Men in Black, an Esoteric Review
By: Robert Ford
Tags: Men In Black, Aliens, Movies, Esoterica, Review

Warning: Maybe some partial spoilers

Always remember, the universe has a way of leading you to where you’re suppose to be at the moment you’re supposed to be there. — Mr T, Mr High T

I recently saw the new movie, Men in Black: International. We’re introduced again to the MIB agency, another no such agency, agency. However unlike the first movie, there was no Will Smith and most of the movie didn’t really take place in America, and we finally have a female lead MIB or rather WIB. We went from the deserts of Morocco to the dancing lights of Paris. Despite the ratings, I thought that overall it was decent while also lacking significantly in terms of character development and a generic “there’s a mole” plotline, and would give it a 5/10 just for storytelling. However, that’s not why I’m writing this since I don’t review every movie with just decent stories.

I’m writing this because of the interesting ideas promulgated by the MIB franchise, and this addition in particular. However, first, for the uninitiated, I’ll explain what the premise behind MIB is. Unlike the Keelian MIB that looks like slenderman in a suit, the MIB of the movies is super secret human agents that work for a quasi-governmental organization that doesn’t really have any official sanctioning, much like section 31 of Star Trek except a little less pushy. They hide the ET presence on earth and allow ETs to disguise themselves as humans and walk among us. In many ways, it mirrors modern conspiracy lore that believes in ET-human contact. It also brings up some interesting questions, like when the main character M played by Tessa Thompson who after having a contact experience as a young child, tries to join the MIB agency, first by going to the FBI and then later hacking into NASA (Gary Mckinnon anyone?) and gaining access to their satellite data which she then used to triangulate where a ship had crashed and hopefully find some real MIB. This made me wonder, “how does one really join the control group?”

There’s something for every kind of UFO and esoteric enthusiast, Metamaterials if you’re a “nuts and bolts” TTSA kind of person, human disguised ETs, demonic hive minds, pocket stars, and even cute little green men that say m’lady constantly. I honestly thought from a Fortean perspective rather than a normie critic perspective, the movie was great albeit the weak storytelling.

Doesn’t he look so cute, except he can blow your face off.

The first movie didn’t really have much in the way of esoteric mind fodder, except some basic “evil bugs look like humans” that would have come out of a David Icke speech. The new movie, however, is different, there’s Forteana a plenty. Where MIB was just a secret NGO that occasionally killed some aliens and saved the world, now it’s a secret society whose past extends back to Gustave Eiffel and the creation of the Eiffel tower as a stargate to other realms. In this way, it mirrors the film Tomorrowland where a secret society also existed which controlled technology that was far advanced of the rest of humanity, and would be considered as Richard Dolan would say, a breakaway civilization. In that film too the Eiffel tower was a portal to Tomorrowland and Eiffel a part of the secret society that broke-away, I really wonder if there was some sharing of ideas between the writers of both films.

The second really interesting piece of esotericism that I found, was the concept of “The Hive”. The hive is the main antagonist of the movie. It’s a dark force which has a hive mind of sorts and can influence and take over other beings which it deems important to its goal of conquest. Hive minds are staples of science fiction with the Borg in Trek or the Formics of Ender’s Game. The hive here, however, works discretely, infiltrating even the super secretive MIB agency. The concept reminded me of something Tom Delonge said in an interview relatively recently, it was either on Coast to Coast or Jimmy Church’s radio show, I don’t remember exactly. However paraphrasing Tom, he said that the UFO phenomena has a hive mind and that it influences us to give it attention. A hive mind makes some sense of the high strangeness of the phenomena, when people halfway around the world report the same strange sightings on the same day, or when bigfoot appears right after a UFO hovered by. A highly coordinated mechanism I think would be required to facilitate such high strangeness.

There’s so much more I could probably write about this movie, and the other MIB movies, and maybe in time, I will. But I want to leave you with a little quote from the movie Paul. Maybe this and other films with esoteric ideas are just harmless fictional fun, or maybe they’re a little bit more ;)