Respond to these rapid questions in our Spectre quiz and we will tell you which Spectre character you are. Play it now.
The James Bond films have never been known for their originality, and this trend has never changed. Even in the 1960s, they were essentially superhero movies starring an indestructible character who wore street clothes (and the occasional wet suit) instead of tights and a cape. In addition, they wore street clothes instead of a cape. He dashed, leaped, drove, and flew through loosely connected setpieces that borrowed whatever action movie cliches were popular at the time and amplified them with more beautiful locations, bigger explosions, cornier jokes, and lush, loud music composed by John Barry. It was only a matter of time before the producers of the Bond films went the extra mile and started modeling the franchise after the Batman and Marvel franchises. Given the lineage of the franchise, it was only a matter of time. The recent superhero movies featured intricate world-building and subplots that were layered like an onion and spread out over a number of films and years. Their idea owed a significant debt of gratitude to comic books as well as to serialized television shows like “24.” (James Bond by way of “Die Hard”). The previous three Bond films by Daniel Craig drew from all of those traditions, as well as Bond’s own unique set of cliches, and they prepared the way for the upcoming fourth outing starring Craig, “Spectre.”
Quantum of Solace, the second Craig Bond film, built a convoluted narrative scaffolding atop 2006’s “Casino Royale.” “Casino Royale” is the best film in the over fifty-year-old Bond franchise, and it is the only one that would satisfy even if the main character were named Oswald Chutney. Bond’s one true love, Vesper Lynd (Eva Green), was killed off in the final act of “Royale,” which set the stage for an emotionally burned-out, extra-icy Bond investigating a global conspiracy in “Solace,” which turned out to be connected to the villains he fought in “Royale.” The events of “Spectre” take place in the wake of the destruction of MI-6 in the previous Bond movie. It retroactively forces connections between “Royale,” “Solace,” and “Skyfall,” by way of a video-recorded warning sent to Bond by his old boss M (Judi Dench) right before she died, urging Bond to follow the trail from Mexico City to Italy to Morocco and beyond, and dig to the bottom of the conspiracy that claimed the lives of so many agents. “Royale,” “Solace,” and “Skyfall” are all referenced in the warning
It feels like everything that the franchise has been working toward since Daniel Craig took over the role of James Bond in “Casino Royale” has been brought to fruition in this film. The most recent iteration of James Bond is more than just a collection of stunts, quips, gadgets, and curvy women with pornographic names. It has a tragic orphan background story (repeated via the death of Dench’s matriarchal figure, who is even called “Mum”), an Alfred-the-butler figure (Albert Finney in “Skyfall”), and a Joker-type bad guy (Javier Bardem’s fey torturer). All of this is thanks to “Skyfall,” which has a mythology that turns Bond into Batman minus the cape and cowl. It
If you enjoyed all of that, you are going to absolutely adore “Spectre,” which brings back the organization with the same name from the James Bond films starring Sean Connery. There are “ret-cons” in the form of subplots, characters, and incidents, as the term is used by fans of the genre. And it gives us our first look at a new major antagonist, Franz Obenhauser (Christoph Waltz), also known as Ernst Stavro Blofeld. Please don’t act surprised by this revelation; neither of us was born yesterday! This new (really old) villain makes Javier Bardem’s character in “Skyfall” seem like a junior Joker at best, if that. At the very least, this is the impression that is given. He goes so far as to trick James Bond into entering a derelict building that he has turned into a combination of a haunted house and a gallery installation. By the time the story is over, he has a scar that is on par with the gruesomeness of the Joker’s mouth disfigurement.
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This could be wonderful, or at the very least, intriguing, if “Spectre” were a fantastic movie, or even just a consistently good one. But overall, it’s a strangely patchy and frequently lifeless picture. Because they are so costly and extensive, the Craig Bonds can’t help but impress with their sheer magnitude. And every once in a while, they come up with striking images, such as the silhouettes of James Bond and an adversary grappling in front of neon signage in “Skyfall,” or the overhead shot of James Bond entering the bombed-out ruins of MI-6 headquarters in “Spectre,” preceded by a shadow that is four times as long as he is tall. However, after a couple of hours have passed since you’ve watched “Spectre,” the movie will begin to fade from your memory, just like “Skyfall” and “Solace” did before it. It has a lot of big sets, big stunts, and other things that are supposed to be big moments, but very few of them actually work.
What exactly is the issue? Perhaps it’s something in the script. It is credited to a murderer’s row of gun-for-hire writers, but it doesn’t seem to be able to come up with anything other than generic chases, fights, and quips that are pieced together by exposition that is undercooked even by Bond standards. Similar to Christopher Nolan’s Batman, James Bond appears whenever and wherever he is needed and manages to evade certain death whenever it is required of him, all without leaving any hints as to how he did it. And even by the standards of James Bond, which are “damn the rules” and “full speed ahead,” the character is such a suitcase nuke in a cable-knit sweater that it’s difficult to see him as England’s (or the West’s) disreputable protector. However, in order to root for Bond, you pretty much have to see him in this light. (Omelets, eggs.) Bond creates an international incident in the pre-credits sequence, which results in him being suspended for the umpteenth time; when he argues that the terrorists he was trying to foil would have caused more damage, he sounds like a parody of the kind of hero who would say such things, and the audience laughs at him. At least when Tom Cruise offers similar defenses in the “Mission: Impossible” movies (the most recent of which has a plot not hugely different from this one’s, come to think of it), it is meant to be ludicrous and frothy, and not burdened with self-righteous anguish.
