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Comments
Silva was a very sinister villain and a disturbing one. In old Bond films, I was never afraid of Blofeld. Silva is a man who stops at nothing to get revenge on M. Everyone in his way suffers even if they are innocent of what happened to him.
I actually think SF was the antithesis of the tick box exercise. In fact out of Craig's 3 films, it stood out as being a huge departure from what we have seen before.
Watching CR again after SF, I see CR looking as the more traditional Bond film with all of the Campbellisms making sure we still had that sense of familiarity.
SF trounces the Brosnan era by a wide margin for true depth. SF did not wave at the audience saying "I hope you like me!?". In fact I was taken aback by how brave the Mendes direction was. If Campbell was Tim Burton, then Mendes was Christopher Nolan.
In SF, when you see people dying, you feel it more. I loved how in the opening Bond seeing his colleagues dead and one dying. It is so well set up for a no compromise thriller. A beautiful reflection of duty having no sweethearts to quote Koskov from TLD.
Had SF been more in the TWINE vein as in a pseudo deep movie, then I would be the first to criticise it. If you start a film out as no compromise then all I ask is that you end it as such rather than bowing to the demands of the populism that infected some of the series.
What about in FRWL? He's pretty terrifying there (and we don't even see his face).
Charles Grey scared me too ;)
Telly Salvalas and his roll neck sweaters were pretty scary!
Yes but he has more of a cameo role in that. Red Grant is the real threat.
Charles Grey is a brilliant actor in all seriousness. But wow was he campy.
I tell you what, he terrified me when he was all in drag stroking his..:))
Come on - are you serious in that you found him scary?
He was scary because what lay beneath this man was disturbing. He was evil. It was what you did not see that made him unsettling. He was invisible too, if we take into account his computer hacking of MI6.
And what he did like putting agents names on Youtube shows he is vindictive and means what he says he will do.
This was a sadistic villain who totally lost his humanity because of his hatred for M. I also think the cyanide disfigurement added to his motivation.
His rage increased after he meets M again after all those years. Up until that point he is more composed. So his maniacalness increases for the third act now he has seen his enemy after years. All the emotion of hate came to the boil in the end.
Need an explosion at MI6? We'll have Silva hack it. Need Silva to ingeniously escape capture? Don't bother - we'll just hack him out. Need Silva to track Bond down to Scotland? Lay a trail of cyber breadcrumbs that (of course) only Silva can hack. And so on.
I was pretty hacked off by the end, I can tell you.
I think the bombing of MI6 was done by inside men. I don't remember them saying MI6 blows up because of a computer hack. Someone had to lay the explosives for sure.
Being an ex-00, Silva would have many contacts and always know someone on the inside. 00's are shown as highly resourceful in the new reboot.
And in the spy world some men can be bought for cash. That is true to life so I assume Silva used his acquired wealth for such an end. His whole purpose was to punish MI6.
As for Silva finding Skyfall. I think Bond left enough clues knowing Silva's hacking supremacy, as to where he will be. I mean if Silva had MI6's records of Bond hacked then he would know Bond's whereabouts.
Bond set is as a trap to make Silva think he was taking M into hiding and playing dumb.
I have to agree with you on this. I was preparing for some kind of cyber-crime element having read scraps of information but I really thought they'd do their utmost to make it believable, or a subtle feature.
Same here.
Me: "OH GOD!!! WHAT HAVE YOU DONE TO THE CHARACTER?!?!"
I thought Bond explicitly mentions Silva hacking into MI6 to set off a gas explosion when he's being interogated by Silva on the island?
I might be wrong - perhaps I read that on here.
How on earth you hack a gas explosion I don't know, but I know a peroxide-haired man who does.
It must be back in vogue. Everything comes back into fashion eventually. ;)
People keep saying this. Silva is not an ex- 00.
My favourite non-Bond 00 is 009 in Octopussy. A great opening to a great Bond film!
You'd have thought so. I think somebody is getting a little carried away with the reboot line.
