If this is modernity, count me out.

Rating: 3/10 (25 June 2013)

Part of the appeal of the original James Bond, as conceived by Ian Fleming and as depicted in all 007 films up to "Licence to Kill," is the way in which it plays to a sort of quirky imperial British nationalistic chauvinism in its twilight but kept alive and polite by the fact that the successor Great Power was a descendant of England (the United States - more on this later) embroiled in a nasty griplock with one of the most horrific superpowers ever seen (Ronald Reagan may have been a cretin, but unless you're a member of the French Communist Party, which famously reacted to news of the Gulag Archipelago by ignoring it and precipitating its own decline, you must admit his speechwriters certainly got the "evil empire" bit right on the money) - and to a sort of male chauvinism very peculiar to Britain. N.B.: Indiana Jones played on post-war American optimism and nationalist chauvinism in much the same way.
However, owing to cultural changes, "Skyfall" could never have lived up to the best ambiance of the 007 franchise, and the filmmakers' attempts to juice it up with modern meaning only serve to hasten the day of reckoning.
As the 1990s unrolled, overt sophisticated jingoism became increasingly less acceptable in the eyes of polite educated company, and the memory of the Hays Code was distant enough that directors need not fear slipping subversive undertones into their films, provided they steered clear of anything that would too overtly offend most of the inattentive box office-goers whose pockets they yearned to empty. Hence "Goldeneye" could only make it to the box office if it were to be touted the "modernization" of the James Bond movies (replete with hammer-and-sickle symbolism neatly planted into the opening credits of a film in which the protagonist is supposedly anti-communist and a feminist dressing-down of said protagonist), and the newest Indiana Jones movie couldn't depict an anti-communist protagonist without showing that a capitalist was just as bad.
And since "Goldeneye," the 007-series has been well unrecognizable. For if the quirky British and male-chauvinist bent of the old Bond films has a kind of quaint charm as an historical relic that excuses "sophisticated" folk for taking guilty pleasure in them, even a rabid reactionary, if honest, would concede that a similar ambiance could not today be captured on film, at least not in any contemporary setting. It's not just that it would be offensive (and to the professional victim class, it would be), or that it wouldn't be plausible (Bond stories have never had a problem dispensing with the limits of plausibility): it would be completely out of order and cheesily laughable.
Arguably, the wise thing to do would have been to throw in the towel and stop creating new installments for a fictional universe which can no longer proceed from the order of things in Britain or the world. But the 007 franchise was too hot to give its last gasp without cashing in, and so the producers castrated it. All of the quirky charm of Old Britain, with all of its flaws and all of its dignity, is gone. What's left is bloodshed and high-paced action. The problem is that bloodshed and high-paced action are each a dime a dozen in cinema. Accordingly, all Bond films since and including "Goldeneye" were predictably bland and boring.
The producers of "Skyfall" surely understood this, for they decided to turn the formula around and "deconstruct" the classic Bond: giving him emotion, injecting anguish over the deaths of his parents, turning the "Bond Girl" fixation into a weird and stupid and possibly depian mommy-attachment, even hinting at homo-eroticism beneath that aggressive womanizing. Some have praised this turn of events for the literary and cinematic richness it breaths to the film and, by extension, to the script.
Please allow me to respectfully dissent, on the following grounds:
"Deconstructionists" are notorious for taking superficial things and turning them into objects of contemplation. In France there is a well-known psychiatrist who wrote a psychoanalysis of the child's love for a McDonald's hamburger as surrogate breast-food. The bottom line is that James Bond is silly and superficial and just a quirky, personal-fantastic guilty pleasure: while the better-crafted of the novels and classic films certainly showcase a few fun-to-contemplate aspects of culture and the world, they are pure entertainment and have absolutely no didactic value, not even incidentally, not even as libertine works. There is absolutely no fun in seeing them deconstructed, and if one is cone-headed enough to take the the deconstruction seriously, one risks having all the previous films retroactively ruined as well.
In the end, the Bond universe is such that anything that aspires to be anything other than simply entertaining is doomed to abject failure. These ridiculous subtexts are so obviously retrofitted onto the character and setting that one is tempted to see this film as a parody of deconstructionism.
But it gets worse. Because the film is so fixated on its the uninteresting and unamusing themes, it fails to advance a sympathetic or conceivable plot. Nothing makes sense; nothing is put together; no progression can be seen - and so throughout the action scenes that so ungracefully intersperse the postmodern drawl, one cannot feel that sort of breathless tension. One is simply not able to make oneself care.
See "The Hangover part 3" for another example of a recent movie that cut the guts out of a purely entertaining universe to try and tried to inject conscious meaning. This has not been a good season for big-name film franchises. Indeed, one might suspect that even the name "deconstruction" is, minus the "-con-," a harbinger for the future of a civilization which insists upon tearing all its own treasures, even the silly trinkets such as James Bond or The Hangover, to bits. Be old-fashioned. Save your money and rent the old flicks.