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So as I've mentioned before I have a really hard time enjoying movies I really want to like (Cabin In The Woods comes to mind..) I just got back from Skyfall and here's one of my " I liked it but..." reviews. Tons of spoilers here so only read ahead if you already saw the movie or have no interest in seeing the movie. Keep in mind I enjoyed the film but this was no Casino Royale....
A better (and way more clever title) would have been Modicum Of Ineptitude because seriously MI6 failed at every single thing they were supposed to do in this movie including: killing the hero at the hand of another agent on the same team and then resurrecting him while not bothering to explain how the gun shot, the fall, or the waterfall did not kill him for reals, securing the disk with all the agents names on it, fighting for your country (but only after a massive terrorist attack because, eh...., everyone thought you were dead....again.), having your top Q intelligence agent plug into the bad guys computer and allow him to hack your system without realizing it until after it was too late despite having proclaimed him as a super genius, get M to a secure location (even after the closest thing she has to a friend and the agent in-charge of protecting her explicitly said to do this very thing 3 times in the course of a few minutes only to have it go ignored because someone was speaking in court), and allowing the bad guy to fulfill his plan and then kill him after the fact. His whole plan the entire movie was to kill M. Once he realized her wounds were fatal and he accomplished what he'd set out to do, he was more than ready to die. He just wanted to be the one to finish M off and was more than ready to go before Bond threw that knife in his back (which may also pass for the lamest Bond villain death of all-time...but at least they kept with the "doing it old-school" theme of the movie.)
Lets also not forget holding back the name of "nameless black field agent who sucks so bad at her job" until the very end of the movie to get an "AH-HA!" moment from the audience but in doing so leaving that same audience to wonder "Why is this field agent who has a major part in the film being allowed to work with Bond again after nearly killing him once before and what the hell is her name?" for the other two and a half hours. I'm also gonna call them out for a terrible CGI dragon tongue (do dragons get that big and do they eat people btw?) and not getting Sean Connery to play an 80 year old Scottish caretaker that lives in Scotland. Ok that last ones minor but tell me that part wasn't tailor made to get Connery back into a Bond film.
Anyway the British Secret Service was completely inept throughout the whole movie. Also...they put this X00 agent in a Magneto like plexiglass case and they don't bother to search him before hand to find that his entire mouth was full of so much metal that without it, half of his face made him look like 00 Droopy Dog!? Anything could have been concealed up in there. Did they even bother to search him?
What was up with the assassination of the guy looking at the horrible picture. Who was that guy?
Then there's the bomb in the subway sene....Silver's plan is that Q is gonna get his computer, try to hack into it but this will cause a reverse hack which will then free Silver to escape into the Subway where Bond will pursue him and guess the right train to (literally) hop aboard at the last second to continue the chase which will then lead them to an open area underground where Silver has preplanted a bomb in the ceiling to go off at the exact time Bond is approximately 30 yards from catching him only to have the moment timed so precise that after the explosion rips a hole in the ceiling a subway car on an upper level track comes hurtling through the opening at lightning speed that sends Bond running for cover and allows Silver to walk into M's hearing and open fire on everyone and nearly killing M despite THREE separate warnings that Silver was coming to that exact location to kill M and to get her out of there ASAP. Wow...that might be the most furthest fetched sequence in movie history let alone any of the Bond films. The only thing that didn't work out there is that the speeding locomotive didn't fall on top of Bond and Silver couldn't shoot a little old lady from about ten feet away. What luck.
Here's something else that didn't really sit right with me...Mr. Silver is an awesome bad guy who steals every scene he's in and the first time he meets Bond is the best scene in the film but unfortunately he doesn't arrive in the movie until it's half way over. He has apparently an army of henchman at his command and not one of them has a rank higher then Goon. Secondary henchman are sometimes almost as legendary as the Bond villains themselves and yet this guy basically carries out an amazingly elaborate plot to take down the British Secret Service and does it all with only a plethora of nameless henchmen.
I did like the throwbacks such as the exploding pen line, having Bond hail from Scotland (a nod to Connery), the Scotch from 1962 (the first year of Bond) the...radio...but there was hardly any high-tech gadgets or cool cars or really exotic locations which have all become staples of the franchise. Skyfall could have been the the name of some top secret government project or the list of agents but instead we find out it's an old castle Bond grew up in as a child. What did that name even mean to the castle anyway? It was never explained!
