Bond 23 - "Skyfall" spoilers from post 595

humanji · 31-10-2012 9:59am

Saw this last night and really enjoyed it. But I do echo a some of the thoughts people are having. I'd have prefered it to have not strayed back into the old style Bond territory. And the overall plot has been done many times before, so I was bored of the premise (but not the action).

I thought Bardem was fantastic and I'd have liked to have seen more of his skills and personality at work. And the cinematography was awesome (I really want to go to Scotland now!). The only thing that really let the film down were the CGI Kimono dragons. There simply was no need for that.

But that's only one small thing in a film I otherwise enjoyed. Although plot-wise it's not related to the previous two films, it's a good end to the trilogy.

Penn · 31-10-2012 11:19am

humanji wrote: »

I'd have prefered it to have not strayed back into the old style Bond territory. And the overall plot has been done many times before, so I was bored of the premise (but not the action).

In fairness, I'd say that was more due to the 50th Anniversary of Bond rather than the future direction of the series.

Penn · 31-10-2012 11:21am

dastardly00 wrote: »

Idris Elba is a great actor, but I associate him with being Stringer Bell in The Wire!

You should check him out in Luther. First series is fantastic (haven't seen the second series myself yet). He's brilliant in it (though I'll probably still just think of him as Stringer Bell)

Jimdagym · 31-10-2012 12:25pm

Penn wrote: »

You should check him out in Luther. First series is fantastic (haven't seen the second series myself yet). He's brilliant in it (though I'll probably still just think of him as Stringer Bell)

And as his legendary short spell as Charles Miner in The Office.

Beefy78 · 31-10-2012 12:32pm

I saw it at the weekend and really enjoyed it. Probably a shade more than Casino Royale in truth, which I always felt went too far in the direction of rolling back on the Bond cliches. I think Skyfall is pitch perfect. A modern, more realistic world; a much smaller, personal, story but with the re-introduction of a few of the markers which have seen this film franchise outlast any other.

So long as they keep Bond away from the worst excesses of the ends of the Brosnan and Moore eras I think this is exactly right balance that the series should be trying to strike.

Ridley · 31-10-2012 12:52pm

senordingdong wrote: »

Then in twenty years we can get a gay Bond. And after another twenty years, a female Bond.

Already happened.

pah · 31-10-2012 2:26pm

Saw this last Sat, enjoyed it for the most part but when the credits rolled I felt a bit...meh.

Cant quite put my finger on it but I think it might have been that I was expecting something different. My own fault I guess for looking at a few spoilers and trailers.

I do think the trailer was a bit misleading though, I thought the plot would go a little something like this..

MI6 loses HDD with details of all covert ops including 00's.

Bond chases down a target and ends up getting shot, falling in river.

He survives but is weakened, physically and mentally. Psychologically he is damaged as M did not trust him to finish the job and gave the order to "take the shot" This drives an already troubled Bond over the edge - he decides "Fuk You, i'm gonna stay dead so, drinking and whoring myself"

In the meantime (Maybe 6 months or so) agent start getting killed all over the place, M decides to recall all the 00's to MI6 (ala Thunderball) to go after the threat -> an explosion at MI6 kills them all as M watches on (I counted 8 coffins draped in the Union Jack in the Trailer)

Bond finds out about this and makes his return, "007 reporting for duty"

He is fuked up in the head though and not ready for the task at hand - evident from not being able to shoot properly.

He does however take on the mission and his abilities, physical and mental are "ressurected" as he takes on the baddies.

I thought skyfall was a codeword for a mission or something and that Silva would be attacking London on a terrorist threat kind of level (london bombings etc..)

I think my expectations may have clouded my view and I hope a second viewing on home release will have me enjoy it more. Certainly enjoyed QoS more on second viewing anyway.

syklops · 31-10-2012 2:32pm

pah wrote: »

Saw this last Sat, enjoyed it for the most part but when the credits rolled I felt a bit...meh.

Cant quite put my finger on it but I think it might have been that I was expecting something different. My own fault I guess for looking at a few spoilers and trailers.

I do think the trailer was a bit misleading though, I thought the plot would go a little something like this..
MI6 loses HDD with details of all covert ops including 00's.

Bond chases down a target and ends up getting shot, falling in river.

