Bloody typical, always lying down on the job
dir: Sam Mendes
It’s a decent enough film, it’s just that I’m not sure how much of a Bond film it is, and that’s something I’m ambivalent about.
The tone of the flick is also fairly grim, fairly dour. It even spends a fair amount of time on the northern highlands of Scotland, which is the grimmest, dourest place on the planet.
After fifty years of these movies, I guess they needed to do something substantially different, radically different despite the window dressing. Skyfall is steeped in Bond lore, and far more grounded than the usual Bond film. When I say ‘grounded’, I don’t mean realistic, or that it’s being punished for breaking curfew. What I mean is that excluding the high energy pre-credits introduction, the rest of the flick mostly avoids the elaborate stunts and absurd gadgetry-inspired last minute escapes that James Bond is renowned for. Mostly, it shows our ‘damaged’ protagonist plodding through the plot up until the strangest ending a Bond film has ever had.
It’s the first time I can think of where Bond doesn’t save the world, and doesn’t really win, in the end, if you consider what his objective is, which I won’t spoil unnecessarily, and I guess that’s refreshing too.
I just wish it had been a bit more enjoyable along the way. Look, it works dramatically, as in, the acting is a notch above what it’s usually like in these Bond films, and so coupled with a less ludicrous plot, it means it’s satisfying as theatre. Is that what we really want from a Bond flick, though?
Skyfall has been ridiculously successful, both critically and box office-wise, so I’m pretty sure I’m in the outer on this one, because I just really can’t see the brilliance that other people are seeing.
As the film begins, Bond (Daniel Craig) is pursuing a badass assassin type through the streets and across the rooftops of Istanbul. The creep he’s after has something which contains the full list of Brit undercover agents across the world. As he’s doing all this, in this Brave New technological age, not only is he communicating with a fellow agent (Naomie Harris), but with his boss M (Dame Judi Dench) and her staff simultaneously.
This heroically great opening sequence, on a part with anything from the best of the Bond flicks, is capped by a superb moment of Bondness: it’s the moment when he drops into the carriage of a train he’s just mangled with an excavator, just making it, and as he rises to full height, he straightens the cuffs of his suit. Superbly done, but the moment of suavity doesn’t minimise what’s about to happen.
Bond is in a life and death struggle, and M decides to impose her will upon the situation, in a manner that emphasises that even the great 007 is expendable: she chooses the objective over the agent, as any commander has to do in order to be effective. The entirety of the rest of the film is about punishing her for her callous disregard for the people beneath her.
Dame Judi Dench has always played the role of M with a certain amount of acerbic sangfroid, and she’s done it in seven flicks thus far, so she’s probably perfected it. Part of that performance requires speaking to Bond like he’s a piece of shit, but then peaking through the layers of icy disregard and total focus on the mission is meant to be a skerrick of affection for the chap who’s saved the world on at least 23 separate occasions. As in, well, you’re a dick, James, but you’re our dick, and you get the job done, eventually.
In this one they’ve changed the dynamic ever-so-slightly, so that James is just an agent, and she’s the disinterested spymaster who’d sell him down the river for a pack of smokes and a bowl of two-minute noodles if it suited her needs. She’s somehow mutated into a distant mother figure that James and the villain compete over, in strange and horrifying ways.
The villain, played creepily by Javier Bardem, officially the sexiest Spanish man in the world, is nothing if not Oedipal in his pursuit of M. In the end, even with her ‘rejection’ of both Bond and Silva (Bardem’s character), they both keep after her, achingly desperate for her approval. And revenge, but mostly approval.
Now, if you grant that there’s a strange maternal / sibling rivalry thing going on, then maybe you could get this film to lie down on the analyst’s couch for a while to figure out why that ‘sibling’ rivalry then gets a homoerotic subtext to it, when Silva pretty much flirts with Bond, and Bond sternly intones “What makes you think this is my first time?”
What we do for Queen and country, eh?
It’s very strange. It’s rarely this personal, or psychological for Bond, and it extends outward, to broadly encompass a whole bunch of Bond backstory just to make sure that he (and we) recall everything about where he’s come from. Sure, the flick can dither around Shanghai, Macau and London, but it’s all about Bond’s history, and his strange relationship with M.
At some moments I felt like maybe this was all an elaborate virtual reality exercise for Bond, that he’d ended up in a coma or some hallucinatory machine which was populating the world he was viewing with elements from his psyche (and multiple references to other Bond films) and history, much of which wouldn’t be that familiar to viewers who hadn’t kept up with the books. It was almost too symbolic, and too self-referential for him not to notice.
Even with that approach, or with that ‘reverence’ for stories past, it makes it stranger that the whole film tends towards clearing the board, utterly wiping the slate clean in an explosive manner, with the only real continuous element being Bond himself, with everything else being set up to get us where Bond was at the start of his adventures. It’s a strange result which almost makes it feel like both an origin story and a reboot at the same time.
Daniel Craig has always underplayed the role, choosing to keep his eyes hooded and his voice low when uttering the various bits of dialogue, and he’s as good as he ever is here. It feels, especially here, like it’s a role he’s not comfortable with, and that doesn’t hamper the performance, such as it is, here, since the character is uncomfortable with ‘being’ James Bond once he’s sees how easily even his own side could discard him if need be. That questioning doesn’t make for great action, but, hey, some people care about characters and motivations and stuff, and it probably doesn’t hurt.
Action-wise, well, this isn’t really up there. It’s almost perversely not an action flick, or even an espionage flick for much of its length. Technology’s wonderfulness only operates on the villain’s side, usually, but James has to rely on his fists, his gun and some Komodo dragons in order to get out of peril. He has a neon-soaked fight with the assassin again, and it’s one continuous brawl in a tight frame. You have to say about the entire film that it’s the most beautifully filmed of all the Bond flicks I’ve seen thus far, that I can think of.
Such cinematographic beauty (courtesy of Roger Deakins), though, is not why I come along to Bond films. I’m not sure what I wanted, really, but whatever it was I was left a bit wanting by the end of the flick. I am confused by the ending, especially, which feels contrived in the way it completely subverts the endings of every single other Bond flick (where the villain’s space station / volcano / headquarters / oil platform / hideout explodes no matter what).
Well, there’s still a massive explosion at the end (so it subverts the subversion), but it requires Bond to scuttle into a siege scenario where he’s holding off an angry horde, in a manner that doesn’t make that much sense on anything other than the dramatic or poetic level. I guess. I mean, to accept the setup of the ending on any other level requires too much of a stretch otherwise. You know, I would have thought the head of MI6 would have warranted, oh, I dunno, a brigade or two of SAS special forces types standing between her and a legion of mercenaries, but what the fuck do I know anyway.
But I guess getting everything to an anti-climactic conclusion in a bare, windswept chapel in the middle of the night is far more poetic and meaningful.
It’s interesting, I’ll give it that. It’s just that, steeped as it is in Bondness, it just didn’t feel like I was watching a Bond film, but maybe that’s not a bad thing entirely. It’ll be interesting to see where they go with the next one, but Daniel Craig is probably in a good place to walk away from the franchise with no hurt feelings. After all the cracks they make in the flick about how old he is, maybe he should take his bat and ball and go home.
Hmm.
7 times and even the Adele theme song for the film was pretty good, something I haven’t been able to say for the last, oh, twenty years or so out of 10
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“Do you see what comes of all this running around, Mr. Bond? All this jumping and fighting, it's exhausting! Relax. You need to relax... Ah well, mother's calling. I will give her a good-bye kiss for you.” Could you be anymore Oedipal if you tried? – Skyfall
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