Skyfall - Grading & Discussion

[Kai "the spy"]

Don't forget a gadget in a watch. Gotta have a gadget in the watch.

[The Wormhole]

Plus the Satellite Weapon of Doom!

[trevanian]

Gaith wrote:

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^ Agreed. This was every bit as silly a movie as Die Another Day, but without the deliberate goofiness. And if the Box Office Mojo-reported budget of $200m is accurate... then I truly have no idea how it could possibly have cost that much.
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I think it was the same issue as QoS, that the post schedule is just way too short and you have to have all the VFX houses working overtime to deliver. Not as bad on this as QUANTUM, which had nearly 1000 VFX shots, but even so ...

Still, it does stagger one to realize even Bond movies can't afford to shoot on location except for 2nd unit stuff (main unit only went to Scotland and Turkey, rest was all faked in UK and fleshed out with second unit stunt & bg plates.)

God I hated this movie.

[Starkers]

Third viewing last night, still fucking awesome, in fact I may even like it more

I can't quite get over the fact that he's never in Macau, Shanghai or wherever he's supposed to be at the start (ie when he's enjoying death, not the start in Instanbul) but frankly if I hadn't already known this I probably wouldn't have guessed.

Q is still stupid and Silva's plan still overly convoluted, but I still love it anyway. In fact I'm starting to seriously consider it might be top 5 materiel. Definitely Craig's best Bond film and probably best Bond since Goldeneye.

Oh yeah, and when Silva's men approach Skyfall, they spread out to a very long ragged skirmish line, if the DB5 had been pointing the other way 007 would have been lucky to get one of them

[lurok]

Here ya go, Gaith.

[Gaith]

Color me afraid. Color me very afraid...

[Trekker4747]

The brig looks like a giant PSP.

[Kai "the spy"]

Well, it does seem like the new formular to break the billion dollar barrier. TDK, Avengers, now (it seems) Skyfall. If this follows through, Into Darkness will be the first Trek movie to make a billion bucks.

[MacLeod]

Well Sky Fall hasn't quite broken the billion mark yet, though it should when it opens in China. Though the question is will China's taking be anywhere near the US$250 or so it has taken at the US box office or the US$155 it has taken at the UK box office.

[DevilEyes]

C, because of good acting and directing, and the amazing opening credits (set to a great Adele song, which would work beautifully for a better story than this one), which are the best part of the movie by far. The story deserves an F.

I will never understand the critical adoration of Skyfall. I'm generally not a fan of the Bond franchise, but I did like Casino Royale and I had expectations of this one due to the great reviews. But the story is such a mess that it makes The Dark Knight Rises look like a deeply satisfying, well-written story with no contradictions or confused messages.

What I get from this story is that Bond doesn’t care about saving people other than his boss (and BTW, he doesn't actually manage to save anyone in the movie), MI6 is endangering the world more than it’s actually protecting it, and M, who would be completely unlikeable if she weren’t played by Judi Dench, puts MI6 above everything and is ready to sacrifice anyone’s life, except her own. One of my LJ friends goes into more detail about the problems with the movie's story here: http://local-max.livejournal.com/52540.html

Skyfall could work as a really dark story about an antihero spy, an orphan who doesn’t really have anyone or love anyone except his Mother Country, who kills without remorse, doesn’t care about saving people, uses women and treats them like shit and is ready to let them die, while the only person he’ll go out of his way to protect and that he’s willing to risk his life for is his mother-figure boss, the embodiment of MI5 and Mother England, who’s using him and treating him like shit and doesn’t care if he lives or die. And even when he has an out to be free and live a different life, he comes back to the fold to work for them again, like someone who keeps coming back to an abusive relationship.

The problem is that the film can’t commit to this dark interpretation despite offering so much in favor of it, but tries to make Bond, M and MI5 into heroes and the ending into Bond’s triumphant return to his life in her majesty’s service.

