Skyfall
November 14, 2012
My hope for this was that at least one of the women who slept with Bond this time around would survive to the end of the movie. And that happened, so huzzah!
Forward from that, this was different, intense, still inarguably Bond, but it may be the first Bond that really involved a theme and a meaning much deeper than “this is Bond, James Bond.” It’s about getting older and obsolescence, knowing when to let go of the past and when to hang on, and when to walk away and what happens if you don’t. And when the old ways are indeed the best ways, and when they aren’t. The best part of all, the usual checklist of Bond tropes were made to serve those themes. See, in the bad Bond movies, the tropes cross the line into self-parody. In the good Bond movies, you can’t imagine Bond without them. And this is a good Bond movie.
November 14, 2012 at 11:24 am
Wow, you got more out of it than I did. I disliked it because it was essentially all action (or setting up for said action).
I realize I am very much in the minority on this one, though; multiple people commented as they left that they thought it was the best Bond movie ever.
November 15, 2012 at 11:35 am
While Kitty and Cormac haven’t shown a bit of aging since I first met them so many volumes ago, the Skyfall movie plot dealt neatly with the Real Life fact that the passage of time in the Real World affects the actors portraying the time-less Bondsian characters.
After all, how many of us want to see a cast of octogenarians in wheel chairs in a traditionally expected action film.
“Bond (gasp), James Bond (Wheeze).”
November 16, 2012 at 5:09 am
The David Niven version of Casino Royale got around the ageing thing by indicating that “James Bond” wasn’t so much a name as a title. The old James Bond didn’t approve of the antics of the new one.