Disappointment. I have been a fan of Daniel Craig ever since I saw Casino Royale. I immediately considered him my favorite Bond, because the others, to me, have always appeared like a bunch of pussies with cool guns. I like the direction the series took and I am still glad to see where it ended with this latest film. It's just that I found Skyfall to be a not-so-intelligent film which rehashed most of the ideas recently dealt in Nolan's Batman trilogy.
I thoroughly enjoyed the opening sequence. When an action scene makes you duck, twitch and cower in your seat, you can tell that shit's tight. I am trying to recall the point where the movie stopped working for me and I think it was around the time Bardem appeared. After the whole build up they give him, he didn't quite live up to it when he finally appeared. Intentional or otherwise, the homoerotic tension was very weird. In spite of his Joker-like physical deformity, he was never really intimidating. It's not like he's not a formidable opponent for Bond. Also, I wasn't quite taken with his motives either.
I am not well familiar with old Bond films and my knowledge is mostly limited to the ones starring Craig. You can hold this against me if you want to, but I never thought there could be a character as useless as that portrayed by Gemma Arterton in QoS. Now I notice a pattern emerging. The scope of the Bond girl who eventually ends up dead is very limited. I don't know if this is a case of genre trapping but Berenice Marlohe's Severine follows in the illustrious footsteps, showing up in a completely dispensable role. All that foreplay lead to nothing.
I am disappointed and the tone of this review may appear too negative, but the movie is not all that bad. For one thing, there's a real clarity in the events taking place. Unlike QoS, which I still don't know for sure what it's about, Skyfall benefits from Mendes' confident direction. Too bad he was let down by a script that offers nothing new. Every little idea it dealt with have already been beaten to pulp in Nolan's Batman films. It was hard for me to not get reminded of League of Shadows when M talks about Bond and Silva growing up in the shadows. The "die a hero or live long enough.." position M finds herself in, the ageing hero filled with self-doubt that Bond is, Silva's capture and subsequent escape, a disk with information about all the secret agents, an ex-operative going rogue.. I don't know, it never felt novel. Due to all this mishmash, the entire conversation about the relevance of field agents in the digital age sort of got lost.
His relationship with M, which is at this story's core, surprisingly, had no effect on me. Deakins' cinematography is the only thing I wholeheartedly admired. Movie will probably play better on a second viewing.