What exactly are the critics going crazy for? Is it just the tendency to adore stories about adult male "heroes" who use violence as their primary weapon, especially when they have the added "gritty, dark" overtone, regardless of the quality of the actual story?

[Flying Spaghetti Monster]

^ I agree completely. I don't know why this film is so well-liked, save for the fact that people want to like it because it's James Bond.

My first problem was that I couldn't connect with Bond as a character. Everything I've ever seen Craig in, I never know what emotion he's supposed to have, he seems so detatched from everything. Here, this is compounded by the fact that, in many respects, as a spy, he's supposed to seem detatched. Did he really fail the tests because he's actually bad at target practice, or was he trying to make it seem like he was bad at them? I couldn't tell, even after seeing it twice. Craig lacks any kind of gleam in his eye to tell me (and not the other characters) what he is truly feeling.

The movie itself was also an excuse.. for itself. He had to chase down and beat up a bad guy in Shanghai. Why? Because Shanghai looked kewl. It would have made no differnce if he went down the block to beat up the bad guy, but never mind, we want to have publicity shots for the film with Bond in Shanghai. From there, nothing happens. He gets a casino piece that leads him to another exotic location for no reason than it looks exotic, and from there he takes a boat to go to the bad guy's island which looks like a leftover from Inception because it looks cool and that's it! Then they give Bardem a big speech but I'm convinced that this man cannot act, so the whole point of the speech was to prove that he could. I'm not convinced, even now. Then they played it like The Dark Knight from there, because they didn't know what else to do.

[sidious618]

I can't say I ever "connected" to any of the James Bonds before Daniel Craig. He's actually acting instead of just behaving like Bronson and Moore did.

[Starkers]

ElfEars wrote:

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What I get from this story is that Bond doesn’t care about saving people other than his boss (and BTW, he doesn't actually manage to save anyone in the movie), MI6 is endangering the world more than it’s actually protecting it, and M, who would be completely unlikeable if she weren’t played by Judi Dench, puts MI6 above everything and is ready to sacrifice anyone’s life, except her own.

How odd given that both Bond and M make it clear that they go off on their own to Skyfall because too many other people are dying. They basically paint big targets on themselves then go off to a remote locatiion precisely in order to protect others.

[DevilEyes]

Starkers wrote:

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How odd given that both Bond and M make it clear that they go off on their own to Skyfall because too many other people are dying. They basically paint big targets on themselves then go off to a remote locatiion precisely in order to protect others.

As they should, since Silva was targeting M specifically and was always going after MI6. But less people would have died if, say, M had alerted the Parliament immediately about Silva's incoming attack, the moment her assistant told her (which he must have, unless he's completely, dangerously and idiotically incompetent). Instead, she chooses to hold it back just in order to to give a speech about how MI6 is supposedly needed because of all the dangers out there and ask "Do you feel safe?" just before the attack, endangering the lives of Parliament members, just to make a point. Which is completely moronic and counterproductive if her idea is to show that MI6 is not an old-fashioned dinosaur that the country doesn't need anymore and that it's doing more harm than good.

Which is exactly what it seems to be in this movie. We are apparently supposed to think that the movie has refuted those claim and shown MI6 to be necessary for the protection of the world. But if that was the idea, the movie should have given us another villain, who is not a product of MI6 itself, and who's not furthermore specifically targeting MI6 and endangering others as collateral damage. The whole movie is about how to protect MI6 and M, not how to protect Britain or the world or other people (whom Bond shows no particular interest in saving - e.g. he doesn't try to stop the assassin before he kills his target).

If the greatest thing Bond and M can do for the world at large and for the ordinary bystanders is not further endanger them/get them killed by having their confrontation with Silva out in the open - well, that still does nothing to answer the question that was posed in the movie itself, why the fuck is MI6 needed in the first place?

[Haggis and tatties]

I gave this a A+, i really enjoyed this to bits, fantastic movie, and when the he rolled up the shutter to reveal the old AM i found myself grinning from ear to ear.

Great movie.