Correct. It's clear he worked for M in HK. P+W even stated in an interview he wasn't a 00.
Their imprint runs through SF like a stick of rock.
SIlva started off as being a pretty scary character but once he left his London cage he became a tad too fantastic for my taste, how he lured 007 into the sewers only to have a trap ready which consisted of a crashing tube, spectacular but a bit farfetched. (and DIE hard did do it better and with a more plausible reasoning imho). It then turns out that SIlva has planned everything ahead even his own capture which is a bit unbelieveable as well and people complain about an invisible reasoning.
While I found the endgame actually a vast improvement on the previous two movies some things like the helicopter with music (lifted from another movie where it actually made sense) annoyed me as well as the large amount of thugs and the total absence of MI6 personal during the whole shebang. They were not even there to defend their boss.
SF does start nicely and after the senseless dying of Severine and the disgusting remark by 007 the movie loses its logic and turns into a collection of improbabilities which look nice but accepts that the average viewer does not engage his intelligence at any moment wondering what the heck is happening.
I think the films might be becoming too tech reliant though. Q is a computer whizz now and Bond almost always has his earpiece. For Bond 24, I'd like it if Bond didn't have an earpiece and he didn't talk to MI6 during action scenes.
The irony is that once they get into the DB5 they step back to 1964... and all modern technology disappears. I guess they are in Scotland. Bit backward up there.
It's all very convenient of course. When they are in Turkey and London we can't escape the ear pieces, hacking, and general gee-whizzery of the tech nerds, and then when the 'plot' requires that that stuff is no longer convenient, it all just magically drops away.
I suppose one theory could be that the DB5 is actually the logical next step up from DAD's invisible car - a time machine - and the Scotland scenes are actually set in the past (this would also neatly explain how Bond got the machine guns fitted). I am sure a time machine would be no challenge for Silva.
I totally respect your opinion @Getafix But I see no need to take everything so literally in the film. The end scene was there to show that you cannot beat Silva with technology but through old fashioned determination and strategy.
As for some of the so called plot holes or fantasticalness like the tube train crashing through on Bond. That scene was a nod to the past and the larger than life scope of Bond films. It is also there to add an unexpected surprise and I look into it no further than that.
Mendes did a wonderful blend of making everything real looking whilst adding elements of the unreal. Look, the way I see it, in the real world, Silva would have executed Bond to hit M even harder and make her demise even worse. But you cannot have that in Bond.
If we want to nit pick at every tiny thing, then we have to do the same with most Bond films. I always thought the villain never killing Bond when he had a chance is unreal, but I accept that for Bond films.
SF is a wonderful mixture of the literal and the symbolic. That is my understanding. But at least it achieved keeping the tension up throughout and giving us a brand new look at Bond's world.
Symbolic some may ask? Well, when the DB5 is blown to pieces, to me that is the final goodbye to the first era. Almost like a symbol of the older Bond not being able to compete now with the advances of modern cinema. That is how I interpreted it and nothing more. This was not any car being destroyed but an icon of the series old days of glory. In other words, once gone, you cannot recreate the past. The DB5 is destroyed forever and no Q can rebuild it when nothing is left.
All-in-all, "Skyfall" is not a Bond movie but a pathetic Batman movie. If you want to see a better Batman movie, see "The Dark Night". If you want to feel the creative fun and sense of adventure that you used to experience at a Bond movie, see any of the "Pirates of the Caribbean" movies. If you want to see an actual good new Bond movie, see "Mission Impossible IV". As for "Skyfall" itself, wait for someone to upload the pre-credit set-piece and title animation (along with the tilte song) to You Tube and watch those there. You'll then have seen all you need to see of this mess.
This is our 50 year anniversary gift for all our support over the years -- and the new formula!? Old formula -- the plot and story must never make sense and we'll have great panache-laden action set-pieces to hide this fact. New formula -- the plot and story must never make sense and we'll have scenes with great acting to hide this fact -- and we'll throw the action set-pieces out (the baby with the bath water).
