And do you know what the next sentance would likely be out of the questioner.
It would have been something along the lines, "Are you trying to get out of answering our questions?, by claiming that an attack on this room is imminant."
Even disregarding the extremely public and lethal attack on MI6 only days before, you cannot
possibly be serious.
Bond shows no particular interest in saving - e.g. he doesn't try to stop the assassin before he kills his target).
That was definitely weird. Sure, he was trying to sneak up on the guy for maximum self-protection, but that's no excuse when a possible innocent life is at stake.
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?
I guess the lesson they took from the fan backlash to
Die Another Day, which also had a valedictory tone filled with callbacks to earlier movies, is that the worst the series can do is do outsize villains any more. And since political correctness drastically reduces other ethnic/nationalist options, rogue ex-agents are an easy and obvious alternative (see: the first three
Mission: Impossibles). Another route is to reboot SPECTRE, which they tried with Quantum, but understandably let go of here, as that was also a pretty stupid idea. (Fact is, white spies just aren't very useful in a post-Cold War world.)
The result, as you observe, is narrative claustrophobia, covered in lots of shiny paint. Here's one of my favorite critics,
Tom Shone:
The result is good-looking, dramatically inert, high-end filmmaking that invites its audience to feel superior to cheap thrills it doesn't have the faintest idea how to produce.
[...] Should Bond be this beautiful? The series always dreamed of sophistication, of course, with its martinis and jet travel and beautiful exotica — those complaining about product placement in the new film ought to remember that Fleming was dropping labels decades before Bret Easton Ellis was spitting out his pacifier — but it was the pseudo-sophistication of the business traveller, doomed to curdle into kitsch. That is what made Casino Royale such a blessed relief, for here was Bond played straight, with a new Bond who was blonde and tough and cool again. Given this, Mendes decision to revisit the theme of the Timothy Dalton Bonds — Bond as dinosaur, ribbed by his younger colleagues for being out-of-date — is all the more baffling, a self-inflicted defeat just inches from the end zone. What sense does it make to have M hauled in front of a government oversight committee and told that era of human intelligence is past, when what revivified the whole Bond franchise in the first place was the renewed threat of terrorism? The contemporary resonance is there on a plate.
I guess that for most, the shiny paint was enough.
