Skyfall *HUGE SPOILER ALERT*

OK, this place is nearing the end… but darn it… I’m going to take it back to its prime!!! Time for some movie ranting and spoiler threads!!!

THIS IS FULL OF SPOILERS!

SO!!! SKYFALL!!!

I…. hated it. I know I am the minority but I did. There is a LOT to love about the movie, but there was so much wrong that *I* was not able to forgive.

First for the good sides:
Daniel Craig: Some hate him but this guy does an amazingly great bond, IMO.
Judi Dench: This was in the trailer, but “take the shot!” this woman was great.
Javier Bardem: he managed to make an extremely flamboyant criminal feel truthfully deadly and cold blooded. He did a magnificent job.
In addition the movie had a lot of good action scenes and excellent cinematography.

OK now for the bad things:
Naomie Harris: meh… may be the script but she was forgettable. Not bad, simply.. meh.
Ben Whishaw: again may be the script but UGH I wanted to choke this guy in his own vomit. The character attempted to be arrogant but it was just cliché and monotonous.

Now for plot itself, and one last warning, this thing is going to be full of spoilers. I won’t summarize the entire movie here, but I will cover the things that made me hate the movie.

Sub Plot about closing MI5: the entire movie drags an absurd plot that sort of pretends there is some very thick 4th wall, where the loss of some important data results in the minister inquiring even the requirement of the organization to exist. The entire inquiry scenes are full of absurdity, trying to solidify or break (can’t decide what) the fourth wall by justifying why the agency even needs to exist. Again, it’s absurd and at the end it’s just turns out to be padding (they try to squeeze in some inspirational speech but I found it to not hit a single note.)

Q, as I noted above, Q is a very arrogant individual. I will forget about the fact that it just does not seem to do a good job at portraying it in any believable way. I will also forget about all the fake computing things because I accept that real computing is boring for non-computer people. However, I can’t accept that it ends up being Bond that figures out the computer password and not Q, the supposed master hacker! Ah but if it was just this… the thing that really annoys me is the fact that this super genius decides the way to crack into a hacker’s computer to see if the stolen data is in it, is to hook it not once… but twice with double Ethernet connections to the entire frigging MI5 network!!! This hacker already demonstrated he was able to hack the MI5 network with a click of a button… and this “super genius” decides to physically plug his computer into the network!!! This is beyond non-computer people… this is just stupid 101!!!

I would be able to forgive the above if it was not because the ENTIRE movie from this point forward depends on this moron connecting the infected computer to the network… ah and that brings me to my 4th complaint:

I forgot the name for this trope… but the villain had the entire thing perfectly planned to the minute! Absolutely everything he did was perfectly choreographed! From being captured, being taken to MI5, this moron geek plugging the computer into the network at an exact time, all doors in the building opening up, escaping through the subway, meeting with 2 cop dressed assistants carrying a bomb, having Bond follow him all the way to a big chamber where he planted said bomb, detonating the bomb, and having a train come out of the hole created by the bomb, then getting out of the subway and meeting again other cops, getting to M’s inquiry with the minister and there attempt to kill her. In fact, the only thing apparently he did not count on was an additional guy jumping in the way of the shot.

Then there is Skyfall, the house where Bond grew up. Here is a scene that was not bad… but it was far from bond. During this entire sequence they go over the house, they realize they only have one hunting rifle. So they must manage with a lot of household traps! The A Team montage follows. I mean, seriously, during the entire scheme I was not able to get The A Team theme music out of my head! They did all the cuts you would expect in the classic TV show until they finished rigging the perfect mouse trap. Again: not a bad scene off itself but this seemed to have been taken away from the script for The A Team 2.

Now to the final thing I hated about the movie: the entire villain’s plot. His entire goal, apparently, was to kill M. That was all he wanted. Thing is: he sort of succeeds. But no, he does not. Instead, mid action scene, they get M shot by some nameless minion. She does not die but starts bleeding badly. The bad guy comes to kill her near the end but Bond gets rid of him, stealing the victory away. M still dies, but due to a casual minion’s bullet and slow bleeding. My issue here is the movie could have redeemed itself drastically, and carried at least some brave punch, by allowing the bad guy to get away with his goal: let HIM kill M. You were going to kill her anyways, let that guy have it. Force Bond to endure the much tougher and sour taste of failure. But no… that would have been too good. Got to make things tragic but not THAT tragic… BAHRG…

Anyways, it’s very likely you all loved the movie (since everyone seems to) but there, here is my rant!