He survives but is weakened, physically and mentally. Psychologically he is damaged as M did not trust him to finish the job and gave the order to "take the shot" This drives an already troubled Bond over the edge - he decides "Fuk You, i'm gonna stay dead so, drinking and whoring myself"

In the meantime (Maybe 6 months or so) agent start getting killed all over the place, M decides to recall all the 00's to MI6 (ala Thunderball) to go after the threat -> an explosion at MI6 kills them all as M watches on (I counted 8 coffins draped in the Union Jack in the Trailer)

Bond finds out about this and makes his return, "007 reporting for duty"

He is fuked up in the head though and not ready for the task at hand - evident from not being able to shoot properly.

He does however take on the mission and his abilities, physical and mental are "ressurected" as he takes on the baddies.

I thought skyfall was a codeword for a mission or something and that Silva would be attacking London on a terrorist threat kind of level (london bombings etc..)

I think my expectations may have clouded my view and I hope a second viewing on home release will have me enjoy it more. Certainly enjoyed QoS more on second viewing anyway.

Aside from the name not being what you thought it was. How is what you were expecting different to what happens?

gmisk · 31-10-2012 2:41pm

syklops wrote: »

Aside from the name not being what you thought it was. How is what you were expecting different to what happens?

Yeah...that kind of read like a plot summary almost

Beefy78 · 31-10-2012 3:09pm

I didn't see the main trailer until after I saw the film. I do think it gave too much of the plot away.

Penn · 31-10-2012 3:13pm

Beefy78 wrote: »

I didn't see the main trailer until after I saw the film. I do think it gave too much of the plot away.

I try avoiding most trailers nowadays. They either give too much away or misrepresent some parts (eg. a meaningless throwaway comment in a film seeming like a huge plot point in the trailer)

pah · 31-10-2012 3:28pm

syklops wrote: »

Aside from the name not being what you thought it was. How is what you were expecting different to what happens?

Not sure about the confusion on your part. What I described is a bit different.

I wanted (or felt the movie would have been better if)

Silva being a bigger terrorist threat (blowing up more stuff around London as opposed to doing it just to get at/to M.)

All the 00's being killed as opposed to just regular other agents/staff and making a bigger deal about that and 007 being the only one left.

I wanted Bond to be more of a wreck, he shrugged it off a bit too quickly.

Essentialy yes, a lot of what I said is more or less the plotline but felt it could have been tweaked/expanded a bit more.
That is all.

tunguska · 31-10-2012 8:02pm

Saw it at the weekend and I thought it was terrible. After reading pretty much universally good reviews I was optimistic. Kept waiting for a good film to start but it never happened. It was like a bond film before casino royale. Definitely a step backwards. The screenplay came across like it was written by an 18 year old kid who'd just binged on all the previous films.
The only bright spot was the photography. It'll make a tonne of money and the masses will lap it up, but thats not such a good thing as the next bond film will follow the same formula and gone will be all the great work established in casino royale.

Grimebox · 31-10-2012 9:12pm

Penn wrote: »

I try avoiding most trailers nowadays. They either give too much away or misrepresent some parts (eg. a meaningless throwaway comment in a film seeming like a huge plot point in the trailer)

I fell for this horribly when it came to this film. The trailer showed a bit of the interrogation scene where they say "Skyfall?", "Done". I thought it was a code word for some super awesome mission and bond fully understood what was being asked of him by hearing those words. Instead he was just moping over his childhood

Riddle101 · 31-10-2012 9:44pm

Saw Skyfall last night. Wasn't overly impressed with it tbh. It was passable but I do think it missed the curb, and I think it is probably the weakest of the 3 Craig movies. Of course I wasn't much of a fan of the Craig bonds, but that's just my opinion on skyfall.

My problems with the film

(1)James bond's unexplained survival at the start of the film. I mean he got shot twice, once by the guy he was chasing and then again by Eve, and fell from a very high place and plunged into the water. So what happened? was he pulled out by someone, did he manage stay alive and barely cling on to life. How did he survive all that, and still stay hidden from MI6. Also How did Silva escape from MI6 so easily. I realize that he had a trap door in his cell, however. How did he kill the guards watching him, and not alert anyone. He was in MI6's base you would think there would be proper security measures in place.

Those two things annoyed me, because I feel it was lazy on the writers part. I don't know if they're deliberately doing that in order to make them more mysterious, or just didn't want to go too much into detail, but I think they should have put more emphasis into it.

(2)The story was quite predictable. Now bond movies have always been a bit predictable. Bond always gets captured in his movies, and uses every gadget he has at his disposal, always wrecks his cars etc. But I'm talking more around the lines of M's death. Mallory was obviously going to take over from M, he even alluded to it when he first met her.

But I suppose this can be ignored because what else where they going to do.

(3)Silva's death. It was very anti-climatic, he dies from being stabbed in the back, with his back turned to the door the whole time so that bond could sneak up on him. I just think he deserved a better death scene.

