We Saw Skyfall and You Probably Should Too

[drwex]

First, if you want to see this film I strongly suggest you avoid spoilers. The effort to avoid them is worthwhile. There are some minor plot spoilery bits under the cut as most of what I complain about is the plot.

The film is, unlike most Bond films, a character piece. What makes this work is the excellent acting by the majority of the cast. Daniel Craig and Judi Dench are both stellar. Ralph Fiennes and Naomie Harris put in good supporting roles, and Ben Whishaw is a stand-out as a 21st-Century Q. I hope they keep him around. I was not as impressed by Javier Bardem as the mad villain but I think he did well enough with the material he was given. I just wasn't too happy with the script. Having three writers credited is rarely a good sign.

The direction is good, if not your typical Bond. Sam Mendes, whose work I adored in American Beauty, is not comfortable with the long shot and it shows here. He's great with the small-scene, personal, and tight images that probably make him a good choice for this film but it makes the visual feel somewhat uneven.

The character story is about the clash of generations - a changing of the old guard represented by Bond and M with the newer more postmodern vision of how intelligence work should be done. Things get boiling when it becomes clear that one of M's old enemies is back for revenge on her and that provides the action-motivation against which the characters' stories are told.


Frankly, the plot makes no damned sense whatsoever, and there's a really problematic bit.

The bad guy runs a mega-hacker data center... on a deserted island? Where's he getting the power to run all that, not to mention the cooling? And unless he owns his own communications satellite he's got to have a massive cable that lands somewhere and makes him a unique location target. You don't just randomly hire someone to lay you some undersea cable - every bit of that stuff is tracked if only to make sure ships don't cut your cable by accidentally dropping anchors on it.

I had to grit my teeth to take in the idea that this successful hacker-genius who can electronically bring down companies or set off revolutions with the touch of a button would throw it all away on a personal revenge fantasy. OK, he's insane, so that gets something of a pass, but it was still surprisingly thin.

And speaking of evil geniuses, how is it possible that in 50 years of fighting them, Bond and MI:6 have failed to realize these guys have accomplices? Once it's made clear that Silva is some kind of insider, why isn't everyone who could have assisted him being sent for lie detector-assisted questioning? The whole movie he's constantly showing up with goons in tow, getting into cars driven by associates, being handed disguises or broken out of cells by confederates and not once does Bond or anyone else think to try and find these people. WTF guys?

I found the whole scene with Bond taking out the other assassin silly. We go through all this nonsense in a high-rise just so the assassin can get a shot at a guy in another high-rise. Once he's shot the guy it's clear that the victim's contacts set him up. So why go through all the rigamarole? Why not just have the mark sit in a room, let the assassin in, fwip fwip fwip done and gone? Yes, I know that wouldn't lead to dramatic dangling-over-the-edge bits, but it's still ludicrous.

The problematic bit: every Bond movie has to have a hot chick on the MI:6 side (aces again to Naomie Harris for making this role a competent, if flawed, person) and a hot chick on the bad guy's side that Bond seduces. This time Bond makes clear in-film that the enemy chick isn't really a villain, she's a hostage/victim of the bad guy who tricked her out of being a sex-trafficked girl and into a life where she's constantly afraid and watched by armed men. Bond doesn't so much seduce her as show up and immediately fall into bed with her, which hit my "problematic" alarm rather hard. The film portrays her as willing/cooperative but it still came across as a serious boundary transgression that I didn't like.

Plus, I think Bond in general and Daniel Craig's Bond in particular has been shown to be generally respectful and gentlemanly. This scene felt wrong for the character, as well as socially wrong. The Bond I was expecting would have respected her past and her current situation. That could have been done and still stay within the Bond-film formula.


All that said, it's still a film to see because the two leads are just so damned good. MizA recently commented to me "How many classically trained Shakespearean actors do we need?" and I responded "More than we have now." Ever since Dench took over the M role I've been enjoying having that character on screen more and if you see this as a Bond + M team film I think it works quite well.

