Reaction: Skyfall
I've been gone away for ever, but now that I finally have time, I've been . . . watching movies.
James Bond movies: This was about 318 times better than any James Bond movie I've ever seen. This isn't saying much, as I haven't seen many (all the Pierce Brosnan and Daniel Craig ones, and one or two Sean Connerys) and the ones I've seen I didn't like very much. Bond movies aren't really my thing. I don't care about action, I don't care about things blowing up, I don't care about gadgets or cars, I tend not to go for slick and suave heroes, I don't usually find the aesthetic they cast for hot. Mostly the only thing I care about is characterization, and Bond movies don't tend to have much of that.
This one had a lot, imo. Specifically it had the characterizations that I go for, which I have seen hints of in James Bond's character before, but never really got teased out much. Usually a line or two suggests it, which is probably the main thing that's kept me coming back (besides friends/family who are keen), but I feel like those lines are promises that don't deliver. This movie delivered that characterization, albeit with all the subtlety of a sledge hammer.
Credits: I lol'ed.![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
my_daroga lol'ed. We didn't understand why the whole theater wasn't lol'ing. Seriously, the Phantom of the Opera made those credits. Or like, a teenager who thinks she's the anti-Twilight fan but really loves it deep down. I mean, you can not do velvet red turning into dripping blood over gravestones growing out of the teeth of a skull made of smoke and suddenly statues of bucks without me thinking you're hilarious. LOLWUT. I actually found the song weirdly appealing, though.
Q: He was really cute. Not sure what the fuss is about. Didn't notice any particular chemistry with Bond, sadly.
Severine and feminism: This character was pointless. Her death was pointless, her sex slavery was pointless, her shower sex with Bond was pointless, and all these things taken together are offensive and somewhat upsetting, as those three points are 1) her entire character, and 2) the entire character of enough girls in films that it's time to do something different already. I hope it is obvious that I don't blame Severine herself, but rather the fact that film makers apparently need to use the tropes of sex, sex slavery, and death over and over again in order to make narrative points in movies.
Now, that said. Treatment of women in Bond movies is fairly notorious, by which I mean Bond girls are often sex kittens or crazy villains or both, and often die. I don't really think this was any worse. And while I really, really dislike the insignificance of her character and her mistreatment, and thus her death, I like it more than if they had used her death as the catalyst for some kind of revenge etc. Basically I'm more tired of females as a catalyst for revenge than I am as females as insignificant plot points; that's my personal issue, not anyone else's.
Ralph Fiennes: Why was he in this movie? I didn't know Judi Dench was quitting. I thought he was going to be the icky bureaucrat, but then he ended up being willing to help out. I liked the surprise and I liked Fiennes, but I was still waiting for him to actually do something. Which he didn't. I mean, besides be a badass at the end; what I mean was I was waiting for there to be a point with him, and apparently the point was just to replace Judi Dench?
The British government (and Narcissa Malfoy) and meta: I did like the inquest or whatever it was about M, because it was more than about just M. It was basically taking the whole Bond franchise and saying, "How does this fit into a modern context? Is this movie still relevant? And by extension--how transparent should government be, are there secrets that need to be protected, what do the people have the right to know?" In the light of WikiLeaks and other events, the fact that a movie like this decided to ask these questions is very, very interesting.
Sometimes, I get uncomfortable when these kinds of questions get asked. The Dark Knight and Doctor Who frustrate me, because they ask these great questions about power and who should have it, but then seem to supply answers when I don't think there are correct answers, and if there are, they aren't as easy as these fictional texts seem to suggest. That said, the questions were asked lightly enough in Skyfall that I am less disturbed and rather more impressed that they brought them up at all. Also, so far, I haven't heard anyone saying, "Wow, Skyfall asks important questions about the place of government!" and part of what really bothered me about TDK was people felt like it really addressed those issues as if answers could be given in a movie like that. Or that was how I felt, anyway.
Moneypenny: I love this actress, and I really liked her character. About halfway through I started to get sad, because Bond girls are not usually recurring characters from film to film. I liked her relationship with Bond; I liked her role in MI-6, and I wanted her to be in the next movie. I thought she couldn't be in any more movies, and that made me sad. This meant I felt pretty conflicted about the revelation that she was Moneypenny. On the one hand: yay! We're going to get more time with a girl who is kick ass and strong and cute and holds her own against Bond.