Then there's this theory that been going around for sometime about who or what James Bond actually is:
The theory that has been circulating among fans for sometime now is that there is no one single James Bond, but that "James Bond" is a codename passed on from one agent to the next as each retires (just as the titles of M and Q pinball from agent to agent). The theory explains the agelessness of Bond--note that Daniel Craig's Bond became 11 years younger whereas Judi Dench's M aged by four years.
This also explains how James Bond's personality changes dramatically from actor to actor. For example, in one film you have Timothy Dalton's Bond burning a man alive (around the 9:00 mark). Pop in another DVD and you see Roger Moore's Bond is doddering around in a clown costume.
The more you look into it, the more it makes sense. George Lazenby's Bond had his wife murdered in the last film he appeared in, so fans could assume that his 007 retired out of grief. Timothy Dalton's Bond went rogue and was kicked out of MI6. Pierce Brosnan's final outing ended with Bond being abandoned by British intelligence. Next movie, there's a new Bond in the tuxedo and the old one is presumably on a beach somewhere collecting a government pension.
That theory makes perfect sense and a great way to tie all the Bond films together in sort of a mesh net type of story weaving but now they go so far to throw that excellent idea away and hint at young Jimmy Bond's troubled childhood. No one cares about how an adult bad-arse was like when they were a child. We've seen that movie before and it was called Episode 1. I'm wondering if when Craig hangs up his tux for good, the next Bond won't be some 22 year old kid that we see climbing the ranks to become the Bond we've seen for the past 50 years. They can even set it back in the 50's to really give it the prequel feeling and then lead right up into the remake of Goldfinger. Remember the first choice for Bond after Bronsan wasn't Craig...it was 20 something Stewart Townsend who went so far as to be cast but then was reconsidered for the role because the producers thought he was too young to play the character.
Now don't get me wrong this movie was fun and entertaining to watch which is what a Bond film should be but the 007 series is also known for being smart, clever and technologically advanced and this movie was anything but that. Scratch the surface to the story and you gotta wonder if anyone was paying attention when they wrote this thing.
Thoughts...?
A better (and way more clever title) would have been Modicum Of Ineptitude because seriously MI6 failed at every single thing they were supposed to do in this movie including: killing the hero at the hand of another agent on the same team and then resurrecting him while not bothering to explain how the gun shot, the fall, or the waterfall did not kill him for reals, securing the disk with all the agents names on it, fighting for your country (but only after a massive terrorist attack because, eh...., everyone thought you were dead....again.), having your top Q intelligence agent plug into the bad guys computer and allow him to hack your system without realizing it until after it was too late despite having proclaimed him as a super genius, get M to a secure location (even after the closest thing she has to a friend and the agent in-charge of protecting her explicitly said to do this very thing 3 times in the course of a few minutes only to have it go ignored because someone was speaking in court), and allowing the bad guy to fulfill his plan and then kill him after the fact. His whole plan the entire movie was to kill M. Once he realized her wounds were fatal and he accomplished what he'd set out to do, he was more than ready to die. He just wanted to be the one to finish M off and was more than ready to go before Bond threw that knife in his back (which may also pass for the lamest Bond villain death of all-time...but at least they kept with the "doing it old-school" theme of the movie.)
Lets also not forget holding back the name of "nameless black field agent who sucks so bad at her job" until the very end of the movie to get an "AH-HA!" moment from the audience but in doing so leaving that same audience to wonder "Why is this field agent who has a major part in the film being allowed to work with Bond again after nearly killing him once before and what the hell is her name?" for the other two and a half hours. I'm also gonna call them out for a terrible CGI dragon tongue (do dragons get that big and do they eat people btw?) and not getting Sean Connery to play an 80 year old Scottish caretaker that lives in Scotland. Ok that last ones minor but tell me that part wasn't tailor made to get Connery back into a Bond film.
Anyway the British Secret Service was completely inept throughout the whole movie. Also...they put this X00 agent in a Magneto like plexiglass case and they don't bother to search him before hand to find that his entire mouth was full of so much metal that without it, half of his face made him look like 00 Droopy Dog!? Anything could have been concealed up in there. Did they even bother to search him?
