SKYFALL

Bond. There have been twenty five James Bond films in fifty years. They have had peaks and valleys, but overall the franchise is possibly the most consistent series of movies this side of Zatoichi. SKYFALL is not only the latest, but the third success in a row, putting Daniel Craig up with Sean Connery in the pantheon of best Bonds.

 

 

Let the sky fall after the jump.
 

Early in this installment, after being shot by the man he is pursuing, Bond is shot again, this time by a fellow agent, Eve Moneypenny. (This reveal is tossed off casually at the end, which would have had more impact had a very similar reveal not already happened earlier in the year in the final moments of THE DARK KNIGHT RISES.) My single quibble with the film is in this scene, as Moneypenny has all kinds of time to get off a second shot at her intended target, but instead wastes time talking to an especially naggy M on her earpiece. After he is shot and left for dead, Bond is dragged away by the cold blue currents and into the title sequence, which actually incorporates many themes and visuals from the coming film that only later begin to make sense.

 

The whole film can be viewed as a meditation on the death of James Bond. The way the surreal title sequence segues into Bond suddenly recuperating in an undisclosed tropical locale, without ever showing how he arrived there has an odd dreamy quality to it. Bond is underwater at the beginning and the end of the film, and there are many nods to his past, almost as though he were drowning and the whole of the film is just his life passing before his eyes. I don’t think that this is an intended reading, just an interesting subtext. This thought was on my mind for two reasons, one being a recent Bond video game that uses the opening of SKYFALL in just this manner, with Bond’s life flashing before his eyes in a series of levels recreating the old films. The other reason had to do with a trailer before the film for DJANGO UNCHAINED. (I love it when Quentin Tarantino releases films on Christmas. It’s a big, shiny present that is already waiting under the tree. I have not been this excited for December 25^th since JACKIE BROWN opened 15 years ago.) Getting my first glimpse of DJANGO UNCHAINED (I don’t seek out trailers, I let them find me) made me think of INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS, and the daring trick it played with history as we know it. It occurred to me that to kill James Bond would be blasphemous, and just as unexpected as the death of Hitler was in INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS. In fact, to go back to THE DARK KNIGHT RISES, there is that part of us that has been conditioned to expect these larger than life heroes to always live, no matter what we may see onscreen. I hope that I live to see the day that such a revered property is allowed to have truly transgressive events take place.

 

One reading of the Bond films that I have always been particularly fond of posits that James Bond is not one man, but a position that MI6 has to fill. This explains the variety of actors to portray him over the years, presuming that Bond dies in service or actually gets out and retires. There are two characters in this installment that feel like echoes of what Bond could become. Toward the beginning, after Bond returns from his tropical hideaway, he is asked why he didn’t just stay vanished and embrace retirement. At the end of the film, we meet Kincade. (Albert Finney, who is great in the role. Having not seen him since BEFORE THE DEVIL KNOWS YOU’RE DEAD, I had presumed that he had passed.) The role of Kincade feels as though it was tailor made to lure Sean Connery out of retirement, although that would open up many avenues of thought that would prove distracting. Kincade shows one possibility of what could become of Bond should he retire. The other possible ghost of Bond future is embodied in Gareth Mallory (Ralph Finnes, who clearly would have made a fine Bond around his ENGLISH PATIENT heyday), a man who has put his field agent days behind him, but still has a flair for action and unconventional tactics.

 

What pulls Bond out of his temporary retirement/recuperation is Wolf Blitzer reporting on the bombing of M’s office. Until then, Bond seems happy getting soused, growing scruffy and bedding women. In fact, Bond on vacation is very similar to Indiana Jones on duty. He wears a worn leather jacket, doesn’t shave and plays dangerous drinking games in exotic places with beautiful women. (I will note that realizing this only made me sad for the current state of Indiana Jones films. They can make 25 good Bond films but drop the ball after 3 Indiana Joneses.) M is being targeted by a former agent, and I suppose that becoming a super villain is another possible avenue for a disenfranchised, retired Bond. This agent taunts M with the kind of computer viruses that movies love so much but do not exist in this world, viruses with clever animation featuring skulls, sound effects and a score.

 

After the bombing, MI6 is forced underground and Bond is forced to resurface. He is unfit for service, but M forges ahead and puts Bond back into the line of fire. He pursues the man he was tussling with in the opening to Shanghai. The sequences in Shanghai are lit and photographed gloriously, making it one of the most beautiful cities I’ve ever seen in a movie. I only wish I could have made it to the IMAX. Because he is still recovering from his multiple gunshot wounds, Bond is unable to finish his questioning of the assassin, instead letting him drop what looks to be hundreds of stories.

 

 

A few continent hops later lead Bond to the true villain, Silva (Javier Bardem in pure Raul Julia mode). We know Silva is pure evil because he has his own island, and only truly despicable people have their own island. (I’m looking at you Tyler Perry. David Copperfield proved that only creeps buy private rape islands.) Silva gets an amazing introduction, one that comes over an hour into the picture. Not a flashy entrance, but a great speech about how you get rid of rats, peppered with an ambiguous sexuality and an uncomfortable handsiness with Daniel Craig’s chest and thighs. With Silva, the film faces a common problem in new action films, the challenge of making a cyber-terrorist interesting. They are mostly successful, and most of this is thanks to Javier Bardem, but there are some nice touches (as much as I don’t like cutesy animated computer viruses, I did love that apparently Silva posted his stolen NOC list on YouTube.) Silva has a fun theatricality, emphasized by his constant use of loudspeakers playing songs with some form of the word ‘boom’ in the title, only underlining the explosive tactics he employs.

 

Explosions are a favorite motif of the movie. It is an explosion that lures Bond back, that same explosion forces MI6 underground. It is an explosion that stops the invasion of Skyfall manor, and a priest hole that saves our heroes. Tunnels, and more specifically tunneling rats, also come up repeatedly. Silva, who calls Bond his brother, as M served as an adoptive mother of sorts for both of them, compares himself and Bond to the last two cannibal rats in an oil drum. Bond himself is sort of a dinosaur, pointed out by the new Q (Ben Whishaw, having a great year with both this and CLOUD ATLAS), who is one of many characters to point out that Bond is trying to solve all of his problems with a gun when everyone else has moved on to computers. Within the film we have a few other deadly old dinosaurs in the form of ancient creatures -- both the scorpion used in the drinking game and the Komodo dragons in Macau echo what Bond has become.

 

 

But that is what James Bond is. He is not a slick hacker, and though he is clever, more often than not it is his brutality that saves the day. His only gadget in the flick is a radio, and later Silva turns this on him, using his new toy to give Bond a toy of his own - a train set. In the climax, Bond gets the upper hand on Silva by literally blowing up his own past. He uses his father’s gun (monogrammed with the initials AB, which I honestly read as a tribute to the late Albert Broccoli before realizing it was for Andrew Bond), and later devolves to an even more basic tool, a knife.

 

And while the film is ultimately concerned with cycles of death and replacement, it is not Bond who we have to worry about. As much as I love staid traditions shaken up, I don’t know how I would truly react to the death of Bond. Besides, then we wouldn’t get the sweetest five words in cinema. “James Bond Will Be Back.”