(4)Now this was probably the worst thing about the film. It ignored the first two movies. Both casino royale and quantum of solace were both part of the same story. Bond was fighting a secret unknown organisation, who the two major antagonists of both movies were apart of. The third movie delved
away from that illusive organisation, and instead had a new organisation run by Silva. Unless of course Silva was part of the same organisation, but I don't think he was. Nonetheless, the story of the first two movies was not really tied up. Sure the villians in the movies were killed, but the organisation still existed. So what became of it, did MI6 finally end it. I just think Skyfall would have been better following on from where the second movie left off, and had Bond take on the secret organisation from the first two movies and finally put an end to it. The story for Skyfall could have been done in a future bond movie.

Anyway that's what I didn't like about it.

johnROSS · 31-10-2012 10:02pm

The Craig movies are technically prequels, correct? What if the mysterious organisation dealth with in CR and QoS is the first murmurs of SPECTRE? That would be weird.

Grimebox · 31-10-2012 10:20pm

The only nitpick that irritated me in the entire film was at the start.

So the woman shoots bond by accident. Unfortunately she has a gun with only one bullet or she is frozen by accidently shooting bond. She watches the baddie get away.

****ing shoot again you twat

norrie rugger · 31-10-2012 11:24pm

She froze. She gets confined to a desk and even Bond tels her that she is not cut out for field work, which she later accepts

.jacksparrow. · 31-10-2012 11:47pm

What was the story with the boat scene?all of a sudden they woke up and had 5 men holding guns at them?what happend during the night?

lizzylad84 · 01-11-2012 12:31am

.jacksparrow. wrote: »

What was the story with the boat scene?all of a sudden they woke up and had 5 men holding guns at them?what happend during the night?

yeah i thought that was somewhat random......

prob mentioned earlier but i thought the "dark knight" influence was very noticeable

Boo Radley · 01-11-2012 1:36am

Just back from this and I'm afraid to say I fell for the hype, again.

This film didn't know what it wanted to be. Granted the opening scene was indeed very good, I felt that after that it began a painfully slow decent into a hackneyed Bond cliché. This may very well be the Bond film fans of the franchise want but it all just seemed so tacked on.

This could all be put down to the natural progression from the reboot (roots of Bond you could say) to the Bond we all recognise but I find it hard to accept that the darker Bond - an angry, bitter man - of the last two films somehow 'evolved' into

someone who has lightened up so much that he delivers one line puns in the most inappropriate of situations. Just like the Bond of old.

I couldn't get a sense of its tone for the longest time but a warning sign came in the form of

badly animated Komodo Dragons who were only ever going to serve one purpose that seemed like some tongue in cheek Austin Powers set up that was a parody of a predictable Bond scene. At least old Bond films had more convincing looking animals.

By the time the final couple of highly predictable scenes came around, which were blatantly set up early, the sighs were brought out in me.

It was an average film at best that really made the last two Bond films a waste of time. It might have made some sense if it was someone else playing Bond but I really left the cinema feeling more confused about what had happened than anything else. It was quite interesting to see a plot device lifted directly from TDK also.

Anyway, I digress. I think I may finally be done with this franchise. It's a shame the reboot had to go this way.

Beefy78 · 01-11-2012 10:57am

Boo Radley wrote: »

Anyway, I digress. I think I may finally be done with this franchise. It's a shame the reboot had to go this way.

I don't get this idea at all. Surely if the reboot didn't go this way then it's no longer James Bond. It's just 'Random Blockbuster about a British Spy'.

Boo Radley · 01-11-2012 11:31am

Beefy78 wrote: »

I don't get this idea at all. Surely if the reboot didn't go this way then it's no longer James Bond. It's just 'Random Blockbuster about a British Spy'.

When I hear something is a reboot I expect a new approach to be taken. This was the case in Casino Royale yet they managed to keep some recognisable Bond elements such as his gun, fancy cars and martini etc.

A reboot does not strictly mean an origins tale that will bring the story right back to where it was before the reboot.

It is possible to change things enough to keep the franchise fresh without making a film by the numbers with the same old crap that is in every of its predecessors.

This film struck me as abandoning what the intent of the reboot was in favour of pandering to fans of how it has always been. I reject the premise that if they didn't return to one liner puns and the like that it would somehow be a "'Random Blockbuster about a British Spy'".

Grudaire · 01-11-2012 11:32am

Beefy78 wrote: »

I don't get this idea at all. Surely if the reboot didn't go this way then it's no longer James Bond. It's just 'Random Blockbuster about a British Spy'.

