With the Steelers on bye last Sunday, my wife and I took the opportunity to go see a movie in an actual movie theater, something we haven’t done for at least two years. When you have 3 kids, date night isn’t an easy thing to arrange. Being a huge Bond fan, I convinced her that we should go see SPECTRE. Three years ago, I left the theater disappointed by Skyfall (except for the song, Adele killed it). Skyfall felt like Sam Mendes trying to karaoke Christopher Nolan and make a Bond movie with a Batman script. There was a forced storyline of the Bond-M relationship being like a mother-son relationship even though there was no contextual evidence to support that in any movie since Dame Judi Dench took over the role in 1995 (Goldeneye). The most poignant review I read was from Tom Clift at the now-defunct site MovieDex, which said:
“M has always been an ancillary character, and that Skyfall attempts to build on foundations that were never actually laid in the first place. No matter how much they harp on about it, the film never quite sells M as a figure of surrogate motherhood. Instead, she becomes just another helpless woman for 007 to save.”
Skyfall rushed through many of the key plot points and concluded with an absolute clunker of a last half hour. Needless to say, I was a little apprehensive about Sam Mendes getting a second shot in the director’s chair. However, I was encouraged by the fact that MGM and the McClory Estate settled their lawsuit in November 2013, freeing up the character of Ernst Starvo Blofeld to be used once again in Bond films, along with the SPECTRE name.
——Warning: Spoilers Ahead——-
On the whole, SPECTRE was very good succeeded in many ways that Skyfall failed. SPECTRE began with a glorious long shot that tracks Bond through a Dia de los Muertes parade in Mexico City, reminiscent of the long shot at the beginning of Pulp Fiction and of the street parade scene in The Godfather, Part II. The cold open provided explosions, a chase scene, a fight in a helicopter flying over a crowded square, and yet another crumbling building. As an aside, the “crumbling building” seems to be a motif of the Craig Bonds, starting with the building where Vesper drowned in Casino Royale and concluding with two crumbling buildings in SPECTRE (the building in Mexico in the cold open and the MI6 building in the conclusion). The glorious smoothness of the long take was undone a bit by the “shaky cam” technique that was used in the foot chase through the parade shortly thereafter. While the long shot sucked you in, the “shaky cam” threw you back out of the scene, making it difficult to determine what was actually happening (reminiscent of the Bourne movies). In typical Bond fashion, the cold open ended with Bond narrowly escaping disaster and pulling the helicopter up away from the crowd before it crashed, bringing on the title sequence.
As far as title sequences go, SPECTRE paled in comparison to Skyfall. If there was one thing that stood out about Skyfall, it was Adele’s monster performance of the theme song. Adele nailed it and secured a spot among the elite Bond songs, up there with Shirley Bassey in Goldfinger and Paul McCartney in Live and Let Die. By contrast, SPECTRE’s title sequence fell flat. The animation was entertaining but Sam Smith’s high-pitched voice just sounded like he was whining the lyrics and bemoaning that “the writing’s on the wall” rather than giving the song depth and intensity. The song would have sounded much better if Smith had either sung it down an octave or if it had been sung by a woman. The screeching, high-pitched voice of a man stretching to reach the high notes gave the song a querulous and petulant aura. Not exactly what you think of when you think “James Bond song.”
That said, the song was probably the low point of the film, which picked up where the cold open had left off, continuing the storyline from Skyfall that MI6 was under pressure from the British government to modernize and move into the new digital era. We were given a brief scene with James Bond in the same room as Voldemort and Moriarity. The audience also got some eye candy with the sleek and sexy Aston Martin DB10 and even though we were told it was “designed for 009,” there was no way Bond wouldn’t wind up behind the wheel (and wrecking it, probably). (Definitely wrecking it). Strangely enough, for a movie in the 21st century about an international spy, Bond was given the least amount of gadgetry to work with in any movie since Dr. No (just a watch). The filmmakers have tried, especially with Skyfall and SPECTRE, to put Bond at odds with the new modern technological world, which is a departure from Bonds of the past (remember Pierce Brosnan driving his car with his phone in Tomorrow Never Dies?). Also, it should be noted that “009” has been referenced before – in Octopussy he was killed at the beginning of the movie and another 009 was referenced as the one who put a bullet in the terrorist Renard’s head in The World Is Not Enough.
Bond’s solo mission in SPECTRE is simple: kill a man and attend his funeral. He is once again going out on his own, not on a mission for Queen and Country, but as a personal vendetta. Prior to Licence to Kill, Bond never departed from the missions set by MI6 but since then has gone off on his own a number of times. This time, we see through Bond’s eyes as we are introduced to the primary villain of the film (through a midnight meeting in the bowels of ancient Rome) and his new henchman Mr. Hinx (former pro wrestler Dave Bautista). Bautista plays the mute henchman very well and while his signature kill is only seen once, it is certainly memorable. His later fight scene with Bond on a train is a throwback to some of the great train fight scenes of old, including Bond and Red Grant in From Russia With Love. His “death” (if you can call it that) is left somewhat open-ended as he is thrown out the open door of a train car, but we have seen villains and henchmen survive worse in Bond films and still live. To be honest, I was expecting him to make a return later in the movie after the train fight scene.