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It’s also possible that the issue lies within the production itself. The crew includes “Skyfall” director Sam Mendes, production designer Dennis Gassner, and cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema (“Interstellar”), and they fill the screen with deserts and lakes and forests and mountains and historic skylines and converging perspective lines and tastefully arranged rectangles-within-squares and shallow planes of focus (the movie often seems to be in 3-D even though it’s not), but too often ends up looking rather like a Super Bowl advertisement
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Or, and this is where the heresy comes in, maybe the issue is with Craig’s performance. Pierce Brosnan had his moments, even though the scripts were even less inclined to support his efforts than they were less inclined to support Daniel Craig’s. He might be the most deadpan actor to play James Bond, and he probably comes closer than anyone else to making the character seem plausibly human. You may be wondering what the point is because the character has become increasingly opaque and recessive over the course of the film, to the point where Mendes and company seem less interested in Bond as a cold but complex person and more interested in Bond as a sculptural object to light and pose. This particular Bond is a wiry husk of a man who is puckering his lips and staring off into the hazy horizon. He has taken on the persona of the narrator from Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven,” only this version is armed. Because the actor and the writers give us so little to grasp onto, it is difficult to even get a sense of how James Bond is feeling, let alone feel those feelings along with him. By the end of “Spectre,” we are supposed to believe that James Bond has developed a genuine attachment to his love interest, Madeleine Swann, played by Lea Seydoux (nice double Proust reference there). Even though she correctly notes that she had been living in hiding for years until Bond led the bad guys straight to her, she still returns the craggy killer’s affection. She does this despite the fact that Bond led the bad guys straight to her. However, neither the way Bond is written in this movie nor the way Daniel Craig plays the role of Bond in the movie give any indication that the character is capable of investing in anything more emotionally taxing than a martini made with house vodka.
Or perhaps the issue is simply a lack of interest in the past. Even the better parts of “Spectre,” such as a close-quarters fistfight on a passenger train between James Bond and a thick-necked henchman (Dave Bautista of “Guardians of the Galaxy”), and a mostly wordless, almost one-take stalking/assassination sequence set during a Day of the Dead parade in Mexico City, are disappointing when compared to their Bondian inspirations (respectively, “From Russia with Love,” and “Live and Let Die” by way of “Octopussy”). The producers of “Spectre” have given us their word that the film is chock full of references to previous James Bond movies. That’s fantastic if your primary motivation for going to the movies is to hunt for Easter eggs in the form of obscure references to characters, settings, and objects. However, it’s not so great if you’re inclined to take the filmmakers of these films at their word and expect a Bond film like “Casino Royale,” something with more brains and nuance than the usual, as opposed to a film that purports to be that kind of movie but is content to posture and strut rather than doing the necessary dramatic spadework.
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Whatever the explanation(s) may be, the fact remains that “Spectre” is the third James Bond film in a row to write conceptual and dramatic checks that the film itself is unable to cash. It’s gotten to the point where it’s more fun to speculate about what will happen in these movies than it is to actually watch them. The media campaigns are typically more devious and full of unexpected twists than anything that makes it onto the screen. This movie received praise for being politically correct for casting Monica Bellucci as Bond’s first age-appropriate lover (she is two years older than Craig), but “Spectre” itself wastes her in two scenes before switching to Lea Seydoux, who is 30 years old. He makes a memorablely nasty entrance by blinding a rival with his thumbs, but after that, he is nothing but sneers, punches, and kicks. Blofeld’s chief henchman is a bust, just a muscleman in a suit. Even Blofeld ends up being useless. Waltz, who tends to give the same performance over and over with minor variations but at least has the decency to be a hoot each time, is in “Spectre” only slightly longer than Bellucci, and he has been drained of the glee he displayed in Quentin Tarantino’s films. Bellucci is the only other member of the cast to have a significant amount of screen time. The conclusion to the storyline involving his character is so ridiculous that it makes the “twist” in “Star Trek Into Darkness” seem thoughtful and genuine in comparison. Bond’s response when he finally gets the drop on his adversary is to act even more stupid than usual. It makes more sense to buy bags of Scrabble tiles.
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Even the film’s visual style gives the impression that it will fulfill certain expectations. A creepy Cubist study in voyeurism and fear, powered by nightmare logic and silhouettes and moments of physical violation; Bond by way of “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari” or Fritz Lang’s Dr. Mabuse films; between the numerous mirror and reflection shots, the surveillance screens, and the wall-mounted cameras, and Christoph Waltz’s all-seeing, all-knowing villain, we are tacitly promised the first James Bond horror movie. Beyond its novelty, such an approach would have made the film’s instances of slipshod plotting feel more cohesive, similar to how Nolan tells the “because I said so” story in his Batman movies.
But of course “Spectre” won’t be able to give that to us, as James Bond movies are products before they are anything else, and it’s against the rules for products to challenge or upset consumers. This movie would have a lower star rating than it does now if Mendes hadn’t been so creative in coming up with new ways to stage the same old moments. Even by the generous standards of Bond movies, which have been graded on a curve ever since 1962, “Spectre” has to be considered a missed opportunity.
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