A few things about Skyfall
Nov. 24th, 2012 11:38 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
seriousficOkay, so for a good movie (better than Quantum of Solace, worse than Casino Royale), this felt very… underwritten. Maybe it's just that it's been six years since the last Bond movie, so you'd expect someone would show the script to their roommate and he'd go "Wait a minute… none of the new characters ever say their names." Am I the only one who thought that was weird? Naomie Harris shows up, goes with Bond into action, fucks him, and apparently they never know each others' names? There's this big scene where M identifies the villain for the first time; "ah yes, Arturo Rodriguez, I remember him;" and then everyone starts calling him Silva for some reason? And when someone asks Daniel Craig his name, he just goes "The name's…" and trails off.
Well, that last one didn't happen, but it totally could've.
Given that one of the subplots is whether or not M should be retired, they probably shouldn't have made every call she makes in the movie a bad one. I think the only one she really got right was putting Bond on duty, which is like making Michael Jordan your first pick in a game of hoops. Yeah, no shit. But before and after that, she…
1. Lets an agent bleed out instead of letting Bond stay with him to give first aid, as Bond asks to (she needs Bond to go after a bad guy, but she's got a second agent there. Send one off, let the other help the wounded).
2. Tells Eve to shoot Bond and Patrice instead of letting Bond punch the guy out like he's done, oh, five hundred times in his career (you could say this is on Eve for flubbing the shot, but M put her in the field in the first place).
3. Falls for Silva's plan.
4. When given warning of Silva's escape and impending attempt on her life, goes "No thanks, I'll just stay here and read some poetry." This leads to several people dying.
5. Turns on a flashlight when she's running away from gunmen at night.
6. Also, during the opening where Bond and Eve are chasing Patrice, must she ask for a report every ten seconds? What does she hope to accomplish there? "Bond, what's going on?" "Well, I'm punching the bad guy in the face and he's punching me back." "Punch him hard and dodge his punches!" "Jolly good, mum, will do."
Really, all of the newbies are for some reason introduced as being awful at their jobs. Eve hits Bond instead of Patrice and then gapes like an idiot instead of, oh, firing again. Q just plugs a master hacker's laptop right into MI6's servers, which is the equivalent of the CIA accepting a care package from Osama bin Laden. Only Mallory really comes off well, taking a gunshot for M (see Point 4 above) and then covering her escape. No wonder they put him in charge; he's the only person in Britain who knows what he's doing.
I understand that this is the 21st century and Moneypenny can be a badass lady spy now, but I don't see what it adds to the mythos to have her be a badass lady spy who is actually iffy at being a badass lady spy and ends up relegated to a desk where she can't shoot anymore of her co-workers. People can't just be secretaries now? Will we be finding out that Betty Brant is actually a failed superhero in the next Spider-Man movie?
(And I know I wrote a fanfic rationalizing this, but my point is I shouldn't have to write a five thousand word story to rationalize the movie going "Well, Moneypenny helped Bond out twice and seemed pretty cool with it, but suddenly she doesn't want to do that anymore. STATUS QUO!")
Why is it that Q is now disdainful of giving Bond gadgets that are actually useful? We now have, what, four actors whose only job in the franchise is to shout in Bond's earpiece? You could at least let him disguise Bond's radio as a tie clip or something, so you can buy the villain's henchmen not finding it. I actually kinda liked having Bond use a gadget in some clever way to get out of a jam. Now he just grabs someone's gun really fast because they totally weren't expecting that and mistook their projectile weapon for a knife ("I better hold the barrel right up to his throat so I can cut him if he makes a move!"). I swear, he does that move three times in this movie.
MI6 must have the most incompetent guards ever. "Holy crap! Someone's hacked us! The prisoner's cell is opening up! Luckily, I'm twenty feet away from him and holding an automatic weapon. I'll just shoot him if he doesn't get down on the ground and hold still. Wait, how am I and yet another guard dead now?"
