By Michael Scoular (The Cascade) – Email
Print Edition: November 14, 2012
There is an order to things in the world of James Bond. Almost completely absent of progression—defined by and doted on for its minimal variation, with one part indistinguishable apart from another, rather than every entry being memorable—the James Bond series is a house style, containing nothing like an individual touch, save the face that sells it. With its undeviating structure and ever-forgetting succession, the Bond movies have always had something of the television series at its core, and on that note, that would make Skyfall, number 23, the penultimate part of the first season, where all the accumulated danger arrives at the “complex” hero’s doorstep, and little shocks to the system provide additional reasons to not miss the next one.
Sam Mendes—working again with regular director of photography Roger Deakins—has a collection of over-serious, arch, facile treatises on history catching up and getting out to his name, and provides the most notable break from tradition here. The major theme of Skyfall is the pounding literalization of major themes, but the emphasis on shadows, broken only by outlines, slants of standout light, and particles in the air, gives Deakins’ work a singular look among the Bond tradition. Unexpected light—spotlit advertisements of rainbow hues and the sky, sunken in orange after destruction—marks Skyfall’s best moments, and public endangerment in broad daylight serves as another thread of tension, not unlike Christopher Nolan’s superhero movies.
For anyone watching Skyfall that’s kept tabs on recent action heroism—even without delving into the obscure—names like Nolan’s come up not out of a desire to compare and play the better-than game, but because Skyfall both encourages and unstealthily borrows from all corners of the current state of the genre – an attempt to update itself. There are two major themes, said verbatim approximately 30 times: the shadowy past, and Bond, as series of movies and central character, as having lost a step and caught between the tropes of past eras and the technology of the present.
“It’s a young man’s game,” muses one character, and like most of the closed-room dialogue, it has everything to do with the series – the Bond series is both older than its contemporaries, and has had a gap between installments, a horrible idea in the mind of producers Barbara Broccoli and Michael G. Wilson, who desperately claw at relevancy with nods to Nolan most notably overall, but also Bond’s spy rivals. The worry, it’s said, is that Bond is “played out.” By both stated competition and similarity, Skyfall invokes the series of Jason Bourne (single dwelling spectacle), Resident Evil (steady rush self-explication), and Mission: Impossible (skyscraping mechanisms and mangled transport) but is inferior to the most recent installments in all three. Skyfall is narcissistically about itself, lengthily so, and in the end, has nothing individual to its name – it is the same, even as it says, self-awarely, that it is all going to be different.
After the film’s fairly woeful first quarter, Skyfallopens up its immobile parts, with Bond (Daniel Craig) analyzed amid his permanently semi-drunk state, before a leader, Bond villain (Javier Bardem), swoops in, discards the broken pieces of the movie up until that point, and digs under the character we know, at once confirming the attributes people love and deriding their essence in an id-clown performance. It’s the only enjoyable instance of this recurring dialogue, if it can be called that at all. Even in this instance, there’s an illusion to Skyfall’s supposed transparent look at its hero. The questioning of allegiances in the wake of poor management as temptation is a plot familiar to anyone that’s seen Goldeneye, and here it’s amplified, turned into some type of moral reckoning, quickly forgotten once Skyfall becomes about who has the most strategically-placed weapon. Bond, as always, is unshakable in his devotion to those that guide his body, technologically or otherwise. With Craig at the wheel, this is done so wearily as shorthand for the “realism” veneer of this generation – even if the whole British spy as acrobat-god-in-the-flesh is parodic to begin with. Bond is the great conformer, submissive to rule, iconography as valid reason for dehumanization.
A far distance from The Bourne Legacy’s concentrated conflict of biology and bureaucracy, Skyfall is even more dated by its focus-tested “old-fashioned” dictum. It’s not that old-fashioned, as in favoring solutions less digitally-inclined, or climaxes more local and rural rather than exponential and nonsensical, is at all something to be contested as inferior. It’s that the core of the Bond worldview is found in the first face-to-face meeting with the Bond girl (Bérénice Marlohe): “I know when a woman is pretending not to be [afraid],” he rumbles, as ashy cigarette smoke drifts from her quivering lips and shaking fingers. If in Casino Royale and Quantum of Solace women were at least granted the ability to do things besides undress and be snatched out of danger (they can be human, they can drive!), here there’s no role for women except to die for Bond. This has always been the way in Bond films, and perhaps for some it’s so conditioned and usual it’s hardly worth attention.
But the scrape of Skyfall’s criticism of Bond’s character never touches that nerve, tellingly, and whether it’s an offhand execution followed by Thomas Newman, as in every second of this movie, doing all the feeling for us (as in, triumph!), or the conclusion, where “field work isn’t suitable for everyone” (where “everyone” means “not our cultured man’s man”) means we get the old role of secretary for the most qualified woman in the series. It’s clear that Bond isn’t complex, or engaging, or worthwhile in any but the most intermittent, colour-sprayed sense. Order has been restored.
