Double Oh...23: Skyfall

 Skyfall Preamble:

I wish the posters were as
beautiful as Roger Deakin's
cinematography for the film

Well, it's finally time.  Time to close out the one gap in this series.  I don't know why it's taken me almost exactly 5 years (the last "Double Oh" entry was November 2015 when Spectre came out) to finish it up.  I know I've watched Skyfall at least twice -- perhaps more -- since then.  It may very well be my favourite Bond movie full-stop.  No joke.  Such is the power of Roger Deakins' cinematography.  This movie is downright gorgeous, one of the best looking films ever made.  The performances are wonderful, perhaps the most connected characters in a Bond movie have ever felt, and I'm not just talking about M and Bond.  The action is straightforward, nothing crazy, and yet I think that's what makes it more exciting ... the action isn't trying to dominate the attention.  There's so much going on here and it all gets served, very, very well.

Let's begin.

Villains:

This film has one main adversary, Raoul Silva, and one minor adversary, the mercenary Patrice.  There are no notable henchmen in this film, that's how great Silva is.  We'll start with Patrice.

Patrice (Ola Rapace) is a capable mercenary and the chase figure in the film's cold open.  The film literally begins with Bond and (who we learn much, much later is) Moneypenny in pursuit of this man with a stolen data disk or hard drive or some form of information transport.  It contains a collection of not just British secret intelligence in undercover roles, but shared global intelligence.  The theft of this information is bad news for M and MI6. Patrice fends off Bond pretty good, they seem pretty evenly matched.  Bond gets back on the trail of Patrice after a little "death holiday" and they spar in an office building in Singapore in what is the most gorgeously shot fight sequence ever - silhouettes moving in violent ballet before the moving bright neon signs, and the glare of multiple glass panels.  Bond gets the better of Patrice and accidentally(?) drops him out the window.  Patrice has no personality to speak of, he's just a plot device.  A plot device to lead Bond to Silva.

Raoul Silva (Javier Bardem) is leading a campaign of terror against M.  Not MI6, not British Intelligence, not Britain or any larger agency... it's M, he's focused upon.  He blows up the MI6 HQ knowing M will be outside to witness it.  He taunts her via her laptop with cute/scary Terry Gilliam-esque animations, telling her to think on her sins.  I'm sure she has many, but he really just means himself.  Silva used to be a Station Agent under M when she was head of Hong Kong.  He got captured.  He took his cyanide pill but it didn't kill him, just destroyed much of the inside of his face.  He wears an appliance that gives him a relatively normal appearance.

But Silva has been doing something much, much different in his time since working for British Intelligence.  He's been running a digital espionage empire that can unseed governments, crash stock markets and orchestrate all manner of unrest.  With Bond captured, he approaches him with familiarity, like they're long lost family.  He calls him "brother", he refers to M as their "mother" and tries to sway Bond to his jilted point of view.  M left him, coldly.  She pretends to be a parental figure, but when it comes time for mother to protect her children, she leaves them to cruel unbending chance/nature/fate.  If Silva has any animosity towards Bond, it's only in the fact that he's her current favourite, and perhaps he's stolen the life (and position) he should have had. Silva is obsessed with M, he even tries to wears his hair like hers (it was only on this latest watch that I noticed that).  Silva's entire motivation is not to kill M, it's not to shame her or destroy her, it's simply to get her to notice him, to acknowledge his existence, and maybe to see what he's capable of, what he's accomplished and for her to be proud of him.  Some deep seeded mommy issues here.  

If the follow-up, Spectre, is to be believed, Silva is working for S.P.E.C.T.R.E. this whole time, and he's being bankrolled by them.  There's no indication of that in this film.  At all.  Not even a hint.  It goes back to the lawsuit surrounding Thunderball, where the rights for MGM to actually use SPECTRE and Blofeld weren't settled until after Skyfall was made.  

Bond Girls:

The interesting thing about Craig's Bond is that he isn't a womanizer.  He's more of a flirt.  