On the other hand: a desk job? Really? I can understand about her having issues with having shot Bond, but she really didn't seem that conflicted about it. The only way I buy her taking a desk job is if it's cover for some bigger thing she's doing. And don't get me wrong. A woman who has a desk job can totally be a strong character. (my_daroga often mentions the difference between strong female characters and female characters who are strong.) However, this Moneypenny has obvious strengths in the field. I want her to use them, and/or, to sit at a desk because that's who she is and not because she needs to be Moneypenny and that's what Moneypenny does.
Also, I have a shaving kink. In particular, gals shaving guys with a straight razor. It has to do with my 19th c. kinks where gals help 19th c guys dress (tying their cravat). I'm stating this as gendered, because that's how I usually think about it, but actually a guy shaving another guy or a girl tying a girls tie would probably be equally as hot. I just haven't read that as often because--hey, idk why. MORE PLEASE. Anyway, I can't believe there was a shaving scene. It was like someone had a list of my kinks and was checking them off one by one.
Silva: Might've been my favorite part of this movie? Not sure. Javier Bardem is hot. Like amazingly hot. Like I didn't know what to do with myself hot, even though his hair was really bad. Oh, and maybe I should've mentioned first that he was absolutely fantastic in the role.
I'm not a villain gal. I don't go for villains. I usually like good guys who are dark, or guys who try really hard to be good but are bad, or guys who were once bad but are now good, etc. I'm not the one who's going to come out of Avengers a Loki fan; I like Spike but I am not a "Spike fan"; I don't like Angelus except as pertains to Angel; and I am the last person on Earth to like Draco Malfoy, even though I eventually did (mostly it was the thought of his redemption that got me into it. Draco in the books? Very interesting, but I wasn't fannish).
I understand the villain thing. I understand having sympathy for and attraction to people who have been mistreated and so become twisted. I also understand having sympathy and attraction for people who have basically shed all social norms and begin to defy even basic human decency--because the world has never been decent to them. I understand having sympathy for and attraction to and interest in madness and completely destructive tendencies, but I'm just usually . . . not that sympathetic. And not that attracted, and not that interested.
Bardem made me interested, even though the part was pretty stereotypical. Villain was once the same as our hero, villain suffers tragedy, villain goes mad and becomes twisted, villain is out for revenge, villain identifies with hero and tries to twist him too, villain is batshit insane. But the way Bardem played it made me 1) believe that he was actually once like Bond (but this had a lot to do with Bond too--and that was a writing thing); 2) believe that he was clever and charismatic (possibly because he managed to be so hot while being so fucked up); 3) actually feel sorry for him when he took his cheekbone out.
But actually, there were a few things in the writing as well that were really, really good. A big part was the fact that a lot of times, these archetypal villains end by either wanting to destroy everything, wanting to destroy the hero, or wanting all the money. It's sort of hard to believe a villain is doing all these bad things just because Mommy didn't love him when what he really wants in the end is a big bag of money. Or, it's easy to believe, but I'm just not as sympathetic toward it.
For instance,my_daroga and a friend compared Bardem's performance to Rickman as Hans Gruber. They're both quite dramatic, and they're both quite good actors. But it's hard for me to even make the comparison between the actors because the villains are so totally different to me. Gruber was just bad; whatever his motivations he just wanted money and power in the end. I don't think Silva even gave a fuck what he wanted in the end; he wanted to burn and burn the world with him. Also, Rickman's melodrama ends up being hilarious. For me, Bardem's melodrama was creepy and heart-rending.
Anyway, what I mean is, Silva's final goal was destroying M and destroying himself. Though you could pin this down as a traditional "kill the hero" goal, M isn't really a traditional hero. The fact that she isn't the traditional hero and he saw her as a mother figure anyway is one thing that makes Silva (and M) interesting. She sold him out because that's her job, and the person she is. He had to know that, and yet he wanted her to be his mother/protector/angel anyway--which I find completely understandable. Him wanting to die with her, by the same bullet, suggests less that he hates her and rather more that he identifies with her. He feels that he's become her--someone heartless and cruel who can play with life and death. And it's particularly poignant that he wants to kill himself, when it was his initial failure to kill himself that so completely destroyed him.
Also, the homoeroticism, while very well played by both Bardem and Craig, was definitely in the writing, so credit goes to the screenplay and to Mendes for that. This is the other thing that probably made me love Silva. On the one hand, I sort of feel about it the way I feel about Severine: just as we don't need any more sex slaves, just as we don't need any more pointless female deaths--we don't need any more homosexual villains. Yes, homosexual people can be bad just like other people, maybe because um, gay people are people too, but the ratio of positive portrayals of homosexuality versus negative is still grossly out of whack, and the number of protagonist homosexual characters compared to antagonist is also grossly out of whack. So, stop it please, Hollywood.
