The latest James Bond film, Skyfall, begins with a pre-title sequence in Turkey where Bond (Daniel Craig) is assisted by Eve (played with conviction by Naomi Harris) on a mission to retrieve a stolen MI6 hard drive. A mercenary named Patrice has stolen the hard drive to take to his yet unidentified boss. Bond chases Patrice through the streets and over the rooftops of Istanbul. Bond pursues Patrice out into the Turkish countryside on the roof of a train. It’s here that the opening comes to a stunning end when Bond is shot and takes a long fall off the train into a river far below. Such a risk in storytelling sets a deep, dark tone that runs through the entire film.
The title sequence, with a haunting, slow song sung by Adele, continues that tone with CGI images of Bond’s silhouette drifting through the water, shooting at its own shadows, and passing by gravestones with the name Bond. The outlines of naked women appear along the way, the first of many small touches that nudge us back toward the James Bond films as we knew them before the reboot of the series in Casino Royale.
After the title sequence, MI6 – or, specifically, M – comes under investigation by the Intelligence and Security Committee for the loss of the hard drive. Worse still, MI6 itself comes under cyberattack by the villain who has the hard drive. Meanwhile, we find that Bond has survived, but has taken the opportunity of his “death” to retire and descend into depression. This is the first time that Daniel Craig’s Bond faces his mortality. It’s only after he sees news coverage of the MI6 explosion that he is stirred to return to active duty.
As a side note here … Before seeing Skyfall, the news that Bond would drink a Heineken beer made me worry that it would be a horrible case of product placement that seems out of character. It wasn’t. The scene in which it happens is not one in which Bond is wearing a suit and being his more suave self. He is, quite literally, drowning his sorrows in beer. While we can all relate, it is not an enviable moment and hardly comes off as an effective sales pitch for Heineken.
After getting a lead on Patrice, Bond goes to Shanghai. In what is an astonishingly colorful and suspenseful, slow-moving sequence, Bond discreetly pursues Patrice to a vacant floor high up in an office tower. Their fight leads Bond onward to a casino in Macau and a woman named Séverine.
Séverine is the most disturbed and disturbing Bond girl. With exceedingly long fingernails (not sure if this was intentional, but it does run completely opposite to Ian Fleming’s aesthetic in the books), constant smoking, jittery hands, and trembling lips, she obviously has some serious issues. Bond seems to respond to her more with sympathy, or even pity, rather than love or even lust.
When we finally meet Silva, the villain played by Javier Bardem, we find that he was a former MI6 agent who considered himself at least equal or even superior to Bond. He certainly believes he was once M’s darling, but that she has been betrayed him, and he is now out for revenge. Imagine the kind of psychopath who would go postal in a corporate office park… except this one is a trained secret agent and the office park is MI6.
If I find one disappointment in the film, it is when the theme goes beyond Bond’s depressed self-questioning and into the tired, sad old theme of whining about the place of human intelligence and operations in the post-Cold War era. That theme was already tiresome before 1995’s Goldeneye. In a post 9/11 world, shouldn’t we have gotten well past this theme? After the success of the mission to kill Osama bin Laden, the value of human intelligence and operatives hardly seems like an existential crisis for any intelligence agency.
M’s little speeches to the Intelligence and Security Committee take the old versus new, human versus technology theme beyond its reasonable limit. Her response to being questioned about her management of MI6 is to defend the need for human intelligence, rather than her management decisions or her agency’s vulnerability in keeping lists of agents on a hard drive that is not only stolen, but not encrypted well enough to avoid hacking it and MI6’s IT systems. She misses the point entirely, but the film goes right along with her, even indulging in her quoting poetry, which becomes a voice-over while we see Bond on a chase.
I don’t mind Bond’s contribution to the theme, since his crisis has more to do with his entering the mid-life risk of losing his ability to keep up with the physical demands of the job, as well as a crisis of his convictions to stay in a game where his life might be intentionally expended with little remorse from his superiors. This “slowly going to pieces” is a hallmark of the deeper characterization in Fleming’s later novels – and given Daniel Craig’s re-establishing Bond as Fleming’s “blunt instrument” in Casino Royale, Craig seals his position as the best actor to play Bond in the entire series.
Nevertheless, Judy Dench’s soliloquy is thankfully brief and the film quickly shifts into its final act – a showdown at Bond’s childhood home, the titular Skyfall property of his family in Scotland.
There are also a few minor touches that raise some concerns in me for the future of the Bond series beyond this great film …
First, in the preview trailers, you may have seen a clip where Bond jumps into a torn apart train car and pauses briefly to adjust his shirt cuffs and jacket. It is such moments that make me worry that the Bond series will eventually slide back into the superficial, comic book caricatures of the Roger Moore through Pierce Brosnan eras. Specifically, it echoes the boat chase scene from The World Is Not Enough where Pierce Brosnan adjusts his tie while underwater.
Second, the film re-introduces Q (Ben Whishaw, in an excellent casting choice), which opens the possibility that we may head back into a reliance upon gadgetry to carry the action – and the action hero with it. To the screenwriter’s and casting director’s great credit, Q has been re-imagined. He is much younger, younger even than Bond. Moreover, he has a minimalist approach, issuing only two relatively simple gadgets that could come in handy in many situations (rather than the usual very precise gadget that requires a setup that will only apply in a specific scene later in the film to save Bond’s ass, as in the old days.) He even fits in thematically, in that what he has to say about himself when he meets Bond – and what Bond says about Q — can be compared and contrasted with what Silva, the villain, later says when he meets Bond.
Nevertheless, Skyfall is equal in quality to Casino Royale and completes the rebooting of the Bond series. At the end of the film, we pass by Miss Moneypenney’s desk and arrive in M’s office, as if we are right back at the start of the formula that sustained the series through 50 years. We can only hope that the next Bond episode will not lapse into the heavy reliance on that formula, with Bond becoming a smug, bulletproof cardboard hero resorting to silly one-liners and relying on absurd gadgets to get him out of every predicament.