Eve Moneypenny (Naomi Harris) is out in the field with James in the opening sequence.  She seems like an experienced field agent but when M tells her to take the shot while Bond and Patrice are on top of the train about to disappear into a tunnel, she accidentally shoots James instead.  It kind of rattles her and she winds up taking a desk job working for Gareth Mallory (Ralph Fiennes), the chairman of the Intelligence and Security Committee of Parliament.  When Bond returns to the job, tracking Patrice in Singapore, she turns up at his hotel to help... perhaps feeling guilty, and perhaps to spy on him for Mallory (who she assures is a stand-up bloke).  They have a sexy moment where she shaves him with a straight razor, and then they get dressed up and go to a casino.  We don't see too much of Moneypenny after this, although when the senate is attacked, she doesn't miss a beat in stepping into action.  While calling her "Eve" throughout the entire film then only introducing her as "Moneypenny" in the final moment was kind of eye rolling, she's great.  

Bond, being dead, has retired to, I believe, the Carribbean somewhere (not entirely sure where he wound up, could also be South America).  He seems to have a woman he spends his drunken company with but she is not a character at all, and clearly nobody he even has a remote emotional connection with.

At the casino Bond meets Sévérine (Bérénice Marlohe), for the second time.  The first time was across the vast gulf between two skyrise building, just after Bond dropped Patrice out the window.  Patrice had succeeded in his assassination across the way in the room where Severine was, following which Severine stood there and watched the silhouettes battle.  Was she in shock, or was she trying to size up the events?  Her eyes met with Bond's...a quick flash-change of the neon sign and he was gone.  At the casino, she flirts with Bond, tells him what he needs to know, and where she will be later, though indicating it's unlikely he'll make it out alive.  She has a defeated look to her, which may be a result of her having been unwillingly conscripted into Silva's employ as a sex worker/decoy/killer.  She looks at Bond and would like to dream he could rescue her, but seems resigned that there's no escape.  She's a very sad figure in all of this.  Does Bond take advantage of her vulnerability, or does he misread her as another part of the game?

And finally, there's Bond's greatest love, M (Dame Judy Dench).  "Mother", as Silva calls her.  And it's apt.  As with all the best agents, Bond, was an orphan, so Father and/or Mother figures are essential to controlling them.  Where she may have been more controlling of others under her employ, there's a certain forgiveness she has for Craig's Bond.  If you look back at her role with Brosnan, it really was more employer/employee, where as with Craig there's is a definite parental affection in the way she chastises him.  She treats him like he's her family.  There's never anything approximating what you would call overt displays of love, and I don't know that she's capable of it.  It's what Silva seems to be after, ultimately, for her to love him as much as he (thinks he) loves her.  M gets put into action at the Bond Skyfall estate, she gets hit on by the caretaker Kincade (Albert Finney), who calls her Emma, and ultimately takes a stray bullet that slowly kills her.  She does leave a little something for Bond in Spectre (the spectre of M should have been hit harder in that one).  This one's a real showcase for Dench, and she, of course nails it.  She's never not been good as M, even in the worst Bond outings, just a natural fit for the role.  Skyfall gives her some backstory, and some actual meat to chew beyond just Bond-wrangling.  RIP M, 1995 - 2012

Theme/Credits:

I knew of Adele before she got this gig, but she didn't mean anything to me until Skyfall came out.  She has a lot of good songs, and a very powerful voice, but Skyfall just shines over everything else I've heard from her.  There are sweeping waves of sound in this that just gives me tingles every time I hear it. Best Bond theme?  Yeah, yeah it is.  Deal with it.

 

 The title sequence is good... it all connects to the film, in ways both direct and metaphorically. I like how the cold open segues directly into Bond's shadowed body in the water and pulls him deeper, the effect of the blood in the water or shifting waterbed sands, and the various transitions into skulls. There's hints of skin (the naked ladies are back), but it's not salacious.  Unlike other Bond title sequences the focus here is mainly on Bond and the trials he's about to face.  The sequence is, at times, a little too clean, a little too digital, but I like the color palette...it fits with Roger Deakins' eye of the film.  It's certainly not as memorable as the song, but I have a hard time thinking of a truly memorable Bond title sequence.  