I suppose the old thing of Bond having perfectly consensual sex with a girl at the end of every movie and then them parting ways is terribly sexist, since no woman would ever want to have a fling with Daniel Craig, but I don't see how having girls just to wear backless dresses, shag Bond, and get murdered by the villain is any better. Bond actually has more reaction to his car getting blown up than Severin being murdered in front of him; I kept expecting there to be a line of dialogue going "Oh, we got her to a hospital, she's fine," to justify why he doesn't seem to give a shit. The way it plays is especially odd since immediately afterward we get a badass action scene and Bond making triumphant quips. I know the old Bond movies killed off Bond girls too, but at least Sean Connery would look sad for a few seconds.
In fact, given the point the movie makes about Bond's compassion as it starts (and the statement by the filmmakers that the movie is about Bond's 'old way' of doing things with honor and compassion vs. the 'new way' of being cold and amoral), he's weirdly blasé for the rest of the movie. He lets an assassin kill someone before attacking him (hope the target didn't have kids, orphan) and then the thing with Severin. Casino Royale, even Quantum of Solace commented on Bond's coldness. It was part of a character arc. Here, it's just like "boo, Silva killed a woman for no good reason! He has no regard for human life! Yay, Bond! He also has no regard for human life!"
I get that Bond is a cold bastard, but if he cares more about his car getting wrecked than someone he just slept with getting shot, that's going too far into the zone of 90s Image Comics superhero. The other interpretation I've heard is that it's just showing how Bond has slipped, but the way that's shown is very odd as well. He can't and doesn’t even attempt to stop an assassin from killing someone who might have vital information about the villain's plot (like the girl he saved from an assassin in Quantum of Solace did), but then he's able to beat the guy up? He can't save Severin, but five seconds later he can beat up all of Silva's men? It feels like they could've structured that better (like with the MI6 helicopters that show up providing an opening, or him nonfatally shooting Severin himself to shock the henchmen into inaction).
I think we should have a moratorium on "yes! We captured the bad guy! Wait, no, it was all part of his master plan!" plots for the remainder of the decade. It worked in The Avengers and The Dark Knight (and The Dark Knight Rises), but here it just seems pointless.
Silva: Yes! After years of work, I've bombed MI6 headquarters to force them into their secondary headquarters, allowed myself to be captured, and now hacked their computers to allow my escape and bombed a subway train to cover it! Time to execute my master plan!
Henchman: What are we going to do, boss? Free a political prisoner? Steal valuable data? Set off a bomb?
Silva: We're going to dress up as policemen and bust into a courthouse, guns blazing, to kill M!
Henchman: What, really?
Silva: Yes, brilliant, I know.
Henchman: Couldn't we just… do the policemen thing without all that other stuff?
Silva: I have to look her in the eyes before I kill her and let her know it was me who did it!
Henchman: So say "Remember me?" before you shoot her. But the way you have it now, you're actually warning her you're coming by escaping.
Silva: Look, I'm crazy, you're a henchman, you know how this works.
Henchman: Yeah, but didn't you see Casino Royale? Bond snuck into her house, like, five times. Can't we do that? I'll tie her up, you can talk to her as long as you want, you shoot her, we're out of here.
Silva: I don't think you understand. I'm… CRAZY. That means I get to do whatever convoluted thing the script demands even when there's a much simpler way to get what I want.
Henchman: I thought we were going for gritty realism now. Sure, Blofeld used to pull lots of crazy shit, but the end result would be a secret volcano base full of nuclear weapons, not one dead old lady.
Silva: …sorry, what was that, I was too busy thinking about how awesome cock is.
Speaking of, I kinda don't see how it's progressive to have the depraved, rapey villain joke about sodomizing Bond and then giving Bond a queer-baiting line about possibly having sex with boys maybe. It's better than him going "Eww, cooties," but still, hardly necessary.
I wouldn't have minded this dumb courthouse bit if they didn't have Q saying that Silva intended to get captured and he'd been working on this exact plot for years and years. You can't expect me to not then find "and then he shoots M in the face!" underwhelming after that. If they'd said it was his Plan B because Bond had fucked up his first go, that'd be fine. Even "oh, he wants to humiliate M and destroy her life!" But there's a limit to how convoluted the villain's plan can be.
