swan_tower | Spectre

The new Bond movie is . . . not very good.

I’ve mostly liked the Craig movies, by which I mean Casino Royale and Skyfall. I basically remember nothing of Quantum of Solace, and the only reason the same won’t be true of Spectre is that I’m bothering to post about its shortcomings.

The main thing that disappointed me with Skyfall was the feeling that, at the end, we had returned to the usual classic Bond status quo. Craig’s Bond didn’t have gadgets, didn’t have Q, didn’t have Moneypenny, and M was a woman. By the time Skyfall ended, you had gadgets (albeit minor ones compared to past films), Q, Moneypenny, and a male M. The whole film was explicitly about looking back to history, both of the franchise and of the characters in it, and so as an ending to the story I think I would have been okay with it. But then we got Spectre.

Which is an utterly conventional Bond movie that fails to be anything more than the sum of its parts. One villain is so obvious that I assumed, the minute he showed up, that the script was doing that as a red herring and the real situation would turn out to be more interesting. Alas, no. The plot is phenomenally stupid; it hinges on the idea that nine countries have decided to share 100% of their intelligence information — and those nine countries include the UK, Russia, and China. I’m sorry, what? Suspension of disbelief is one thing, but the notion that those three countries would be peachy keen with sharing all their secrets because surely they’ll be BFFs forever and never end up in conflict with one another is so far outside the bounds of reality, I lack the words to describe it. (And I write fantasy.) Nothing gets explained enough to have any impact: Monica Bellucci shows up for long enough to babble something about how she hated her husband but her marriage was the only thing protecting her from being killed by nevermind we’ve run out of infodump time GET TO THE MAKEOUTS. And then she vanishes from the film, with nothing about her entire situation having any relevance to the story whatsoever, except that we’re twenty minutes into the movie and the schedule says Bond has to get into bed with somebody. The main villain is clearly supposed to have all this personal resonance for Bond, but unless he came up in Quantum of Solace and I forgot it (entirely possible), we don’t know anything about that personal resonance until the last third or so of the movie, which is far too late for it to mean anything to the audience. Bond commits inexplicably stupid errors: we see him notice a not-at-all hidden security camera, but apparently he decides there’s no point in wiping it before he leaves, just so there can be a later scene where somebody else is horrified to see what it recorded.

Skyfall, though not perfect, was in every way a better movie. It had the personal weight this one seems to think it has, but doesn’t. It had a thematic argument about human intelligence vs. the technology of the new age, which gets stuck in a microwave for Spectre and does not reheat well. It had a meaningful relationship between Bond and M, instead of a Bond girl who almost manages to be interesting but again, her backstory is not explored very well and somehow I’m supposed to believe Bond retires and settles down with her or something? It had genuine tension; I’m not a filmmaker, but even I can tell this movie dragged stuff out for too long, kept the score at too THRILLING! EXCITEMENT! of a level with insufficient dynamics, made things more complicated than they had to be so I’m wondering why there are all these string things set up instead of worrying about the characters’ lives. It had entertaining moments, but they added up to nothing whatsoever.

It turns out the best part of Spectre was Daniel Craig’s press tour.

Originally published at Swan Tower. You can comment here or there.

Spectre

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