I liked Skyfall a lot, except I have a hard time with the incredibly unlikely and unbelievable plan by the bad guy.
More on Hashima Island, the abandoned Japanese island which inspired Silva’s hideout:
I caught Skyfall on DVD a couple of weeks ago, back-to-back with Quantum of Solace. After seeing Casino Royale at the cinema I somehow missed the two subsequent Bond films until recently.
I can barely remember Quantum - there was a Miami Vice bit near the beginning, and the villain shot his girlfriend in the head… but no, that was Skyfall, and (clicks fingers) big hotel at the end, boom! Ends with the two anti-heroes stuck in the desert, chained together with handcuffs. Famously the original cut was eight hours long, but. No, that was Greed. There was an opera sequence, but I can’t remember how it gelled with the rest of the plot. Bond used it to… but how did he get there? Something something aeroplane, pasty white CIA man. Moonraker shuttle?
(I kept thinking that, in real life, a real-life Bond would be working to help the real-life Quantum organisation, not hinder them. If the British government is colluding with corrupt businessmen to do despicable deeds, Bond would be working for Royal Dutch Shell and BAE Systems and EADS and whatever, not against them. They don’t really do anything villainous in the film. They mess up Bolivia’s economy, but Bond is a British agent, sworn to uphold Britain’s national interests, and if that means squeezing the life out of poor foreign people so be it.)
Editing. One thing that struck me is that Royale and Skyfall were both edited by Stuart Baird, who is infamous for directing Star Trek: Nemesis, but is apparently a crack top movie editor. Usually it’s hard for a civilian to evaluate an editor’s work - it’s vitally important but usually unnoticeable, because the editor’s job is to make everything flow, and not generally to show off.
But Royale and Quantum give the audience a chance to compare editing styles, because the second film follows directly on from the closing scene of the first, but has a radically different style. Quantum was widely panned for its jumpy action sequences, and I can sympathise with the critics. With Skyfall I didn’t think about the editing at all, but with Solace I frequently found myself visualising a couple of blokes sitting in front a bank of quad-core Mac Pros, and that took me out of the film. I pictured them stroking their little tufty beards whilst moving the jog slider back and forth, mentally calculating how many frames go by in 0.03 of a second. Also, when the film cut to a new location, there was a caption that identified the location - but it was e.g. painted onto the ground, or projected against a wall, instead of just floating in the air. That was not a good idea.
There’s an article here about the making of the title sequence for Quantum, btw. It seems to have consumed more resources than many small films:
*“The crew had built two massive sandboxes, which they sculpted into desert landscapes on a shot-by-shot basis. Sometimes we’d use the boxes as 1:1 sets for detail shots of Craig, but most of the time they were miniature landscapes sculpted around our female talent. We also had a couple of middleweight stunt shots that required some custom rigs and rehearsals. At one point there was a three-story jungle gym thing erected with a floor that would collapse on cue so that Craig’s double could fall through it, which we then composited into a motion-control plate of our women moving around in the sand. We also used a gyroscopic armature — affectionately called the “Potter Rig” due to its use on that franchise — which Craig would strap himself into and tumble around as though in free fall.”
*
I respect the work that went into it, but the end result didn’t really grab me and no-one remembers it nowadays. It kept some people in work at any rate. The same site also has an article on the title sequence for Soylent Green, which has nothing to do with Bond but kept me amused and that’s what matters.
“The problem with the gadgets is that we have to be introduced to them (if we didn’t know Bond’s car had an ejector seat in Goldfinger, its unexpected deployment would would be a ridiculous deus ex machina). But the very fact of their introduction creates a Chekhov’s Gun problem. Every gadget introduced by Q has to be used in a one-to-one mapping onto crises, and this pretty effectively kills the spontaneity necessary for improvisation to shine.”
There’s an interesting example of this in Live and Let Die. Bond is given a magnetic watch that can pull metal objects. He’s left on a small rock surrounded by alligators, so he uses the watch to pull a boat towards him - but it gets stuck, so he has to improvise a way out of the problem. Which in this case involves leaping across the backs of the alligators. It’s silly but brilliant at the same time, doubly so because it’s a genuine practical stunt done with actual alligators. It’s compensation for an earlier scene when the watch becomes a buzzsaw, even though we’re not told that it can do this.