I think, in the end, the movie is trying to do too many things at once. It's a swan song for M, it's more 'Bond Begins' stuff introducing Moneypenny and Q, it's a Dark Knight Returns story about an old and busted Bond getting his groove back (by completely and totally failing to foil the bad guy's plot). And all of these stories mix together to not really take Bond anywhere as a character. "All of Bond's issues stem from his parents dying. And now he's lost another parental figure. THUS SOLVING THE PROBLEM FOREVER." Coulda put more work into that.
I think the movie actually might've been better if they killed M at the courthouse, then Silva cut a deal with the British government to give them the list back in exchange for immunity, but Bond goes rogue to get revenge for M because he's come to care about people over 'the big picture.' I know it's been done before, but everything in this movie has been done as recently as the Brosnan years, so why not?
ETA:
M: You heartless bureaucrats may want to shut MI6 down, but have you considered this? *fearmongering, fearmongering, fearmongering!*
Helen McCrory: Actually, I just wanted to know why you would make a list of every undercover agent in the world, then send it to Turkey.
M: ...hold on, there's a really good Tennyson quote for this situation.
Well, that last one didn't happen, but it totally could've.
Given that one of the subplots is whether or not M should be retired, they probably shouldn't have made every call she makes in the movie a bad one. I think the only one she really got right was putting Bond on duty, which is like making Michael Jordan your first pick in a game of hoops. Yeah, no shit. But before and after that, she…
1. Lets an agent bleed out instead of letting Bond stay with him to give first aid, as Bond asks to (she needs Bond to go after a bad guy, but she's got a second agent there. Send one off, let the other help the wounded).
2. Tells Eve to shoot Bond and Patrice instead of letting Bond punch the guy out like he's done, oh, five hundred times in his career (you could say this is on Eve for flubbing the shot, but M put her in the field in the first place).
3. Falls for Silva's plan.
4. When given warning of Silva's escape and impending attempt on her life, goes "No thanks, I'll just stay here and read some poetry." This leads to several people dying.
5. Turns on a flashlight when she's running away from gunmen at night.
6. Also, during the opening where Bond and Eve are chasing Patrice, must she ask for a report every ten seconds? What does she hope to accomplish there? "Bond, what's going on?" "Well, I'm punching the bad guy in the face and he's punching me back." "Punch him hard and dodge his punches!" "Jolly good, mum, will do."
Really, all of the newbies are for some reason introduced as being awful at their jobs. Eve hits Bond instead of Patrice and then gapes like an idiot instead of, oh, firing again. Q just plugs a master hacker's laptop right into MI6's servers, which is the equivalent of the CIA accepting a care package from Osama bin Laden. Only Mallory really comes off well, taking a gunshot for M (see Point 4 above) and then covering her escape. No wonder they put him in charge; he's the only person in Britain who knows what he's doing.
I understand that this is the 21st century and Moneypenny can be a badass lady spy now, but I don't see what it adds to the mythos to have her be a badass lady spy who is actually iffy at being a badass lady spy and ends up relegated to a desk where she can't shoot anymore of her co-workers. People can't just be secretaries now? Will we be finding out that Betty Brant is actually a failed superhero in the next Spider-Man movie?
(And I know I wrote a fanfic rationalizing this, but my point is I shouldn't have to write a five thousand word story to rationalize the movie going "Well, Moneypenny helped Bond out twice and seemed pretty cool with it, but suddenly she doesn't want to do that anymore. STATUS QUO!")
Why is it that Q is now disdainful of giving Bond gadgets that are actually useful? We now have, what, four actors whose only job in the franchise is to shout in Bond's earpiece? You could at least let him disguise Bond's radio as a tie clip or something, so you can buy the villain's henchmen not finding it. I actually kinda liked having Bond use a gadget in some clever way to get out of a jam. Now he just grabs someone's gun really fast because they totally weren't expecting that and mistook their projectile weapon for a knife ("I better hold the barrel right up to his throat so I can cut him if he makes a move!"). I swear, he does that move three times in this movie.
