The Troubling Blah Blah James Bond Daniel Craig Let’s Finish This Already

No, YOU can’t commit to a simple project.

The Daniel Craig Bond series now has two movies on opposite extremes of quality; masterpiece and dumpster fire respectively. I was nervous about the next one. Could the series really recover from a misstep like Quantum of Solace?

The answer turned out to be “Yes. Yes it can.

Granted only for a minute. But it’s a damn fine minute.”

I said before that Casino Royale might be the best Bond movie but it is not my favorite. That is because Skyfall is my favorite Bond movie. It’s so good I’m not going to waste time going into it. Suffice to say it is the perfect blend of the darker character exploration of the new movies and the sheer joyful energy of the old and the result is a perfect popcorn flick; certainly not one of the best movies ever, a derivative work to be sure, but still a sublime way to kill two-and-a-half hours.

And the Spectre happened.

I’m not going to lie; I really hate this movie. So instead of going on another long rant like with Quantum of Solace I’m going to make this a list of bullet points connecting my issues with the movie to my issues with the current series so I can stay on topic. Here we go:

• The single most obnoxious thing about Spectre is that it tries to tie in with all the previous Craig Bond movies and turn the whole thing into a big tapestry where everything that happened was all planned by SPECTRE leader Ernst Stavro Blofeld. Problem is that since this was not planned while the previous movies were filming it ends up making no sense of Blofeld could have accounted for any of what happened in them. This wouldn’t be too big of a problem except that it is brought up constantly throughout the second half of the movie. The movie never allows you to forget that it is forcing itself to be the culmination of all that has come before. So not only is the storytelling dumb and lazy, it’s also impossible to look past the fact that it is dumb and lazy. It just keeps beating in every insulting plot point over and over. This is made even sadder by the fact that this was done partially because it was looking to be Craig’s last movie, so they really tried to wrap up the whole story that didn’t actually exist, but now that he has one more on the way this just seems like even more of a waste of everyone’s time.

• Speaking of Blofeld, woof. Christoph Waltz is a top tier actor, but something went wrong here. Waltz’s only note is quietly smug self-satisfaction, a note which quickly runs dry of intimidation and instead just becomes irritating. The worst thing a villain performance can do is leave the audience unconvinced that the bad guy can actually live up to any of his threats, and frankly at no point does Waltz come off as even a little threatening. It doesn’t help that we’re seemingly meant to believe that this man built the most powerful international crime organization on the planet…in order to get back at his old foster brother for taking his daddy’s attention. No really, this is the backstory we are sold. In this universe, James Bond and Ernest Blofeld are foster brothers, Blofeld was annoyed at his dad’s attention being taken, and SPECTRE as an organization is predicated on hurting Bond as revenge. I feel like I shouldn’t have to explain why this is asinine.

• Lea Seydoux is in the same position as Waltz, a fantastic actress giving a dull performance to a nothing character. Madeline Swan may be the worst Bond girl in franchise history. I can think of Bond girls who have been annoying, extraneous, excessively objectified or any number of issues, but every single one of them I can find some redeeming value in. Swan’s major problem is that she is just boring, both from a writing and performance standpoint. The problem is that everything about Swan is utilitarian. Every scene with her is exposition about her past, her connections to other characters, and her thematic connection to Bond, all without ever giving the audience a reason to care. The film is palpably afraid of creating another “Bond girl”, instead trying to sell the idea that Bond has found true love again, but without any of the character investment or chemistry of Vesper Lynd. Instead the romance is used as a vector to sell the next dumb thing:

• This movie has a strange fascination with the idea that Bond being Bond is a bad thing and he cannot be a complete person until he stops. I feel I should not have to spell out the problem with a James Bond movie wagging its finger at the main character for being a super spy who kills megalomaniacs to save the world, but here we are. I get that the argument here is that maybe this makes Bond a more three-dimensional character, but here is the issue with that; first off, James Bond is just not that malleable a character. Now, you can give him interesting characterization, both Casino Royale and Skyfall managed that by exploring his limitations, both mental and physical and how they affect his work. But that was exploring his established character. This movie flat out turns Bond into something he is not. In fact, I can tell you exactly what it turns him into; Spectre turns Bond into Batman. A trauma victim unhealthily dealing with his issues through a deeply unhealthy endless mission that consumes him fully that can only be healed when he lets go and settles down with a bland love interest. So not just Batman, but specifically Christopher Nolan’s Batman. And that leads us nicely into a major problem:

• This movie is not trying to be a Bond movie. It wants to turn the Bond series into a superhero franchise. To be clear, this didn’t start here. The Nolan Batman influence has been noticeable throughout the series, in particular Skyfall too a lot structurally from The Dark Knight, but here the influence of the genre takes over completely. Like I said before, the main goal of the movie is to turn the series from Casino Royale onward into an ongoing narrative. This is bad enough, but even worse is that it tries to turn James Bond into the center of the universe. Like I said, the big reveal is that the whole of the SPECTRE vs MI6 plot turns out to revolve around Bond; Blofeld wants to take down MI6 because that’s where Bond works and that will hurt him. Bond is no longer the vector through which we the audience interact with a big and interesting world…you know, the entire appeal of the series…now instead the world is responding to his existence. All the evil he has stopped exists in response to his all-consuming angst and inability to cope with personal tragedy…you see why I compare this to Batman.

• Even more specifically, the B-plot of this movie is specifically a blatant knock-off of Captain America: The Winter Soldier. Except, you know, bad. To wit: Spectre is an organization that has connections in every major government and organization in the world, and their endgame is to gain access to all the worlds surveillance technology so they can more efficiently run their crime empire. Here’s the difference between this and The Winter Soldier though: in Spectre, the threat of the movie is that this organization is going to gain access to global surveillance and use it to spy on people. That’s it. No plan, no big endgame, the only threat that the movie sells is that people’s private information may end up in the hands of villains. Meanwhile, in The Winter Soldier, which I remind you is a Disney movie aimed at children, it is understood that the world is already a surveillance state where everyone’s private information is at the disposal of untrustworthy people. The evil organization burrowed into world governments isn’t trying to obtain peoples private information; they already have that. Instead, the evil plot of that movie is to use that information, from bank records to voting patterns to test scores, all of which they have easy access to through the world governments they are a part of, to suss out every individual who may be a threat to their new world order, then take them out by staging a weapons malfunction in the new global defense network that was built by the seeming “good guys”. My point being that the freaking Disney superhero movie tackles these issues in a more adult way that actually acknowledges the already sinister nature of global surveillance and data gathering. The bad guys are exploiting the already screwed up nature of our governments. Meanwhile, Spectre borders on propaganda, implying that the surveillance and information is currently in good, trustworthy hands and the only threat is falling into the hands of bad people.

• Dave friggin Bautista plays the main henchman in this movie. He is somehow completely forgettable. How do you even accomplish that?

• In spite of being mostly made by the same production team as Skyfall this is a really dull looking movie. I guess it shows how important a good cinematographer is, as Roger Deakins was one of the few people from that movie not to return.

• Off topic, Roger Deakins was the cinematographer not just on Skyfall, but also The Shawshank Redemption, Fargo, No Country for Old Men, A Beautiful Mind, Sicario, Blade Runner 2049, and 1917 just to name a few. So, you know, all the best-looking movies you can think of. He only has one Oscar, it’s a freaking travesty.

At least I can say I tried. So yeah, the Craig Bond movies have been a ride so far. We have one more to go, and I’m going to be honest the advertising has me worried. Sure we Carey Fukunaga directing and Rami Malek playing the villain and I dig Billie Eilish’s song, all promising elements, but we also seem to continuing with most of SPECTRE’s mistakes in terms of plot, characterization and worldbuilding. But hey, when I’m cynical about an upcoming release I’d love nothing more than to be proven wrong, so here’s hoping.

My final conclusion from this retrospective is this: the issue with the Craig era of James Bond is that it increasingly feels like there is a lack of confidence in the brand and that the studio is fighting it’s seeming irrelevance, and each movie fought it in a different way. Casino Royale  was good because it added grit and complexity to the established formula of guns, chases and babes. Quantum of Solace was bad because it coveted realism more than satisfaction (and did it badly). Skyfall was great because it was celebratory of the franchise, both old and new. And Spectre was terrible because it tried to mold Bond into something it isn’t; to make it more like the successful franchises around it. This is never a good strategy for franchise longevity. Bond does need to keep up with the times and desires of the audience, it has survived this long by doing so, but if it loses all it’s individual identity then there’s no reason to keep it alive in the first place.