However. If you're going to have a bisexual villain, please do it this way. I'm not excusing the film on either the feminist or the gay rights front; I'm just saying that the biggest arguments against the way this particular film handled it is the context of thousands of other films that do the same things. But I did like the way it was handled here: I liked that I didn't feel it was in there for comedic relief, or as a gross-out factor, or to imply that Silva is sick twisted and evil. I suppose that scene could be taken that way, and that is the main reason it's problematic (again, in the context of those thousand other films wherein a guy coming onto a guy is meant to come across as sick and twisted). However, Bond's response helped pull it away from that stereotype to suggest: this is how some people are, this is what some of them want; it is not something sick and twisted or the least bit out of the ordinary. It just is.
Also God help me, I found it hot.
M: More than any other Bond film I've seen, this movie treats Bond as an employee, not a superhero; the work he does is a job, not superpowers and magic. For us as viewers, the most important part is Bond, but for M and by extension, England, the most important part is getting the job done. The inquest around M, and the decisions M makes, are centered around this. M chooses to risk Bond being shot to recover sensitive data; she also chose to betray Silva to recover six agents.
The reason this was so interesting is you assume she does care for people. They obviously care for her--it was obvious Silva was inspired by her and expected her to protect him. I feel like Bond loves her.
The script, where M is concerned, doesn't give the character a lot of sympathy for others. M finds out Bond is alive and her only reaction is to ask why he didn't report in. She tells him his apartment was sold, and acts as if the idea of him staying with her is crazy. I kept expecting to see some flickers of emotion from Dench, because she's obviously written this way in order to have a gooey center.
Yet neither the script nor Dench chose to spin out the character in that simplistic way that I was expecting. There weren't flickers of emotion. You couldn't tell what M was really thinking. Dench turns to the window when M hears that Bond died, but you don't see her "actual" emotion when she's finally turned where no one can see her. There's no expression at all--the rain has to be her tears. The first time M gets face to face with Silva on-screen, there's not even a flicker. Afterward, when she walks out of the cell and is with Bond, you expect to finally get a reaction--but you don't, not in her face, at least. The only telling thing is the rapidity with which she informs Bond of Silva's identity, revealing that she was stone-cold lying when she told Silva she didn't remember his name.
These choices had particular resonance from Dench, not only because she's a great actress but because--well, she's looking older these days, and they made no effort to hide it. She can be imposing, tiny as she is, but in this she acted as though her figure was as imposing, as inimitable, as it always is--and then just looked exceedingly vulnerable next to every single person with which she shared the screen. I loved Silva's line, "I forgot how small you were."
And then there's the fact that she puts Bond on the field when he's not ready. Is it because she knows that only he can do what needs to be done? And does she think he can do what needs to be done in spite of him failing his psychological evaluation--or because of it? Part of the idea here is that she creates monsters--and she does it on purpose. She tells Bond that orphans make the best agents, meaning she picks people with certain emotional backgrounds on purpose. She made Silva. She made Bond. She makes monsters, and when they become too monstrous, she throws them away or takes them out. How aware of this is she? Does she hope that her love and things like loyalty will be enough to save these agents from the brink? Or does she purposely use love and loyalty to push them toward it? How about both?
How she must hate herself, and how she must abstain from hating herself--from thinking about any of this at all, or else she could never do what needs to be done.
Bond: I haven't seen all of the Bond movies, but I feel like this gave us more backstory than the other ones possibly could, or else they'd be stepping on canon. We got to see his childhood home, which tells us a lot. It wasn't a slum (which would have been interesting) and in fact seemed quite well-to-do, but the class issue allows for some complexity.
That was an estate right there, with a name and groundskeeper and everything, but it was so lonely and out of the way and undeveloped around there, that you wonder whether it's just because the family died, or whether it's because the land is very old. That is, the estate was passed down through the ages and the Bonds were never very rich, or if they were they'd long since lost its fortune. That is, Bond didn't grow up with a lot of rich wining and dining and the "society" lot. He grew up wandering the moors or whatever, poking sticks in bogs and making traps for hares.