MI6 must have the most incompetent guards ever. "Holy crap! Someone's hacked us! The prisoner's cell is opening up! Luckily, I'm twenty feet away from him and holding an automatic weapon. I'll just shoot him if he doesn't get down on the ground and hold still. Wait, how am I and yet another guard dead now?"
I suppose the old thing of Bond having perfectly consensual sex with a girl at the end of every movie and then them parting ways is terribly sexist, since no woman would ever want to have a fling with Daniel Craig, but I don't see how having girls just to wear backless dresses, shag Bond, and get murdered by the villain is any better. Bond actually has more reaction to his car getting blown up than Severin being murdered in front of him; I kept expecting there to be a line of dialogue going "Oh, we got her to a hospital, she's fine," to justify why he doesn't seem to give a shit. The way it plays is especially odd since immediately afterward we get a badass action scene and Bond making triumphant quips. I know the old Bond movies killed off Bond girls too, but at least Sean Connery would look sad for a few seconds.
In fact, given the point the movie makes about Bond's compassion as it starts (and the statement by the filmmakers that the movie is about Bond's 'old way' of doing things with honor and compassion vs. the 'new way' of being cold and amoral), he's weirdly blasé for the rest of the movie. He lets an assassin kill someone before attacking him (hope the target didn't have kids, orphan) and then the thing with Severin. Casino Royale, even Quantum of Solace commented on Bond's coldness. It was part of a character arc. Here, it's just like "boo, Silva killed a woman for no good reason! He has no regard for human life! Yay, Bond! He also has no regard for human life!"
I get that Bond is a cold bastard, but if he cares more about his car getting wrecked than someone he just slept with getting shot, that's going too far into the zone of 90s Image Comics superhero. The other interpretation I've heard is that it's just showing how Bond has slipped, but the way that's shown is very odd as well. He can't and doesn’t even attempt to stop an assassin from killing someone who might have vital information about the villain's plot (like the girl he saved from an assassin in Quantum of Solace did), but then he's able to beat the guy up? He can't save Severin, but five seconds later he can beat up all of Silva's men? It feels like they could've structured that better (like with the MI6 helicopters that show up providing an opening, or him nonfatally shooting Severin himself to shock the henchmen into inaction).
I think we should have a moratorium on "yes! We captured the bad guy! Wait, no, it was all part of his master plan!" plots for the remainder of the decade. It worked in The Avengers and The Dark Knight (and The Dark Knight Rises), but here it just seems pointless.
Silva: Yes! After years of work, I've bombed MI6 headquarters to force them into their secondary headquarters, allowed myself to be captured, and now hacked their computers to allow my escape and bombed a subway train to cover it! Time to execute my master plan!
Henchman: What are we going to do, boss? Free a political prisoner? Steal valuable data? Set off a bomb?
Silva: We're going to dress up as policemen and bust into a courthouse, guns blazing, to kill M!
Henchman: What, really?
Silva: Yes, brilliant, I know.
Henchman: Couldn't we just… do the policemen thing without all that other stuff?
Silva: I have to look her in the eyes before I kill her and let her know it was me who did it!
Henchman: So say "Remember me?" before you shoot her. But the way you have it now, you're actually warning her you're coming by escaping.
Silva: Look, I'm crazy, you're a henchman, you know how this works.
Henchman: Yeah, but didn't you see Casino Royale? Bond snuck into her house, like, five times. Can't we do that? I'll tie her up, you can talk to her as long as you want, you shoot her, we're out of here.
Silva: I don't think you understand. I'm… CRAZY. That means I get to do whatever convoluted thing the script demands even when there's a much simpler way to get what I want.
Henchman: I thought we were going for gritty realism now. Sure, Blofeld used to pull lots of crazy shit, but the end result would be a secret volcano base full of nuclear weapons, not one dead old lady.
Silva: …sorry, what was that, I was too busy thinking about how awesome cock is.
Speaking of, I kinda don't see how it's progressive to have the depraved, rapey villain joke about sodomizing Bond and then giving Bond a queer-baiting line about possibly having sex with boys maybe. It's better than him going "Eww, cooties," but still, hardly necessary.