What was up with the assassination of the guy looking at the horrible picture. Who was that guy?
Then there's the bomb in the subway sene....Silver's plan is that Q is gonna get his computer, try to hack into it but this will cause a reverse hack which will then free Silver to escape into the Subway where Bond will pursue him and guess the right train to (literally) hop aboard at the last second to continue the chase which will then lead them to an open area underground where Silver has preplanted a bomb in the ceiling to go off at the exact time Bond is approximately 30 yards from catching him only to have the moment timed so precise that after the explosion rips a hole in the ceiling a subway car on an upper level track comes hurtling through the opening at lightning speed that sends Bond running for cover and allows Silver to walk into M's hearing and open fire on everyone and nearly killing M despite THREE separate warnings that Silver was coming to that exact location to kill M and to get her out of there ASAP. Wow...that might be the most furthest fetched sequence in movie history let alone any of the Bond films. The only thing that didn't work out there is that the speeding locomotive didn't fall on top of Bond and Silver couldn't shoot a little old lady from about ten feet away. What luck.
Here's something else that didn't really sit right with me...Mr. Silver is an awesome bad guy who steals every scene he's in and the first time he meets Bond is the best scene in the film but unfortunately he doesn't arrive in the movie until it's half way over. He has apparently an army of henchman at his command and not one of them has a rank higher then Goon. Secondary henchman are sometimes almost as legendary as the Bond villains themselves and yet this guy basically carries out an amazingly elaborate plot to take down the British Secret Service and does it all with only a plethora of nameless henchmen.
I did like the throwbacks such as the exploding pen line, having Bond hail from Scotland (a nod to Connery), the Scotch from 1962 (the first year of Bond) the...radio...but there was hardly any high-tech gadgets or cool cars or really exotic locations which have all become staples of the franchise. Skyfall could have been the the name of some top secret government project or the list of agents but instead we find out it's an old castle Bond grew up in as a child. What did that name even mean to the castle anyway? It was never explained!
Then there's this theory that been going around for sometime about who or what James Bond actually is:
The theory that has been circulating among fans for sometime now is that there is no one single James Bond, but that "James Bond" is a codename passed on from one agent to the next as each retires (just as the titles of M and Q pinball from agent to agent). The theory explains the agelessness of Bond--note that Daniel Craig's Bond became 11 years younger whereas Judi Dench's M aged by four years.
This also explains how James Bond's personality changes dramatically from actor to actor. For example, in one film you have Timothy Dalton's Bond burning a man alive (around the 9:00 mark). Pop in another DVD and you see Roger Moore's Bond is doddering around in a clown costume.
The more you look into it, the more it makes sense. George Lazenby's Bond had his wife murdered in the last film he appeared in, so fans could assume that his 007 retired out of grief. Timothy Dalton's Bond went rogue and was kicked out of MI6. Pierce Brosnan's final outing ended with Bond being abandoned by British intelligence. Next movie, there's a new Bond in the tuxedo and the old one is presumably on a beach somewhere collecting a government pension.
That theory makes perfect sense and a great way to tie all the Bond films together in sort of a mesh net type of story weaving but now they go so far to throw that excellent idea away and hint at young Jimmy Bond's troubled childhood. No one cares about how an adult bad-arse was like when they were a child. We've seen that movie before and it was called Episode 1. I'm wondering if when Craig hangs up his tux for good, the next Bond won't be some 22 year old kid that we see climbing the ranks to become the Bond we've seen for the past 50 years. They can even set it back in the 50's to really give it the prequel feeling and then lead right up into the remake of Goldfinger. Remember the first choice for Bond after Bronsan wasn't Craig...it was 20 something Stewart Townsend who went so far as to be cast but then was reconsidered for the role because the producers thought he was too young to play the character.
Now don't get me wrong this movie was fun and entertaining to watch which is what a Bond film should be but the 007 series is also known for being smart, clever and technologically advanced and this movie was anything but that. Scratch the surface to the story and you gotta wonder if anyone was paying attention when they wrote this thing.
Thoughts...?
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