Miscellaneous Movie Musings the Sequel

[innerSpaceman]

I found Skyfall to be a far better than average Bond movie, but a so-so action movie - which makes it all the more coolsville that such a thing does not prevent it from being that far better than average Bond movie.

Perhaps that's all I should say about it until a few more people have seen it. I respect general spoiler rules during opening weekend. I was not bothered by the omniscience of the truly fun villain. It was stated as a given, and I don't need my Bond movies more serious than that. So I was perfectly pleased when it turned out to be a pretty darn seriously-themed and dramatically well acted film ... not really typical - and very welcome - in this 50-year-long series.

Of the Daniel Craig Bonds, It was not as knockout fun and gangbusters as Casino Royale, but so much better than Quantum of Solace. Bond fans are used to the films being literally hit and miss (not necessary alternating perfectly), so it was nice to have a genuine hit after such a lousy miss.

There are things in the movie leading me to feel this is the last time Daniel Craig will be appearing as James Bond. If so, it's a nice send-off. I liked it.

[Alex]

One of the movie related podcasts I listen to is a BBC radio show and they had Craig on a couple weeks ago. During that he was talking about ideas he has for Bond and hoping to get to collaborate on them, especially with Mendes if he returns.

I was fine with omniscient villain until:

Serious spoilers in here so don't read if you don't want to know.

Spoiler:

He apparently so perfectly planned his escape from MI6 that he had planted an explosive in the roof of an unused station, apparently knowing that Bond would catch up to him in that room and exactly where he would be when it happened and that a train would be coming along at the right time.

A moment of lightly showing the diabolical nature of the villain could have been had if they'd shown him waiting around in that abandoned station until warned that Bond was almost there and then he starts scurrying up the ladder.

Of course, all of that relied on knowing that Bond would shoot at him three times and each time hit a 2 inch wide strip of metal instead of the bad guy.

All the other omniscience didn't bother me*, but at that moment it went a step too far.

*And that is apparently considering that Bardem's diabolical plan was apparently this:

1. Steal hard drive but don't have your guy get away so clean that Bond isn't in pursuit.
2. Arrange that pursuit so perfectly that Bond will be shot by his own team and put out of commission. But first your guy will shoot him with a bullet that will leave shrapnel behind but not fatally or seriously impair him.
3. Wait until Bond has healed enough to implement the next part of the plan.
4. Assume that Bond will return to service after seeing the news.
5. Assume that after six months M will lie so that he can return to service.
6. Assume that Bond will finally have the shrapnel so that it can be used (making sure your bad guy used a type of bullet that apparently only three people in the world use) to track down your bad guy).
7. Arrange a job for your bad guy that hopefully MI6 will learn about from the Americans, who want your bad guy but apparently not enough to pursue him when they know where he is going to be.
8. Assume Bond will be sent to track him down.
9. Assume that once Bond catches up to him he will kill the bad guy rather than capturing him.
10. Assume that Bond will not wonder why a casino chip was actually given a special space in the glass cutter case and smell a trap.
11. Bond will go to that casino and survive an apparently very serious attempt on his life.
12. Bond will offer to kill you so that your sex slave will bring him to you. Bond will then do the extremely creepy thing of announcing his arrival to a woman he deduced has been a sex slave since 12 years old by joining her in the shower.
13. Bond will capture you (not kill you) once on your island. So that you can, from custody, engage in an escape even more improbable than the plan so far.

[Alex]

Oh, one other thing.

There is an island in the movie that I assumed was CGI. It wasn't. So I'm grateful to the movie for making me aware of its existence.

[innerSpaceman]

Heheh, I assumed many of the stunts in the digital age were CGI, but the Bond crew apparently prides itself on doing everything live. This is very impressive for some of the stuff - - but it's too bad most people will just think it's CGI. Double-edged sword that technology is.

Oh, and I didn't mind the product placement in Skyfall, supposedly setting a record number. A lot of ballyhoo has been made of it, and the modern Bond films, in particular, make a habit of it. But the Heinekin beer seemed totally natural, the Sony Vaio logo ditto (though obviously selected as the brand to model), and I never noticed that the motorcycles were Hondas, or any of the other 20 product placement deals that were so lucrative for the studio.

Alex, can you shed some further light on Craig's ideas for Bond, other than quitting?

[innerSpaceman]

Spoilers wherein I discount Alex's problems with plot holes and raise the one that instead bothers me a lot:

Spoiler:

For what it's worth (i.e., I don't think the absurdly perfect plot of Silva merits real dissection), I did not figure his plan relied on Bond specifically, but only that he would allow himself to be captured and taken to London. And I will allow for the tube station roof explosion to be the only part planned, perhaps to cover his tracks or perhaps to thwart any live pursuit, but that the train timing was coincidental in the context of the film ... and such "coincidences" in action films were hardly invented last week for Skyfall.

Spoiler:

No, the one that really bugged me was the elaborate assassination of the dude viewing the painting on the high floor of a skyscraper. Everyone in the room with the target was in on the plot, so why bother having the assassin in a tower across the street? Why not have him in the bedroom or the closet or under the sofa in that very room?

Even if I go so far as to assume the room was secured and the personnel checked for weapons by the cautious target (when nothing in the film eluded to this), it's hard to believe the three of them could not simply kill the target with a bottle or by strangling or by really poor art depression. The complex assassination was just absurd ... and struck me way moreso than the main villain's super-elaborate London plot.

But neither detracted me from the enjoyment of this Bond movie, and rare is the one without absurd plot holes.