I wouldn't have minded this dumb courthouse bit if they didn't have Q saying that Silva intended to get captured and he'd been working on this exact plot for years and years. You can't expect me to not then find "and then he shoots M in the face!" underwhelming after that. If they'd said it was his Plan B because Bond had fucked up his first go, that'd be fine. Even "oh, he wants to humiliate M and destroy her life!" But there's a limit to how convoluted the villain's plan can be.
I think, in the end, the movie is trying to do too many things at once. It's a swan song for M, it's more 'Bond Begins' stuff introducing Moneypenny and Q, it's a Dark Knight Returns story about an old and busted Bond getting his groove back (by completely and totally failing to foil the bad guy's plot). And all of these stories mix together to not really take Bond anywhere as a character. "All of Bond's issues stem from his parents dying. And now he's lost another parental figure. THUS SOLVING THE PROBLEM FOREVER." Coulda put more work into that.
I think the movie actually might've been better if they killed M at the courthouse, then Silva cut a deal with the British government to give them the list back in exchange for immunity, but Bond goes rogue to get revenge for M because he's come to care about people over 'the big picture.' I know it's been done before, but everything in this movie has been done as recently as the Brosnan years, so why not?
ETA:
M: You heartless bureaucrats may want to shut MI6 down, but have you considered this? *fearmongering, fearmongering, fearmongering!*
Helen McCrory: Actually, I just wanted to know why you would make a list of every undercover agent in the world, then send it to Turkey.
M: ...hold on, there's a really good Tennyson quote for this situation.
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no subject
Date: 2012-11-24 07:55 pm (UTC)1. I don't think Bond actually didn't care about Severine. In fact, I think the fact that his hand was shaking so badly he couldn't make the shot showed that he cared quite a lot. (Which is why he couldn't non-fatally shoot her; I was half-expecting him to accidentally blow her head off.)
The bland look and wisecrack at the end seemed to me to be him trying to wallpaper over the feelings he did have. This may also stem from what one is accustomed to seeing in men that surround you. When my dad was told that his cancer was terminal and he had three months to live, the first thing he said was, "Well, that's disappointing," and his further commentary on the topic ran in the same vein. He never reacted with any overt angst. I could see that he had stuff going on under the surface, but he never let it out. And that's what I saw here. My partner is the same way when it comes to expressing angsty emotion, so to me this is What Guys Do, and when I see guys get angsty in a movie it just looks ridiculous. Bond's single tear over M was about the limit for me.
2. Regarding the flashlight: wasn't it the gameskeeper that did that? Yeah, she could have asked him to turn it off, but I figured by that time she was bleeding out enough that she wasn't thinking much beyond "don't drop dead right in the middle of this Scottish fens."
3. I didn't think Eve and Bond had sex. I just thought they flirted a lot. I have been constantly surprised by the people who think they had sex.
4. I think Q's snark about the exploding pen was really meta-snark about the absolutely improbable gadgets Bond got time and again, which would only be effective in the very specific situation that he got into. If you watch the early movies, it was always "And I'm going to give you a left-handed screwdriver that squirts both oil and glue!" And it would turn out later that Bond's right hand was tied up but his left hand wasn't, and the way for him to get away was to lubricate a screw with oil so it would turn silently, unscrew it, and then glue it to the floor so the bad guy would step on it barefoot and hop around screaming until the base blew up.
no subject
Date: 2012-11-24 11:56 pm (UTC)I think the safe assumption is that Bond and Eve had sex. When has Bond ever NOT had sex with a woman after a flirty scene like that? I admit, there was no clear-cut evidence of it (no fade to black as they fall onto a bed, or someone dressing again after), but still...I'd bet that it happened.
I liked the low-tech stuff in this film. High tech has its place, yes, but sometimes you need a bloody-minded killer to just walk in and break necks and shoot people in the head.
no subject
Date: 2012-11-25 12:57 am (UTC)As for the killing the thugs with Silva there, my reading was that he needed Silva to have an unloaded gun in his hand and be looking the wrong way. Silva's meant to be about as good as Bond - and Bond wasn't at his best. So Bond needed a decent edge.