9 / 10
Official trailer
Men in Black is among the most commercially successful and structurally efficient science fiction comedies of the 1990s.
Barry Sonnenfeld directed. Ed Solomon wrote, loosely adapted from Lowell Cunningham’s Aircel/Malibu comic. Tommy Lee Jones plays Agent K, a senior member of the secret agency that polices the alien population on Earth. Will Smith plays James Edwards, an NYPD officer who’s recruited to become Agent J. Vincent D’Onofrio plays Edgar/the Bug, a giant cockroach wearing a deceased farmer’s skin who’s hunting a fugitive alien jewel.
Linda Fiorentino plays Dr. Laurel Weaver. Rip Torn plays Zed.
From the first scene to the last, Men in Black is pure fun, and I grin the entire time. It’s quick and weird, and it never stops to admire its own cleverness. This is the kind of movie I’d put on again tomorrow without a second thought, and that’s why it gets a 9.
The film made approximately five hundred and ninety million dollars worldwide on a ninety million dollar budget. It was one of the highest-grossing films of 1997 and the launching pad for Will Smith’s career as the dominant summer blockbuster star of the late 1990s. The reviews were uniformly positive. The film won the Academy Award for Best Makeup. The success was deserved.
Jones and Smith
The pairing of Tommy Lee Jones and Will Smith is the foundation of the film. Jones was fifty during production. Smith was twenty-eight. Jones brings the dry, exhausted, professional patience of a man who has been doing his strange job for decades. Smith brings the high-energy comic timing he’d refined on The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. The pairing works because the two tones complement each other without either performer compromising what they do best.
The script gives both performers their preferred mode. Jones handles the world-weary exposition and the deadpan delivery of absurd information. Smith handles the audience surrogate role, reacting to the absurdity with the right astonishment. Neither is asked to do the other’s job.
I could listen to Jones explain alien bureaucracy in that bone-dry voice all day, and Smith’s reactions land every single time. I rank them with the great buddy pairings of the decade, genre or no genre.
For Writers
A buddy comedy works best when the two performers complement each other instead of compete. Men in Black gives Tommy Lee Jones the dry-delivery role and Will Smith the reaction role. Neither has to do the other’s job. The lesson is that ensemble casting should be additive. Two performers doing different things produce more than two performers doing the same thing. Plan the contrasts in the writing.
The Aliens
Rick Baker’s creature design and makeup work won the Academy Award.
The aliens in Men in Black aren’t generic. Each species has its own physical traits, cultural details, and bureaucratic relationship to the MIB agency. The pug-faced Frank is a Worm. The squid-faced Mikey is a fugitive. The Annelid worms in the office are coffee-drinking employees. The detail makes the world feel populated instead of designed.
The Bug, Vincent D’Onofrio’s villain, is the production’s most impressive practical achievement. D’Onofrio plays a giant cockroach wearing Edgar’s stretched and damaged skin, committed to the physical comedy of inhabiting a body the Bug doesn’t understand. The walk is wrong, the proportions are wrong, and the cuticles are wrong. I think it’s the funniest and most disgusting villain performance of the decade, and I laugh and squirm at the same time whenever he’s on screen.
For Writers
A creature pretending to be human is funnier and more disturbing than a creature that obviously isn’t human. The Bug in Men in Black is wearing Edgar’s skin badly. The audience can see the creature underneath. The lesson is that horror and comedy both benefit from creatures that almost pass as human. Pure aliens are predictable. Aliens pretending to be human produce the uncanny effect that gives the audience handles to grip the strangeness.
The Worldbuilding
The film constructs an entire secret society in two hours of runtime.
The MIB headquarters. The neuralyzer. The training process. The alien immigration system. The locker scenes with the tiny civilization in the storage locker. The Arquillian battle cruiser containing the galaxy. The bureaucratic procedures for alien residency. The worldbuilding is dense and yet entirely accessible because the film delivers information through dramatic action instead of through exposition.
The locker civilization scene is one of the film’s most quoted, a tiny world living inside a Grand Central locker.
The closing shot turns that joke around on us, pulling back until our whole galaxy is a marble in some alien’s game. That pull-back delights me. It’s a cosmic joke told with a straight face, and it makes the whole movie feel bigger and sillier at once.
For Writers
A final-image reveal can recontextualize an entire film if the image is sufficient to its job. Men in Black ends with the camera pulling back to reveal our galaxy is a marble in an alien child’s game. The audience reframes everything they’ve just seen. The lesson is that powerful endings often work through scale shifts instead of through plot revelations. Show the audience that the world they’ve been watching is smaller than they thought. The audience’s relationship to the entire film changes.
Craft Note
Rick Baker’s makeup work on Vincent D’Onofrio as Edgar-the-Bug is the franchise’s most underrated craft element. The prosthetic structure transforms D’Onofrio’s posture, jaw, and facial geometry into the bug-wearing-human-suit performance that the comedy depends on. Practical creature effects allow performers to commit to specific physical choices that CGI can’t reproduce. D’Onofrio is acting through the makeup.
Is Men in Black as good as people say?
9/10. Men in Black is as much fun as science fiction comedy got in the 1990s. The Jones-Smith pairing drives it, Rick Baker’s creature work is exceptional, the worldbuilding is dense without ever slowing down, and the closing scale shift is a perfect last joke. The sequels got progressively worse and I’d skip them, but I’d put the original in front of anybody who hasn’t seen it. It misses a 10 only because it’s a little slight, and I’m fine with that.
