Coyote Cinema: Skyfall

[cyrano]

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So here we go.

All in all, I liked this film. I don't know if the retro stuff was a new trend or just a tip of the hat to year fifty. But I'm good either way, because I see Daniel Craig, in a lot of ways, getting back to older James Bond. And I utterly hearted Q's line about "Exploding pens? We don't really go in for that any more."

I really liked the tone of this one. I like Uncertain Loyalties, which I think need to be an element in *any* spy/espionage film. You're telling a story about people who tell lies for a living. M is behaving oddly. Is she potty? Is she selling out? Does she have a Clever Plan? Is she Just Too Old For This Shit? I don't want to know right away. Let me wonder a bit, let there be some tension.

I loved the Churchillian digs. I loved the Battlestar logic of 'he cracked our most secure computer network, so we need to get off the computers for now'. I loved Bond being off his game, out of shape. I loved M not being a crack shot who kicks ass like a double or triple '0'.

I'm not entirely happy with our villain. I like it when somebody has a reason for what they're doing beyond "I want to take over the world and rule it like it was my own personal Malibu Barbie Dream House". Jonathan Pryce was a brilliant bad guy. I like bad guys who are smart.

However.

There are two pit traps you can fall into when writing a super smart bad guy. This film hits both of them.

Trap #1: In order to make the bad guy super smart, you lower the intelligence of his adversaries. Q says he invented some of the supergenius programmer tricks that Bardem uses. And yet, knowing that this guy hacked MI6's tightest security, turned the gas on inside, and remotely flicked a match, he plugs the sinister laptop into the network, inside firewalls, inside security, instead of quarantining the thing until he felt satisfied it was safe. And, big shock, supergenius badguy had planned for this all along and wanted to be captured so that he didn't have to pay airfare to Heathrow from Macau.

And that's Trap #2. Supersmart bad guy prepares for every single contingency, including "if he catches my train and spots me at this tube stop, then I'll jump off and hope he doesn't shoot me until I can blow the charges I previously planted here on a track where a train will be along twenty seconds later". Preparing for every contingency means that London is laced with explosives for 'if I have to get off at *this* stop....', not to mention the various pit traps, pressure triggered gas jets, trained attack alligators, and what else have you he needed for various other contingencies.

I am more than willing to toss problematic genre physics out (even though I still twitch when they happen) like a fireball that sucks all the oxygen out of a tunnel, or a secret agent soaked to the bone with freezing water who would die of hypothermia before he reached the forbidding stone chapel on the hill. But if you want me to believe in your characters, don't make me work that hard.

I know I said 'spoilers' earlier, but this is sort of a big one, and if you haven't seen the film you may want to skip on.
I was not surprised at the changeover in M, but I was surprised that they 'retired' Dame Judy. Which probably means they did a pretty good job of it.



So, I say four wags, but I'm not sure it has a lot of rewatch value for me.

Comments

[missroserose]

Yeah, that was my biggest problem with the film, too - especially so, being married to a network guy and thus perfectly aware of the existence of quarantined setups for testing potentially hostile machines. Hubris can account for a certain amount, esp. as Q is supposed to be sort of young and cocky, but that's the sort of mistake that can lose you a job at a run-of-the-mill company, let alone MI6.

[cyrano]

And it also presupposes that our bad guy had enough time after the new appointment of our young and cocky Q to do a psycheval, write the code that will pop every single door in a yet to be installed computer security system in the sixty-year-old tunnels that MI6 will move into once there is an explosion at current HQ.