed that certain vital organs appear to have been replaced with underperforming replicas. |
|---|---|
| Detail of Inspection | Once, with occasional clip viewings on cable. |
| Forensic Investigator | Michael Stangeland |
| Comments | A potentially good movie ruined by some bad story decisions. |
Men in Black was a fun movie that got good reviews and did well at the box office. It’s sequel, Men in Black II didn’t fare quite as well. Sure, it made a lot of money (though not as much as the first), enough for a third one to be on its way, but it wasn’t as enjoyable to watch. Both were on Cable the other day, and while I more or less watched the first all the way through, the second I didn’t bother with. So lets open it up and see what’s wrong inside.
The premise itself is good enough, and between K’s missing memory and MIB headquarters being overrun, gives us enough to work with even though the same danger is that an evil alien wants to destroy the world.
The first change I think we need to take is one of two options. Either we A) bring back Agent L, or B) introduce a new character (which, for the purposes of this article, will be called Agent I) who can serve as a replacement for Agent L should we decide that it’s ultimately better that she be left out of the movie for whatever reason. Whichever we use, it solves some early problems in the movie that we’ll get to later.
This theoretical Agent I would provide a kind of character who would service much like a young K, providing both a straight man and a more by-the-book sensibility that would complement J’s more humorous and unorthodox style. At the same time, we’d also ensure that audiences wouldn’t just see him in such a light, both ensuring he can naturally move more to the background when K makes his return and heavily suggesting that working with J has caused him to pick up on some of the more experienced agents style.
Personally, I’d like to see L return, and I don’t see why we can’t make this happen. The biggest problem I’d see is that the actress just didn’t want to return. While I would like it best if we could get the same person, I’m sure that we could get a suitable replacement actress if we needed. If, at this point, we didn’t want to just pretend that she looked that way all along, we could even bring it up as an event that happened between the movies, some incident that caused a change in appearance, likely one that she’s touchy about and doesn’t like being brought up.
With L back, we don’t have to keep her as J’s permanent partner. The MIB animated series had her often working at headquarters, which is an element we could bring into the movie. This could even allow us to include both L and I, though at that point we’d probably be working with too many characters if we were to give them all a proper amount of screen time to justify their inclusion in the movie. So from here on out, we’re going to use just one of them.
The first change to the storyline itself is subway slug scene. Here, we cut the character of Agent T and replace him with L/I. By cutting Agent T, we can also quickly eliminate the whole partner neuralization subject brought up in the film. This solves the first of the movies big problems. The problem right off the bat here is that from T’s screen time, it’s very difficult to believe that he would have been recruited by the MIB in the first place (maybe J just neuralized so many potential recruits that they were scraping the bottom of the barrel by that point). Unless the agency’s recruiting standards have lapsed over the past 5 years, you would think that they would be able to avoid recruiting future washouts. Especially with the kind of frequency Zeds later talk to J would seem to indicate.
On the flipside, it helps us to avoid giving J the supposed power and influence within the organization the movie places in him that stretches credibility. While he may still be the star of the movie, it once again makes you wonder about the organization itself if J has apparently gained so much influence, and not just in the fear he’s put into lower-ranked individuals through use of his supposed neuralizer-happy fingers.
Back at the subway slug scene, we still have the operation go poorly, though this time it’s not shown to be so much the fault of one of the MIB agents, but rather the ill-temper of the slug itself. The scene then mostly plays out as normal, up until J’s covering his tracks. At this point, after we have J begin to rant about the civilians behavior, rather than provide the second neuralizaion himself, we have his partner catch up with him and, after a quick warning should J have his sunglasses off by this point, pre-empting him.
Coming off this, the next change would be the J and T coffee scene, which with T’s character axed, would instead be between J and either L or I, and rather than be about T’s inability to fit in with the organization, would provide some useful information for the audience on either the current situation between J and L or let us better know exactly who I is as a person, agent, or both.
At this point, if we’re using L, we can explain that perhaps the two aren’t on the best of terms, with L spending most of her time as an Agent at headquarters, though she needed to get out and spend some time in the field and happened to be partnered with J. This would begin a minor subplot that would flow into the later romantic tension between Laura Vasquez.
For I, it would allow us to casually give the audience an idea of how long J and I have been working together, their thoughts on one another, and their contrasting styles as agents.
