Skyfall (2012) | Overrated

When Skyfall came out, I heard a lot of positive buzz about it and its song by Adele. With the disappointment of Quantum of Solace, I was ready for a more cohesive story and charismatic villains. I was excited. Then, I watched it and…I didn’t like it. There were a few things that gnawed at me afterward that soured my opinion and I just couldn’t get over them. I watched it a second time a few weeks later when friends wanted to see it at our home and my opinion improved slightly when I focused on the positive aspects. It’s been ten years since I last watched Skyfall and I tried to park my opinions through my third viewing. That lasted less than 10 minutes. I don’t care. This movie is not as good as its reputation suggests. I dislike this movie, despite all of its positives and thus, I have a lot to say about it. Spoilers ahead….

Pros

Beautifully shot
Individual sections of the movie in isolation are cool
Performances from the cast, especially Javier Bardem, are solid
Motorcycle chase across rooftops in Istanbul is cool despite some obvious stunt doubles or green screen
Home Alone climax is memorable and fun, along with the classic Aston Martin spy car

Cons

THAT was your master plan?!
What was the point of Severine and how was she involved?
Plot and character motivations do not make sense
Adele’s song is not as good as everyone says
Moneypenny in the field and “kills” James Bond
A lot of “deconstructing” of James Bond and insulting his character
Modern Q sucks as a character
Ripoff of the Joker from The Dark Knight
How is Silva’s project being financed?
Serious movie needs to be judged seriously

Plot & Thoughts

The film opens with Bond and a female agent in pursuit of a man who has stolen the list of active MI6 agents in the field—no idea how something like this could happen, but it sure would have been nice to see it. They cannot afford to let him escape and potentially reveal their identities and compromise the countless missions of agents around the world. The chase takes them through the streets, onto the rooftops of Istanbul, and the roof of a moving train. After the woman who introduces herself at the very end of the movie as Moneypenny (Naomie Harris) accidentally shoots Bond off the train at M’s (Judy Dench) request to “take the shot,” Bond falls into a river below and the list is lost. “Skyfall” by Adele starts and the pretty opening credits sequence begins.

Shortly after the opening credits end, it’s revealed that M’s inability to reclaim the list of agents is apparently the latest in a string of failures and she’s being pressured to resign. On her way back from a meeting with the man in charge of the transition period, Mallory (Ralph Fiennes), the true villain hacks into MI6’s computers, and M witnesses the MI6 headquarters explode, with her office at the epicenter. It’s clear that whoever received the list of MI6 agents has a vendetta against M and soon exposes several agent identities to the world on YouTube. This disaster motivates Bond—who had been enjoying his new life in the bars of Turkey, having been assumed dead—to return to service. Bond fails his physical and mental evaluations after returning, but M clears him for active duty anyway. It’s up to Bond to follow the clues to find the man responsible for all this and bring him to justice.

I’ll start with the positives before I get into all the things I don’t like about Skyfall. The most obvious quality that stands out is how pretty it is. Skyfall is a beautiful movie with some great, colorful photography and cinematography. It makes the movie memorable and is probably the reason why so many people remember it fondly. When Bond visits Shanghai, he confronts the man he was chasing in Istanbul in an empty skyscraper and the fistfight between them is backlit by the bright lights of the city, making the encounter very visually dynamic and memorable. Bond later visits an exclusive club via a small boat and walks across a bridge over a monitor lizard pen into the building to follow another lead. There is a lot of yellow and red to mimic the style and decorations of the club—as well as appeal to that juicy Chinese market of audiences. A yellow filter is used frequently in Skyfall with the scenes in Istanbul and the Shanghai club, but then the movie takes a more muted washed-out tone with a bluish or greenish filter when Bond returns to his home in Scotland in the final act.

The action scenes in Skyfall are also pretty good. The opening chase scene sets up the movie very well with its dynamic camera angles and action. The first time I watched it, I was excited to see what would follow such a gripping chase across rooftops on motorcycles and aboard a moving train. Likewise, the fist fights in Shanghai are gritty and raw in the satisfying way that most of the Daniel Craig fights are in this series. The final act that takes place at the titular home of James Bond is what people remember most about this movie, and for good reason. The action is shot well and the setup of the situation by making M and Bond rely on traps and limited weaponry adds to the drama. Visually, Skyfall succeeds. Too bad this movie is more style than substance.

Where my opinion of Skyfall started to wane is when we’re introduced to its villain, Raoul Silva (Javier Bardem). That’s not a knock against Bardem’s performance, as I think he does a great job at playing a deranged villain with mommy issues and sadistic tastes. He’s far more engaging than the villains from Quantum of Solace, at the very least. He manages to be both one of the worst and best things about this movie. He’s one of the best aspects of Skyfall simply because of the charisma Bardem brings to the character. He immediately captures your attention and commands the scene whenever he’s present. Bardem is great at portraying menacing characters and he brings a great performance here.

