Confused and poorly executed

Rating: 5/10 (11 November 2012)

This is the worst kind of awful movie and an extreme failure. In this review, keep in mind that the production company blew through $150 million on this thing.
What do we get? Bad acting/directing, poor cinematography and editing, and not to mention an absurd plot, bad screen writing and bad executing in general.
This is a clinic on what not to do when you're making a movie.
*** SPOILERS START ***
Let's start with Bond. This is a bit of a character study because Bond is going through a lot of trials. If executed well, we would have gotten a great character arc of growth and development. However what we get is a Bond that is unable to display any emotion at all. Why do we care about this person? Is he a human or a plank of wood?
What are Bond's motivations? Why is he still in the business? Is he depressed about it? Is he uncertain about his own motives? Is he actually interested in any of the women he meets? Is he lonely? Unfortunately there's no indication. So how can we relate to this character when he seems to have no dimensions and no emotion?
Maybe you don't want this in an action flick, but when you decide that you want a lot of character driven stuff in your movie and you make it 2.5 hours long and don't have many action scenes (there really aren't many) you better have an actor who is acting.
Q. The Q gadgets are absolutely depressing. It's actually a joke in the movie how ordinary Q's inventions are. Why is this good? Remember those whimsical and funny contrivances Q had that would help Bond out of a fix in an amusing or novel way? Yah they decided that wasn't necessary here. So what's the point of having Q at all?
Q presents himself as a 1st class computer hacker. Pop Quiz: what's the best thing to do when beginning a forensic analysis of a foreign computer? Hook it up to the British Intelligence's LAN? Yah you failed. The worst part is, the villain was relying on them to do this as part of his plan. That's right, the villain's circuitous plan depended upon British Intelligence making a mistake they would never do in real life. As a writer, do you write this and then say, "ooh that's awesome!" This is so stupid it hurts. "My new character Q comes off as extremely incompetent - great time to write the next scene!"
The plot is horribly tired. Throughout there is a feeling of been-there done-that. There's not much originality here. But it's not a paint-by-numbers plot like you'd expect, the characters make decisions that don't appear to make sense. The villain's plots are elaborate and nonsensical. Now this may sound like a typical Bond villain, but in this case it's much more immediately elaborate and nonsensical (think sharks with lasers attached to their heads). The responses by M and Bond are equally nonsensical. The movie feels like a patchwork of fail.
There are some pieces of a good movie in here - the Macau part was really interesting - just what you want to see, an intriguing Bond location with gambling, etc. But we are only there for a little bit before getting whisked away to the next location. The action scenes are well done, but even these seem tired, there was nothing really exceptional about them.
The villain seems to be very well executed as a character. His introduction is OK, and he does have an interesting story arc. It's too bad his actions are too illogical for him to be a convincing character.
The cinematography left me wanting. The camera was not dynamic enough, the shots were too tight, there wasn't much composition going on, and the camera placement was disorienting. I could go on quite a bit here, but it's not worth it.
The title sequence with the great hit Skyfall was really good, it's an opening to a movie that I would like to see.
There were not enough femme fatales in the sequence, which is a mistake. I'm sorry but the whole concept of Bond is the male fantasy - beautiful women, cars, guns, parties, beaches, gambling, etc. Traditionally, the sequence features femme fatales more strongly - it's the juxtaposition of beauty and death. To replace this theme with anything else means you don't get it. Although since the movie doesn't really feature a prominent romance (another mistake) I guess it makes sense not to have the female figure displayed prominently in the title sequence.
Instead we have a lot of CGI blood, which hints at the movie's latent theme of betrayal. But this theme is mishandled, Bond seems to completely forgive M for ordering the risky sniper shot, so there is no sense of betrayal or conflict in Bond as there is in the villain. We also get close-ups of Bond's eye, hinting at a potential character study, but we are not allowed into his personal world.
The meaning of the title track (which has a strong message of maintaining dignity during great tragedy - especially "at Skyfall") is not represented in the movie. Indeed Skyfall turns out to be Bond's childhood home, which he's happy to see blown to bits. There is no betrayal, tragedy or regret for Bond in this movie, so why is he so sullen and devoid of life? If you're going to have a brooding Bond, at least give us a reason why.
*** SPOILERS END ***
Why am I extra disappointed in this movie? It's because Rotten Tomatoes and IMDb have both failed me. As of this writing, The Rotten Tomatoes score is 91% and the IMDb score is 8.1. These scores historically suggest a not-to-be-missed movie. Is that what Skyfall is? No.