Skyfall

(Movie Review)

     When this movie first came out, I told everyone I wasn't going to bother seeing it.

     I had been a huge James Bond fan when I was in 7th grade.  (Aren't all 7th grade boys?)  But after Bond has been around for 50 years, 23 movies, 6 different actors, and several re-boots, is there any point anymore?  Now that the cold war has been over for 20 years, what is the point of continuing to watch the man famous for seducing Soviet spies in Istanbul?  Isn't it time we laid James Bond to rest, and started with a new action franchise?

     And yet, here I am reviewing the movie.

     In my defense, when I said I wasn't going to see the new James Bond movie, what I had meant was that I wasn't going to go out of my way to watch the new James Bond movie.  I didn't mean that I would jump up and switch the channel if it ever came on TV, or turn down invitations to see it if someone invited me out.

     As it happens, my parents ended up inviting me out to see this movie for dinner and a movie night when I was back in town for Christmas, and I accepted.

     You can never really go too far wrong with James Bond.  Even when he degenerates to just a generic action hero, he is still, after all, a generic action hero, and I'm a sucker for mindless action movies.

The Review
     After 23 movies (and after having used up the original novels for source material a long time ago) the challenge with James Bond is to keep from running out of ideas.

     James Bond fighting a former MI6 agent gone rogue?  I've seen that before in GoldenEye.
     James Bond gets an injury in the beginning of the movie that he has trouble recovering from for the rest of the movie and that brings in the question of him aging?  Seen it before in The World Is Not Enough.  
     James Bond is killed before the opening credits, but later it turns out he's not dead at all?  Seen it in  You Only Live Twice.
   Those factors right there were reason enough for me to quickly become bored with the plot as I watched this movie.

    But of course James Bond has never been about the plot, right?  What about the action, the girls, the cars, the chase scenes, the exotic locations, the casinos, the suave expensive alcohol and sophisticated drinking?
     Well, check, check, check, check, check, check and check. So it does check all the right boxes, and not a terrible James Bond movie by any means.
   The ending was a bit boring I thought.  Lots of big explosions, definitely, but not great choreographed fighting sequences--just lots of guns shooting and things blowing up.

Notes
* Whisky Prajer gives his review of Skyfall here.  I agree with pretty much everything he says, so I'm not going to repeat him.  Particularly I agree that the last 3rd of the movie feels like it belongs in a Batman movie, not James Bond.  (In the comments section of his post, yours truly can be seen giving all the reasons why I will never see the new James Bond movie.  But I guess all that's moot now.)

* The homosexual issue--what do you guys think?  Is having an openly gay character in the movie a step forward, or is having a creepy gay villain character a step back?

*  For the fascinating real history of the abandoned island in this movie, click here--The Bond Villain’s Lair: Skyfall’s Abandoned Island.

*  When did the villain get time to place all those explosives in the subway wall?  And how did he know in advance that James Bond would catch him right under that particular place?  And how did he know this would happen right at the exact time the train was coming through.

*  There was a lot of talk about Q leaving "breadcrumbs" that only Silva would be able to follow, but it struck me as lazy writing that they never actually explained what these breadcrumbs were.  I mean, what was Q doing on that computer? What kind of breadcrumbs could he program into a computer that would lead Silva on the trail?

*  About the priesthole:  I can accept that old medieval houses would have a small cubby carved out for the priest to hide.  An elaborate tunnel underground tunnel carved out through solid rock seems a bit much though.  (Of course in the old campy 1960s era James Bond movies, you would never complain about unrealistic elaborate underground lairs.  That was just part of the genre.  But these new James Bond movies seem to be moving away from the campyness into a slick sophisticated semi-realist atmosphere.  So I'm going to complain this.)

 * Ian Fleming said of Bond that I wanted Bond to be an extremely dull, uninteresting man to whom things happened (W).  The movies haven't always strictly stuck to this of course, but I still feel that the attempt to give James Bond a Batman-like style backstory is completely out of place.  I tend to think James Bond is better left as dull and uninteresting as possible.  I don't know though--what do you guys think? 

*  My friend the Cinephile complains of this movie that the main message is: "Don't worry, everything will be okay now that the men are back in control."  M is replaced by a man, and Moneypenny is now in an office job (presumably for incompetence after she botched the sniper shot?  I think that's what the movie was hinting at.)
I don't think open misogyny was the intention of the film.  Judi Dench's M character is replaced by a man, but not before she's given a hero's death by the script.
Nevertheless, the film does end with the women characters either dead or sidelined.
Confession time: I never particularly liked Judi Dench, but I did think there was some value in having M's character be a woman.  James Bond has always been a bit of a misogynist, and that's all part of the character, but having M as a woman meant that at least the world Bond inhabited kept a check on his attitudes.  
Naomi Harris is now the new Moneypenny, and I worry slightly that she's too good an actress to be stuck in that thankless role.  But we'll see what the Bond films do with her in the future before rushing to judgement.

Link of the Day
Inside USA Noam Chomsky

Vertigo: Movie Review (Scripted)