Also, we already knew he was an orphan--or I assumed he was (and I just looked it up on Wikipedia, and yep, we know it from You Only Live Twice). But now we know his parents died at the same time and he was quite young. Hats, with whom I saw the movie, pointed out this leaves further room for backstory--of course, both parents may have died in a fire, but maybe they didn't.
All of this provided really interesting food for thought. Even if we were dealing with a Pierce Brosnan James Bond--this guy kills for a living and does this crazy, risky stuff all for England and love of country or whatever. You wanna think about where the hell someone that ruthless and careless of his own life comes from, and I feel like none of the other Bond movies even think about it, much less care.
But anyway, this isn't Brosnan!Bond. Brosnan is perfect for everything Bond is said to be--slick, suave, charming, non-descript in a dashing way, classy. What's interesting to me is that Sean Connery, whom everyone seems to think is the perfect Bond, wasn't perfect casting for that--Connery can certainly be classy, and he can be all those other things, but he was body-building when he was cast, and looked it. Some guys can play slick and suave (think Kevin Spacey in L.A. Confidential) but other guys just are that way; just like some guys can affect gravitas, but other dudes just have it (like Patrick Stewart, and yes, Sean Connery). Connery actually kind of reminds me of Gene Kelly--these big, manly dudes who can pull off elegance and grace, but who still have those rough edges while doing that.
With Craig, I feel like they've just basically forsaken the grace part. I don't think Craig can't do it; I just think they've decided not to write it that way. Casino's Royale's Bond was certainly less graceful, but this one is even less so. The parts that would have looked suave on other Bonds look bored on Craig; the places where Bond is supposed to be charming, Craig is smoothly sardonic; when he's supposed to be slick, he's just empty.
THIS IS OF COURSE WHY I LOVE HIM. This Bond is jaded and fucked up and doesn't know how to feel anything any more. This Bond comes across as cool because he's stopped letting anyone or anything actually touch him; he comes across as urbane because all that's left is this shell going through the emotions, and the thing underneath is ugly and twisted.
What we get in this movie is someone pushed even beyond that point, where he's not even playing the game any more, particularly in the psych eval. For the first time we see the Bond sees himself as a murderer and his job as a crime--and yet he keeps doing it anyway. He's doing it and doing it and doing it, and the question you're left with is why. It's all he knows how to do, and yet you've got to wonder whether he does buy into the ideals that Silva mentions, and whether that's what makes the difference between Bond and Silva. Or is it just that Bond hasn't been pushed far enough? You don't get to find out, but the question feels heavy in the film.
Not only did this film seem to characterize Bond differently, it made the accoutrement suit, and then commented on the fact that it did so. This was an interesting choice to me. I enjoyed it because it was meta, but I'm not sure why it was done. The first comment was the toys Q gives to Bond--a gun and a radio, with a very explicit, "what did you expect, an exploding pen?"--which is basically the one and only thing I remember about GoldenEye. The other comment is when Bond's groundskeeper Kinkaide lays a knife on the table and says, "Sometimes the classics are best."
It's as though someone wanted to take away everything that's polished and snazzy from Bond's character, so they decided to take it out of his weapons too. That's fine. That's great! I don't like polished and snazzy, and it's why I've never really much enjoyed Bond. I do wonder at the motivation though, because polished and snazzy are what really distinguished Bond from other action movie franchises. He's the spiffiest, the nattiest, the most cosmopolitan and most posh. Take that away--is he still Bond?
I don't really care. I don't like the Bourne movies not because there aren't exploding cufflinks, but because I never can care about the character. I can care about this character, though. He has issues, and they're the issues I gravitate toward.
Fic: What I really want is the AU where Silva and Bond started spydom together and worked together and kept each other from going crazy and they discuss M and their love/hate for her and deal with it together. I also want another AU where Bond is the one who got abandoned (BUT IT WAS A MISTAKE) and he tries to kill himself with the cyanide tooth or whatever it was and it fails, and he goes CRAZY and tries to take down Silva to get to M.
But I don't actually want either of these AUs. What I really want is the one where Bond or possibly M ends up in one of these AUs, and then in the other one, and then back to the "actual" universe, and then has to, idk, choose one of those worlds. Of course, you'd choose the one where both Bond and Silva are happy and healthy, right? WRONG. Because that's the one where they both go crazy and fuck over the whole world. And then M chooses the one where Bond is the one who is okay because he's her favorite and Silva always knew and he just never understood why he wasn't the favorite son. Or something. I just. The three of them just killed me.
Overall: Best Bond movie ever, best action movie I have seen in a long time (except for Avengers), still has typical Hollywood problems, I don't care give me fic.