Comments

[pierceheart.livejournal.com]

What's your take on the villain essentially being a stereotypical caricature?

[drwex]

Disappointed. Doubly disappointed by the way his implied bisexuality was played. I blame the script more than the actor, though.

[pierceheart.livejournal.com]

Oh, I would definitely point it at the script, not the actor.

I also saw suggestions from others that there was an implication of bisexuality, as opposed to simply homosexuality, whereas I read the character as being a 5 out of 6 on the Kinsey scale.

Is it that any actions with an opposite gender partner were portrayed as part of a dominance issue, not out of desire, and thus we are seeing his possible bisexuality as more aberrant than his likely homosexuality ?

[drwex]

I can kind of read him as a gay villain, which would be more sad if it was more overt. I can also read him as bi and note that all the interactions we see or hear of him that have any sexual nature are completely dominance-based. I am less likely to buy into the gay interpretation, though, since Sévérine was (we are told) taken out of a brothel. There aren't a lot of gay men who frequent heterosexual brothels.

It's also clear that this behavior comes after his captivity and I think we're supposed to get the idea that his captivity, torture, and failed suicide pretty completely broke his mind. So I'm not sure how you can read actions by a character that the film presents as completely insane.

Mind f*ck (spoilers)

[sweetmmeblue.livejournal.com]

I read it not as the character's bisexuality but as another way in which he knows his opponents better than they know him. Bond is a ladies man and the character was doing everything in he could to get Bond to question everything he held as true, this could include his sexuality.

Re: Mind f*ck (spoilers)

[pierceheart.livejournal.com]

That's why I liked the phrase "who says it's the first time?" from Bond.

[drwex]

yeah that possibility did occur to me. Also, probably the only good one-liner in the movie. Current Bond isn't much for quips, sadly.

[rednikki.livejournal.com]

That's how I read it, too - and also a way for them to blow up the gay panic of earlier movies and ESPECIALLY the novels. The Bond in the books would have TOTALLY flipped out the moment Silva touched him. In some ways, to me, the scene was an acknowledgement that Bond can be macho without panicking over Teh Gayz.

[bluegargantua]

SPOILERS!

So, it's a Bond film and I'll give a lot, but the bad guy had positively Xanatos levels of planning. I can believe he blew the hole in the tunnel causing the train to fall in just to cover his tracks and not because he planned for Bond to be chasing him at that point but still -- just ludicrous amounts of precison planning on the whole thing.

The other thing is...the bad guy won. He didn't achieve his aims on his own terms, but his goal was still fulfilled. Not cricket.

But I love the fact that the whole Penny/Bond relationship is predicated on her having shot him, which makes the banter in those older movies take on a whole new edge (and may explain why he was always ducking her in those older films -- didn't want to get shot again).

later
Tom

[drwex]

I was sort of... I dunno on the Moneypenny thing. In the old films it seems pretty clear she won't sleep with him unless he's serious about a relationship, which he's clearly not. This one is definitely not that, which can be good or bad. We'll see if she comes back (I hope so) and how it gets played out.

My guess is that he had the Tube schedules memorized, at least for the routes and times he wanted. Also, that train was empty, which leads me to think it wasn't a regular train but something dispatched by an accomplice once the bad guy realized Bond was on to him.

Another thing I forgot to mention: once it's revealed that the bad guy has an extensive map of underground London the FIRST thing that comes to my mind is "bombs!" I would have had sniffer dogs and teams crawling all over the MI:6 vicinity to say the least. For a while I thought his plan was going to be some kind of Guy Fawkes repeat.

[mzrowan.livejournal.com]

Plus, I think Bond in general and Daniel Craig's Bond in particular has been shown to be generally respectful and gentlemanly.

