So I definitely thought it was a success. Here are a few issues, though.
1. Boy, the politics of this movie! Hard to remember a more conservative movie. Reactionary, really. It's intelligently tied into the "return to the Bond roots" stuff which I mentioned as a strength, but everything in the movie seems to posit the preference for the old ways, in both the practical and the social spheres. The explicit text is about the preference for old-fashioned techniques of human intelligence over their digital intermediaries; the hotshot Q mostly mucks things up. More disturbingly, the movie is straightforwardly anti-civilian oversight, treating the politicians who question M and MI6 as ineffectual bureaucrats, despite the fact that M and MI6 very clearly did fuck up, fairly horrendously. (Honestly, the villain is pretty justified in his quest for vengeance, given what M admits to doing to him.) The less explicit politics are just as disturbing.
I mean, just look at what we've achieved by the end of the movie: the call by public officials for more oversight into an espionage organization has been rejected, and the autonomy of MI6 re-established. The emasculating bitch of a boss, having been demonstrated to be incompetent in physical combat, has been dispatched; in her place stands a rigid man, who proved his righteousness by showing that he knows how to shoot a gun, and was revealed (natch) to have worked against the revolutionary forces of the IRA. The woman who wanted to be a badass field agent has instead been relegated to the role of secretary. The mincing gay villain-- who has mommy issues, naturally-- has been defeated. In a church! I thought it was clever how Bond turned around Silva's attempt to induce gay panic, and in a different movie I wouldn't mind playing the villain as over-the-top queer. But when you combine it with the general retrograde urge, it's pretty off-putting. All in all, in both text and tone, the message of the movie is "go back to the past."
None of that is a comment on the movie's quality, and it didn't really bother me while I watched it. Certainly not in the way that, for example, Zero Dark Thirty did, for obvious reasons. I can safely ignore a Bond movie's politics. I'm just saying, when you break it down, it's kind of crazy.
2. The idea that you can narrow depleted uranium ammunition down to only three guys in the world = lulz.
3. Can we talk about the whole "the villain meant to get captured" trope in movies? I think this is a good example of why it doesn't really work. Bardem's character is one of those villains who plans everything down in absurd detail. His plan involves himself getting captured intentionally, which has become something of a well-worn plot point. But think about it. James Bond has to fend off the bodyguards at the casino, getting the help of a very timely Komodo dragon bite just to survive. If he hadn't gotten that lucky, Silva's incredibly complex plan would have been ruined. The dictates of action movies tells us that the hero(es) have to be in constant danger. But the intentional-capture trope requires that the villains let the hero(es) win, temporarily. That produces consistently implausible scenarios, where the hero just barely survives despite that survival being the key to the villain's plot.
I know that some people want to say that plot holes and inconsistencies just don't matter. But I'm afraid I can't go along. I don't think that praise for intricate and satisfying plotting can mean anything if it isn't balanced with criticism for bad. To value a movie like Chinatown for its incredible script, to me, requires taking plot holes seriously. There's of course plot holes that matter and those that don't. I mean, you wouldn't actually have Komodo dragons in a casino, right, but who cares? It's cool and funny. What I do care about, though, is inconsistency in character behavior. Bardem's character plans everything down to an incredible degree, to the point that he knows where to put explosives to force a train to fall on James Bond, which he must have done ages in advance. But then his initial plan to kill M involved shooting his way into a government building with a bunch of dudes and killing everyone with handguns.
Now that I'm thinking about it... why did Silva get himself captured at all? Like what does that accomplish for him? Is it just to have a conversation with M? There are doubtless easier ways! You might think it's to pull off the hacking job, but the only thing he does with that hacking is to escape... from the cell that he got himself thrown into on purpose. Then he just leaves and party crashes a public hearing that he very easily could have just shown up to anyway without getting captured or getting James Bond involved at all. Man. Now that's a plot hole.
4. I think the thing about doing an "edgy" Bond is that you should be consistent about it. Yes, jetpacks and such are pretty silly. That's kind of what I'm after with James Bond, but I don't mind that the movies have gone in a different direction. But is it really more adult to have the aforementioned Komodo dragon? Or, even worse, the casino chip which represents the payment for the hitman, which he conveniently packed in his murder briefcase, and which is actually labelled "Macau"? (My brother pointed out that it's like a Carmen Sandiego clue.) The problem with saying that you're going for a darker take is that it makes your sillier decisions seem more silly. Like having Bond grab onto the bottom of an elevator and go up a hundred stories, risking his life to chase after a villain, and then have him just watch and wait for ten minutes before actually attacking the guy. I mean he even lets a murder go down. (That was a definite "when keeping it real goes wrong" moment for me.) If you have the time to just wait, why not just grab the next elevator? My issue with the edginess is its inconsistency.
5. Everybody said that Adele and James Bond were a perfect match, and everybody was right. Great song, and a classic Bond abstract credit sequence.
6. The Bond continuity here is really weird. As others have mentioned, the notion that "James Bond" is a title that gets handed down from agent to agent over time is pretty much murdered in this movie. We learn that Bond is his real name, as we learn the names of his dead parents. (Silva is a codename, which is sensible, but James Bond is just James Bond.) That's fine as far as it goes. But introducing the classic car is kind of crazy. It's done up just like the car from Goldfinger. So did this Bond experience the events of that film? Why the hell else would he have a classic Aston Martin with built-in machine guns, especially since he so dislikes gadgets? But if that's true, and he lived through that movie... well, then it's a whole can of worms, isn't it? For example, wouldn't it be odd that there's a new secretary named Moneypenny that he bangs?
7. Do you think they made Ralph Fiennes look fat for this, or is Ralph Fiennes just fat now?
Hmmm. I may have talked myself out of this movie. I still like it! But it has tons of problems.
Update: With the continuity talk, I should point: I know that the Bond movies have never cared about continuity, which I dig. I'm just saying, when you introduce the old Bond car... where did it come from, exactly?
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