James Bond movies: This was about 318 times better than any James Bond movie I've ever seen. This isn't saying much, as I haven't seen many (all the Pierce Brosnan and Daniel Craig ones, and one or two Sean Connerys) and the ones I've seen I didn't like very much. Bond movies aren't really my thing. I don't care about action, I don't care about things blowing up, I don't care about gadgets or cars, I tend not to go for slick and suave heroes, I don't usually find the aesthetic they cast for hot. Mostly the only thing I care about is characterization, and Bond movies don't tend to have much of that.
This one had a lot, imo. Specifically it had the characterizations that I go for, which I have seen hints of in James Bond's character before, but never really got teased out much. Usually a line or two suggests it, which is probably the main thing that's kept me coming back (besides friends/family who are keen), but I feel like those lines are promises that don't deliver. This movie delivered that characterization, albeit with all the subtlety of a sledge hammer.
Credits: I lol'ed.
my_daroga lol'ed. We didn't understand why the whole theater wasn't lol'ing. Seriously, the Phantom of the Opera made those credits. Or like, a teenager who thinks she's the anti-Twilight fan but really loves it deep down. I mean, you can not do velvet red turning into dripping blood over gravestones growing out of the teeth of a skull made of smoke and suddenly statues of bucks without me thinking you're hilarious. LOLWUT. I actually found the song weirdly appealing, though.Q: He was really cute. Not sure what the fuss is about. Didn't notice any particular chemistry with Bond, sadly.
Severine and feminism: This character was pointless. Her death was pointless, her sex slavery was pointless, her shower sex with Bond was pointless, and all these things taken together are offensive and somewhat upsetting, as those three points are 1) her entire character, and 2) the entire character of enough girls in films that it's time to do something different already. I hope it is obvious that I don't blame Severine herself, but rather the fact that film makers apparently need to use the tropes of sex, sex slavery, and death over and over again in order to make narrative points in movies.
Now, that said. Treatment of women in Bond movies is fairly notorious, by which I mean Bond girls are often sex kittens or crazy villains or both, and often die. I don't really think this was any worse. And while I really, really dislike the insignificance of her character and her mistreatment, and thus her death, I like it more than if they had used her death as the catalyst for some kind of revenge etc. Basically I'm more tired of females as a catalyst for revenge than I am as females as insignificant plot points; that's my personal issue, not anyone else's.
Ralph Fiennes: Why was he in this movie? I didn't know Judi Dench was quitting. I thought he was going to be the icky bureaucrat, but then he ended up being willing to help out. I liked the surprise and I liked Fiennes, but I was still waiting for him to actually do something. Which he didn't. I mean, besides be a badass at the end; what I mean was I was waiting for there to be a point with him, and apparently the point was just to replace Judi Dench?
The British government (and Narcissa Malfoy) and meta: I did like the inquest or whatever it was about M, because it was more than about just M. It was basically taking the whole Bond franchise and saying, "How does this fit into a modern context? Is this movie still relevant? And by extension--how transparent should government be, are there secrets that need to be protected, what do the people have the right to know?" In the light of WikiLeaks and other events, the fact that a movie like this decided to ask these questions is very, very interesting.
Sometimes, I get uncomfortable when these kinds of questions get asked. The Dark Knight and Doctor Who frustrate me, because they ask these great questions about power and who should have it, but then seem to supply answers when I don't think there are correct answers, and if there are, they aren't as easy as these fictional texts seem to suggest. That said, the questions were asked lightly enough in Skyfall that I am less disturbed and rather more impressed that they brought them up at all. Also, so far, I haven't heard anyone saying, "Wow, Skyfall asks important questions about the place of government!" and part of what really bothered me about TDK was people felt like it really addressed those issues as if answers could be given in a movie like that. Or that was how I felt, anyway.
Moneypenny: I love this actress, and I really liked her character. About halfway through I started to get sad, because Bond girls are not usually recurring characters from film to film. I liked her relationship with Bond; I liked her role in MI-6, and I wanted her to be in the next movie. I thought she couldn't be in any more movies, and that made me sad. This meant I felt pretty conflicted about the revelation that she was Moneypenny. On the one hand: yay! We're going to get more time with a girl who is kick ass and strong and cute and holds her own against Bond.
