Architectural dismay in the James Bond house

Rating: Null/10 (28 December 2015)

One and two star reviews for this are crazy. It's decent, if in a thankless way. The most vivid sense I got is this:
James Bond at this point is like a house full of old things gathered over a long period, maybe things that were hip when new but now a lot of it is just junk. People are too sentimental to throw any of it out and make room, they've been accustomed to coming in and finding all this stuff, but obviously the place call for change, so what do they do? They keep moving furniture around instead.
The same chases across rooftops and down slopes, the same sex scenes, exotic villain and locales, no one dares throw any of it out so it all has to be there, shuffled around from here to there, and can you imagine how aghast some people would be if Bond didn't order his martini shaken? So the line has to be there, the supercar with gadgets has to be there and all of it just obligatory junk at this point.
The problem is that they didn't revamp the whole thing from the ground up when they had the chance; so bringing in new furniture just crams the place more and makes both the old and the new look tackier still. So a villain with his shady organization won't do, there has to be evil that goes all the way up inside the company, Bond is disowned and has to make it on his own. All these designed in Nolan's fashion. The Nolan influence was more pronounced in Skyfall, less so here. But how tacky to contrast good old boys in MI6 with bad new MI6 guys with their tech gizmo? In old Bond we accepted them as good in spite of what they were not because.
In other words nothing here comes from architectural considerations about what would befit a sense of something; it's all just a matter of having all these things and worrying about where to fit them in the space of a story. They began to move a few things out in Skyfall but producers stopped them at the door, so it's all back.
But let's now close the door on this unhappy house, nothing really good will ever come out of it.
What stood out for me this go around were the women. Monica Bellucci is one. Her scene itself is tacky; no sooner has the hero saved her life than he beds her, because see, there have to be "Bond girls". But it was marvelous to see a woman her age presented as a sexual being, giving a sense of maturity, unexpected these days; women's sexual lives don't stop at 40.
The other is Seydoux, fierce and lovely and the only one who manages to evince a sense of conflicted life. A woman who guards herself fiercely but hasn't numbed herself, she will give intimacy another chance. The scenes where she's holed up in a Tangiers hotel with a spy (doesn't have to be Bond) suggest a whole other movie, everything that lies ahead hazy and uncertain.