Skyfall

To grow up, a man who never did must go back to where he was a boy again. So it is with James Bond. And so it must be with the multi-million-dollar movie franchise’s latest 007 venture, Skyfall.

This is easily the best movie about the most influential fictional secret service agent ever. Post-Roger Moore era, though. It’s almost the equal of From Russia With Love and some of the other Sean Connery 007s. A direct comparison would be fruitless and a disservice to the talents of both Connery and Daniel Craig. Both reflect their times best. Connery, with till then unseen gadgetry and post-war rationing, was ahead of his time, whereas in Skyfall Craig must fall back behind the times.
MI6 is under attack. A rogue British agent-turned-cyberterrorist engineers an explosion at the MI6 headquarters at Vauxhall Cross soon after a list of undercover agents is stolen and put out, five names at a time, on YouTube. The perils of the Digital Age. As the compromised agents begin dying, it becomes clear that the target is more M than MI6, the foreign intelligence agency she runs with the ruthlessness of a woman nearing retirement and the warmth, to 007 at least, of a mother he scarcely knew. Bond will forgive her anything, even a high-velocity rifle bullet in the shoulder. “Regret,” M says, “is unprofessional.” Judi Dench, superb as always as M, is talking about the shot that nearly took her celebrated agent out of the reckoning.
This film has everything, from tightly masked emotion eventually laid bare to loss to punchy action. The fight sequences are short, intense poems of brain and muscle in harmony, somewhat like a muscular ballet without the tights. Pretty bone-crunching stuff. The car chases, and the motorcycle and train stunts? Well, it is James Bond. He’s human. But nobody does it better.
A funereal sombreness pervades the film, as if to reinforce M’s belief that life and the meting out of death still belong in a world of shadows where, ultimately, the human element is supreme, and not the bits and bytes of the modern world we inhabit. This is a Bond of an older vintage, one closer to what his creator, Ian Fleming, intended. To achieve that vintage, the film goes back in time, to the old days and the old ways, a world in which a knife had the same finality as a bullet and the killing was up close and personal, and not at the click of a mouse on a computer far away. It is tinged with a sadness that hasn’t been seen since Louis Armstrong sang We Have All the Time in the World as Bond wept in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service.
Director Sam Mendes has been daring, digging deep into the bullet-marked body of Bond to find a soul scarred by death. He reveals a Bond of flesh and bone and sinew, who bleeds like anyone else, but quietly, and that the pain glimpsed only fleetingly behind the cold grey eyes is real. This is where Craig scores.
“Pathological rejection of authority,” reads the MI6 psychological evaluation. Most of what Bond fans have grown to love is there. But, given the old ways, there isn’t too much gadgetry. How do you amaze an audience grown accustomed to iPhones and other marvels? All he gets is his Walther PPK, albeit activated only by his palmprint, and a good old-fashioned radio transmitter. “Not exactly Christmas,” Bond says with disappointment to Ben Whishaw, playing the bespectacled boffin Q, who, 007 thinks, is far too young to be the new Quartermaster. “Were you expecting an exploding pen? We don’t really go in for that anymore,” replies Q, who believes he can do more damage with a laptop and coffee while still in his pyjamas than 007 can do in a lifetime blowing up things all over the world. Bond smiles wryly. Experience over youth, old ways against the new.
The timbre of Adele’s voice in the eponymous theme song brings back the past as well. The audience will be reminded of the power and grace that Shirley Bassey brought to Diamonds Are Forever and the husky wanting of Sheena Easton when she sang For Your Eyes Only.
Craig excels at the almost proverbial Bond banter. “How much do you know about fear,” asks the mysterious Severine, played by Berenice Lim Marlohe. “All there is,” replies Bond, very seriously. “WIll you kill him?” she asks. “Someone usually dies,” is the answer. And unflinching lip when faced with an unpleasant prospect. “What’s yours,” is a question the villain asks him about his hobby. “Resurrection,” 007 answers. Always pithy, never camp, never flippant. Bond has lost some of the quintessence of 007 but he appears to have realised that life and death are not always to be laughed at. He doesn’t do the shaken, not stirred bit, still shaves with a straight razor, and his suits are immaculate, his little protest against a vulgar world.
Javier Bardem is very, very good as the antagonist, Raoul Silva. Just one complaint. The writers should have given him as grand a stage as that occupied by a Blofeld, or an Auric Goldfinger, or even a Scaramanga. But he makes up with an excellent display of a tortured mind seeking payback and a mouth as black as the inside of a mamba’s. What’s missing is the arch-villain’s main heavy, Oddjob in Goldfinger or Nick Nack the giggly dwarf in The Man With the Golden Gun. And no punny Bond girl names either. While on the subject, the viewer will meet a young Eve Moneypenny and discover why 007 is perfectly happy that she chooses to stay put behind a desk. Ralph Fiennes’ is a transitional role. You will see more of him.
The shoots take you from Istanbul to Shanghai and Macau to London to the shattering climax on a moor of heather and bracken, a vast emptiness where you can see sky meet earth.
James Bond is 50 this year, though, in his world, never over 38. Sam Mendes intends his riveting work, the 23rd in the Bond series, to be as much a film of our times as it is of the past. It is apparent when M recites the last verse of Tennyson’s Ullyses to convince a ministerial intelligence committee that the old ways are needed: Tho’ much is taken, much abides; / and tho’ / We are not now that strength which / in old days / Moved earth and heaven, that / which we are, we are; / One equal tempo of heroic hearts, / Made weak by time and fate, but / strong in will / To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
And never more so than in the porcelain bulldog with the Union Jack on M’s desk that survives everything. It is a reminder of Britain’s wartime past, of Churchill, of survival.
This is Bond’s finest hour. Watch the film.