Movie Review: Skyfall

First, I must make an admission. I’d never seen an entire James Bond film before this. I grew up playing GoldenEye on N64 and might have seen parts from other Pierce Brosnan flicks over the years (which all pretty much sucked), but I’m a 007 n00b basically. I heard all the hype/positive word of mouth this film was getting, and saw Sam Mendes was the director and said, why not?  That being said, I enjoyed Skyfall.

The film follows James Bond’s return to the espionage world after a near fatal accident in the field sent him into self imposed exile. Bond returns to find his beloved MI6 spy agency in ruins. Bond has to rush back into action, even though he’s horribly rusty and not fit for active duty, and stop the deranged cyber terrorist/rogue MI6 operative who plans on destroying the agency and kill its director; M. 

Daniel Craig is the coolest Bond I’ve ever seen (that doesn’t say much). He’s got the sophisticated British charm thing down, but looks like he would generally enjoying beating the shit out of someone at the same time. Javier Bardem is much creepier as the villain then I imagined. He puts a tortured, quasi-homoerotic spin on his character. He’s a damaged man, both physically and mentally and is just really fucking weird. The film’s visuals look great, even the shots of Bond’s gloomy pad in Scotland are beautiful. I did have a problem with the final act of the film. It sort of turns into a super spy version of Home Alone, and the big finale is a little anti-climactic. Eh, it’s still a good movie though.

Also while I was watching Bond wreak vengeance on that sniper in the Chinese hotel, I suddenly realized where Christopher Nolan gets all his juice from. Most all of Nolan’s films follow sharp dressed dudes who jet set around the world, using fancy gadgets on some epic adventures (The Prestige, Inception, Batman Trilogy) and now I totally see the Bond worship. It makes sense, Nolan is British and probably grew up on this stuff. In Skyfall, Mendes seems to acknowledge the cultural impact of Nolan’s recent Bond worship films (and their use of Bat-wings, memory extraction/inception devices and clones machines) and decides to root Skyfall in good ol’ fashioned reality. The villain is a high tech computer hacking terrorist while Bond is armed in the latest cutting edge gadgets: a radio and a gun. It may be old school, but it’s very refreshing.