Word: planetful
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There was, of course, no one in Mars' Ares Vallis floodplain to mark the moment when NASA's 3-ft.-tall Pathfinder spacecraft dropped into the soil of the long-dry valley. But there was a planet more than 100 million miles away filled with people who were paying heed when it landed, appropriately enough, on July 4. For the first time in 21 years, a machine shot from Earth once again stirred up the Martian dust. More important, for the first time ever, it was going to be able to keep stirring it up well after it landed. Curled...
...results are starting to show. In September the Mars Global Surveyor, already en route to the planet, will settle into orbit and begin a two-year program of photographing and mapping the terrain below. Over the next eight years, up to eight more ships will follow. As these new probes are heading Marsward, others will be dispatched to places as familiar as the moon and as remote as Pluto. "In the next 10 years," says NASA administrator Daniel Goldin, "we'll be flying by, orbiting, landing, roving and bringing back samples from every critical planetary body in the solar system...
...Black. To ensure that humans are kept in a state of tranquil ignorance. Jones coolly erases people's memories of encounters-of-the-third-kind simply by holding up a handy-dandy pen-shaped object called a "newralyzer." More importantly, the MiB serve as the planet's inter-terrestrial INS agents, regulating the movements of some 1500 aliens sojourning on Earth, concentrated mainly in NYC and mostly in human disguise. (Watch for the quick shot of monitored aliens-whom-you-always-suscpected-were-aliens: I believe I spied Sylvester Stallone and Newt Gingrich, among others.) Indeed, the movie gets...
...copy of "American Gothic"), who claims that an alien's wearning her husband Edgar's skin, turns out to be key and makes for a hoot of an interview with Jones and Smith. From a cheap postcard, the Bug tracks down the flying saucers as his ticket off the planet. And of course, the requisite Elvis joke...
Perhaps the best thing about "Men in Black"--besides Danny Elfman's deliciously campy score--is its ending sequence, in which Earth is visually reduced to an alien's plaything. This and occassional lines from Jones referring to Earth as a little backwater planet almost smack of Douglas Adams. Too bad he didn't have a hand in writing the script...