Yeah, It'd basically be Johnny English.

:pac:

(But I agree, declaring that you are 'done with this franchise' is silliness. Who knows, the next one might be more your style!)

Boo Radley · 01-11-2012 11:33am

Cliste wrote: »

(But I agree, declaring that you are 'done with this franchise' is silliness. Who knows, the next one might be more your style!)

Perhaps I was hasty. Never say never and all that but this dramatic return to form of old does not bode well. Let's wait and see.

Beefy78 · 01-11-2012 11:44am

Boo Radley wrote: »

When I hear something is a reboot I expect a new approach to be taken. This was the case in Casino Royale yet they managed to keep some recognisable Bond elements such as his gun, fancy cars and martini etc.

A reboot does not strictly mean an origins tale that will bring the story right back to where it was before the reboot.

It is possible to change things enough to keep the franchise fresh without making a film by the numbers with the same old crap that is in every of its predecessors.

This film struck me as abandoning what the intent of the reboot was in favour of pandering to fans of how it has always been. I reject the premise that if they didn't return to one liner puns and the like that it would somehow be a "'Random Blockbuster about a British Spy'".

But do you not think you're being slightly OTT? There was no invisible car or astronauts with laser guns. There were a few one liners and some shadows of the old films in the score & script. Plus the sort of plot holes that inhabit most big films trying to keep their running time to a minimum.

For me, the film struck the balance perfectly between the Casino Royale new Bond World and the nods to the classic films which have kept the franchise alive for 50 years.

I just think you read way too much into the 'reboot'. What they did with Casino Royale was not much different to what they'd done with The Living Daylights two decades earlier.

Boo Radley · 01-11-2012 11:54am

Beefy78 wrote: »

But do you not think you're being slightly OTT? There was no invisible car or astronauts with laser guns. There were a few one liners and some shadows of the old films in the score & script. Plus the sort of plot holes that inhabit most big films trying to keep their running time to a minimum.

For me, the film struck the balance perfectly between the Casino Royale new Bond World and the nods to the classic films which have kept the franchise alive for 50 years.

I just think you read way too much into the 'reboot'. What they did with Casino Royale was not much different to what they'd done with The Living Daylights two decades earlier.

Well, no, I clearly don't think I'm being OTT. They appeared to heavy handedly shoehorn nods and gimmicks from classic Bond into this film and as I said earier it didn't fit the mould they created with the previous two films. The tone was all over the place as far as I'm concerned.

I get why they did it but, as also stated earler, I think they'd have been better off with a different bond if they wanted to make this return to old. They built Craig's Bond imagine in a very particular fashion and the character in Skyfall was inconsistent with this, to say the least, and it just didn't work.

There was no logical progression from moody, angry and bitter Bond to the 'new old' Bond we saw in Skyfall.

Paudie223 · 01-11-2012 11:57am

Boo Radley wrote: »

Perhaps I was hasty. Never say never and all that but this dramatic return to form of old does not bode well. Let's wait and see.

I don't understand how you think this movie is a return to form of old?

Skyfall is different to any Bond film we have seen before, much different to any of Roger Moore's or Brosnan's Bond movies. Frankly I hope they never go back to that silliness.

They have to keep changing things, complacency in the movie business means failure. Skyfall had some very good bits of humour but was a also a very serious film. A Bond we had never seen before.

Grimebox · 01-11-2012 12:18pm

In this thread:

People who enjoy the return of an older style bond film.

People who are annoyed at the departure from the Casino Royale style bond film.

Beefy78 · 01-11-2012 12:26pm

Boo Radley wrote: »

Well, no, I clearly don't think I'm being OTT. They appeared to heavy handedly shoehorn nods and gimmicks from classic Bond into this film and as I said earier it didn't fit the mould they created with the previous two films. The tone was all over the place as far as I'm concerned.

I get why they did it but, as also stated earler, I think they'd have been better off with a different bond if they wanted to make this return to old. They built Craig's Bond imagine in a very particular fashion and the character in Skyfall was inconsistent with this, to say the least, and it just didn't work.

There was no logical progression from moody, angry and bitter Bond to the 'new old' Bond we saw in Skyfall.

It's OTT because there's not this sudden jump between the two which you're portraying the characterisation as having suffered. The womanising is in there which is due to him getting burnt by getting involved with Vesper in CR. Bond is still moody and angry, he's just also older and more relaxed about things. It happens to a lot of us.

Bond 23 - "Skyfall" *spoilers from post 595*

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Bond 23 - "Skyfall" spoilers from post 595