[Alex]

Battling spoilers!

Spoiler:

It may not have needed to be Bond specifically but it was only through the actions of Bond that any movements towards Silva's confrontation of M was achieved. Plus not only did he have to get captured but he had to get captured at just the right time so that he'd be transported to London, interrogated, have Q infect the network at just the right moment so that he could escape and not just assassinate M but do so while she was testifying before the parliament committee.

Seriously, it was a plan that make Heath Ledger's Joker look feeble minded.

But the part that bothered you doesn't bother me because it was part of the horribly unlikely and convoluted plan. The assassin needed to be separate from everybody else in on it because the assassin was bait for Bond (or whoever else) so that Bond would find the casino chip and follow it to Macau and from there get to Silva. The thing I wonder is if the assassin knew everybody else was in on it.

And one thing has really settled poorly with me over the last date. One horribly wrong emotional note:

Spoiler:

Seriously, as it has settled, I find Bond getting naked and sneaking up on her and groping here without warning, even though he knew her to be a horribly sexually damaged person. One who, so far as he knew, would consider sexual submission to him the cost of seeing Silva killed. Just a horrible scene from the point of view of what the character of Bond believes he knows at that point and what it says about him that he'd act that way.

That isn't sexually promiscuous it is very nearly sexually predatory. Especially when the next day she is killed and he barely bats an eye. Surely he enjoyed his night with an attractive woman who had learned many great skills in her 20 years of forced sexual labor.

[Alex]

[quote=innerSpaceman;366617]Heheh, I assumed many of the stunts in the digital age were CGI, but the Bond crew apparently prides itself on doing everything live. This is very impressive for some of the stuff - - but it's too bad most people will just think it's CGI. Double-edged sword that technology is.

Alex, can you shed some further light on Craig's ideas for Bond, other than quitting?

No I can't, as I don't remember specifics other than that he was talking about future films and his involvement.

Oh, and I didn't mind the product placement in Skyfall, supposedly setting a record number. A lot of ballyhoo has been made of it, and the modern Bond films, in particular, make a habit of it. But the Heinekin beer seemed totally natural, the Sony Vaio logo ditto (though obviously selected as the brand to model), and I never noticed that the motorcycles were Hondas, or any of the other 20 product placement deals that were so lucrative for the studio.

In that same interview he addressed this, saying essentially: "Look, it costs hundreds of millions of dollars to open a movie globally and you aren't going to get anybody to take the risk if you don't pay for a lot of it up front and we try hard to fit it in naturally."

[innerSpaceman]

Well, Alex, you're interpretation of the plot is so elaborately ridiculous, that it's simply not one I share. Your's requires absolutely every element of chance to fall one particular way. Whereas I'm assuming the villain is playing things much more as-they-go ... meaning the results must be the same, but he adjusts his game based on how things occur in real time, because ...

Spoiler:

... there's no way to have predicted Bond would be the victor in the fight with the Shanghai skyscraper assassin, or that he'd even be in place at that moment, much less that he'd be shot by future Moneypenny and knocked off that train, or that he'd even be shot with the uranium bullets that ultimately led him to the assassin in Shanghai. Counting on all that happening is just so insane ... and so I believe it's far less of a stretch to assume Silva is adjusting to events as they happen, but is prepared to be captured by Bond or whoever MI6 sends after him, however that plays out.

The timing of new-Q's computer investigation is pretty much tied to his captivity (i.e., Q would attend to that as soon as practical), so I find Silva's plot much less of a stretch as it gets closer to execution.


* * * * *

If the Art-Lover assassination was all an elaborate trap for Bond, then he's the stupid one for falling for it. Or, at the very least, the film never implied Bond was following the clues even though a trap was likely. That kind of thing can be done with a facial expression in a proper shot, so it's absence was telling. Also, as I said above, the outcome of a fight between Bond and the same assassin he lost to last time could hardly have been a given.

It works better for me if it's not a trap, but rather a real series of clues. And that also could have been established with a single shot of Femme Fatale's face in the Art-Lover's target suite. The people in the room could all have been properly freaked out by the shooting, and she could have shown in a filmed glance that her freak-out was fake (see, e.g., Catwoman's similar revealed play-acting in the recent Batman finale).

Lazy filmmaking is what I chalk it up to. Plot holes that can be remedied with a single shot of an actor's face, but are not ... that's one of my movie pet peeves.

[Alex]

Spoiler:

No, it was all plan. He had explosives set in a specific room. He had a very specific moment planned for when he'd assassinate M. All of required knowing, before he was captured the exact moment he'd escape from MI6. He had two fake cops in a tube station set to hand him his disguise at a specific moment in time. he had a car waiting at a specific spot at a specific moment to take him to parliament.

All of this ha to have been planned before he was captured since he never communicated with anybody after that. And not just knowing that he would be captured but exactly when he'd be captured because everything about the latter half of the plan was extremely time specific.

And to know when he'd be captured with such specificity he'd have to have even manipulating Bond (or whatever agent ended up on his tail) from the beginning.

Now, perhaps he didn't know Bond was alive, but ten the curious question would be why Silva waited months after capturing the drive to begin phase two of humiliating M before killing her.

The problem beyond excessive villainous omniscience is that the events make even less sense without it.

[Alex]

Spoiler:

and talk about omniscience, his entire escape plan required knowing that MI6's top computer expert would jack an unknown computer, recovered from someone who had already cracked every computer security system they had, directly into th MI6 network.

Predicting that level of idiocy is true omniscience.

Damn, you're talking me into liking it a lot less than I did at the time.