Personally I loved the movie. He was a very human Bond, well as human someone could be for someone who was shot off a moving train and fell into a river 100ft below and then washed over a waterfall.

I enjoyed the villain (he "threw" a subway train at Bond). The Bond girl wasn't all that memorable, she just added local color. And I enjoyed all the throwbacks to the older Connery Bond films from the car to the "original" office of M at the end.

Yes, I'm old and nostalgic and the whole old guard Vs new guard theme that ran through the movie struck a positive chord with me as I see this every day. Which is why Q represented the arrogant attitude I see from new college grads who think they know more than those with 20 years on them, only to get outsmarted by an "old man" who played on that arrogance.

I enjoyed the movie a lot, but it dawned on me well after the fact - the bad guy won.

I'm not sure if I like that or not.

I liked the movie but still like Casino Royale as the best of the "new" Bond Daniel Craig movies.





Probably because Eva Green was in it.....

I was into it up until near the end. But then... then Bond and M arrive at Skyfall and the production switches from James Bond to the A-Team. There's a montage sequence of them rigging up all sorts of cockeyed booby traps... okay, fine. But Kincaid... sawing off the end of that shot gun. And while indoors, with no hearing protection, turn and fires the shotgun... INDOORS... at the the side of the building, punching a basket-ball sized hole.

WHAT? Why would you ever, ever do such a thing? I really want to see the directors cut where Bond clutches his ears for five minutes and then demands an accounting from Kincaid. That might be the stupidest use of a firearm in any A-list movie from the past ten years. Monumental.

Firing a shotgun indoors. Destroying a wall. "Hey James, it worked!" How is Skyfall still standing with that dotty old man running it?

ARRRRGH.

BOOM... "Hey James, I can see out the wall!"

*head desk*

Very much enjoyed it - gave everyone a much wider range of characterisation than your typical Bond. And much as I'll miss the mighty Dame Judi, she is now having trouble reading scripts - so this is her last major role, and what a great send-off.

(Y'all did read the spoiler warnings, didn't you?)

As for Pebble's comment, M hung on just long enough to deny Silva the success he craved, so that's a victory. But in the words of Wellington, "God save us from all such victories..." First time I've ever cried at a Bond film.

Oddly enough, Bond is more relevant than ever precisely because our enemies are no longer arrayed in straight lines. The Bond-staple warlords, mega-criminals and conspiracist corporate zaibatsus, uncontrolled by government, now exist in plain sight. Hell, America nearly elected one a couple of weeks ago, although most Bond villains are more convincingly scripted.

As for terrifying machines of death: the end of the Cold War and the abandonment of large parts of the Soviet military machine have left plenty of interesting odds and ends kicking about. Maybe nothing as sexy as a giant orbital laaaaaser, but a nuclear demolition charge ("satchel bomb", even though they're rather bigger) left in the right place at the right time would be rather more effective. Even stuff like the nuclear batteries used to power tower lights in the old USSR have been found with smugglers, presumably for dirty bombs. Dead is still dead, no matter how unglamourously it happens.

These aren't the kind of threats you can send an army against, except as a deterrent. Intel, infiltration and small-team strikes are the way forward. Precisely what the world of Bond has always been about.

I think I'd make a great villain.

I'd just go and knock off the Hero, and then use the $20B I DIDN'T spend manipulating the world for the past 10 years and spend it on a nice jacuzzi and some smoothies.

Yeah, overly complicating things is beautiful and it certainly helps with the Muwahahaha's. But it's so much work..... I'd rather solo grind Incarnate powers. (See what I did there?)

I thought it was great.

I think it's safe to say that just about every movie unravels when you over-analyze it. And let's be honest here: every James Bond movie has a sense of "over the top" impossibility that ultimately renders it implausible to some degree or another. No movie is absolutely plot-perfect.

When it comes to how I judge a movie it usually boils down to whether or not I start mentally nit-picking it WHILE I'm watching it or only AFTER it's over. If it's fun enough then I'll usually enjoy my time watching it and not consciously think about the impossibilities until it's done. For me this Bond film was good enough that I really didn't think about its shortcomings until it was over. To me that automatically makes it one of the better Bond films. Was it the best Bond film ever? No, I wouldn't say that. But it was certainly better than many of the other latter-day installments.

For me this Bond was very Nolan-esque "Batman versus Joker" oriented - right down to fight in Bond's version of Wayne Manor with his Scottish version of Alfred. They even drove home the point of Bond being an orphan and showing his parents' graves alluding indirectly to Bruce Wayne's origin story. Might not have been the most original plot idea for a Bond film, but it worked well enough for me.