Last week we started looking at some of the worst films to come out of the James Bond franchise. I gotta say, that was a painful experience! I’m still having night terrors as a result! True story! I kind of left you all on a cliffhanger, and I feel really bad about that, but I needed some time to recover. Also, I have a lot to say about this final entry. But before I do, let’s review the criteria that I was using to review these movies. They were minimized use of cheese, having a good villain that has a somewhat believable plan and isn’t a Mary Sue, use of a legitimate theme in the film, and attempts at giving Bond more depth as a character. Now that we have that out of the way, let’s get this party started because I know that you’re all dying to know what film I chose. Oh, let me just say that while the other films were in no particular order by way of awfulness, this one is by far my least favorite film. Okay, the movie is:
#1: Skyfall:
Alright, alright, calm down. I can hear you raging through my router. Did you think that I would make such a bold claim and not have any empirical evidence to back myself up? I should certainly hope that you know me better than that by now. Of course I have empirical evidence to back up my asinine claims! But I can understand your confusion:
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| Proof that you can't believe everything that you read on the Internet. |
For whatever reason, this movie is pretty popular. There are probably a lot of reasons why people think they should like it, but please allow me to debunk a bit. So Bond, and actual Moneypenny have to track down a guy who’s stolen the NOC list, I mean list of aliases of several MI6 agents that’s on a hard drive. In the process, Moneypenny has to just straight up shoot the thief because Bond just can’t catch him, but instead she shoots Bond. Once we get done with the spoiler ridden credits, we catch up to Bond drowning his sorrows in cheap beer on some tropical island. How does he have money to do these things? Anyway, There’s a huge to do about just how needful MI6 even is anymore, and in order punctuate the situation, MI6 gets hacked, and then the MI6 building just up and explodes. Engineers these days, amiright? M also gets a message from an anonymous source claiming that MI6 operatives who are in the field are going to start dying soon, and they absolutely do. Also, this mystery admirer is totally after M. Bond gets wind of the bombing and decides to go back to work, finally. He’s put through the batteries of tests, and pretty much fails them all, but hey, MI6 is kind of desperate so you know what? Why not? And so Bond is reinstated.
Bond goes to China to continue what he should have finished at the beginning of the film, but the guy who stole the NOC list, I mean operative list falls to his death before he can offer up any answers. Bond, being a good sleuth, finds a poker chip, which takes him to Macau. There he meets a woman who claims to be the thief’s accomplice. She says that she will take Bond to the head honcho if he promises to kill said honcho. Bond, of course, agrees knowing full well that pretty much anyone within a thirty yard radius at any given moment is screwed anyway. There’s a fight, but Bond escapes to this woman’s yacht, and then they’re both captured. They end up on a deserted Japanese island where Bond finally meets the orchestrator of his misery Raoul SIlva. Silva used to be an MI6 operative himself, but turned to cyber terrorism because reasons. There’s some boring expositional back and forth, and then in a “trust building” exercise, SIlva and Bond have a contest of weapons accuracy, featuring the woman that Bond already did the nasty with, probably. Bond watches as Silva casually kills the woman. The important thing is that MI6 swoops in at the last minute to pick up Silva and take him into custody. They also confiscate his laptop.
Back in the land of rain and fog, a newly minted Q is tasked with unlocking the secrets behind Silva’s antics. It’s at this point that Q makes the fatal mistake of connecting an unsecured device to his network, but we’ll get to that. Meanwhile, M is in court defending her job as a bunch of phony cops start to shoot the place up. Silva gets broken out, and the game is afoot, as some might say. Everyone knows that M is the target so Bond nobly offers to take her back to his childhood home. They get there and there’s a not Sean Connery, but you’re supposed to think it’s Sean Connery character there who offers to help booby trap the place Home Alone style. They do so, and just as they’re finishing, Silva comes swooping in via helicopter blaring opera music… for some reason? There’s a final showdown, and the old DB5 gets demolished, Not-Sean-Connery dies, and M gets killed.After that, there’s some tying up of loose ends. A new M gets appointed, MI6 moves underground… literally, and Bond begins the process of moving on.
Alrighty, this isn’t necessarily a, “Where do I even begin,” moment, but let me count the ways in which this movie doesn’t deserve to be lauded as one of the best Bond films of all time. First, let’s tackle the theme. The theme here is, “Is MI6 really necessary anymore?” The answer is ultimately yes, of course because no film studio is going to wantonly throw away a multi-billion dollar franchise. But we’ve seen this theme done before, and done much better in my opinion. You might recognize a little number called:
Goldeneye told basically the exact same story, and in my opinion, did it much better. The sad thing is Skyfall goes out of its way to inform the viewer that those involved in making the film were aware that they were rehashing a classic. Silva is just Trevelyan, only with computers. And even the hacking thing plays a big role in Goldeneye as well. And at the very least, I got to see Bond destroy a Russian city in a tank in Goldeneye. What I’m saying is, Goldeneye was more fun, and therefore, quite a bit more enjoyable.
My next gripe is with SIlva. Remember that one of the criteria by which I was judging these films was in the villain, and SIlva is one of the most Mary Sued characters to come out of any franchise in a long time. I understand that he’s supposed to be some sort of wizard hacker, but I guarantee that MI6 has an army of network engineers watching their systems for breaches. Also, after being out of MI6 for fifteen years, I’m pretty sure he’s going to be a little out of the loop as far as protocol is concerned. And lastly, he’s so whiny. Seriously, did the guy stop maturing at age eight? I can’t stand it. Everytime he opens his mouth, it’s whiny. Oh and he’s so melodramatic. It gets old really fast, and he’s just not a likable villain.
Lastly, WTF Q?! I’m literally a first year IT student and I’m pretty sure that in week one of my class we covered not connecting unfamiliar, or unsecured devices to a secure network. It’s basic common sense, and because of such egregious laziness in writing, I just can’t take anything seriously that happens after that point in the film. It’s lazy, and the movie going masses deserve better. I just expected that maybe we’d get a bit more for Bond’s golden anniversary, but then again, that period between July 2012, and July 2013 was a year for bad rip offs of iconic classic films...
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Stay tuned for next week!
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