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Skyfall (2012)
Skyfall. Dir. Sam Mendes, 2012.
I saw this movie twice in four days. I really have only two questions: whether it's the best Bond movie ever (almost certainly), and whether Craig is a better Bond than Connery (almost certainly).
I really, really liked this movie. Aside from it being slashy as hell--and it was; there were multiple points at which![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
kuwdora and I could only clutch each other in mute disbelieving joy ("Is this actually happening?" "Yes.")--it was also really funny in a way that the other Craig outings haven't been. And I loved Casino Royale and I also actually really like Quantum of Solace, but I'd forgotten how fun Bond could be, and this movie brought that back, in spades, while keeping the best of modern Bond, and in particular Craig's Bond. In a word, the action was brilliant, the supporting and female characters were great, M was a badass, and at the end we went back to the future, which is just like the past but only without the annoying sexism and the ridiculous gadgets. (Q: "We don't really go in for that sort of thing anymore.")
Hello, Tailor wrote some great posts on Bond, the last of which is the costumes, and which links to the others. I don't fully agree with all of her analysis, but I do think that decrying the portrayal of the female characters in this movie misses a good chunk of the nature of Bond. The operative point is that Eve and M both kicked serious ass in their own way, and refusing to see M, in particular, as a BAMF is deliberately blinkering yourself to the range of possible female characters beyond those that Hollywood normally shows us. (Also, I loved her speech. So good! So good!)
I also really loved the thematic of the movie, and how it showed that even as Bond is a necessary, even essential, part of MI6, he's unquestionably not alone and can't really be effective alone, either. Skyfall actually accomplished the neat trick of making me like the movie song even better: as Adele sings, "Where you go I go/What you see I see." Bond is never far from his allies, and they are never far from him, whether in London or half a world away in Macau, and when they are out of contact with each other, things go wildly wrong. (They do still anyway, of course; when will law enforcement learn not to put the madman in the heart of the web? When?) There isn't a division between the field and the office anymore, and M needs a secretary who can handle a gun as well as everything else, just as Q needs a man on the ground to pull the trigger--or not.
I was impressed as well by the credits and the score, both of which were subtly but distinctively different from how Bond movies have handled both of those aspects before. The thing I still wonder about, plot-wise, is whether Bond knew definitively before he wound up on Silva's island that his scores had been so low. I think somehow he did, and I also think that Silva fundamentally doesn't get it when he tells Bond that M sent him out unprepared and unready. The point is that he's Bond: even when he's not ready, he is.
I hope the next two Craig films, and the franchise, don't lose what Skyfall has gained. I also think that, while Brosnan was the first Bond I saw in theaters and always had a good deal of my affection for that, his movies may well turn out to be in front of only Roger Moore's in the end. What the Brosnan era added, in retrospect--and I suspect that Goldeneye, the first, will turn out to be adjudged the best--was fleshing out the secondary characters, which the Craig films have excelled at. James Bond will return. I can't wait.
ETA: Go readtoft 's post on Skyfall, the final three paragraphs say everything I think about this movie.
I saw this movie twice in four days. I really have only two questions: whether it's the best Bond movie ever (almost certainly), and whether Craig is a better Bond than Connery (almost certainly).
I really, really liked this movie. Aside from it being slashy as hell--and it was; there were multiple points at which
kuwdora and I could only clutch each other in mute disbelieving joy ("Is this actually happening?" "Yes.")--it was also really funny in a way that the other Craig outings haven't been. And I loved Casino Royale and I also actually really like Quantum of Solace, but I'd forgotten how fun Bond could be, and this movie brought that back, in spades, while keeping the best of modern Bond, and in particular Craig's Bond. In a word, the action was brilliant, the supporting and female characters were great, M was a badass, and at the end we went back to the future, which is just like the past but only without the annoying sexism and the ridiculous gadgets. (Q: "We don't really go in for that sort of thing anymore.") Hello, Tailor wrote some great posts on Bond, the last of which is the costumes, and which links to the others. I don't fully agree with all of her analysis, but I do think that decrying the portrayal of the female characters in this movie misses a good chunk of the nature of Bond. The operative point is that Eve and M both kicked serious ass in their own way, and refusing to see M, in particular, as a BAMF is deliberately blinkering yourself to the range of possible female characters beyond those that Hollywood normally shows us. (Also, I loved her speech. So good! So good!)
I also really loved the thematic of the movie, and how it showed that even as Bond is a necessary, even essential, part of MI6, he's unquestionably not alone and can't really be effective alone, either. Skyfall actually accomplished the neat trick of making me like the movie song even better: as Adele sings, "Where you go I go/What you see I see." Bond is never far from his allies, and they are never far from him, whether in London or half a world away in Macau, and when they are out of contact with each other, things go wildly wrong. (They do still anyway, of course; when will law enforcement learn not to put the madman in the heart of the web? When?) There isn't a division between the field and the office anymore, and M needs a secretary who can handle a gun as well as everything else, just as Q needs a man on the ground to pull the trigger--or not.
I was impressed as well by the credits and the score, both of which were subtly but distinctively different from how Bond movies have handled both of those aspects before. The thing I still wonder about, plot-wise, is whether Bond knew definitively before he wound up on Silva's island that his scores had been so low. I think somehow he did, and I also think that Silva fundamentally doesn't get it when he tells Bond that M sent him out unprepared and unready. The point is that he's Bond: even when he's not ready, he is.
I hope the next two Craig films, and the franchise, don't lose what Skyfall has gained. I also think that, while Brosnan was the first Bond I saw in theaters and always had a good deal of my affection for that, his movies may well turn out to be in front of only Roger Moore's in the end. What the Brosnan era added, in retrospect--and I suspect that Goldeneye, the first, will turn out to be adjudged the best--was fleshing out the secondary characters, which the Craig films have excelled at. James Bond will return. I can't wait.
ETA: Go read
toft 's post on Skyfall, the final three paragraphs say everything I think about this movie.