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For me, that is the icing on the cake. The genius of Logan's script is that Silva is already established as a mad genius, with the ability pull levers but also with the lack of sensibility. As a villain, he's a perfect example of The Dunning-Krueger Effect.
Think about it. The guy wants to kill M. OK. That should be simple enough for a man like him; he could have done it by blowing up her office when she was in it . But NOOOOOO. He has to go through this elaborate, years-long plan to make sure she is humiliated and that it is also personal for him. That is the very definition of madness. And it's brilliant.
How much he planned is open to debate. All of it? Some of it? That's the further brilliance of the script, because once Silva has gotten into MI6's (and the audeience's) heads that he can hack into anything and manipulate our decision-making, then all bets are off.
As the Dunning-Krueger Effect would suggest, Silva has an over-confidence in his ability to manipulate "on the ground" as well. Remember, he hates all that "running around" which he describes as "so dull, so dull." Yet he is committed to killing M in this manner.
And this is why his plans go awry at the hearing and at Skyfall. He is NOT the field agent that Bond is.
There is so much to unpack in this film.
I think it shows how good this film is that it seems like a great action movie despite the logic issues with Silva's plan and the fact that there's almost no action in it! :D
Call it nostalgia if you will, but I can forgive those films for their sins. Because they never pretended to be anything else than fun entertainment. Even those of them that do take a serious turn and take some risks, such as OHMSS or LTK (and later on CR-QOS), never feel as pretentious as this one. And therefore I am less willing to give this one a pass.
SF, from the first scene to the very last, feels to me like this: 'Look people! Look! We are doing something different with a Bond film! You know, that antiquated travelogue with silly villains with steel teeth and killer bowler hats, we're finally making a genuinely good film with that! You shouldn't feel ashamed to be a Bond fan anymore! All hail!'
I will admit it has great cinematography, good dialogue and it is well-acted too. But for me, it is a crowd-pleasing, self-important anti-Bond film. SF can't be the best Bond film, it is not a Bond film to begin with.
Give me QOS over it any day. The underrated masterpiece of the post-1990 Bond legacy. Bond goes arty, but done right.
Just my two cents, of course.
While Deakins has a great reputation and deserved place in film history, he's following in the footsteps of men like Freddie Young, Michael Reed and Claude Renoir, not exactly lightweights in the cinematography department. I'd still call SF the best in that department, though. It's always great to have a talent like that involved, fan of the series or not.
I think a clarification has to be made on the term "original." Screenplays not based on Fleming novels would be considered "original screenplays." This is different than calling something "original" in the sense that it is "new and groundbreaking."
Much has been made of SF's borrowing of elements. TDK is one. The glass cell is reminiscent of Silence of the Lambs. The battle at Skyfall is like Straw Dogs or Home Alone. All of this is true. But for some of us who have seen a lot of movies (and TV), we're always going to be reminded of other things. Interestingly, though, when TDK came out, and the "intentionally caught" plot element happened, I was reminded of Bill Murray's 1990 film, Quick Change, and his bank escape.
Heck, the helicopter scene in FRWL is such a North by Northwest ripoff...but who cares.
Yeah I don't feel like The Dark Knight invented the idea of the baddie being caught as part of his plan- that feels like a fairly old plot idea. Nothing wrong with any film using it, I just don't think it's a direct ripoff of Batman only.
Basically many popular franchises saw how popular and lucrative Nolan's take on Batman was and took many elements from those films to use in their own films. This is true for Skyfall, but also for Casino Royale which starts out as an origin story. That surely gets general audiences on your hand, but it's not quite my cup of tea. I think the Bond Begins angle in CR is a poor faux-Nolan addition to an otherwise great Bond film.
Maybe preferences are influenced by what you like outside Bond. LTK is influenced by Miami Vice, but I like MV so I have no issue with that. QOS has a distinctly European touch to it and I love European cinema, so I applaud that. SF and SP are influenced by popular comic book films and I'm not into those so maybe those things are in correlation with one another.
