I liked Ralph Fiennes as the new M. It was good to see M, Moneypenny, and Q doing something more than one scene setups for Bond quips.
Actually, FYEO was the next film in the original production schedule; it was bumped by UA after the success of Star Wars in 1977. The preceding film was The Spy Who Loved Me, with its underwater lair and submarine pens, which were in retrospect only slightly less ludicrous than the shuttles, space station, et cetera.
I agree… as my wife and I left the theater, I turned to her and said "That was a lot more like a 60s Bond movie than I’ve seen since “You Only Live Twice”.
I’m not going to say it was bad, but it was definitely a throwback in a lot of ways.
I think what jars people is that the last few Craig movies have had this weird juxtaposition between “gritty” New-Bond scenes where he gets holes drilled in his head, and gets his ass handed to him in a really violent fight scene, and then you have cartoony Old-Bond scenes, where he does crazy car chases complete with comedic Q-branch toggle switch effects and one-liners, and crazy helicopter fight scenes.
I kind of think you can’t have both; the movie has to be pretty much gritty and well grounded, a-la “Casino Royale” or “The Living Daylights”, or the movie has to be cartoonishly absurd, a-la “The Spy Who Loved Me” or “You Only Live Twice”
Trying to combine the two hasn’t ever worked- “Spectre”, “Quantum of Solace” and “License To Kill” more or less bear that out. “Skyfall” was more gritty than cartoony- and I suspect it’s about as cartoony as you can get and still have that level of grit and violence.
I felt like the opening 90 minutes was quite solid. I enjoyed that portion of the movie. The final 50 minutes or so were quite bad. Really once Chrisoph Waltz entered the movie(well, re-entered), it got really bad.
Oddly enough, the Sony hack confirmed these thoughts a year before it came out. Execs thought the final act was quite bad and needed work. It looks like they worked on it since that time, but they did not fix the problems. It falls apart when:
We learn that Blofeld is the “author” of all his pain. He made the first four movies happen. No way. It’s crap from here on, too.
They delivered 90 minutes of quality and failed the final section.
How? He had it slid across the floor, it blew up and damaged Blofeld. How did his restraints on the chair open up? It looked like magic.