Men in Black II

Aliens? In New York City? Just gedouttahere

One of the snappier conceits in Barry Sonnenfeld's 1997 sci-fi spoof Men in Black was a gizmo called the neuralyzer. This slimline device, wielded by alien-fighting agent Tommy Lee Jones, would emit a flash, and any hapless earthling who happened to have witnessed intergalactic nastiness would have all memory of it instantly erased. Some sort of neuralyzer mechanism must have been built into the film itself; I thought I had fond memories of it, but watching Men in Black II, I suddenly realised I couldn't remember much about it at all. The blockbuster industry thrives on this principle of forgettability: it means your mind is all the more receptive to sequels, especially if what you're getting is essentially more of the same.

In most respects, MiBII is a straight re-run of the original, generally retaining its sardonic, quickfire, confidently wiseacre attitude. It's a little bigger (and even, at 10 minutes shorter, a fraction crisper), but the concept has lost its novelty. And MiBII is nowhere near as funny, either. What can I tell you about its distinguishing features? There's a single good one-liner about the power of cleavage, cracked by Serleena, an evil artichoke-thing that arrives on Earth in a tiny spacecraft resembling a Philippe Starck lemon-squeezer, then assumes the human dominatrix form of Lara Flynn Boyle (whose fierce meat-cleaver profile has never been more alarming). There's a droll but gratuitous sequence where Will Smith, as agent Jay, briefly teams up with a talking pug. And Tommy Lee Jones as agent Kay – here doing time with the US Postal Service – looks more terrifying than any alien in his khaki shorts and black socks.

This apart, what does distinguish the film is that, while it's not terribly funny, it is oddly beautiful, in a hideous kind of way. Rick Baker, the dean of monster design, has devised a spectacular batallion of new plug-uglies – I particularly admired the thug with the face like a scowling lychee. As for the Industrial Light and Magic digitals, apart from the natty climactic firework display, you have to gasp at Serleena's multitudinous and truly repulsive tentacles. This is what digital FX cinema was always aspiring towards – everything writhing, fluid and tentacular, perfectly liquid imagery paying no lip service to any kind of realism.

In general, though, MiBII is MiBI all over again – same premise, same look, same gags. And yet the passing of five years has given this film a radically different meaning. Men in Black was made in the Clinton era, when the idea of straight-edged black-suited CIA types rooting out malevolent aliens hiding in America ("the scum of the universe", as the poster put it) looked like a harmless camp joke. After 11 September, however, with the rise of a new xenophobic anxiety in America, the same joke looks less funny; considering how ineffective the real CIA proved in identifying real terrorists, the no-nonsense authoritarianism of Agents Jay and Kay seems like a straightforwardly reassuring conservative fantasy.

In this light, MiBII comes to look as genuinely paranoid as the Fifties B-movie sci-fi that it parodies in passing. Is it pure coincidence that one of the clandestine aliens hiding in New York, who turns out to have built his own illicit deneuralyzer device, is played by a Lebanese-American actor, Tony Shalhoub? Isn't it pandering just a little to American anti-Arab fantasies that one of the gags involves him getting his head blown off (even if he does grow it back again)? Certainly, mainstream sci-fi's reactionary terror of "the Other" achieves a lavish new flowering here, and given the changed cultural climate, the gentle ironic spin of MiBI no longer mitigates it. The figure of Serleena is old-school vagina dentata misogyny taken to a nightmare degree: disguised as a lingerie model, she's really a devouring Medusa sprouting a zillion tentacles. Aliens here must either be tamed, or proven to be friendly – good immigrants, in effect. Some of the creatures here are in their own way as servile to humans as the wretched Jar Jar Binks, but even the friendly ones are depicted as suspiciously creepy: the jovial Worm Guys are lubricious little perverts in their Sixties-style swingers pad. The most implausible thing about this comic fantasy is the idea that an immigration centre for extra-terrestrials would resemble a flashy airport, complete with duty-free shop: if it had been more like Ellis Island, I might have believed it.

Well now... It's just a spoof, isn't it, and I'm taking it too seriously. I'm probably being as misguidedly earnest as the film's demented video nerd (David Cross), whose store is dedicated to Oliver Stone movies. But Hollywood parody no longer seems to work as real parody: as Nicholas Barber said in this paper last week, the new Austin Powers film barely refers to Sixties spy cinema at all, only to the other Austin Powers films. The same is true of Men in Black II – because it no longer offers any critical insights into the sort of sci-fi it lampoons, it simply reproduces that genre's prejudices. In the Fifties, American science fiction articulated hysterical anxieties about Communism and the Bomb; the first Men in Black, confident in the assumption that America had grown out of its paranoia and out of its sillier genre expressions, could be seen as benign knockabout.

Now America has become nervous again – this time about terrorism, Islam, well-disguised enemies within – and so Men in Black II acquires a less benign meaning. Such resonances probably never crossed the minds of Barry Sonnenfeld and the film's writers, who probably just wanted to give us a jolly ride, but that doesn't mean they're not there. An example of how unfunny the same jokes can become is the gag about blasé New Yorkers: a monstrous fanged snake-thing bursts through the Manhattan subway system, and the commuters on the platform don't even look up from their papers. This time last year they might not have done; you rather imagine they would now. It's a slight example, but it shows how the overall MiB concept has been soured. The joke hasn't changed: but history, and a shift in American consciousness, mean that suddenly it's not funny any more.

j.romney@independent.co.uk