So, as mentioned earlier I did go see the new Bond movie, SPECTRE, with my friends Jeremy, Clayton, Steven and Moira tonight. I shared Drew McWeeny’s review when he put it online. Hoped he was wrong, hoped that this man who knows the Fleming novels as well as I do had somehow gotten it wrong in his review. Well, he didn’t. McWeeny was right.
I hate to admit it, but screenwriting is dead, at least in mainstream movies. On the drive home I mentioned to Clayton that it’s as if they filmed the synopsis or the notes, and in a rare moment he actually laughed at something I said — because it was true. SPECTRE, like basically any of the worst films in recent memory — Star Trek Into Darkness, The Amazing Spider-Man, any of the Transformers movies — has a series of bullet points that comprise the basic moments of a plot, but no connective tissue. We know things are important because we’re told they’re important, but they have no actual dramatic weight.
Clayton was talking about how he’d love to see the series stop trying to be an action series and be more of a mystery series, which is certainly more faithful to the Fleming novels. He also raised a great point that the reason the chase scene has no weight here is because you know Bond isn’t going to die. He’s on the defensive but you know he won’t die, so he’s going to get away from Dave Bautista sooner or later and there’s no tension. Whereas the chase in Casino Royale had Bond doing the chasing, will he catch them or won’t he is a far more compelling question. Likewise the beginning of Quantum of Solace, with Mr. White in the trunk, the stakes aren’t about Bond but Mr. White. This movie was made by people who don’t get that concept. There’s no drama when there’s no stakes.
The entirety of SPECTRE is a mess. It’s a love note to the late Connery-era, Roger Moore clown acts of yesteryear, with every major beat ripped from a previous entry in the series. By playing Moore-type comedy gags as straight as possible with Craig’s ruthless, haunted badass Bond, it manages to feel so much like self-parody that by the time Christoph Waltz shows up in his Nehru jacket and Chinese slippers, kissing a fluffly white cat, you automatically hear Mike Myers saying, “when Mr. Bigglesworth gets upset, PEOPLE DIE.”
And then, SPOILER ALERT, the film commits its cardinal sin: Blofeld is Bond’s adoptive brother. Blofeld’s daddy was nice to Bond after his parents died, so now Blofeld wants to ruin Bond’s life. He actually goes on record as saying that everything, from Vesper Lynd’s death to M’s, from Casino to Skyfall, was all his doing in order to punish Bond. So now nothing means anything. Bond’s heroics were just self-contained, he was fighting a guy who hates him for no reason this whole time and not just doing his duty to God and country because he’s a hero and that’s what he does. What planet do these people live on that they think this is compelling storytelling?
You know, the best thing about the Bond of Casino Royale and Quantum of Solace is that he was a government assassin who killed people without remorse and often without breaking a sweat. I know that may seem like a twisted sentence, but come on. It’s Bond. He’s an assassin, he’s been conditioned to give no craps. That’s the point of him. I felt in Skyfall that he’d lost his edge, that he didn’t act when he ought to have and it cost some people their lives.
Here we get a Bond who spends half of the cold opening trying to choke out a helicopter pilot while the helicopter is flying, risking an horrific crash that would have killed scores of innocent Dia de los Muertos revelers in Mexico City, and at the end of the movie has his Walther pointed directly at Blofeld’s face on Westminster Bridge from three feet away, and elects not to pull the trigger, but to walk away. Are you kidding me? I know you can’t kill Blofeld, so don’t put Bond in a situation where he has the chance to do it, because the Bond I know would pull that trigger, smile coldly, and go have dinner and a sexy evening with Lea Seydoux. Sam Mendes, John Logan, all of you: WHAT YOU ARE DOING IS NOT STORYTELLING. PLEASE STOP.
And don’t get me started on the theme song and title sequence. We were laughing out loud during this. Not only is Sam Smith’s song six times as painful when you actually have to sit through the whole thing, but the title sequence that goes with it is like a joke. There’s a CGI octopus caressing naked women and naked women caressing a naked Bond who is on fire and staring dead-eyed into the camera. The octopus rides an explosion into the camera and…oh piss on it, there’s no point going on. This isn’t a Bond title sequence, it’s some kind of Japanese porn.
It’s like EON Productions is allergic to making good movies and can only stand to string two of them together at a time before making the stupidest possible crap for the next 6-10 years. I hate to say it, but I may be done with the series. Die Another Day damn near killed it for me, and if they hadn’t rebooted I’d have been done with it then. They had something going that I loved. And they just made me feel like an idiot for having done so. Well, you know the saying. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, and the hell with the lot of you.