On the other hand: a desk job? Really? I can understand about her having issues with having shot Bond, but she really didn't seem that conflicted about it. The only way I buy her taking a desk job is if it's cover for some bigger thing she's doing. And don't get me wrong. A woman who has a desk job can totally be a strong character. (
my_daroga often mentions the difference between strong female characters and female characters who are strong.) However, this Moneypenny has obvious strengths in the field. I want her to use them, and/or, to sit at a desk because that's who she is and not because she needs to be Moneypenny and that's what Moneypenny does.Also, I have a shaving kink. In particular, gals shaving guys with a straight razor. It has to do with my 19th c. kinks where gals help 19th c guys dress (tying their cravat). I'm stating this as gendered, because that's how I usually think about it, but actually a guy shaving another guy or a girl tying a girls tie would probably be equally as hot. I just haven't read that as often because--hey, idk why. MORE PLEASE. Anyway, I can't believe there was a shaving scene. It was like someone had a list of my kinks and was checking them off one by one.
Silva: Might've been my favorite part of this movie? Not sure. Javier Bardem is hot. Like amazingly hot. Like I didn't know what to do with myself hot, even though his hair was really bad. Oh, and maybe I should've mentioned first that he was absolutely fantastic in the role.
I'm not a villain gal. I don't go for villains. I usually like good guys who are dark, or guys who try really hard to be good but are bad, or guys who were once bad but are now good, etc. I'm not the one who's going to come out of Avengers a Loki fan; I like Spike but I am not a "Spike fan"; I don't like Angelus except as pertains to Angel; and I am the last person on Earth to like Draco Malfoy, even though I eventually did (mostly it was the thought of his redemption that got me into it. Draco in the books? Very interesting, but I wasn't fannish).
I understand the villain thing. I understand having sympathy for and attraction to people who have been mistreated and so become twisted. I also understand having sympathy and attraction for people who have basically shed all social norms and begin to defy even basic human decency--because the world has never been decent to them. I understand having sympathy for and attraction to and interest in madness and completely destructive tendencies, but I'm just usually . . . not that sympathetic. And not that attracted, and not that interested.
Bardem made me interested, even though the part was pretty stereotypical. Villain was once the same as our hero, villain suffers tragedy, villain goes mad and becomes twisted, villain is out for revenge, villain identifies with hero and tries to twist him too, villain is batshit insane. But the way Bardem played it made me 1) believe that he was actually once like Bond (but this had a lot to do with Bond too--and that was a writing thing); 2) believe that he was clever and charismatic (possibly because he managed to be so hot while being so fucked up); 3) actually feel sorry for him when he took his cheekbone out.
But actually, there were a few things in the writing as well that were really, really good. A big part was the fact that a lot of times, these archetypal villains end by either wanting to destroy everything, wanting to destroy the hero, or wanting all the money. It's sort of hard to believe a villain is doing all these bad things just because Mommy didn't love him when what he really wants in the end is a big bag of money. Or, it's easy to believe, but I'm just not as sympathetic toward it.
For instance,
my_daroga and a friend compared Bardem's performance to Rickman as Hans Gruber. They're both quite dramatic, and they're both quite good actors. But it's hard for me to even make the comparison between the actors because the villains are so totally different to me. Gruber was just bad; whatever his motivations he just wanted money and power in the end. I don't think Silva even gave a fuck what he wanted in the end; he wanted to burn and burn the world with him. Also, Rickman's melodrama ends up being hilarious. For me, Bardem's melodrama was creepy and heart-rending.Anyway, what I mean is, Silva's final goal was destroying M and destroying himself. Though you could pin this down as a traditional "kill the hero" goal, M isn't really a traditional hero. The fact that she isn't the traditional hero and he saw her as a mother figure anyway is one thing that makes Silva (and M) interesting. She sold him out because that's her job, and the person she is. He had to know that, and yet he wanted her to be his mother/protector/angel anyway--which I find completely understandable. Him wanting to die with her, by the same bullet, suggests less that he hates her and rather more that he identifies with her. He feels that he's become her--someone heartless and cruel who can play with life and death. And it's particularly poignant that he wants to kill himself, when it was his initial failure to kill himself that so completely destroyed him.
Also, the homoeroticism, while very well played by both Bardem and Craig, was definitely in the writing, so credit goes to the screenplay and to Mendes for that. This is the other thing that probably made me love Silva. On the one hand, I sort of feel about it the way I feel about Severine: just as we don't need any more sex slaves, just as we don't need any more pointless female deaths--we don't need any more homosexual villains. Yes, homosexual people can be bad just like other people, maybe because um, gay people are people too, but the ratio of positive portrayals of homosexuality versus negative is still grossly out of whack, and the number of protagonist homosexual characters compared to antagonist is also grossly out of whack. So, stop it please, Hollywood.
However. If you're going to have a bisexual villain, please do it this way. I'm not excusing the film on either the feminist or the gay rights front; I'm just saying that the biggest arguments against the way this particular film handled it is the context of thousands of other films that do the same things. But I did like the way it was handled here: I liked that I didn't feel it was in there for comedic relief, or as a gross-out factor, or to imply that Silva is sick twisted and evil. I suppose that scene could be taken that way, and that is the main reason it's problematic (again, in the context of those thousand other films wherein a guy coming onto a guy is meant to come across as sick and twisted). However, Bond's response helped pull it away from that stereotype to suggest: this is how some people are, this is what some of them want; it is not something sick and twisted or the least bit out of the ordinary. It just is.
Also God help me, I found it hot.
M: More than any other Bond film I've seen, this movie treats Bond as an employee, not a superhero; the work he does is a job, not superpowers and magic. For us as viewers, the most important part is Bond, but for M and by extension, England, the most important part is getting the job done. The inquest around M, and the decisions M makes, are centered around this. M chooses to risk Bond being shot to recover sensitive data; she also chose to betray Silva to recover six agents.
The reason this was so interesting is you assume she does care for people. They obviously care for her--it was obvious Silva was inspired by her and expected her to protect him. I feel like Bond loves her.
The script, where M is concerned, doesn't give the character a lot of sympathy for others. M finds out Bond is alive and her only reaction is to ask why he didn't report in. She tells him his apartment was sold, and acts as if the idea of him staying with her is crazy. I kept expecting to see some flickers of emotion from Dench, because she's obviously written this way in order to have a gooey center.
Yet neither the script nor Dench chose to spin out the character in that simplistic way that I was expecting. There weren't flickers of emotion. You couldn't tell what M was really thinking. Dench turns to the window when M hears that Bond died, but you don't see her "actual" emotion when she's finally turned where no one can see her. There's no expression at all--the rain has to be her tears. The first time M gets face to face with Silva on-screen, there's not even a flicker. Afterward, when she walks out of the cell and is with Bond, you expect to finally get a reaction--but you don't, not in her face, at least. The only telling thing is the rapidity with which she informs Bond of Silva's identity, revealing that she was stone-cold lying when she told Silva she didn't remember his name.
These choices had particular resonance from Dench, not only because she's a great actress but because--well, she's looking older these days, and they made no effort to hide it. She can be imposing, tiny as she is, but in this she acted as though her figure was as imposing, as inimitable, as it always is--and then just looked exceedingly vulnerable next to every single person with which she shared the screen. I loved Silva's line, "I forgot how small you were."
And then there's the fact that she puts Bond on the field when he's not ready. Is it because she knows that only he can do what needs to be done? And does she think he can do what needs to be done in spite of him failing his psychological evaluation--or because of it? Part of the idea here is that she creates monsters--and she does it on purpose. She tells Bond that orphans make the best agents, meaning she picks people with certain emotional backgrounds on purpose. She made Silva. She made Bond. She makes monsters, and when they become too monstrous, she throws them away or takes them out. How aware of this is she? Does she hope that her love and things like loyalty will be enough to save these agents from the brink? Or does she purposely use love and loyalty to push them toward it? How about both?
How she must hate herself, and how she must abstain from hating herself--from thinking about any of this at all, or else she could never do what needs to be done.
Bond: I haven't seen all of the Bond movies, but I feel like this gave us more backstory than the other ones possibly could, or else they'd be stepping on canon. We got to see his childhood home, which tells us a lot. It wasn't a slum (which would have been interesting) and in fact seemed quite well-to-do, but the class issue allows for some complexity.
That was an estate right there, with a name and groundskeeper and everything, but it was so lonely and out of the way and undeveloped around there, that you wonder whether it's just because the family died, or whether it's because the land is very old. That is, the estate was passed down through the ages and the Bonds were never very rich, or if they were they'd long since lost its fortune. That is, Bond didn't grow up with a lot of rich wining and dining and the "society" lot. He grew up wandering the moors or whatever, poking sticks in bogs and making traps for hares.
Also, we already knew he was an orphan--or I assumed he was (and I just looked it up on Wikipedia, and yep, we know it from You Only Live Twice). But now we know his parents died at the same time and he was quite young. Hats, with whom I saw the movie, pointed out this leaves further room for backstory--of course, both parents may have died in a fire, but maybe they didn't.
All of this provided really interesting food for thought. Even if we were dealing with a Pierce Brosnan James Bond--this guy kills for a living and does this crazy, risky stuff all for England and love of country or whatever. You wanna think about where the hell someone that ruthless and careless of his own life comes from, and I feel like none of the other Bond movies even think about it, much less care.
But anyway, this isn't Brosnan!Bond. Brosnan is perfect for everything Bond is said to be--slick, suave, charming, non-descript in a dashing way, classy. What's interesting to me is that Sean Connery, whom everyone seems to think is the perfect Bond, wasn't perfect casting for that--Connery can certainly be classy, and he can be all those other things, but he was body-building when he was cast, and looked it. Some guys can play slick and suave (think Kevin Spacey in L.A. Confidential) but other guys just are that way; just like some guys can affect gravitas, but other dudes just have it (like Patrick Stewart, and yes, Sean Connery). Connery actually kind of reminds me of Gene Kelly--these big, manly dudes who can pull off elegance and grace, but who still have those rough edges while doing that.
With Craig, I feel like they've just basically forsaken the grace part. I don't think Craig can't do it; I just think they've decided not to write it that way. Casino's Royale's Bond was certainly less graceful, but this one is even less so. The parts that would have looked suave on other Bonds look bored on Craig; the places where Bond is supposed to be charming, Craig is smoothly sardonic; when he's supposed to be slick, he's just empty.
THIS IS OF COURSE WHY I LOVE HIM. This Bond is jaded and fucked up and doesn't know how to feel anything any more. This Bond comes across as cool because he's stopped letting anyone or anything actually touch him; he comes across as urbane because all that's left is this shell going through the emotions, and the thing underneath is ugly and twisted.
What we get in this movie is someone pushed even beyond that point, where he's not even playing the game any more, particularly in the psych eval. For the first time we see the Bond sees himself as a murderer and his job as a crime--and yet he keeps doing it anyway. He's doing it and doing it and doing it, and the question you're left with is why. It's all he knows how to do, and yet you've got to wonder whether he does buy into the ideals that Silva mentions, and whether that's what makes the difference between Bond and Silva. Or is it just that Bond hasn't been pushed far enough? You don't get to find out, but the question feels heavy in the film.
Not only did this film seem to characterize Bond differently, it made the accoutrement suit, and then commented on the fact that it did so. This was an interesting choice to me. I enjoyed it because it was meta, but I'm not sure why it was done. The first comment was the toys Q gives to Bond--a gun and a radio, with a very explicit, "what did you expect, an exploding pen?"--which is basically the one and only thing I remember about GoldenEye. The other comment is when Bond's groundskeeper Kinkaide lays a knife on the table and says, "Sometimes the classics are best."
It's as though someone wanted to take away everything that's polished and snazzy from Bond's character, so they decided to take it out of his weapons too. That's fine. That's great! I don't like polished and snazzy, and it's why I've never really much enjoyed Bond. I do wonder at the motivation though, because polished and snazzy are what really distinguished Bond from other action movie franchises. He's the spiffiest, the nattiest, the most cosmopolitan and most posh. Take that away--is he still Bond?
I don't really care. I don't like the Bourne movies not because there aren't exploding cufflinks, but because I never can care about the character. I can care about this character, though. He has issues, and they're the issues I gravitate toward.
Fic: What I really want is the AU where Silva and Bond started spydom together and worked together and kept each other from going crazy and they discuss M and their love/hate for her and deal with it together. I also want another AU where Bond is the one who got abandoned (BUT IT WAS A MISTAKE) and he tries to kill himself with the cyanide tooth or whatever it was and it fails, and he goes CRAZY and tries to take down Silva to get to M.
But I don't actually want either of these AUs. What I really want is the one where Bond or possibly M ends up in one of these AUs, and then in the other one, and then back to the "actual" universe, and then has to, idk, choose one of those worlds. Of course, you'd choose the one where both Bond and Silva are happy and healthy, right? WRONG. Because that's the one where they both go crazy and fuck over the whole world. And then M chooses the one where Bond is the one who is okay because he's her favorite and Silva always knew and he just never understood why he wasn't the favorite son. Or something. I just. The three of them just killed me.
Overall: Best Bond movie ever, best action movie I have seen in a long time (except for Avengers), still has typical Hollywood problems, I don't care give me fic.