Silva is built up well with how M reacts to the terrorist attack on MI6 and with the dialogue between Bond and Severine (Berenice Marlohe), the woman who helps him find Silva. He seems like a menacing force of brilliance and ruthlessness. The scene in which he’s introduced is great because Bardem’s acting builds his personality up through a monologue as he walks from the far end of the room over to Bond in a lengthy shot. He starts the scene so far away that he’s too small to recognize. Yet, by the time he gets close to Bond, you have a great idea of how unstable and powerful this guy is.

Alas, Silva is built up so much that he couldn’t achieve the greatness the movie tries to afford him, mainly because the writers were not able to come up with a real means of doing so. He and his evil plan are written poorly and that’s what makes his character so bad that it sours my opinion of the film. Taken straight out of The Dark Knight, Silva is captured by MI6 but that turns out to be part of his master plan. He wanted to get caught so he could get close to MI6 headquarters and then enact his real plot of assassinating M. What a genius! No one can compete with his intellect! Yet, his brilliant plan is made not so brilliant by the fact that his ultimate intention is: while dressed as a London policeman, storm into a hearing where M is giving her deposition and shoot her with a pistol in front of a bunch of people. I’m sorry, this makes no sense to me based on how the plot has established him as a decisive genius and what his desires are up to this point.

Silva hates M because he views her as the mother who has forsaken him and he wants to make her suffer humiliation and defeat. We understand this because of how he leaves the insulting video message to mock her after blowing up MI6 headquarters, let alone the dialogue exchanges he has later with M and Bond. The fact that he’s able to pull off a terrorist attack of that scale, as well as leave her the instigating message demonstrates his technical skills and that he knows how to access her personal devices. This shows he’s not only vengeful but extremely intelligent and capable of hacking very secure technology. This is further established in his escape sequence because he hacks all of MI6 to sow chaos. The first time I saw this, I was on the edge of my seat, waiting to see what would happen next. It’s a strong moment because it shows he’s several steps ahead of the heroes—just like the Joker was in The Dark Knight—and you don’t know what the next step in his master plan is.

When that next step turns out to be just walk into a room—in which you are very likely to be captured or killed before or after doing the deed—and shoot M in the face, it is just such a deflating and embarrassing moment for the character, especially because M escapes. Think of any moments—it doesn’t even have to be fiction—where something was built up so much that, when it finally happens, all you can think of are the sounds of crickets. For many moviegoers, it was Episode I: The Phantom Menace or 1998’s Godzilla. For some reason, the opening of Al Capone’s vault with Hiraldo Rivera also springs to mind. It was built up as a media sensation with countdowns to the day Copone’s vault contents would finally be revealed to the public. Then, it happened and there was nothing in it aside from the egg that was all over Rivera’s face.

Not to just compare this to The Dark Knight all day, but that movie at least understood how to stick the landing. When the Joker escaped the police station, he had other plans and schemes, including his “ace in the hole” of turning Harvey Dent into a madman. He created several catch-22 situations after his escape. Silva had nothing else planned beyond escaping MI6 and assassinating M with a pistol. No sniper rifles, no notes slipped into her deposition papers, no messages on her phone, no other thing of interest that would humiliate M in front of everyone during her hearing to give her assassination more impact. It was just an impersonal and poorly planned finale to his evil scheme. I was so disappointed by this moment in Skyfall, it completely ruined my experience the first time I watched it and made me that much more aware of the other issues I had upon repeated viewings.

What are those other issues? A lot of them are tied to the same sort of tropes and characteristics of the “modern writer” we’ve seen in movies these days. Skyfall came out in 2012, so it predates a lot of the trash that has come out since the year Hollywood lost its mind, but it still shares some similarities with the likes of movies that have been made by Disney in the past four years. First of all, I do not care for the modern reinterpretations of Moneypenny (Naomie Harris) or Q (Ben Whishaw). I do not fault the actors for their performances, it is purely how they’re written.

I do not agree with the decision to make Moneypenny a field agent who then decides to go to a desk job. Moneypenny may have been the assistant/secretary of M in previous Bond movies, but I never viewed that as a derogatory or degrading position for the character. She was always portrayed as a strong-willed and intelligent woman. She was the woman who was too smart to fall for Bond’s charms, even though she really wanted him. That’s why their “will they, won’t they” flirting was always so endearing about their dynamic. And it isn’t like she didn’t do her part to help him in previous movies as there were instances during the Brosnan and Dalton era in which she pulled some strings behind the scenes to give Bond support in the field.

Making Moneypenny a field agent feels like a clumsy attempt to make her a stronger woman capable of doing what Bond does and making her an equal in that way. She was already an intellectual equal, why does she need to be a field agent to prove anything else? Also, in case you weren’t watching, she misses the shot and “kills” Bond in the beginning. So, the movie proves she can’t be as good as he is at fieldwork because she fails the mission spectacularly by presumably eliminating a double-o agent in the process. Nice job, movie!

