'Spectre'

The Joy Of Repetition

I watched a whole bunch of Bond films at the cinema (as opposed to on TV or video) starting from 'The Spy Who Loved Me' through to 'Tomorrow Never Dies'. It was just the done thing, and Bond movies are alway excellent value for entertainment, even when they're bad. And some of those films were real stinkers.

Roughly, I caught the second half of Roger Moore, both Timothy Daltons, and the first two of Pierce Brosnan. And I was done - or so I thought. There was something about a Rupert Murdoch parody played by the guy who played Sam Lowry in 'Brazil' (Jonathan Pryce) having a submarine base and a bunch of gun-toting flunkies that made the implausible go into total stupidity. I could take an over-the-hill Moore in 'View to a Kill', it was awful but I kept going; I could take the low-octane 'Licence to Kill-you-through-boredom' , and I kept going even then; but I drew the line at 'Tomorrow Never Dies'.

It's really been a credit to Daniel Craig's efforts that I've gone back to watching these things at the cinema. When I think about it, I've gone four in a row with Craig now, so really I just missed 2 of Brosnan's efforts in that string of Bond movies. So I remain a valued customer even after the clunker that was 'Tomorrow Never Dies'.

That being said, these Daniel Craig Bond movies have been something else to what came before. There's a lot more grit and less fanciful sadism, they're less jovial and jaunty, and more motivated with quiet brooding anger than a detached kind of nonchalant killing. The word professionalism invokes a certain image of being a secret agent, but these Bond movies have repainted that picture. It actually looks painful to be James Bond.

Anyway, before I go into the nitty gritty, here is your obligatory spoiler alert. If you hate spoilers, don't read on.

What's Good About It

It's a big movie. A heck of a big movie. Every bit of the mooted US$300m budget is on screen. The production design is spectacular - one can only dream of having that kind of lavish budget to spend on things looking so good. It's lit and shot well, it's cut well, the staging of the action is effective and punchy, and the overall aesthetic is of its time. What happened with Bond films of the 80s and 90s was that they slipped behind the times and the lighting would look flat or the effects would look chintzy or the edit would be languid. Next to films made by Steven Spielberg and James Cameron back then, Bond films looked tired and old. This thing looks every bit as polished as any front line action franchise right now, only more luscious and rich.

It's also good to see the bad guy with the name Ernst Stravro Blofeld finally makes an appearance in this incarnation of Bond. It's been a long time since Blofeld was the bad guy. He hasn't been around since 'Diamonds Are Forever'. It's also good that he's played by Christoph Waltz, an actor of considerable villainous charm. It's an excellent bit of casting. Blofeld's absence could partly be explained by just how much of the arch-villain schtick he embodied. Let's not forget, the version played by Donald Pleasance is the entire source material for Dr. Evil in the Austin Powers movies. It's exciting to see Bond go up against his old foe, so to speak. In some ways this is what the Daniel Craig Bond movies have been building up to over three films.

This is also the first time we see the rest of Bond's office go into the field at once. It's interesting because it re-grounds James Bond into the institution of government, and as a government agent instead of the seeming one-man lone-wolf agent we're used to seeing.

What's Bad About It

The film feels structurally uneven. It feels like it has 2 third acts. The first is all too brief and too easy, the second, more convoluted but oddly garbled.

Also, this business of Bond being a rogue agent is getting a bit boring. He saves the day so often you'd think the government would understand that Bond temporarily going rogue is the risk they take in even hiring the man, let alone sending him out to do missions. The trope where the government is shutting down the Double-O programme or the MI6 is also getting old. Politics does cast a strange shadow over these Daniel Craig Bond movies, but it just seems gratuitous that the government would want to shut down a highly effective programme even if they had global surveillance tie-ups.

There could have been bit more of Blofeld. As it is, we only really see him at the first turning point about 30minutes in for the scene at the Rome meeting, and then he's absent until late in the second act that feels like a third act. Otherwise it's clues that paint an incomplete picture that barely hints at an unexplained past. Considering the story is a lot more personal than previous incarnations of Blofeld, Waltz is on screen all too briefly.

Lea Seydoux is a bit weak as an actress. There's something a bit blank about her that you don't quite believe her character. I'm always suspicious of casting choices where somebody in their mid 20s plays a specialist medical professional. You just don't get to be those without turning 35. Even ignoring that factor, there something a bit amiss about her performance, most likely because she's not a native English Speaker. I kept wincing at the uneven-ness of the performance.

What's Interesting About It

If the Bond film is anything to go by, our reflected paranoia about terrorism is actually out of control. This has manifested itself in the surveillance state that is now the UK, but also around the world, there seems to be this growing surveillance. Against this context, Bond has to go to some obscure places, or places without such surveillance to prove his worth.

Bond definitely doesn't (and probably can't) work in places where the threats are real. He can't infiltrate ISIL, he can't go work undercover in places like North Africa, Middle East, the Subcontinent, and East Asia. Strangely, as globalisation advances, the potential for Bond to go undercover keeps eroding to the point where in this film he isn't an undercover spy, he's defining himself as an assassin. That is to say, the Double-O programme is a state-sanctioned assassination bureau whose distinguishing feature is the "licence to kill". Maybe it is, but this brings strange ramifications.

This creative decision skews the action out of espionage where the roots of Bond movies lie, towards a more brutalist Hollywood conception of action. Daniel Craig's Bond has ideological pinnings closer to Steven Seagal movies of the 90s than say, Timothy Dalton Bond movies. It's the old "You might be a bastard but you're our bastard. Go rogue as long as you kill the bad guy" brief.

Consider for the moment that back in the Sean Connery Bond era, Bond would don makeup to look like a Japanese guy (!) to go do undercover espionage in Japan. Or the lovely moment where he kills a guy in the lift in 'Diamonds are Forever', swaps the ID with his victim and tells Jill St. John's character that he just killed James Bond. The Daniel Craig Bond doesn't pretend to be anything other than James Bond when he kills 2 other assassins and then shags Monica Bellucci.

Brothers

It's interesting that Blofeld's back story melds into this Bond's back story. Blofeld, it turns out is foster brother to James Bond. Thus, the four films together takes shape as more of a feud between two men, even though James Bond was not entirely aware that this was what was taking place. It's interesting that to make it personal, the backstory had to be changed into one that denotes fratricidal impulses. Doubly more so because Austin Powers had this area pegged when in the third instalment of that franchise 'Goldmember', it was revealed that Austin and Dr. Evil were brothers. Take a bow Mike Myers.

The Challenges Of Character Realism

The Bond franchise oscillates between character realism and then lighter laughs, depending on the Bond actor. So Connery was a character realist back in the 60s when spy movies were a rage; Moore was a lighter comedic Bond in the 70s and 80s until he wore out the tropes; Dalton was an attempt to go back to a character with gravitas; and then Brosnan brought about a breeziness and TV-honed casualness that echoed Moore. The franchise has gone back to character realism with Craig for four movies now, but the strain is beginning to show.

One of the great challenges of the Bond franchise is staving off the psychopath label from Bond. If Bond is running around the planet exercising his licence to kill too liberally, then he becomes less distinguishable from his foes. after all, what kind of crazy person kills so many people and then carries on a life as if he's a normal citizen? It was particularly apparent with the Brosnan Bond because he had the highest kills of any Bond per screen time, but offered the most light-and-breezy Bond of the lot. If the cognitive dissonance wasn't going off in the directors' and producers' heads, then surely the audience was getting alienated by this problem.

The absence of character realism for Bond leads to the rest of the film becoming less real. At one point I'm led to believe Bond was driving an "invisible car", in one of the Brosnan Bond films I didn't watch. An invisible car! I mean, you know... I'm kind of glad I missed that at the cinemas.

Daniel Craig's Bond has been tackling this problem across four films. With his portrayal, Bond actually feels the weight of his kills. He doesn't quite care for all his victims individually, but the mounting body count wears on his conscience and drives him to drink. In the four films, he's walked away from the job twice. He even admits to a drinking problem in this film. The state of the character is slowly evolving in a way that he was never allowed to do in the 60s, 70s and 80s.

This choice has brought about a very interesting Bond but it is clear he is nearing the finish line. If Bond can - inconceivably - die, then it would be on Daniel Craig's watch. It would be as tragic as Kirk or Solo dying, but for once it would make sense. It would also bring the cycle of films to a meaningful conclusion, a completion of mission that all the other Bond films combined, never possessed or could attain.

We're A Team!

Over at the 'Mission Impossible' franchise, another spy genre off-shoot from the 1960s, Tom Cruise has been ruling the roost and making it more Bond-like in that the hero action centres on himself. It was worse in earlier films, but lately he's been backing off from hogging the screen time - he's been actively sharing it with Ving Rhames, Jeremy Renner and Simon Pegg. They've been making it look more like a team-effort which is more in the spirit of the original TV series, which is a good thing.

Similarly with the evolving Bond, they've managed to develop Q, M, and Moneypenny so that they are doing more spy-agency-like things. It has the benefit of showing these kinds of protagonists as being part of a functioning social set, even if that social set is made up of other spooks. It contextualises the actions as work. What's more telling is that it shows just how obsolete the Bond figure has become. In the old days of 'Goldfinger', Bond had to fight the bad guy in front of the ticking bomb and disarm the bomb himself. In this stage of civilisation, the equivalent of the bomb is embedded in technology in such a way as to need hacking - so it is Q who ultimately hits the switch that saves the day. More realistically, Bond couldn't have done that bit.

Bond, at that moment in the story, is diverted on to a mini-adventure of his own where he has to save the girl from a collapsing building, but it's hardly the same thing as saving the world from surveillance hell. Call it, the villain-twirling-his-moustache-at-the-rail-tracks moment. Because we're invested in Bond, we feel it's a big deal, but under rational analysis, it's actually nerdy-geeky Q and ever-responsible-and-loyal bureaucrat M who finish the big deal. It is as if the film itself is admitting that even in the tallest fantasies, the limitations of one person are such that they cannot overcome institutionalised evil. Maybe it's a big step back for hero action movies, but it just might be a big step forwards for our understanding of the surveillance state. It's not going to get undone with a flourish of the pen in legislature or a judicial decision in some high court.

 Bond's Euro Anxiety And Buying British Bonds

The Daniel Craig Bond movies have concentrated more on a European threat more than anything else. He isn't facing off against Russian agents in this day and age, and he can't go undercover in other ethnic groups, so naturally Bond's villains have come from the ranks of Europeans. It is probably not surprising given the overall anxiety in the UK about its place in the EU. These Bond movies vividly illustrate just how deep the unease run in the UK about the European Union as a project - it is with great suspicion and distrust.

As the last vestige of the Great British Empire, Bond is more icon of a flag-waving Cool Britannia. With its roots in the 1960s, it has something in common with Mods and the Who with their Union Jack draped garb. The anachronism is further magnified by the nostalgic fetishisation of Aston Martins and period English vehicles. The whole point of the Bond movie is to brand Great Britain, and continue to bear that standard in the mass consumer market place. The endorsed goods come hard and fast while everybody gets around dressed to the nines. It's a weird continuum where nobody looks bad or dresses bad. Great Britain needs to keep the branding going lest it sink in the flood of goods coming out of Europe.

I have to say the product placement in this one was just a bit much.