This might be James Bond month for me. Am going through my suspiciously incomplete DVD sets and am screening them backwards, beginning with Skyfall, which I just finished viewing.
Skyfall has all the indications that this is a James Bond swan song, except that a title card at the end says "50 Years -- James Bond will return". The movie begins with an old-fashioned car chase--you can tell that it is deliberately old-fashioned because there is nothing so overused as cars plowing through fruit and market stalls with fruit and vegetables flying in the air. And then there are constant references to old age, retirement, and sins committed in the past.
This is a movie completely atypical of Ian Fleming'c series concept. There is no weird villain with steel dentures or diamond implants on his face. Instead, the villain is a thinking, feeling HUMAN BEING. But then again so are James Bond and M, in this episode.
The story is further un-Flemingesque because of the Freudian psychology incorporated in it. It is heavily influenced by Oedipus Rex, both embodied by Bond and the counterpart villain. Sequences of running through tunnels and underground chambers remind us of man's return to the birth canal, frequent plunges in deep water his re-immersion in the universal amniotic fluid. When M dies in James Bond's arms inside the chapel toward the end of the movie, the director lingers on two-shots (and then a three-shot with the dead villain) that remind us of a reverse Pieta.
Maybe this SHOULD be a swan song. The writer and director seem to loathe gadgets, a lot of which we see in previous 007 movies, and show us in the end that the tools of salvation are a shotgun, an old rifle, and a hunting knife. Perhaps they are better off developing a completely new series, one that will take us further into the 21st century instead of back to the 20th.
Skyfall has all the indications that this is a James Bond swan song, except that a title card at the end says "50 Years -- James Bond will return". The movie begins with an old-fashioned car chase--you can tell that it is deliberately old-fashioned because there is nothing so overused as cars plowing through fruit and market stalls with fruit and vegetables flying in the air. And then there are constant references to old age, retirement, and sins committed in the past.
This is a movie completely atypical of Ian Fleming'c series concept. There is no weird villain with steel dentures or diamond implants on his face. Instead, the villain is a thinking, feeling HUMAN BEING. But then again so are James Bond and M, in this episode.
The story is further un-Flemingesque because of the Freudian psychology incorporated in it. It is heavily influenced by Oedipus Rex, both embodied by Bond and the counterpart villain. Sequences of running through tunnels and underground chambers remind us of man's return to the birth canal, frequent plunges in deep water his re-immersion in the universal amniotic fluid. When M dies in James Bond's arms inside the chapel toward the end of the movie, the director lingers on two-shots (and then a three-shot with the dead villain) that remind us of a reverse Pieta.
Maybe this SHOULD be a swan song. The writer and director seem to loathe gadgets, a lot of which we see in previous 007 movies, and show us in the end that the tools of salvation are a shotgun, an old rifle, and a hunting knife. Perhaps they are better off developing a completely new series, one that will take us further into the 21st century instead of back to the 20th.
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