I also hate the way it’s revealed that she’s Moneypenny at the very end of Skyfall. She says, “We’ve never formally been introduced,” as though the two of them didn’t do multiple missions together in the movie that required constant communication. We’re to assume he would only know her first name, even though he’s a spy who needs to know who is supporting him on missions—never mind that he refers to the injured agent in the opening scene by his last name. It’s just a cheesy method of revealing her identity to the audience that doesn’t make sense in reality.

Let’s talk about Q next. Again, I do not fault the actor because I like the character’s personality and how he interacts with Bond. I have a problem with the idea that this young millennial assh*le is the head of an entire branch within MI6. Part of what made Desmond Llewlyn instantly iconic as Q in the old movies was that you expect someone wisened through experience and age to be handling the R&D of weapons in a spy agency. This is why casting is important. One of the many, many issues I had with the movie Prometheus and its failed attempts to recapture the magic of the original Alien was that the ship was filled with handsome and pretty people—who also happened to be complete morons. Are they scientists or supermodels? In Alien, the actors all looked ragged, tired, and real. That helped make them more interesting, endearing, and believable as characters.

Q in the previous Bond films was also often surrounded by employees who worked under him doing a lot of additional research. Llewlyn’s portrayal of the character made him seem capable of immense knowledge and leadership. Ben Whishaw comes across as too young to demonstrate that he is the man who knows more than everyone else in the room like the movie wants him to be. The archetype of the young, super-genius hacker is a convenient trope in a lot of movies, but I’ve never liked it and I don’t like it here. If he were working for the real Q who seemed like a leader capable of handling the responsibilities of a branch of MI6, I would have far fewer problems with it. Bond could still interact with Whishaw’s character and he could still behave the same way for all I cared. My issue is purely with this modern re-imagining of Q being a young guy who talks down to Bond as though he has any authority to do so.

Speaking of talking down to Bond, I’m not sure any Bond movie (up to this point) was so insulting to his character in both tone and dialogue. Judy Dench’s M would talk down to Brosnan’s Bond from time to time, but there was a fair amount of respect she would still give him. The only time this faltered much in their relationship was in Die Another Day, and not by much. Her relationship with Craig’s Bond has been far more aggressive and occasionally antagonistic, sometimes justifiably so. Yet, it’s after Bond is shot and he’s possibly dead that her affinity towards him is identified—not by Bond or M, but other characters say she prefers him because she’s “sentimental.” This is a rather forced method of demonstrating her feelings towards him, rather than just letting the character’s actions do the talking.

That’s about it when it comes to anyone thinking “kindly” about Bond, even though the word “sentimental” could also be interpreted in a way that suggests Bond is old. If you think that is not the case, my counterpoint to the argument is how everyone talks about him at MI6 and what his reevaluation process tries to suggest. He’s an outdated, out-of-shape, mentally unstable agent unfit for service, yet, M approves him for active duty anyway due to her so-called sentimentality. Q talks down to him. Mallory has no faith in him. The reevaluation scenes are meant to reinforce how much Bond doesn’t belong. Perhaps I’m reading too much into this, but with how the movie treats Bond and how he’s surrounded by young, pretty re-imaginings of other characters in MI6, Skyfall is saying that the past is old and worth killing, which they metaphorically do at the beginning of the movie. Years before Kylo Ren would suggest it best to kill the past and let it die in The Last Jedi, Skyfall seems to be insulting James Bond or the very idea of Bond and saying everything he represents is outdated. Obviously, there are things about the character of James Bond—namely the womanizing side—that are pretty dated, but that doesn’t mean that everything about James Bond during the days of Pussy Galore was bad. Maybe Skyfall’s intention was to do yet another rebirth of James Bond with Daniel Craig. After his “death” in the opening sequence, and after his return to his home in the end, he is remade into a more acceptable version of Bond suitable for “modern audiences.”

TL;DR

Skyfall is a flawed film that still irritates me quite a bit when I really think about it. If you turn your brain off and just accept what the movie gives you, it’s a pretty spectacle with a charismatic villain and some cool action scenes. If you don’t, however, it’s a movie that disrespects James Bond and botches its villain with the worst conclusion to a brilliant plan. I don’t actively hate Skyfall as I think there are still enough positives to warrant its existence and viewing. I just wish that there were some changes made to specific details to actually tighten the movie up.

Hair of the Dog Drinking Game Rule

The two main heroes of the movie, M and Bond, do not get much preferential treatment. In fact, both of them get insulted and scrutinized pretty much the whole way through the film. M and her ability to make decisions is constantly brought into question, while Bond is often regarded with disdain as something old and worth discarding. Since their aged inefficiency seems to be the central theme of the movie, why not have a drink to get over the fact that the writers seem to hate the characters?