This Bond movie had pretensions of being taken as a serious thriller. It has an academy award winning director at its helm and is filled with top tier actor and actresses. It has a celebrated writing team. The producers have publicly bragged about this script and all the time (YEARS) that they had to perfect it. All this and they give us a story no more cohesive than that of "Moonraker" -- but with none of that movie's stunts, sets, or special effects to hide the craters. It's enough to make one forget one's complaints about double-taking pigeons, gondola-car hybrids, and henchman who fall in love with teenage girls half their height.
I appreciate the great performances, drama and cinematography. However, If "Skyfall" is supposed to be the new direction of Bond -- all the dumb story and plot faults we've come to expect of the franchise but none of the special effects, action, thrills, stunts, gadgets, sets, panache and fun -- the series will never make it close to another 50 years. Happy Birthday anyway Mr. Bond. You may have done nothing for us lately but we appreciate your cumulative service. Now, I'll stop "expecting you" as you, yourself, have become an "uninvited guest". You've committed an unforgivable sin. You bored me.
James Bond is dead. Long live Mission Impossible.
I completely get what you're saying and the way you describe the film it makes me wish that I had actually enjoyed it. I see what Mendes was trying to do and I applaud the intentions. I just think he was poorly served by the script.
The film, as you describe it, is perhaps the Bond film that I've long dreamed of seeing and which I had hoped SF would be. But for me - and obviously this is personal and subjective - it did not actually do any of the things that you described. To be honest, although I found the non sequiturs annoying, this was not the reason I did not enjoy it. It was because I found the characters and plot uninteresting and the script, score and direction bland.
It is a funny situation to be in. I think I share the same aspirations for Bond that most DC fans do - to see EON take the character in new and interesting directions, sometimes but not always darker than before. But this film just fell totally flat for me. Any way, as I've said before, it's basically my loss if I wasn't feeling what most others were when watching it.
If I'm entirely honest, I do have this nagging feeling in the back of my mind that DC is not quite as good an actor as he perhaps believes himself to be and others make him out to be. I think after Brosnan it was such a relief to have someone take the role seriously and inject some life into it. But I have always had this sneaking sense that Craig is never really going to quite convince me the way that Connery, Moore or Dalton did in their different ways. For me he just lacks a little something that would make me care for his character. I've noticed this in other films, most recently the Girl with the Dragon Tatoo, which I also found strangely flat and disappointing. Perhaps this is for another thread...
You make it sound like a low point in the series. Audiences and critics don't agree, nor are they bored by this movie. Word-of-mouth is sensational and propelling the movie to break records.
I don't believe that the acting is so great that it "hides" the plot holes. You are implying that critics and audiences are somehow too stupid to notice. Yes it had plot holes, but art or entertainment doesn't have to make absolute sense. Film making and story telling can't remain in a straight-jacket.
A painting can be photographic in its execution or a few bold brushstrokes. Brushstrokes without intricate detail can be used to create a narrative on a canvass, through the printed word or through cinema. It doesn't have to be spelled out precisely - that may be the convention, but Bond is fantasy - let them take their liberties and break conventional rules. Open your eyes to what is on the screen and not what is not or you will be bored, for a man who is bored of Bond is bored of life.
There really needn't be a whole lot of logic in a Bond movie, IMO. And plot holes are fine with me, too. The fact that Silva's plan - which was "years in the making" - didn't make a lot of sense, when his goal was merely to confront M and kill her, doesn't really bother me.
What bothers me though, is that I found much of the movie very unoriginal and boring. It's like I've felt I have seen most of it before, just done better. So it didn't grab my attention the way that CR did, which largely used Fleming's highly original story arc.
@gklein
Wonderful review. I don't agree with everything you are saying (like calling the crossedited Tennyson-scene boring, for me it was one of the few highlights of the movie), but nitpicking aside, this is probably one of the best analyses of SF I have read. Don't forget to post it here:
http://www.mi6community.com/index.php?p=/discussion/4494/skyfall-2012#Item_12
I especially like this part: