Skyfall & Pickles

I’ve been an Ian Fleming fan for years, having found him in the seventies, after most of the 007’s had been written and quite a few of the early films already come and gone. I found all the books in the series and ate them up like popcorn. I hadn’t seen most of the Bond films in recent years, but I thought I’d give Skyfall, this latest one, a try, especially since it got such great reviews. After two hours and twenty-three minutes, I don’t think I quite agree with those great reviews. It was good, not great. But the cinematography was excellent. Shanghai at night looked like a futuristic fairyland, and Bond’s old family castle, Skyfall, out in the Scottish boonies was starkly beautiful. The action was as violent and exciting as ever and the cast were all good, especially Judi Dench as M and Javier Bardem as the oh so blond, oh so vile Silva and, of course, Daniel Craig as the aging agent 007. This was no country for old agents, and 007 was weary and felt outdated, just as M and the entire agency was outdated. But someone had stolen a computer that held the entire list of agents in deep cover within terrorist organizations around the world. Thus the reason for Bond and his young fellow agent Eve chasing the thief through the streets of Istanbul. It seems that auto and motorcycle chases through Istanbul are a required ingredient for many current action films. And this one was almost a carbon copy of Liam’s Neeson’s pursuit in Taken 2 and Jeremy Renner’s Manila chase in The Bourne Legacy, lots of smashed autos and flying fruit and who knows how many people killed in collateral damage. I’m willing to follow Coleridge’s dictum of willingly suspending my disbelief, but Skyfall asks me to hang from a suspension bridge as high as the one Bond falls from into the river below. No one, not even James Bond, could have survived such a fall. But he did, and only a little worse for wear. There were also too many questions left unanswered, too many details that, although maybe not nonsense, didn’t make a lot of sense. Mallory (Ralph Fiennes), head of the Foreign Intelligence wing, would cast out the old relics in the agency, especially M, in favor of the new, younger people like Q (Ben Whishaw), Bond’s new quartermaster, who tells him they no longer use all those high-tech gadgets from the past. Now it’s all cyberspace and computer wizardry. And Bond, although not what he once was, seems fated to return for another fifty years.

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