Skyfall

Cinema these days seems to be obsessed by numbers. How many people have seen a film, how much did it make, how many Oscars did it win? We also see now that this is the 23rd Bond film, or the 25th, the series has been going for 50 years. That’s fifteen more than Star Wars, with six films, soon to be seven. Bond seems far more prolific even though the Quantum of Solace seems so long ago now and seemed such a long film as well.


On the other hand Skyfall seems to fly by. As with the Bonds of old the locations stack up, Istanbul, somewhere in South East Asia, Shanghai, Macau and the London Underground, etc. He visits a casino, he drinks a vodka martini, he’s given gadgets by Q, all as you would expect. In all the years of the Bond films he’s met with the uber-villain and has had a verbal spar with them. I don’t recall thigh caressing and overt flirting between them, hello!

In Sam Mendes’s hands as well we have a bit more character development of Bond and M. This is all a bit curious though as we were presented with a new agent in Casino Royale and now we have this grizzled old agent in this film. Judi Dench develops her role as M for mother, but then M has always been able to make Bond feel like a naughty schoolboy. I would say more but then I would be shot for it.

I did enjoy the film; it is after all at the top end of recent Bond films. I did also keep being reminded of the World Is Not Enough, Bond back story, M back story, Istanbul, explosions. The World Is Not Enough had Scots playing Russians; Skyfall has an Irishman playing a Scot. That’s not unique in the history of Bond though.

The film is as well beautifully shot, there are some gorgeous shots of Scotland, breath-taking views of Shanghai and exhilarating sequences in Istanbul. I also loved how the seeds were sown for Bond films in the future as well as reaching back to the past. It was also good to see a classic Aston Martin back, even though it was really shoe horned in. Bond has some of his swagger back, but this film also retains some of the recent seriousness, therefore reflecting today’s serious times, to an extent.