Much like the train sequence, SPECTRE gave us some throwbacks to other Bond films, including the premise of an isolated medical resort atop the Alps (see: On Her Majesty’s Secret Service) and a chase scene down the mountains (this time with Bond in an airplane and the villains in cars, though a ski chase might have been more fitting). The chase scene through Rome ended with Bond landing on the street after ejecting from the car in a shot reminiscent of the jetpack scene in Thunderball. Speaking of throwbacks, while the character of Franz Oberhauser is new to the Bond canon, his lineage is not. While the character of Franz was never identified, he is spun off from an actual character in the Octopussy and Living Daylights stories – Hannes Oberhauser. Like in the film, Ian Fleming’s version of Hannes Oberhauser did teach a young James Bond many things. While Franz was never mentioned in the books, it is a sensible addition to make to the canon, and while “Franz Oberhauser” could have been a capable villain in his own right, the use of the name “Ernst Starvo Blofeld” certainly packs a punch with Bond fans.
There was a good and a bad side to the Blofeld character, and I will start with the good. Christoph Waltz’s performance of the role was top notch. He carried a similarly calm veneer throughout the film that covered the madness inside much in the same way Donald Pleasence (You Only Live Twice) and Charles Grey (Diamonds Are Forever) did. Pleasence and Grey are certainly the more memorable Blofelds and Waltz was essentially a mashup of the two. While Pleasence was the only one with the signature scar on his face, SPECTRE gave us a freshly-scarred Blofeld in its concluding sequence, and it was wonderful. The inclusion of his signature Persian cat was a nice touch (though we never see Blofeld actually pet the cat) and Waltz’s wardrobe was a nice homage to the lapel-less Nehru jacket worn by his predecessors.
On the whole, Blofeld’s appearance in the film was outstanding and the end of the movie left his storyline open-ended so that he could be brought back at any point in time (which was also a hallmark of the earlier Bonds). However, the problems with Blofeld lie not with his portrayal but with his backstory. Even though I have no problem with the addition of Hannes Oberhauser’s son into the Bond canon, the juxtaposition of Bond’s step-brother as the main villain that Bond has been fighting against all this time is basically a plotline lifted from the Austin Powers movies. Things certainly have come full-circle when actual Bond movies are taking plot points from movies that were made to parody the Bond movies.
Setting up Oberhauser/Blofeld as the primary villain also undercuts the rest of the movies in the Daniel Craig era. Now, rather than seeing Casino Royale as Bond beginning to uncover a much larger criminal organization that is funding terrorism, we see it as a criminal organization that is doing things because the group’s leader had daddy issues and is trying to get back at his long-lost step-brother? The Sam Mendes-directed Bond movies have attempted to delve into Bond’s past (something none of the prior 22 Bond films did) but have not delivered. In Skyfall, rather than giving us a convincing villain bent on world domination through the use of technology, we got a bemoaned former agent with displaced mommy issues that then got transposed onto Bond even though there was no prior evidence to suggest their existence. In SPECTRE we got a villain who had actually murdered his father because his father apparently spent more time with a step-son than with him and then who had seemingly spent the rest of his life trying to find out how to get back at his step-brother? We’ve come a long way from the Connery days when SPECTRE was hijacking nuclear warheads or stealing rockets out of space. Luckily, where Skyfall made this a main point of the movie, SPECTRE didn’t introduce it until the movie neared the conclusion and did not make it a primary plot point, but rather an explanation of rationale that you’ll likely accept in the moment because there’s another action scene coming to prevent you from thinking too hard about what it means in broader context of the series.
In conclusion, if SPECTRE is the last Bond film that Daniel Craig does, it was a fitting conclusion to the overarching storyline of the four films. Even though it didn’t quite explain all the ties between the “Quantum” organization and the “Spectre” organization (or ever address some of the points left open at the end of Quantum of Solace), the major points seem to be concluded. I personally would not put SPECTRE in the upper echelon of Bond films with the likes of Dr. No, Goldfinger, Thunderball, or The Spy Who Loved Me, but it was certainly better than Skyfall and Quantum of Solace. I’d probably rank it in the middle third (9th-16th range) overall. Unlike any of the Bonds that came before, who were dedicated to King/Queen and country and fulfilling their task, Craig’s Bond always seemed to be looking for a way out. Starting in Casino Royale when he tendered a resignation to go live with Vesper to the end of Skyfall when he walked away with Madeleine Swann (who made for a quality Bond girl – she was capable of holding her own and wasn’t just being dragged along for the ride with Bond). While this may close the book on the Daniel Craig era of James Bond, Blofeld is still alive and there are other villains to fight. While the main subplot of SPECTRE was the movement to the new technological era, the conclusion of the film clearly came down on the side of secret agents still being a necessity. After all, as the end credits always promise…
James Bond will return.
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