I have to disagree with you on this. I haven't seen the first Daniel Craig and can't recall specific examples at the moment from Quantum of Solace or Skyfall other than the shower scene, which also bothered me (even though I saw them both this weekend! I blame the pain medication), but I can definitely say that Bond in general tramples all over boundaries and consent. The worst example I've seen so far is from Thunderball, where he outright blackmails an unwilling woman into sleeping with him by threatening to get her fired for something he (probably) knows is not her fault. And I've lost count of the number of times he takes advantage of women whom he knows can't say no (because they'll blow their cover, because their bad-guy boss will kill them, etc.).

[dcltdw]

> Plus, I think Bond in general and Daniel Craig's Bond in particular has been shown to be generally respectful and gentlemanly.

Yeah, I'd agree with the "No on Bond in general". I do like how Daniel Craig's Bond is much much better.

[ceo]

I haven't seen Quantum of Solace or Skyfall, but Bond in Casino Royale is entirely gentlemanly. Bond in general does have a great deal to answer for in this regard; it's why I have some embarrassment at being a Bond fan.

[rednikki.livejournal.com]

Oh, and what about when Bond basically rapes Pussy Galore into helping him in Goldfinger? Super-boundary transgressing there. The early Bond movies are all kinds of rapey.

[catness.livejournal.com]

Agreed on this. I'm a huge Bond fan and I find this extremely rage-inducing when I watch the older movies. The Sean Connery Bond was disgusting. Brosnan Bond at least had the violence right and was less rapey.

[rednikki.livejournal.com]

Also, there's the slapping-around of Tracy in On Her Majesty's Secret Service, which I just watched last night. OTOH, all the sex he has in that movie is VERY consensual.

[dcltdw]

HOO BOY SPOILERS HERE



I love the character angle since the reboot. Glorious!

That said, this script was deeply flawed. I felt like the director didn't have the heart to say, "Look, this script, we've worked on it a lot. A lot. But it sucks. We're starting over." A villain who is first in everything? Bzzt. The gorgeous woman who shows up to suffer a trope's death? Please. I was all excited that, during the interrogation/psychologist scene, maybe "Skyfall" was an internal codeword: it means that we have such a high-placed and/or widespread leak in MI6, we can't even openly talk about it, and that we're implementing some sort of armageddon we-hope-to-never-use-this contingency plan. But no.

And then the whole MacGyver thing... no.

But after all is said and done, I figured: well, you can either have a character Bond who develops... or you can have a plot that makes sense with lots of action. And really, I'd rather have the former. So it was a good movie, and I rather like the direction the franchise is going in (you have to pay attention to what M says versus the old GUNS TITS BOMBS TITS EXPLOSIONS TITS CARS TITS TITS). But it could've been great.

And I want Quantum back. The Bond franchise really needs a recurring SWORD/Warlock villain, and Quantum was nicely filling that hole. :)

[rednikki.livejournal.com]

The data center: Severine does say that Silva got the people on the island to abandon it. I figured the power and data lines had already been laid in before he did that. Then Silva had paid someone off to keep them running, or hacked into the computers that ran the power plant in order to make it not realize it was still powering the island, or a little of both.

[mzrowan.livejournal.com]

The one plot hole that really bugged me was the flashlight. Seriously, M makes a rookie mistake like that? Any ten-year-old who's read a Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew novel (or more likely in M's case, Enid Blyton) would have known to not use a damn flashlight.

[drwex]

Agreed. That was particularly egregious.

[catness.livejournal.com]

Let me just say in advance that I ignore all plots in Bond movies, because... they're Bond movies. They're not really *about* plot, they're just the template for Details magazine. They're about a badass western male who gets into lots of ladies' drawers, gambles, rolls with high society while rumbling with the baddies out back, fights / shoots / blows stuff up, has lots of cool gadgets, and can drive the hell out of any kind of moving vehicle. Plot is to Bond movies as corn-on-the-cob is to butter: it's merely a carrier. At best tasty, but largely ignorable.

This movie... had the right comic book characters. But it tried to be long on plot (sigh), and was decidedly short on action.

Waste of good whiskey, indeed.

[drwex]

OMG yes. Both Pygment and *gasped* audibly when Bond tossed back the entire shot of Macallan 50 as though it was some generic rotgut.