Skyfall is a James Bond spy thriller starring Daniel Craig (his third time in the role), Javier Bardem, Judi Dench, Ben Whishaw, Naomi Harris, Ralph Fiennes, Albert Finney, Rory Kinnear, and Bérénice Marlohe.
Bond - James Bond (Craig) - has his usual exciting opening sequence in Istanbul (not Constantinople), during which Moneypenny (Harris) gets out from behind the desk and...accidentally shoots and apparently kills Bond. A few months later, the MI6 building is bombed while M (Dench) looks on, and some shadowy cyberterrorist threatens to release the names and identities of agents every week. Meanwhile, MI6 itself is under investigation and M is being squeezed out by Gareth Mallory (Fiennes), a bureaucrat with a long job title.
Anyway, Bond returns, goes back on active duty despite roundly failing all the exams to do so, pursues the assassin he was trailing in Istanbul, and winds up on an abandoned island with our real Big Bad - Raoul Silva (Bardem), a former agent who was left to die and/or be tortured because M gave him up. His plan is, ultimately, to humiliate and kill M, and we end up with Bond, M, and Bond's family gamekeeper (Finney) on the Bond estate in Scotland (the titular "Skyfall") for a good ol' fashioned Die Hard-esque home invasion/shootout. M dies (spoilers), Mallory succeeds her because he has the proper initial in his name, and Bond returns to duty while Moneypenny gets the hell back behind her desk.
I enjoy this movie; I don't think it's quite my favorite Bond film (I think Casino Royale edges it out for that), but I think it might be the best one in a lot of ways. But I do think it's got a weirdly...conservative, maybe?...vibe to it. This is Dench's last go as M, and she doesn't exactly retire with honors or even die heroically. She bleeds out in a church just after Silva nearly shoots her, she's left MI6 largely in shambles, and the wrap-up scene where Mallory takes over as M has Bond walking past the now firmly out of the field Moneypenny into M's office and calling him "M" for the first time and saying he's ready to get back to work. The vibe is very much "OK, we've been fucking around long enough, now."
Combine that with the repeated idea that comes up in the movie that one can do more damage with a computer than with a bomb, and that the old methods of espionage are quaint and outmoded (and more damaging than helpful), but that the movie ends with a very physical, very analog action sequence involving shotguns and booby traps and explosives. Skyfall feels like a reset in the series, not in continuity (because we have two more movies in this series), but in its priorities and aesthetics. (I kind of want to rewatch Spectre and No Time to Die and see if that continues; it's been a while.)
And then there's Bardem's Silva. I really like the character, and I think they could have done a lot more with him, but he's an unseen presence for the first act of the movie. The scene where he "seduces" Bond likewise could have gone further - if we're to see Bond as someone who will do things that are against his nature in service to Queen and Country, then why not fuck a dude occasionally, regardless of whether that's where his proclivities take him? (Not Silva, though; the situation was very much not that.) Bardem manages to walk the line portraying a character who is intelligent, ruthless, and in control but still broken and chaotic, and that's hard to pull off. (Does his plan actually make sense? Eh, it makes as much as sense as any other Bond villain's, and more sense than most of them.)
Skyfall is uncommon in the Bond series because it seems to be actually about something, rather than just a series of chases, shootouts, and sexy one-liners, and I appreciate that, because I think the days of Bond being goofy but wanting us to take him seriously are probably over. I'm interested to see what the next incarnation of Bond looks like...but since he's now owned by Amazon, I dunno. There's some interesting things to say about corporate takeover of what used to be government business, but we'll see.
My Grade: A-
Rewatch Value: Medium-high
Next up: Taken
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