Okay, I hate the Skyfall post I did last night because I hate talking vaguely about movies. I hate it. I hate saying shit like so-and-so gave a “great performance.” It says nothing, informs no one. I might as well be saying boring shit like “beautiful cinematography” and “sweeping score.” What am I, a film critic?
So, let’s get into some Skyfall spoilers, below. Note: Skyfall spoilers will contain a great many spoilers for Skyfall.
Opening Scene: Rooftop chase on motorcycles, really exciting. Though, kind of Bourne-ish. But, everything is kind of Bourne-ish these days. Also, motorcycles are so goddamn easy to steal, have you noticed? In any given city, there are just hundreds of idling motorcycles with no one sitting on them at any given time. Leads to a chase and fight on top of a train, also exciting. When Bond is shifting gears on the bulldozer thing, you also get a nice close up of his fancy watch. Product placement!
Theme Song & Opening Credits: All very nice and Bond-y. Adele has a great voice. Bond doesn’t shoot into camera — is that the first time that hasn’t started the opening credits in a Bond film? It’s because he’s unconscious in a waterfall, so we can forgive him. I think he does it at the end.
Computers Are Magic: Silva blows up MI6 using computer hacking. He used computers to turn on the gas, or something? Reminds me of the last Die Hard, where Timothy Olyphant sent gas over the internet to blow up Bruce Willis. I can’t do anything to my house over the internet. I can’t even tell my DVR to record something because I can never remember my Comcast password.
Bond Returns:Â After pretending to be dead, because he’s all butthurt that M would sacrifice him for a mission, Bond comes back to work. He hasn’t shaved in a while, which is how movies tell you someone is deeply distressed. I’ve enjoyed Daniel Craig as Bond, but I think he really knocks it out of the park in Skyfall, showing some real vulnerability. Connery was a great Bond, but did we ever get a sense of what was going on inside his head?
Q: Finally, Q appears in the movies, and instead of an old cranky dude who makes gadgets, he’s a computer geek. Makes sense. A joke is made about exploding pens. Pierce Brosnan, thou hast been zinged.
Bond in China: Okay, there’s a scene where he’s following a guy who is about to assassinate someone, and Bond needs to question him. He thoughtfully waits until the guy has completed the assassination to start punching him. That felt a little odd to me. Maybe punch him before he shoots someone in the brain? There’s a cool fight all in silhouette so they don’t have to edit the crap out of it to hide the stunt doubles. Then, Bond sits there taking his time going through the guy’s things, after the guy has plummeted to the street, which will alert people, who will then find the dead guards the assassin killed, and it just seems like, hey, Bond, you might want to get the hell out of that building immediately.
Bond at the Casino: During a fight in a casino, a goon gets eaten by a gila monster komodo dragon. I thought this was kind of silly, but Kris pointed out that people in old Bond movies used to get eaten by sharks and piranha and other exotic animals all the time, so maybe it’s a callback. There are a lot of references to past Bond films and tropes in Skyfall. I do like that during the fight, Bond sees one of the komodo dragons and points to it in surprise. Like, Jesus! Do you see that giant komodo dragon, goon? It feels like a natural reaction to warn someone that they’re about to be eaten by a horrifying dinosaur, even if that someone is trying to kill you.
Bond Has Sex: Bond determines a sexy woman was sold into the sex trade as an adolescent, so of course he immediately fucks her. Seriously, Bond? You just talked to her about how she was repeatedly raped at age 12. Do you really have to bang her? Maybe don’t do that. Maybe make her some hot cocoa and get her into a nice comfortable fluffy robe and maybe, later, into therapy. Everything in this poor woman’s life is about guys trying to put dicks into her, and you’re not helping. And, having had sex with Bond, she’s going to die, obviously.
Bond Girls Always Die: Say! Here’s a thought. Can we maybe dispatch with this particular Bond tradition at this point? Is it maybe played out by now? You’ve ditched gadgets as old fashioned, so maybe it’s time to ditch the theme of women dying brutal deaths simply because they sleep with Bond? Maybe? I think it’s time.
