Falling from the Sky - Spectre
Spectre is a marvelous spectacle at times, wonderfully directed in portions and tense with such basic and yet effective nuances. But film must transcend its own visuals. What we see mustn’t blind us with explosive chaos. It must drive us to the next organic phase of the story it’s telling.
Spectre and Skyfall are very different films, but they are also companions in some ways. Skyfall changed the game. It delved ever so slightly into the depths of James Bond’s past. Spectre tried meekly to follow up on this, but it felt as though it went backwards, toward the shallow end. It couldn’t quite commit to dipping its head straight into the murky water.
The similarities end rather quickly, although the conflict of the film is instigated directly from M’s posthumous message for Bond, a bizarrely cryptic video that leads him on a true journey of espionage. If a James Bond film could ever find intimacy within its action, Skyfall did it. The antagonist was deranged and to a degree frightening. But he had a motive that tied directly to the heart of the central characters.
This can be seen as effective or ineffective, depending on your take. M (Judi Dench) for me never felt entirely sympathetic. She was hard to support even as every finger pointed at her. Her stoic presence may be what grounded Bond in past films, but her concrete exterior left a lot to be desired when she had to at least try to show pain behind her eyes.
Nevertheless, Skyfall’s insistence that it strike at the heart of the Bond mythos leads it to a concluding act that is as thrilling as it is aesthetically rich. It stood out. It relies on silhouettes, bodies scrambling through a darkness lit only by the blazing fires that mark the remains of Bond’s childhood home. It’s gorgeous filmmaking.
Spectre opens with a similarly memorable sequence, this time in the midst of Mexico’s Day of the Dead festival. The masks, the theme, the wildness at the heart of the city all creates an immediate atmosphere that the events to follow, sadly, could not live up to.
Instead of pursuing further development of its rather young cast from the previous film, here a new girl is brought into Bond’s life, with loose ties to previous films, and apparently a spark is lit. The chemistry is hardly noticeable. Her motives are shallow. She’s spent so very long hiding from the spy world, but in a day falls head over heels and commits to the hunt.
What the film succeeds at is bringing Bond to his knees. The central character manages to not feel like a terminator. Instead he loses in an incredibly physical showdown, and then later he's strapped in at the mercy of the film’s central antagonist. Where Skyfall is a more psychological (action) film, Spectre is painfully physical.
Look no further for proof of that than Dave Bautista’s character, a villain whose name I’m not even sure gets mentioned, and who gets just one word of dialogue until his abrupt end. His existence is completely worthless, laughable but not in the way a smart script might intentionally make it.
Christoph Waltz plays the central antagonist, a man who has a brief history with Bond in childhood that’s never before been touched on. The relationship between the two characters must have been strained in youth, because supposedly much of the chaos Waltz’s character creates is for Bond’s own pain.
Waltz is a fantastic actor, and seems to thrive in front of Quentin Tarantino’s camera. His performance is fine here. But his villain is bland, his introductory monologue unappealing (Bond even interrupts; it’s as though the script knew it had a dud, too), and his goals entirely unoriginal.
Enjoyable to some extent is the focus on surveillance, and in turn the added question of whether the 00’s are simply redundant. It’s as though the film itself is trying to make a claim for James Bond’s relevance in modern film, though how is that debate not going to win, over the extremities of Spectre’s intent on having eyes everywhere.
Spectre, the organisation, consists of many people, apparently. Apart from that early scene in which Bond stands in the shadows as board members discuss the state of their control, Spectre plays no apparent role. These people seem to have fled the moment Bond showed up. There’s very few faces remaining after then. Only henchmen. And Bautista. Though, he probably counts as a henchman.
Digging into the third act, we’re finally supposed to believe that Bond and Madeline (Lea Seydoux) have feelings for one another. Fair enough. Films do this all the time. They hurry two characters toward unrealistically deep feelings for one another. Only this might sometimes actually be done well. Instead, she says ‘I love you’, and it hardly feels as though it rings true. Five minutes later, she leaves him and his deadly world behind. You know what happens next.
She’s a hostage. It’s a shame that the film had to stoop to these levels. James Bond films have basic conventions, but that cannot excuse it such redundant lows, especially in the wake of the work that was done on Skyfall. The predecessor is not without flaws, but it manages to tell a James Bond film that gives the character some semblance of life. It avoids the ‘Bond girl’ trope and manages to convey a compelling villain whose sole purpose isn’t to take over the world.
Spectre is an enjoyable Bond film. But that right there is the problem. It’s a good 'Bond film' that could have been, and should have been, more. It needed to follow in the footsteps of Skyfall and give Daniel Craig’s story new heights, lows, and limits. The end of the film is reminiscent to that of The Dark Knight Rises. Bond leaves it all behind to be with the woman. And it may have worked.
But the build-up and development of all of the above aspects failed. Spectre is a well-directed action film, with descent performances despite a script that allows little room for its actors to stretch their arms. If Skyfall is the height of the modern Bond film, than Spectre sits in the middle, but it’s a far fall from the previous installment. If this is Daniel Craig's last Bond film, it's a fitting ending. It's just not a very good one.
