BEFORE: I'm finally at the end of the Bond films - that's 23 Bond films in 23 days. While I'm not a Bond expert now, I certainly know a lot more about the series than I did before. This chain has certainly had its ups and downs, some films were good, some bad, and some just ridiculous. But I'm hoping this whole thing ends on a high note. Judi Dench carries over from "Die Another Day", and I think she's the only one to do so, since I'm back to Daniel Craig as Bond, sort of back where I began.
THE PLOT: Bond's loyalty to M is tested when her past comes back to haunt her. While MI6 comes under attack, 007 must track down and destroy the threat, no matter how personal the cost.
AFTER: Well, now I know the answer to the (non-existent) riddle - "What has four M's and three Q's?" Not to mention 6 Bond actors, and countless women - fast cars, cool gadgetry and more than a few disfigured villains...
My attempts to create a forced continuity that includes all of the Bond films failed quite miserably - you simply cannot string together or interweave the 20 films from the old series with the 3 new Daniel Craig films and expect things to work out. They just don't. Judi Dench's M got older, then younger, then old again - she must have lost the job and then got it back, which is possible but unlikely. Bond ended up working with someone for 20 films, and then meeting them for the first time, so that was weird, unless they were a new person with the exact same name. And let's not even try to untangle the complicated appearances of CIA agent Felix Leiter - unless like "James Bond", Felix Leiter is a code name used by several different people.
It's no good - I simply have to accept that a new continuity began with "Casino Royale", or simply posit that each film takes place in a magical framework called "story time", in which all things are possible and conflicting information is summarily discarded. And anything we don't like, such as Bond's brief marriage, is retconned away, just like Spider-Man's and Superman's marriages. (I suspect that many comic-book writers just don't know how to write for married characters, because they're a mostly unattached bunch, but I'm generalizing.)
But even if you just take the 3 Daniel Craig films as a separate entity, there are still issues - not just with "M", but also with the new "Q". The film series doesn't seem to be sure whether the Connery/Moore/Dalton stories happened or not. For Bond to be shocked at the age of the new Q, he must have a frame of reference, meaning he worked previously with an older, more experienced quartermaster. Yet if you just watch the three films in the new continuity, there is no previous Q to refer to, so then why is he complaining?
But, taking "Skyfall" on its own merits, it's a great continuation of the new Bond mindset established in the first two Daniel Craig films. The world is a dark(er) place, terrorism is a real threat that can't be dispelled with a laser watch, and villains don't just threaten to blow things up, they make good on their promises. This is the post 9/11 Bond, dealing with madmen who demolish buildings or fire directly into a crowd - and how do you deal with that?
The villain here is a former British agent, which is something of a new twist - they've done double agents before, but never a character who was one thing and then became something else on the other side. His personal connection to M is driving him for revenge, for what he sees as a betrayal. And he strikes with some efficiency in the cyber-terrorist arena, something that was depicted rather poorly in "Goldeneye".
I confess I missed something somewhere, as I wasn't really sure what "Skyfall" meant - it appeared in Bond's evaluation as part of that word-association game, but I had to look it up after to see what the significance was. Turns out it was the name of the estate Bond grew up on, which is featured prominently in the later sequences in the film.
And if there's a pattern to the newer Bond films (Brosnan + Craig), at least it's a new pattern, which is "Bond struggles, Bond loses, Bond struggles more, Bond wins". Or maybe it's called a draw. That's a little more realistic than "Bond always wins, Bond never gets shot, Bond never gets his tuxedo dirty." They seem to be pushing Bond into yet another new direction, so this sort of constitutes another relaunch in some ways, just two films after the last relaunch. But if the films are this good, I'm going to be along for the ride from here on out.
Well, it's the first day of summer which means I have a few rituals - I've shaved off my mustache (there was a prominent shaving scene in "Skyfall", and I love little coincidences like that), plus I'm doing the bi-annual laundry push to get all of my novelty t-shirts cleaned. But I'm also kicking off the summer sci-fi series tomorrow - my own list of summer blockbusters, even if they weren't originally released in the summer.
LOCATIONS: Istanbul, London, Shanghai, Macau, Scotland
VILLAINS: Raoul Silva, Patrice
BABES: Eve, Sévérine
ALLIES: M, Q, Eve, Kincade
PASTIMES: Roulette
CARS: classic silver-birch Aston Martin DB5, various Range Rovers
GADGETS: palm-print specific Walther PPK, improved radio transmitter/tracking device
THEME: "Skyfall" by Adele. One of the best, I see what all the fuss was about. Hearkening back to the bold voice of Shirley Bassey, riffing off the wah-wah jazzy instrumentations, this is a possible category winner, on a par with "Nobody Does It Better".
Also starring Daniel Craig (last seen in "Quantum of Solace"), Javier Bardem (last seen in "Collateral"), Ralph Fiennes (last seen in "In Bruges"), Naomie Harris (last seen in "Miami Vice"), Albert Finney (last seen in "Tom Jones"), Ben Whishaw (last seen in "I'm Not There"), Rory Kinnear.
RATING: 7 out of 10 komodo dragons
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