Skyfall

In a rare trip to the cinema, I’ve just got back from Skyfall. (Before you start, I know a blog is rarer than a film viewing for me but why not break two habits at once?)

The new Bond film is all over the place at the moment, and rightly so. For anything to survive 50 years is a huge achievement, let alone a franchise which it can be argued has seen better days. Recent films have had money thrown at them and, in my view, not been all that great. Alongside this, I really hadn’t warmed at all to Daniel Craig in the lead role. If I’m totally honest, I found both Casino Royale and Quantum Of Solace fairly forgettable and I doubt I could tell you a lot about either film.

Coupled with this is the revelation that, apart from a mild obsession with Bond music, I don’t really care for it and Skyfall is the first Bond film I have seen in a cinema.

Having said all this, I thoroughly enjoyed it from start to finish – there isn’t a moment that doesn’t feel polished, and I urge you all to see it. Yes, it’s a diversion from the classic films, but things have moved on – watching Day Another Day recently, it felt very old even though it celebrated 40 years of Bond on its release. Yes, Craig is a very different Bond – one who is older than most, one who appears weary at times – but for me, this is his film. This is where the role becomes firmly his, in the same way that it took a good series and a half before Matt Smith became The Doctor for me… I just hate change.

Back to Skyfall though.

There are four things to look out for when you watch it, three of which I feel are fairly spoiler free (avoid point four if you wish):

There is a section of the film which is basically a London Underground version of Where’s Wally? – the films are known for their humour and, while that particular part of the film isn’t really intended to be humorous, that’s all I could think of throughout that scene.
I enjoyed the Scrabble reference… that’s all I can really say about that without ruining a little moment for you.
A good use of music throughout, in particular John Lee Hooker’s Boom Boom – although, again, I could only think of the Levi’s advert that used that back in the day to start with, and Now That’s What I Call Music 23, on which it appeared and the cassette version that I pretty much wore thin throughout the mid-1990s (if you can find a list of songs on the first part of that compilation, check it out on Spotify or similar).
Finally though, I couldn’t help but feel shades of the Harry Potter series all the way through. There are echoes of plot, which I won’t divulge, but also in the way it was produced. I’m convinced that a colour map of the film, a graph showing light and dark sections, periods of differing colour, would reveal vast similarities. This is no bad thing. I’m not known for a love of Harry Potter, but I have seen all 8 films – the last two, 7A and 7B, at the cinema. The more memorable moments of them haunted me while I watched Skyfall. Is this necessarily a bad thing? Well, no, I don’t think so. Skyfall is Bond in a modern era and is fabulous for it.

One final thing. Over the twenty-three films only two of them, Goldfinger and Thunderball, have received Oscars. With few other huge films out this year, surely Skyfall deserves to add to that tally? For my money at least, Judi Dench deserves a nomination, for she gets to do more work than any other M since a child at school tried to tell me that, “My mummy makes me muffins on Mondays.”

A very good film.