Funny, I tend to think of QOS feeling like the kind of trashy European action film that would star Gerard Butler. After something like CR, QOS feels classless.
I think i posted this before, but still this video might clear the doubts where the idea of baddie getting caught came from.
I don't think the dates quite work out for that though: Campbell says he was tempted back to Bond when they told him CR would be a reboot, and he was announced as being hired several months before Batman Begins was released. They'd decided on Casino being an origin story (taking the two kills from the novel as a cue for this) and already dumped Brosnan, plus it's something Wilson had tried to do in 1986 with his storyline about a young Bond meeting the old 007 and inheriting his mantle.
Obviously Batman Begins wasn't a total secret before its release, but the Bond crew had been heading in that direction for a while.
That's fun, but I guess there are more examples than that. Bond himself does it at the end of Diamonds when he surrenders to the guards on the oil rig. He probably does it more often than that too. Luke Skywalker does it at the beginning of Return of the Jedi. I know those aren't exactly the same as they're not baddies though! :) I'm pretty sure Mark Strong's baddie does it in the first Downey Jr Sherlock Holmes movie.. I dunno, there must be a few.
All true. If anything, BATMAN BEGINS being a hit film at the very least made EON feel even more confident that they were taking the right direction with CR. Worth noting too, CR was an even bigger hit than BB.
I wasn't talking about the trashy kind of film though ;)
I was talking about the layered, balanced, nuanced, subtle, artistic and thought-provoking kind of film for which the Old Continent is so renowned :)
Well said @Denbigh ... nothing is original anymore. It's taking the familiar and giving it a new twist. This has happened since Ancient Greece to Shakespeare (Oedipus Rex/Hamlet), from Shakespeare to even cheesy modern films like She's The Man (12th Night), or Greece, to Shakes to Japan with Ran...
Nothing is original. The creators must spin something new from the archetypes we've been given.
Sure,Bond survives some crazy stuff in this series but this was just laughable.
Not as ridiculous as it might seem, in reality.
Assuming two things, it’s not impossible: he was wearing some kind of protective vest, and the gunshot knocked him unconscious. There have been stories of people falling out of planes and surviving, if they’re unconscious; the bones have a lot of “bounce” if you’re not tensing.
Then he’d have to have woken up while in the river before drowning ;)
It’s very far fetched but not impossible.
This is true. He fell off a bridge, not from the sky.
Wouldn't a plane be worse? 10,000 feet vs. 500 feet?
At a certain speed, surface tension of water reacts a lot like concrete.
EDIT: Wait, are you agreeing with me? I can't tell :))
Skyfall is "serius", so unike with other Bond films anything slightly OTT cannot be tolerated. Skyfall is so "pretentious" so therefore, unlike other Bond films, it deserves to be nitpicked to death.
Needless to say I think neither are true and I am quite tired of reading it. To me it seems to speak of some deep resentment of the fact that the producers and Mendes deared to seek a personal spin on the story and that so many of the general public, who are not normally into Bond, deared to like it.
I think it also stems from the fact that an Oscar-winning director of more intimate films, an American composer, and an Oscar-winning villain (though not unheard of) infiltrated the series. There was a certain sub-section of the fanbase that went to the theater looking to hate it. And what truly galls them, now, is that the film was a huge critical and financial success. It won Oscars. It won Newman a Grammy. It got Bardem several best supporting actor noms. It led to Craig winning a Brittania Entertainer of the Year award. And to top it all off, the film won the BAFTA for Best British film.
Haters will continue to hate. But none of that changes what's in the books.
As for the bridge fall, it's silly, but given that the PTS and main film are set three months apart, that at least makes enough room for Bond to recover from his fall. It's not as ludicrous as say enduring 14 months of torture in a North Korean prison and then jumping right back into action with no signs of consequence.
Good points.
Yes, it was meant as support for your argument.
Sure, there is no denying it was a critical success.
Still though, it's not like it won the Palme d'Or.
Considering it took 92 editions of the Oscars for a foreign movie to finally win Best Picture, I'm not taking anything Oscar-related too seriously.
There is no denying it was a success, period, at all levels.