Bond:

The film opens with a chase, but in the first few seconds Bond is navigating a scene where violence has happened and another agent is down.  He wants to help his colleague, knowing that his intervention could be the difference between life and death.  M forcefully tells him to keep after the suspect, and Bond reluctantly complies.  The message is the mission is more important than any life.  This is the guiding hand with which M(other) has raised her agents.

When M tells Moneypenny to take the shot and she misses, Bond hears the whole conversation in his ear, but has no time to talk, to warn them off.  Instead he takes the bullet and falls into the water.  He takes a sort of retirement, but it's not a happy retirement. He spends it drunk, I think moping about the fact that his life is so easily discarded.  But as he tells M later, it's more about trust, and that she didn't trust him to get the job done.  It goes both ways though, and James rarely trusts the decisions she makes, which is why he goes rogue so damn often. 

Yet, Silva is right, she is the mother figure these poor orphans crave, and as much as Bond may love his country and feel a sense of obligation towards it, when the SIS building is attacked he returns more for M, maybe to ensure she survived, maybe to have another chance to prove himself.

I don't think the film highlights enough the significance of that agent's death in the opening on Bond, and how it influences his interactions with M, Mallory, or Silva.  The opening credits capture this spectre of death that hangs over him better than anything else in the film does.

This is the sweet spot for Craig's Bond.  This is his most comfortable performance, and it gives him a lot to work with.  Craig does "calm panic" very well.

Movie:

Look, I know there are detractors for this film.  They have their reasons.  And I don't really have any qualm with those reasons, but I just don't care.  For me this is the best Bond movie from start to finish.  The action is exceptional, the story has very personal stakes involving both the good guys and the villain which leads to some tremendous acting, and it balances many different spinning plates at once with seeming ease.  Where Casino Royale and Quantum of Solace felt like a deviation from the type of Bond we were used to, Skyfall swings it back into a more familiar Bond reality while still holding true the two films that came before it.  It's not a course correction so much as a more enriched experience.

It does an immaculate job of both giving M a meaningful sendoff (it's the biggest spotlight any M has ever gotten), and also in introducing Feinnes as her replacement, showing very well the difference between the two of them. When Dench came in as M on  Goldeneye that Bond gave her very much the same chilly welcome this Bond give Mallory so there's parallels.

But really, I keep watching this film because of Roger Deakins' gorgeous cinematography.  This film is such eye candy.  I find it hard to pick apart whats happening in the film because I'm so pleasantly stimulated that I get distracted.  I could care more about the overuse of homages, or that the film muddies even further the idea of continuity in the Bond series (is he the same guy, or a bunch of different guys???) by introducing Bond's "childhood home" and picking at the backstory scab far more than any other film has, or that Bond, M, and Kincaid basically pull a Kevin Mcallister on Skyfall by booby trapping the house... I could care... but I don't.  It all works for the film.  It's interested in belonging to the series but doesn't let continuity stand in its way.  And those visuals.  Sumptuous. 

I watch it over and over again because it looks so amazing, but also I genuinely like the story it tells, and Javier Bardem's villain is the best of Craig's series and one of the best of the overall run so far.

 Q Gadgets :

Bond meets the new Q (Ben Whishaw) for the first time and they wage a bit of a chilly exchange at first but eventually come to a pleasant understanding.  Q gives Bond two items, a little portable radio transmitter (recalling the same item from Thunderball) and a handgun coded to his palm print.  Of course, the latter makes itself useful once, then gets tossed away, which is sort of a Bond tradition of wasting thousands, or even millions of dollars of research.

As well, Bond retrieves his Aston Martin DB5 (from Goldfinger) still tricked out with the ejector seat, guns and other gimmicks.  It gets butchered pretty good, but Q will resuscitate it in Spectre.

Classification (out of 01.0): 01.0