Skyfall (2012)
Nov. 19th, 2012 23:41![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
starladySkyfall. 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 whichkuwdora 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. ![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2012-11-20 08:30 (UTC)I did like the way Craig Bonds have been epically grim. I'm not sure I want them to edge back to early Bond, much as I enjoyed that Bond when it was. (Size of crush on Roger Moore: RIDICULOUS)
(no subject)
Date: 2012-11-20 08:40 (UTC)As soon as they get to Skyfall and Bond becomes ~his father's son~ and all that, takes up a rifle and starts fortifying the mansion, making plans, M just sits back and does as she's told, not offering feedback or even snark, even though BY THE NATURE OF HER JOB, she should have a billion things to say (and she's still Bond's superior officer!) and then later when she's being (again) rescued by the groundskeeper and he keeps USING THE FUCKING FLASHLIGHT which leads the villain right to them, again that's basically character assassination of M right there since she's still conscious and she would have to be a COMPLETE IDIOT not to mention an extremely inexperienced spy, which she's not, to let him continue using it.
She doesn't have to (and didn't, I think, ever in the Craig films?) wield a gun, or be physically aggressive or even be constantly in charge to be badass, but she has to have some sense of herself, some say in what's going when it's HER life on the line (which, her life has always been on the line, she was a field operative like Bond and then became a higher-up for MI6, shes' ALWAYS been a target), and just the entire last third of that movie was so offensive to me. (I mean again, I thought the writing in Skyfall overall was also atrocious compared to the other Craig films, something I'm sure our opinions differ on, but I have a real problem with defining M as "badass" in this film when they, imo, betrayed every bit of characterization they'd established for her previously.)
(no subject)
Date: 2012-11-20 10:40 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2012-11-20 13:24 (UTC)I AGREE WITH THIS WHOLE REVIEW!--except for the part where you've seen it twice. i have only seen it once. i can't wait to see it again. it was so good. so good! <3
(no subject)
Date: 2012-11-21 04:03 (UTC)I'm glad to hear that are two more Craig bond films to come--from the way this one ended I rather feared we were seeing the end of Craig's era.
(no subject)
Date: 2012-11-21 05:03 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2012-11-21 05:04 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2012-11-21 05:05 (UTC)Current rumors are that Sam Mendes may write and/or direct the next one. I would be happy with that, based on this movie.
(no subject)
Date: 2012-11-21 07:36 (UTC)I agree to some extent that the final third of the movie feels different--it is different, but I also don't fully agree with your interpretation of what we're shown. I don't think what we're shown is all of what happened, and facing down Silva with a handgun and homemade nail bombs takes courage. The flashlight thing, yeah, but in context it makes a horrible kind of sense, and I'm not prepared to judge the entire movie on it. This is a movie in which M has to fix her mistakes, and I think by the end there's evidence that she thinks that dying is the best way to do that. Certainly having been shot might alter that calculus. What I didn't like was her half-scream when Silva had the gun to her head.
(no subject)
Date: 2012-11-21 20:11 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2012-11-21 20:50 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2012-11-22 06:27 (UTC)(Though there have undoubtedly been more since then.)
(no subject)
Date: 2012-11-22 07:22 (UTC)