This past weekend, 007 celebrated his 50th anniversary with a record-breaking bang. Big box office grosses and a solid 92% aggregate score on Rotten Tomatoes should silence any stubborn cynics who were still apprehensive about James Blonde, Daniel Craig, and the interesting directorial choice of Sam Mendes. Mendes is primarily known as a quasi-Hollywood drama buff, with such self-serious claims to fame as American Beauty, Revolutionary Road, and Road to Perdition (we’ll pass over the excessively quirky outlier, Away We Go).
Skyfall is a highly successful return to form that erases Quantum of Solace’s bland after taste, and may even surpass the delights of Casino Royale, Craig’s induction as 007 from six years ago. The film manages to find a perfect harmony with the Bondian formula ideal that has emerged over the last 22 films. It starts with an outlandish opening chase scene (complete with a car chase, a motorcycle chase, a train chase, the use of a tractor as a weapon, and the first time Bond has ever been shot onscreen), then an eye-pleasing credit sequence with the already popular Adele song, followed by some globetrotting and an introduction to the menacing villain (an eccentrically dastardly Javier Bardem), and concluding with a large yet constrained finale of gunfire, bloodshed, and resolutions.
With that basic plot structure in place, other classic Bond tropes are injected throughout. The theme music makes a comeback, a whole new Q and another prototypical character (who shall remain nameless) are reintroduced, and Bond even gets back in the Aston Martin DB5. But while veteran franchise scribes Neal Purvis and Robert Wade team with John Logan to keep all this throwback nostalgia alive, they also contemporize the whole scene and use the film’s narrative to directly question the relevance of MI6 in 2012—both in terms of the story’s context and the real world Hollywood realm. Old-fashioned, old Bond, and old M become motifs.
There’s also an interesting subplot revolving around the relationship between Bond and M. Skyfall’s attention to M as a matriarchal figure to 007’s willful, loose canon sensibility adds some human layers to these previously one trick ponies. Bardem’s Silver also factors into this dynamic, and he’s given a reasonable back story, which is not exactly common practice when it comes to movie characters of Silver’s variety. All these components of the old, the new, and generally refined filmmaking craft, add up to a honed entertainment value that we haven’t seen in the franchise for quite some time.
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