Skyfall done spoilt us.

I enjoyed watching the new Bond movie, Spectre. Initial viewing does prompt several questions:

1) Does Bond ever look at something that will NOT be later used as a weapon?

2) How does one redo their makeup and hair on a moving train?

3) Does Bond ever sit down on a boat?

4) How does one *flip* a helicopter?



Yes, most of these deal with issues of transportation. And that is what Bond movies tend to be. Transportation from one spy trope to another. Most of those tropes are ones of Bond's own making. The set-piece action sequence. The wide-angle view of a foreign city. The fisticuffs with a dire henchman. The villain's lair. Specter has all of these things - check, check, and check.

The issue is Skyfall, the prior Bond outing. This movie was done so well and was such a completely functional film that it's hard to use it as a yardstick to anything else in the Bond oeuvre. Can one measure their success in a game of checkers after pitching a perfect game? The question is apples and space shuttles.

In the movie, Spectre is the original nameless and all-seeing enemy organization which has been building its menace and tension through the first three Daniel Craig Bond films. Except it falls squarely in the middle of the criminal syndicates that good guys have been chasing for the last century. How evil is Spectre? Their leader talks in a German accent. And no one really thought about Spectre through the most recent three Bonds. So there's really no tension. As created here, Spectre is actually a pretty run-of-the-mill group that has been tacked on to this group of films only in hindsight.

That hindsight is really a negative because it makes us all remember how fantastic the last movie was. Why was the last movie so good? It started that Bond did not walk away from the first scene. There was real heft to the fight scenes and malice in the villain. It's not a perfect movie, given the tech guy's willingness to plug anything into his network and the desire of the villain to give away his plan AND chase Bond past the point of reason. But the tension worked because they were based on interaction between the characters, not due to visible countdowns and music cues.

So, Bonds have gotten to the point of statistical analysis. It's important to separate and describe the outliers, then judge the rest. Unfortunately, Skyfall was an outlier. Spectre falls somewhere above the curve, but really is just a string of tropes of Bond's own making.