Spectre (2015)
Synopsis
Having worked through all his personal and historical traumas (or so we thought), Bond discovers that, this just in, um it was actually SPECTRE behind anything and everything that’s ever happened during his previous adventures. Yep. Anyway, here’s a new girlfriend!
Particulars
Director: Sam Mendes
Writer/s: Neal Purvis, Robert Wade and John Logan (and an uncredited Jez Butterworth)
Producers: Michael G. Wilson and Barbara Broccoli
Stars: Daniel Craig as James Bond, Léa Seydoux as Madeleine Swann, Christoph Waltz as Ernst Stavro Blofeld, Ben Whishaw as Q, Naomie Harris as Eve Moneypenny, Ralph Fiennes as Gareth Mallory, Dave Bautista as Mr. Hinx, Andrew Scott as Max Denbigh/”C", Rory Kinnear as Bill Tanner, Jesper Christensen as Mr. White and Monica Bellucci as Lucia Sciarra
Budget: $250-$300 million
Shot: Austria, Mexico City, Rome, Morocco, London and Pinewood Studios
Inspired by: An original screenplay with some material taken from Octopussy and the Living Daylights, the fourteenth and final book in Ian Fleming’s James Bond series
The Craig era’s biggest flub
The Daniel Craig era up to and including this point, like the first four Roger Moore films many years before, has an interesting and trackable cadence. It’s a curious phenomenon that started at the end of the Brosnan era and it reminds me of the adage “Hard times create strong men, strong men create good times, good times create weak men and weak men create hard times.” It goes as follows:
Die Another Day = bad, thus building motivation for improvement
Casino Royale = excellent, letting confidence set in and bad decisions take hold
Quantum of Solace = bad* (though I’m a reformed hater), thus building motivation for improvement
Skyfall = excellent, letting confidence set in and bad decisions take hold
Spectre = bad, leading to a long hiatus
Whatever you think of the Craig films I’ve categorised as ‘bad’ (such as they are, they’re nowhere near as offensive in quality as previous ‘bad’ Bond films), the pattern is fairly hard to argue against. What makes it especially interesting is that Spectre had pretty much the same creative team behind it as Skyfall, suggesting the cycle is not purely down to management change but is somewhat inevitable.
Ultimately, my opinion about Spectre hasn’t changed but rather solidified; I think this is the most frustrating and least interesting film of the Craig era. While I don’t have much love for it, it does do a few things well.
When Bond and the gang are Scooby Dooing their best
The story outside of the core MI6 gang may be convoluted and unbelievable but the scenes involving just Bond, Q, Moneypenny, M and Tanner are delightful and well written. Moreover, they do an excellent job of expanding the characters, particularly Ben Whishaw’s Q.
New Q lore is that he has two cats, a mortgage and a formidable array of jumpers, tweed jackets and cardigans. He’s also a wielder of dad jokes, the best of which refers to the destroyed Aston Martin DB5: “I believe I said ‘bring it back in one piece’, not ‘bring back one piece,’” he says, following immediately with a self-congratulatory guffaw. Wonderful.
Bautista as henchman
He only has one line/word in the film and it’s “shit”, but that didn’t faze lifelong Bond fan Dave Bautista, who said not speaking was a nice acting challenge. I love Bautista and I think he’s fab as the literal strong, silent type. Mr Linx’s motivations are more buyable to me than Blofeld’s and Bautista’s physical presence as a henchman is one of the franchise callbacks that I do like.
The cinematography and production design
Replacing Roger Deakins is Hoyte Van Hoytema, who shot the majority of the film on Kodak 35mm film stock. As a result it looks fabulous, particularly in that opening Day of the Dead festival with its long take (not a oner but six shots stitched together) and the shadowy SPECTRE meeting that Bond crashes. Very yellow, very shadowy, very Eyes Wide Shut.
Daniel Craig continues to be dressed phenomenally by Jany Temime, wearing the fuck out of every suit he’s put in. The sets continue to be beautifully decorated by Anne Pinnock and production designer Dennis Gassner keeps the standards high.
I extend the praise to Daniel Kleinman and his title credits, which I like quite a bit despite feeling they’re at odds with the song. The tentacles, the ink and whatever sea creature it is that has finger legs like the facehugger in Alien are beautifully rendered and pretty visually arresting, which can’t be said about some other Bond film credits.
While there are other little things I enjoyed about Spectre — the cunt jokes, the Aston Martin being given to 009 (who we never meet) and it being programmed to play Frank Sinatra’s ‘New York, New York’, and the ageism towards the 00 program itself — there are some big, quite glaring problems that stoke within me a great anger.
The pendulum has overswung
Before I get into my main gripe about Spectre — which is its unnecessary overcorrection to the formula of yesteryear — some backstory is required.
THE THUNDERBALL CONTROVERSY
The reason no Bond film after Diamonds Are Forever mentioned SPECTRE or Blofeld is because they weren’t allowed to, owing to a little thing called the Thunderball controversy. The controversy was a fight between Kevin McClory and Ian Fleming over copyright issues that would span decades after they settled.