Silva: Played by Javier Bardem, Silva is a proper Bond villain. He’s smart, weird, creepily playful, absolutely mesmerizing, and later we see he’s disfigured. Also: insane, though justifiably. He’s been through some shit after M let him get captured and tortured. Silva messes with Bond by pretending to come on to him, but Bond isn’t ruffled. I thought this was great and interesting. It felt like a real grown-up moment in series of silly fantasy action films. Silva even has his very own island hideout, like old Bond villains always used to. Only, in a great twist on the trope, Silva’s island is crumbling and shitty and abandoned. Instead of the usual opulent palace of money and pools and pillars, he’s just got a giant room full of computer servers. Amazing touch, I thought. Orbiting space stations, volcano fortresses, underwater bunkers: nah! All you need to run the world is a bunch of computers.
Silva Meant to be Captured: Silva is like Joker in The Dark Knight: being captured is all part of his elaborate plan. As with Joker, it’s a little hard to believe that everything goes down exactly as he figured it would. Even while in captivity, he is totally computering everything with hacking! He escapes, because now he wants to kill M in front of everyone, to show how bad she is at being spyboss while she’s being investigated for being a bad spyboss (she is, frankly, a pretty bad spyboss).
Ralph Fiennes: I pretty much sat around waiting for him to be evil, because that’s what happens when a new government boss shows up. But nope! He’s super nice. Good for him, and good for the movie. Very un-Bourne like! Bourne turned the American Spy vs. America’s Evil Enemies story into American Spy vs. America’s Evil Government story, which I’m tired of already. Glad Skyfall took a different route.
Skyfall: Bond’s old giant abandoned mansion in Scotland. Bond takes M there, figuring that of the 835 intricate plans Silva has, probably none of them involve Bond’s old house. I will say this: if I grew up in Skyfall, I would never have left. I would just stay there in that giant old stone house and spend my time staring out over the… I dunno, moors? Whatever. All the foggy hills. It’s damn beautiful. BEAUTIFUL CINEMATOGRAPHY. There.
Albert Finney: The caretaker of Skyfall is Albert Finney, which means we all sit there in the audience for the rest of the movie thinking loudly DO NOT HURT ALBERT FINNEY, MOVIE. SERIOUSLY. WE WOULD NOT BE COOL WITH THAT. WE ARE NOT JOKING.
Skyfall Showdown: Loved it! Silva and like 100 henchmen show up with an attack chopper, and there’s a great, exciting fight. I’m a sucker for a couple people hiding in a building while a bunch of goons try to kill them, like at the end of L.A. Confidential, so I loved this.
Note for Henchmen: Seriously, henchmen, don’t stand directly behind Bond holding a gun on him. He’s just going to grab your wrist and make you shoot things you don’t want to shoot, like other henchmen and the ice you’re standing on. Stop doing this!
The Ending: The ending is great. We’ve got Moneypenny, the hat rack, the MI6 office where Bond gets his mission briefings, and a new M… it’s like coming home, it’s the old movies made new again. And M is all, “Bond, are you ready to do some work?” And the audience is like “FUCKING YES!” and then M is like, “Well, too bad, you just failed two fucking missions! You let the hard drive get into terrorist hands and a bunch of agents died, and then you abducted M and took her to your shitty house and you let HER die. You are the WORST! Fired! But, then, I did get promoted to M, so… good work!”
They were komodo dragons, not gila monsters!
Also, I loved all the callbacks to classic Bond.
Oh, thanks! I fixed it.
I’m guessing that Moneypenny proved she wasn’t fit for the field when, at the start, she only fired 1 bullet at the guy on the train instead of 2. Seriously, if she had just kept shooting instead of watch Bond take his header into the water, they could have avoided so much trouble.
Oh, and where exactly did she shoot him? I don’t think they ever showed that, unless she was lucky enough to hit him in the same shoulder wound that the guy on the train shot him in. The wound he conveniently still had shrapnel in which he plucked out (at just the right time to look bad-ass) and be analyzed.
He mentioned the bullet broke four of his ribs, so I guess somewhere in his side, but I don’t recall really seeing the scar other than the shoulder one.
Actually, that bit in Die Hard where he “sent gas over the internet” as you put it? Yeah, that’s a real thing. That happened.
