No chance of the sky falling in on this franchise JUST yet...

Rating: 7/10 (28 July 2018)

"Skyfall" proves there is life in the James Bond franchise yet. Indeed, shouldn't these films have died a death already? It is remarkable they are still going, in the wake of the culmination of the Cold War; the initiation of the War on Terror; Britain's own changing place on the world stage as a super-power and the ever-changing tastes that cinema-goers have. Just where does Bond, as both a filmic entity and a character within his own universe, fit in to all of this?
The spy thriller demands, when all is said and done, a narrative, but Bond is big-business and very much part of mainstream film culture, which of course isn't interested in narrative. When Daniel Craig sits, pensively, in a gallery staring at a painting of an old warship being tugged away, it doesn't require much thought to work out the allusion. The scene is somewhat spoiled by another character verbally confirming it to us, but there you go. Later on, a scene involving Judi Dench being asked by an obnoxious MP as to what the "point" of her division is anymore should strike us as probably the series' most existential ever moment.
Beginning in Turkey, the film opens with an impressive sequence involving the infiltration of a building; a foot-chase through the dusty streets, which evolves into a car chase, before settling for a battle aboard a freight train as Bond (Craig) and Naomie Harris' Moneypenny strive to reclaim a stolen list of identities of undercover NATO agents. What is striking about this opening, aside from the somewhat awkward moment whereby Bond must 'take-over' driving duties from his female accomplice in order to properly land a fatal blow, is its pessimism - the heroes do not obtain the list; there is no win or quip after all the stunts, just a failure.
This is due to Moneypenny accidentally shooting Bond with a sniper rifle (can she do nothing right?) - he falls from the train and a bridge into a river; director Sam Mendes cleverly transposes the sound effects of the running water whilst focusing on a distraught looking Dench in a wet London as rain teems down the window she looks out of. The first words of the title song we hear thereafter are "this is the end..." We sense then that there is something afoot, and everything thereafter carries with it a strange sense of vulnerability.
Bond is not dead, of course, but utilises his time in the wake of his injury to bed women and engage in nefarious drinking games on a Caribbean island while, back home, M (Dench) is told she's being phased out of her role as head of the division. Intelligence is then hit by a cyber-attack. It is to the film's credit that is sets aside time for Bond's rehabilitation back into being an agent of some stature again instead of making the mistake of merely allowing him to be able to pick up where he left off before an alcohol-fuelled sabbatical.
What is most impressive about "Skyfall" is its ability to be able to look back as well as ahead AND be able to systematically tell a decent story of espionage - Mendes has managed to make a Bond film with an opinion on its own status: it has time for the silver Aston Martin, but doesn't think much of the exploding pen gadget. The film is otherwise peppered with the imagery of our time: an exploding London underground train; characters utilising YouTube and has one eye on the dominant role computer run neural networks have in our world. The idea of 'hackers' as villains might have ended up as stale and silly, but the film pulls it off and it even comes across as quite original.
A mention must go to Javier Bardem for playing the lead villain in the form of Raoul Silva, whose entrance is put to a long unbroken shot of the man entering a large warehouse on a long-since abandoned island that is therefore stuck in time and so clashes with all the tech-savvy equipment around him. As he talks about controlling the world via the Internet, his terminals begin to look like rolls of razor wire stacked up together thus inferring a sense of the impenetrable. If we are surprised that there are degrees of duality between Bond and Silva after a later reveal, we perhaps should not be - Mendes' had already introduced the pair of them at their respective moments in the same manner: with a long, slow pacing towards the camera.
Certainly, after the nature of "Quantum of Solace", which I did not think terrible but appeared plastic and hurried in the wake of "Casino Royale", "Skyfall" brings narrative clarity; genuine excitement and, most importantly, heart back to the series which may exist now in a very different world to the one it was born into, but is nevertheless still able to pack a punch.