*Spoilers*
I seemed to be one of the few people that didn’t like ‘Skyfall’ that much. Everyone loved it when it came out but it does look some people have cooled on it since. Unfortunately ‘Spectre’ seems to have a lot of the same problems and I liked it even less.
One of the biggest problems is that they don’t really seem like they know what to do with Bond anymore. That’s pretty understandable. It’s something that just happens when you are so influential and going on for so long, the things you were known for and great at will get divided up and specialised in and make it harder and harder for you to stand out amongst all the competition you inspired (see also The Simpsons). For example the Bond movies used to be trailblazers in practical stunts but now you have the Fast and Furious franchise focusing on car stunts and the Mission Impossible franchise has Tom Cruise focusing on doing more and more impressive physical stunts. So they can’t compete on stunts.
There’s also the problem that the character was created over 60 years ago and has a long history of sexism (among other things) and as more and more time goes by it’s something that will stand out more and more and less and less possible to ignore. They meet those problems face on by making them part of the story and part of the characterisation now. Bond is a broken man who doesn’t really fit into society. His orphan backstory has been pushed to the forefront and become part of the plot instead of just backstory. He is supposedly haunted by all the death that has followed him and is his casual sleeping around comes from his numbness after the loss of Vesper. The problem with doing this is that it’s also still a Bond movie and as much as they try to drill into the character to get into a realistic reason for why a man would be like this there is also another answer to every question about why is he like this and it’s ‘because he’s James Bond’. Why does he sleep around? Because he’s James Bond. Why is such an effective killer? Because he’s James Bond. Why is he always able to just brush over any threat with a joke? Because he’s James Bond? Why is it okay to have a spy just going around killing people so willy nilly? Because this spy is James Bond, haven’t you heard of him?
‘The Dark Knight’ had the same problem. Any time they tried to get close to getting into Batman’s head it was undercut by the fact that the answer to any question about why Batman does anything is ‘because this is a movie about Batman and this is what Batman does’ and it starts getting a bit ridiculous once it starts becoming a plot point.
It’s a half measure. The makers of the film want you to think that they’ve thought about all of this, all about the realistic aspects of it and what Bond would be like in real life and as a real person but they’ve only gone half way. They can’t go the full way because they have a Bond movie to make. The supposed realism is undercut by the inherent silliness and the fun stuff is undercut by the attempts to ground it. Even with the main song, which *a lot* of people don’t like I like it on it’s own but the biggest problem I have with it is that it suggests a level of melancholy that the movie doesn’t live up to. They even have the movie shot by the guy that did ‘Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy’ and it looks good but it’ll never be anywhere near the kind of movie ‘Tinker Tailor’ is. (For the record I think ‘Casino Royale’ did navigate this balance incredibly well so it’s not impossible just very difficult.)
Skyfall and Spectre literally have made it part of the plot the fact that Bond’s one-man-army style is unrealistic and would incur a whole bunch of red tape and is kinda outdated in the world of drones. But to move away from that or to address it too much would also stop Bond form being Bond and they can’t have that so they have to make sure Bond is on the right side. M in Skyfall and the new M in Spectre both give speeches about how important it is that Bond keep being able to do what he does. M grounds Bond at the start for going rouge so Bond just continues to go rogue until he is proven right and M likes him again. M Q and Moneypenny are just doing their jobs but we need the audience to like them so we can’t dare have them go against Bond so they all help him out in the end. The guy that was trying to close down the 00 program? Oh it turns out he was working for the main villain so we can just kill him now.
And oh boy lets talk about the bad guy.
Part of the weird limbo the Bond franchise has found itself in is that there is a pressure to stay current. Unfortunately they seem to have just been ripping off current trends or other popular movies. First it was the Bourne movies, then The Dark Knight (right down to the villain letting himself get captured. Remember when every second movie did that?) now it’s the trend of making the world smaller and adding more and more connections between characters and making stuff about destiny. (Which arguably actually started with ‘Batman’ back in 1989 but it seems to be becoming more and more popular.
I still don’t fully get why so many movies are going to this well. I’ve heard a theory that it comes from a pressure to impress. As movie goers become more and more savvy they also start going into movies to ‘compete’ with them. They are competing to be smarter than the movie, to see if they can spot plot holes or mistakes to see if they can figure things out before the movie tell them (this isn’t a good way to watch movies by the way.) So the writer feels the need to impress the audience. They want to be able to point at all the threads in the movie and say “look at the intricate web I have weaved. See how it all fits together? Look how smart I am!” It never works the way the writer wants it to though.
Spectre goes with the frankly bizarre idea that Bond and Blofeld were kinda brothers. Like, what? It’s even weirder considering that Skyfall did this on a thematic level with Bond and Silva both competing for the approval of ‘mom’ (M). Did they just see how well people reacted to that and think “well if they liked us doing it on a thematic level they’ll LOVE if we do it literally”. I seriously don’t understand what they thought it added to the story or to the characters. I also just realised that it’s the same plot as Austin Powers 3 so I guess the Bond franchise is ripping off Austin Powers now.
They also reveal that Blofeld was responsible for killing all the women in Bond’s life (“I’m the architect of all your pain) and well I don’t think that works either. I did once see a thing a comics writer said where he was talking about writing for Superman and how when you have Superman as an all powerful god and Lex Luther as just a mortal man it becomes hard to have Luthor as a credible threat. His solution was to have it so that everything bad that happened to Superman could be traced back to Luthor. That’s how you make him a genuine threat. I like that idea so maybe the fact that it don’t seem to work in Spectre was they mishandled it or maybe I was still too distracted by the fact that they were fucking brothers.
One thing I will say I kinda like about the brothers angle is that considering Bond has always meant to be a indulgent wish-fulfilment character the fact that Blofeld’s back story comes down to ‘his father met Bond and Bond was just SO AWESOME that his father just didn’t like him anymore’ is kinda hilarious. Now that’s a movie I’d like to see; Bond just keeps going around accidentally breaking up families because he just can’t help being awesome.