But, yes. Skyfall. It felt like a really good Pierce Brosnan Bond film. They’ve basically ditched the pretence at being gritty and angsty in favour of high-class cheese. I was struck by a sequence in which Bond finally has the villain at gunpoint, but allows him to reach for and activate a switch on his jacket that instantly causes a London Underground train to burst through a wall, almost killing Bond. I’ve been on the London Underground, I used to commute on it, and although the trains generally run on time they’re not that punctual. And yet in the context of the film you don’t think about that kind of thing, because it’s exciting. Without being jumpy and off-putting, eh?
Interesting to see London as well. The Bond films generally use London as a backdrop during the briefing sequence, but here we had a glimse of the thing that Bond has risked his life to defend. Because London = Great Britain. Okay, Bond is Scottish, but on the evidence of Skyfall Scotland is basically a big permafrost devoid of human beings and livestock. Albert Finney was in this and the Bourne films. These old British actors - that includes Ralph Fiennes, too - must thank the Lord that they were born with rich booming voices.
Ah, Ralph Fiennes. He starts off as a turd and then turns into a good egg. A good egg with a heart of gold that hatches into a wise old rooster who can also do the action stuff, at a pinch. You could say that the chicken that laid him had been fed on a free range diet, thus producing an egg with a nutritious yolk. So, this is one of the few films in which it is proven that Judi Dench was fed a rich diet of insects. Because she is the hen that laid the egg that Ralph Fiennes’ character hatched from. At first the shells are weak, see, but they get stronger.
Australia, Bond hasn’t been to Australia, as far as I know. But he generally hangs out in classy locations, and Australia isn’t… no offence to Australians, but it’s not… I don’t know how to put this politely. I generally associate Australia with a cultural milieu that does not overlap greatly with the world of James Bond.
Looking back at Brosnan’s stint at Bond - was it really a decade since Die Another Day? Ten years of my life gone? - ten years. Jeez. I can remember watching Die Another Day at the cinema. Ten years ago. There was an irritating kid in front of me playing with his mobile phone. It was one of those films that just felt off from the start and didn’t improve. At the time it was supposed to be a dramatic counterblaste to xXx, but looking from pig to man and man to pig I couldn’t tell any difference. If anything I despised the pigs more, because they had a chance to make things better, and they blew it. The farmers were born bad.
Looking back at Brosnan’s stint at Bond I’m struck by realisation that, beyond Goldeneye, there isn’t really a single definitive Brosnan Bond film. A flawless home run that you could point to and cite as Brosnan’s one crowning achievement as Bond. They’re all flawed in some way. The World was tedious, Tomorrow Never Dies was half-good, half-day. Skyfall felt like Brosnan’s second great Bond film.
Which worries me, in a way, because we’ve been here before. The Bond films seem to snap back to seriousness every so often, and then drift into camp, and I worry that the next film will be a boring Brosnan film. At least the producers can say that they’ve outlasted Bourne.
Skyfall, eh? I can understand the order to shoot Bond at the beginning. The sensible thing would have been to pump both of them full of bullets. If you have to do a mean thing, make sure you do it right, so you don’t have to do it again. I felt that the setup didn’t work as it was supposed to; Bond would have accepted the decision to shoot at him as part of the job. It’s not as if M was betraying Bond, or just throwing his life away, she was simply making a very tough decision. The detail of M sending the villain to imprisonment in China again didn’t resonate, because we weren’t given enough detail; if it subsequently turned out that M was incompetent, or wrong, it would have been easier to sympathise with the villain. I’m sure that in real life there were numerous spies and intelligence operatives circa April 1989 who must have wondered what the bloody hell they had risked their lives for, if the Soviet Union was just going to collapse. Imagine if you had had your legs shot off smuggling people across the Hungary / Austria border one week before it was opened; imagine if your loved ones had been arrested and murdered as a consequence of orders that were no longer relevant; you’d be aggrieved. But Skyfall didn’t have a large enough canvas to get that across.
'cause ultimately it was an action film, a good one. Three good scenes, no bad scenes. And, hey, the idea of a villain who can spy on people with computers will only become more and more relevant as time goes by.