I had fairly high expectations for the newest Bond film going in. They were met, exceeded, and surprised. What I didn’t expect: to find it one of the most loving movies of the season, within the bounds of its own perverse brand of love. Skyfall is a reinvention—perhaps the apex of the new Bond films in terms of where reinvention and franchise meet—and it is many different love letters to the franchise it is reinventing.
I’d go so far as to call Skyfall the first modern Bond. Casino Royale, the actual first in the new franchise, functioned as more of an origin story than a true recalibration of the genre—it was the first Fleming story, the one the original franchise never touched, gone back to as a sort of narrative ground-zero. It was a very, very good film, and not quite Bond, precisely because it was about being not-quite-Bond: it was the movie that made the man, that gave him his ghosts and his taste in martinis. Quantum of Solace cleaned up after it, but was mostly about that cleanup; it was about catharsis, and was almost no fun. It was a bridge between Casino Royale and the real, realized Bond-to-come. And we’re here—we’ve finally arrived, and it’s a movie about the triumph of that arrival, delighted equally with its changes and with the structures it’s embracing. Skyfall delivers slick absurdity and real modern action nastiness with the same level of chin grit and genre commitment.
The movie starts out with one of the most genuinely ridiculous chase scenes in recent memory—a classically Bond display of glossy, exhilarating contempt for basic physics. It hits all the right hyperbolic chase notes: roads are left a wreckage of cars and spilled fruit trucks, one-liners are spat back and forth over the wireless, at least five different forms of transportation are borrowed. Bond drives a crane onto and through a train. It’s a perfect heightened delight—one that ends with Bond getting shot. The moment where he falls is silent and shocking and seamless. The tone drops, not dissonantly. The movie is large enough to encompass both its potential exaltations and tragedies without making either of them out of place.
The ridiculousness of the Bond franchise is in full display here, as it has always been ridiculous in wonderful ways, and it sits next to a newly rich emotional vocabulary and neither one disturbs the other. Javier Bardem’s mad-dog ex-agent is a classic Bond villain, both well-acted and allowed cartoonish lunacy by the nature of the part. He takes his time to relish each moment he’s been given, emotions in caricature on his great sledge of a face (and believe me, there is payoff for casting that particular sledge of face). He’s also genuinely nasty and visceral: there are stakes to him, stakes that the franchise has finally figured out. What we have here is a truly personal villain, political only because his chosen vendetta is against a political figure, and he is all the more frightening because his troops and guns are not working in the name of any one God or Country outside himself.
Bond villains are a difficult commodity in the post-Cold-War age, wherein national monoliths don’t tend to offer themselves up on cackling platters. Like so many of the old narrative structures, they have become untenable simply because the shape of the world has changed. The Bond franchise has never lived in direct political reality (there’s nothing “reality” about it) but its hyperbole needs to be contemporary hyperbole. Skyfall is about that, about that paradigm shift. Skyfall talks about that—literally, in a wonderful speech given to the wonderful Judi Dench, who is on her A game in a movie that belongs to her as much as it does to Daniel Craig’s Bond. The ground has shifted underfoot, but the game is still worth playing—the spy game in text and the spy game in film marketing.
The new franchise has already shown itself to be at its best when it’s genre-malleable—perhaps the finest bits of Casino Royale were full-on Old Hollywood screwball, on a train and everything—and Skyfall is gleefully this, its last act a full on unapologetic Scottish Gothic pastiche. It is, again, like the comedy of the beginning cheek to jowl with tragedy, not dissonant. The movie’s large enough to encompass genre shifts along with location shifts. What’s wonderful about the post-rise-and-fall Bond franchise is that it knows how durable it is, how conscious of that durability: that it understands what makes a Bond film, why a Bond film is still something the audience want to see even though espionage isn’t remotely like what it was when Fleming was writing, and how to keep that intact. The knowledge—that the spirit of the thing is capturable in style and soul and musical stings—gives the movies fantastic leeway. Genre constraints are not an issue here. The movies are free, larger than the trappings of any given set. (As they’ve always been: remember when Roger Moore’s Bond went to the Moon?) Indeed, the movie takes great joy in burning its set to the ground, repeatedly, not because of any particular need to destroy and surmount, but because it knows it’s larger than its trappings. The whole set can burn to the ground, and Bond (character and series) will only be ready for the next one, gun in hand, gin hangover on the back of his tongue.
The movie is stylish and new and loving of its past without being nostalgic: it loves without looking back. It’s a love letter to Country (no one can look at its gloriously gloomy London panoramas and think otherwise—to say nothing of the Tube maps that come later) that acknowledges that the country has changed shape a great deal since Bond first drove his Aston Martin through its fictionalized streets. It’s a checklist of the Bond standbys—girl, gun, martini in its shaker—that acknowledges and transcends each of its checkpoints. (The introduction of old-hat names like Q and Moneypenny have never been newer: respectively Ben Whishaw, snippy and generationally apt, and Naomie Harris, living Lois Maxwell’s expanded dreams.) It’s new Bond, which contains old Bond, casually expanded to fit a larger world.
Context aside, it is a very good action movie and ridiculously well-shot. Context added, it’s ecstatic. I’ve been here this long, and I’ll follow this franchise as far as it goes: I’m so happy we’ve arrived back here.
The FIG 