‘Men in Black International’ details and photos: more aliens, plot details and the twins, Laurent and Larry Bourgeois
The upcoming Men in Black International, a half-sequel, half-reboot of the comic book franchise that started over 21 years ago, will forego the legacy of Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones, who made the series memorable, handing the baton to Chris Hemsworth and Tessa Thompson.
The trailer featured the voiceover from Liam Neeson, who believes there is a mole in MiB that is putting the entire operation at risk. This kind of threat means our MiB heroes Agent H (Hemsworth) and Agent M (Thompson) are globe-trotting to track down the threat, taking them from New York City to Istanbul to Italy and London, which is where Neeson is in charge of his own branch of the MiB, working from what is described as a “a massive mad snooker ball” by production designer Charlie Wood.
Entertainment Weekly reveals the story is set in motion after a powerful alien government is killed on Agent H’s watch.
So fans can expect a ton of new aliens.
Jeremy Woodhead, who has worked on Doctor Strange and Avengers: Age of Ultron, created somewhere between 400 and 500 individual sketches for the movie. He teased a “showcase moment for the movie’s creature makers that recalls Star Wars’ iconic cantina scene.”
One of the new creatures will be a bit of a sidekick int he movie. His name is Pawny, and we’ve already caught a glimpse of him in the first Men in Black International trailer. Kumail Nanjiani (The Big Sick) is lending his voice to the character who is said to be “the last survivor of an alien race that had been hiding out on Earth disguised as a chess set.”
Apparently he has some major self-esteem issues.
French dancers Laurent and Larry Bourgeois, best known as back-up dancers for Beyoncé and winning NBC’s World of Dance in 2017, play villains in the film.
Director F. Gary Gray wanted to bring them on as a pair of aliens known as Les Twins, and yes, they get to showcase their dance movies.
One particular sequence, which you can see briefly teased in the trailer, has the duo strutting their stuff in a fight scene in the middle of a busy road in central London. Full of acrobatics and crisp yet smooth movement, apparently these two know how to bring it.
Hemsworth was wowed by their moves: “It was Gary’s idea to bring them on, and I’ve just been rapt watching them move. It’s like some sort of high-speed, very postproduction altered state.”
Hemsworth likened his MIB work to the work done for Marvel.
“Thor’s stunts are wildly complicated, but it feels like an atomic bomb goes off with each of those [hammer] hits. Everything is sort of magnified to a level that is so nonhuman. Whereas this, we have to keep grounding it. There’s always a part of it where I’m like, ‘Can I do a flip or just sort of leap from this building to that one?’ and they’re like, ‘Nah, humans don’t do that sort of thing.’ So they have to rein me in occasionally.”
Wood says, “He’s been drifting cars on this and doing all sorts of things that are completely different than anything he’s done before.”
Mission: Impossible franchise star Rebecca Ferguson, who is playing an alien named Riza, glimpsed in the trailer in a fight with Tessa Thompson, has the use of an alien’s third arm.
From the trailer, Thompson appears like Smith’s Agent J, but she clarified: “The genesis of the whole thing is a young girl whose life had been altered by an encounter with Men in Black, and the idea is that unlike Will [Smith] in the original films, she’s a protagonist who hasn’t been recruited but has found them.”
Thompson confessed that she loved and hopes to continue with this latest installment: “I mean, the start of the first movie talks about immigration, and Will [Smith] has these really searing jokes about race…. I think you do have the chance inside of all this escapism to say something, and make a movie that has heart and that has satire and that holds up a mirror to our stuff. I think that’s possible, without preaching.”
Men in Black International arrives in theaters on June 14, 2019.