Fleming had been struggling with this book and used aspects of a screenplay that he, McClory and others had written. Then he published the book crediting only himself and the shit hit the fan. The verdict of the proceedings meant that Fleming got custody of the novel and McClory got custody of the literary and film rights of the screenplay. Fleming had multiple heart attacks during the legal proceedings and finally died from his third nine months after the trial ended.
It wasn’t until 2013, seven years after McClory died, that MGM were able to buy the rights from his estate and were finally allowed to use SPECTRE and Ernst Stavro Blofeld again. Giddy with excitement over this Bond relic that had eluded them for over 40 years, the gang naturally wanted to inject these aspects back into the story.
Unfortunately, they’d already done so much work establishing their own lore in the first three Craig films that injecting old stuff into new veins, in my opinion, leads to disaster.
Look what they’ve done to my boy
Let the record show that my problems with Ernst Stavro Blofeld are not with Christoph Waltz, who is the most perfectly cast Blofeld that ever Bolfelt. Rather, it’s with his preposterous backstory, his cuckoo allegories, his general ill fit in the 21st cenutry and the way he’s ultimately treated at the end of the film.
You’re expecting me to believe that because Blofeld’s (original name Franz Oberhauser) papa was Bond’s legal guardian for a time, Blofeld got jelly, killed his dad and has been doing all this SPECTRE retconned shit (I’ll get to that in a sec) out of personal vendetta against Bond? I don’t think so.
The head of a global criminal organisation, Blofeld’s schemes in past Bond films have been nuclear by comparison. While his general plot here is to create a global surveillance empire, he also apparently founded SPECTRE to target Bond. Ridiculous! You can’t have it both ways.
Finally, once the film thinks it’s pulled off a seamless Blofeld reintegration, complete with a lair in the desert and an outlandishly old school Bond torture scene, it shoots down a helicopter containing the greatest criminal mastermind of all time with regular old bullets and leaves him on a bridge to be taken in by authorities.
The not so minor retconning
Spectre’s script, according to writers Purvis and Wade, would do a “minor retcon” to the established continuity of the Craig films, which would involve the reimagining of Quantum (the organisation hinted at in Casino Royale and explored in Quantum of Solace) as more of an inactive division of SPECTRE than its own thing. It would also retcon the motivations and background of Skyfall’s Silva, so impactful due to his personal link with M and desire for retribution, as also being part of SPECTRE.
The most retrospective aspect of the credits shows images of Le Chiffre, Dominic Greene and Silva in shards of glass denoting their involvement with SPECTRE, undercutting the solo motivations of each of them and in my opinion, performing the script’s most egregious sin. None of this makes sense, all of it damages the reputations of the films in the Casino Royale-Quantum-Skyfall trilogy and it’s incredibly lazy writing. And it could’ve been worse.
According to Ralph Fiennes, Sam Mendes suggested turning M into a villain (illegal), while a Screenrant piece revealed that John Logan even pitched the idea of Rory Kinnear’s Tanner being a SPECTRE mole. Were the writers sitting in an unventilated room full of black mould? Perhaps I should be grateful for the script we got after all.
I don’t care what the Oscars say, the song is mid
I get that following Adele is a tough gig and I don’t think Sam Smith’s ‘Writing’s on the Wall’ is awful; it’s just not very exciting, especially as a ballad sandwiched between two other ballads.
It’s not like the filmmakers didn’t have other options, either. Lana Del Rey submitted a song titled ‘24’ but got rejected. No matter, she finally got her chance with ‘First Light’, her song for this year’s Bond game. Radiohead submitted not one but two songs: ‘Man of War’, which was unreleased and not written for the film, thus ineligible for a Best Original Song Oscar; and ‘Spectre’, which they did write for the film and which was still rejected.
Personally I think ‘Man of War’ would’ve been perfect; it’s rock-tinged and hardened, which would’ve differentiated the film between its neighbouring ballads and meant a break in the see-say nature of Bond songs named after their film titles.
The Oscars and Golden Globes disagreed with me, though, because ‘Writing’s on the Wall’ somehow won Best Original Song at both. Wild.
Overall, Spectre feels pretty forced and uninteresting. It’s oddly retrospective despite the fact that Craig was contracted for five films, his famously crotchety demeanour at this point explaining the six year gap until No Time to Die. While I like Léa Seydoux I think Madeleine and Bond’s relationship is a bit underdeveloped and I don’t fully buy the “I love you” at the end.
Sam Mendes became the first in the modern era to direct consecutive Bond films since John Glen. Initially, he hadn’t meant to; Nicolas Winding Refn later revealed he’d declined the opportunity and I can’t help but feel massive FOMO for how that might’ve turned out. At the very least it would’ve been more daring.
RANKING CATEGORIES (70%)
Bond execution = 9
Villain = 5
Bond girl(s) = 7
Song = 6
Opening titles = 7
Plot/action/gadgets = 3
Franchise identity = 5
PERSONAL ENJOYMENT (30%)
10/10