There would be necessary minor changes made after this to fit L or I, but at this point we can then zoom to the next big change, when J meets with Laura. Here, J does most of the questioning, with his partner doing some talking, but rather than have J let himself avoid neuralizing Laura, we would instead have his partner do it, right as it appears J is going to let her go with her memories in tact, then have them give a replacement memory as J looks on, clearly trying to hold back more surprised and disbelief than he’s already showing. When asked why they did it, he’d be reminded that it is standard procedure.
This would have an even greater effect if we were using L as J’s partner, as we can play the scene to suggest that perhaps there’s some hint of jealousy from L towards Laura that triggered her to act that way. At the same time, of course, we would have the previous neuralization scene to leave the audience thinking that perhaps it is just her doing her job, plus the fact that’s in the right to begin with.
The next changes come as we bring K back into the fold. This starts with making some significant changes to the deneuralizer idea. While it the deneuralizer isn’t bad itself, the idea of it is handled poorly. Part of it is that the easy use of it takes away one of the fun concepts of the movie, that of having to get the help of K while lacking his memories. The other major problem is that with the neuralizer forming the cornerstone of the MIBs undercover nature, having a device which is readily available, especially one line and having been built in the basement of some aliens store, creates a major risk to the entire operation.
While the deneuralizer remains in the movie, its prescience in the movie is scaled back significantly. First, the thing doesn’t actually work. When it comes up, it’s mentioned as experimental, and it’s only used because it’s seen as their best opportunity to solve the problem as quickly as is safely possible. Second, we completely cut the basement, home-built deneuralizer and Jack Jeebs part in the sequel.
J goes with either L or I to retrieve K with the understanding that the deneuralizer may be ready by the time they get back. The retrieval will go largely the same, though rather than having K’s relationship with the woman he got together with at the end of the first movie completely fall apart, it’ll instead be strained, giving him something to happily go back to at the end of this movie. If we have I go along, it’ll also give an opportunity to show some fun interaction between the two.
After returning to MIB headquarters, the group will have an opportunity to use the machine on K before Serleena overruns the facility, but they won’t have an opportunity to know if it worked right away due to the forced evacuation. The moments following the forced evacuation will also bring about the next major change to the story, where J and K won’t be the only ones we know escaped the building.
As demonstrated in the first film, the MIB is a major undertaking, policing every space alien on Earth. So with all the preparedness they have in place already, it would make sense for them to have a secondary headquarters where they can set up operations temporarily and organize the re-taking of MIB headquarters along with any agents that also escaped or were out in the field when headquarters were overrun. However, at the time it’s activated by those agents not trapped at MIB headquarters A, it’s being inhabited by the yellow worm guys. After they do a preliminary sorting of what’s going to happen next, J takes K to try to fix things.
Few changes other than those necessary would take place as J and K try to fix things, with the exception that K still doesn’t remember anything from his time as an Agent. However, he would still prove to be effective in helping, both because, as we’ll be shown, he’s a true natural, and because of the clues he left from his time as K.
Later, Laura would be left at the secondary MIB headquarters rather than at the Worm Guy’s apartment, only to be re-taken from there largely due to their behavior. J and K would return there to get weapons rather than visiting some families home where the MIB happens to store extra hidden weapons.
J and K would not go busting back into MIB headquarters alone. Rather, the retaking of the facility would be done with a much more professional appearance, and with the assistance of aliens called in to help friendly to the MIB. The two would then confront their respective foes as the headquarters is retaken, and those agents previously free would provide what mission control they could as the fight between them and Serleena goes to the streets. While K would still be unable to fly the car, it would simply be a matter of not knowing how to drive something of its type, with the playstation controller getting the ax for a more traditional flight control system.
In the end, J would know about the means for mass neuralization, but again would be pre-empted, this time by MIB headquarters. With the mission over, K would be reneuralized, though the final ‘real’ scene, featuring J and either I or L, would have J taking a peek in on K’s life to see that thinks look like they’re going to work out better this time. Likewise, the final interactions between J and his partner would show that things are looking up for them, and possibly posing the question as to whether they miss civilian life, to which they could reply that sometimes they do, but they wouldn’t trade the life them have.
Finally, the locker room scene and reveal of the headquarters being inside a locker would be replaced with a different scene where things are not as they appear. Instead, however, it would continue the theme with the video, and the missions that never happened nor ever existed. As J and his partner would drive off, the camera would pull back to reveal…a movie theater, perhaps one just like the one the audience is seated in. And from the front row, as the MIB theme plays, the narrator from the poorly made film would stand up, repeat his lines about it never happening, and then would put on a pair of sunglasses and “neuralize” the audience, essentially making it so that the movie they just watched “never happened”, just in time for the credits to roll.
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