Director: Sam Mendes
Talent: Daniel Craig, Judi Dench, Javier Bardem, Ralph Fiennes
Release date: 26th October 2012
Skyfall, on the back of a broad-ranging marketing campaign in which various brands have been conspicuously aligned with Bond’s and whispers of “best Bond ever!” have leaked from the well-recompensed mouths of major media organs, promised to be a reinvigoration (again!) of a franchise whose last outing, the bombastically titled Quantum of Solace, mired in production by the Writers’ Guild strike and the uninspired casting of Mathieu Almaric as a rather unimpressive corporate villain, did away with the public and critical goodwill engendered by 2006’s Casino Royale. And if that earlier, high-profile reboot of the Bond franchise “reinvented” its protagonist for a modern, post-Bourne audience, then Skyfall attempts to do the same for a world post-Bond: much as in this year’s The Dark Knight Rises, our hero is broken before dramatically “resurrecting” himself to face a swarthy villain (here a Raoul Silva, played by Javier Bardem) whose primacy and command of his environment—Silva is a computer genius of near mythical capabilities, able to manipulate and sabotage MI6, the Met and the London Underground—demands a rethinking of the heroic apparatus. The stage is set for another reinvention and, indeed, Mendes’ film carries itself with a revolutionary hubris for its entire second half, assured of itself both as a Bond film and, supposedly, as a comprehensive reassembling of the format—except that this rather self-conscious reassembly is a “back to basics” Bond, eschewing gadgetry and wit for grit and individual nous (one might fairly say that this has been the general project of Craig’s Bond in both of his previous films, though here it is presented, again, as a progression). Just as Christian Bale’s Batman defeats Bane by “punching harder”, so too does Bond rely on his baser instincts to combat Silva, in a Highland skirmish far from the influence of modern technology or Vesper martinis.
Before its climactic and uncharacteristic battle, in which Bond is placed under siege in a dilapidated manor that once belonged to his parents—yes, the “therapeutic” or purging aspect of this is lingered upon with little subtlety—by Silva and his mercenaries, the machinations of The Bond Film, as it has come to be understood, are worked through dutifully and with some imagination. A scene in which Bond ambushes an assassin in an empty, high-rise, commercial building in Shanghai while fluorescent, animated street-lighting and advertising reflect off its myriad glass surfaces is visually pleasing while playing with the filmic space in an intelligent, slightly bewildering way. But while Mendes shows flair in individual scenes, his treatment of the film as an addition to an oeuvre is distinctly lacking in such perspective. Skyfall’s tonal assuredness of its radicalness is at odds with its material content, in which all the most objectionable and reactionary tendencies of the Bond franchise return with great conviction.
Sévérine (Bérénice Marlohe) appears, is attracted to Bond and is murdered by the possessive Silva so quickly as to be an afterthought. The fact that she tearfully predicts her own demise may appear to be self-consciousness on the filmmakers’ part—and this is a self-conscious film—though cinematic fate surely need not spell death for all “dangerously attractive” women (and does the phrase “Bond girl” not bring up bile with its every utterance?), with resistance to the notion limited to a Sisyphean irony. Depictions of “The East” retain, too, the series’ quintessential Orientalism: a place of trickery, unnatural decoration and deceit, in which the British hero’s movement is impeded at every turn by foreign agents. That this otherness should in itself spell villainy is a mutually-acknowledged shorthand, certainly, and as the film progresses, the “safe spaces” for our hero become fewer and fewer, the inexorable creep of “villainy” that is no great cognitive leap from alignment with contemporary British far-right ideologues as they bemoan the “creeping Sharia” promised them by an alien doctrine of multiculturalism. At the same time, the work of MI6, asBritish intelligence, is held in almost divine regard, with a put-upon M. (Judi Dench) forced to defend her job—and with it the spying institution itself—in a show trial (how petty these litigious, governmental types!) and delivering a speech, Jimmy Stewart style, almost directly to the audience, asking “how safe do you really feel?”. An entire fiction is created to support such racially-tinged paranoia! So what of the old is cast off, then, in this reactionary reinvention of Bond?
The idea of The Bond Film is, clearly, fundamental to our understanding of any individual example of it. It is for this reason that charges of misogyny or Orientalism, as detailed above, might be readily met with “well, what did you expect? It’s a Bond film!” It is telling, then, that it is the more objectionable traits of the series are the ones gladly institutionalised and allowed to reinvent themselves in perpetuity through the unassailable logic of patrimony, without any great resistance from the viewer. So too does M’s defence of clandestine intelligence operations shift the parameters of the discussion from the moral, from establishing British interests as fundamentally good and against the evil of others, to questioning the safety of the public they serve! If Skyfall is not appealing self-consciously to transcendent notions of tradition to support its misogyny, racism and chauvinism, it’s greasing the wheels of interventionism by calling into question the mortal safety of the British public.
What did you expect, then? Probably something like this, though it’s time our expectations of the objectionable ceased to soften our hearts to such perfumed imperialism.