Check it out: http://www.cracked.com/article_20050_6-real-cyber-attacks-straight-out-bad-hacker-movie.html
It turns out computers are even more magic in real-life than they are in movies.
Ooh, neat! Though, Cracked being Cracked, you kind of have to dig a little deeper to get the full story, which turns out to not really be a full, well-cited story. The story only comes from a single source (a book written by a retired NSC staffer) and may be a bit of an exaggeration. A KGB veteran also denied it, says the explosion occurred because of faulty welds in the piping, not the software, and that the damage was fixed within a day. On the other hand, you can’t really trust the KGB, either. Still, I guess I don’t give computers enough credit for being able to remotely blow things up.
In the end, I guess we just have to believe whichever one makes the world seem cooler, so I’m going with “computers blow things up”.
I found it especially funny, that SKYFALL (the location) looked like a total real-life-version of SKYRIM. Indeed absolutely beautiful! I wouldn’t be surprised if the tourism in Scotland would get a massive boost after this movie.
The “Bond Has Sex” section is funny as shit! Thanks for that.
When Bond digs the shrapnel out of his shoulder and hands it to the guy for analysis, I fully expected the next scene to be a de-breifing where they tell him they matched the shell to the 20’000 other shells that the guy fired in the middle of a public space and that they’d tracked that shit down like 3 months ago.
Heh, that would have been funny. “Uh, thanks, Bond! We couldn’t have done it without you!” Lab guys exchange a look, slowly push a big bag of bullets into a drawer so Bond doesn’t see they already had all the evidence they needed.
“Well, too bad, you just failed two fucking missions! You let the hard drive get into terrorist hands and a bunch of agents died, and then you abducted M and took her to your shitty house and you let HER die. You are the WORST! Fired! But, then, I did get promoted to M, so… good work!â€
That’s kinda what I was thinking at the end, he literally failed his main task and it he barely killed the villain in time, all in all a bit of a failure.
Still, awesome film!
I quite like to think it’s taken place many many years after Quantum of Solace, since at no point does any suggest that the people screwing up their day might well be that super effective organisation “Quantum” that was meant to be some real bad news.
Yeah, that’s a good point, the super secret new SPECTRE or whatever the organization from the first two new Bond films is never even mentioned, even though they were shown to have a whole bunch of members in QoS. Kinda glad they didn’t drag them back in, though.
I was actually very disappointed in this one. I loved the first two, but this seemed very.. lame. Not only was the “banter” between bond and everyone else so.. lame, but everyone in the movie was too. For half of the movie bond wasn’t even good at being bond, as exemplified, he had Silva on the ladder near the end and chose NOT to shoot at him anymore once he’d stopped moving. M couldn’t do anything right at any point. The constant old referencing was worn out by the second instance and it carried through out the movie continually. I understand the dynamic of showing a hero fall and pick him/herself back up, but it was more like they showed an old guy get pushed off a moving train and fall to a crippling impact and watch 100 more minutes of him be an old crippled guy.
I haven’t seen other Bond movies, so I may have missed something, but a moment before M dies, she says something like, well, there’s something I did do well… But what did she mean?
I assume she meant she did a good job making Bond into an awesome super agent. I guess?
That’s what I gathered as well. But she chose an odd movie in which to reveal that.
Spot on – hilarious review, especially Albert Finney and ‘Bond Has Sex’- note they didn’t even bother to attempt the trope of ‘good, pure sex wipes away all the abusive evil sex’ – good thing because it seems pretty clear (like the assassination victim) that he waited until Badem killed her in order to get the element of surprise. If in the next movie, a henchman stands within grabbing distance of Bond, he’d better look out, that’s all I can say.
I particularly loved the heavy-duty placement of Sony Vaio laptops, which the whole of MI6 use – presumably if, after their massive security breach with the gas and that, they’d swapped them all out with a bunch of Macs, then Javier’s evil computering would just have bounced?
And what a shame miss Moneypenny still can’t act! Since she’s been the token sassy black woman since at least Eight Days Later, you’d think she’d have some licks by now, wouldn’t you?