Spoiler alert! The following column contains details about the Skyfall plot. It has been out for three weeks already, so if you haven’t seen it yet you’re probably waiting for the DVD release or for Christmas 2015, by which point you’ll have forgotten all about this column and that newspapers even existed.
Suffice to say you don’t need to be a genius to divine the major plot points of a Bond film anyway, such as the fates of 007, the baddie and attendant henchmen. As a service to you, however, and so you can continue in the knowledge that you won’t stumble into spoiler boobytraps, I’ve italicised dangerous paragraphs so you can skip them without ruining your overall enjoyment of this column. Except for this paragraph. This is italicised for separate style-of-spoiler-alert reasons. The result is a column of maddening typographical disorder. Enjoy!
Irish cinema audiences are not given much to cheering, but there was a scene in Skyfall when my fellow cinemagoers raised a shout of delight so surprising it even woke the man snoring in the seat beside me.
It is the scene in which Bond opens a garage door to reveal his old Aston Martin waiting for action. Such warmth ran through the cinema that it was as if someone had piped popcorn butter through the air-conditioning vents.
Italics alert! Bond further proceeds to threaten M with the ejector seat (cinema laughs) and to use its front-light machine guns to mow down bad guys (cinema chuckles) before the Aston Martin is ultimately destroyed in a terribly moving scene that fuses Love Story with Arnie’s thumbs-up-out-of-lava farewell in Terminator 2.
The joke works as a reference not just to previous Bonds but to the film’s central theme – mentioned only every 24 seconds – of the tension between the old ways and the new reality. Except it makes no sense whatsoever, even in the world of James Bond.
Movies, like all fiction, are not meant to make sense within our world, only to have logic within the world in which they exist. Film expects a suspension of disbelief. Bond, as much as any series, requires an extra commitment to that. Its inherent ridiculousness has always been a large part of its appeal.
But even within its own narrative structure Skyfall makes no sense at almost any point. Then again, Bond movies are so filled with contradiction and implausibility that it is futile and overly earnest to go picking apart its plot just to satisfy some nagging itch. So let’s do it.
Italics alert! Bond, who has failed his secret-agent test, takes M to an isolated and unprotected house to use her as bait for Javier Bardem’s bad guy. He entrusts her with a man who escapes with her across open ground, at night, while carrying a really bright torch. This otherwise foolproof strategy gets M killed. The movie ends with Bond getting his job back rather than a lengthy public inquiry.
But what was his family’s groundskeeper doing in the house after it had been sold anyway? And how could Javier Bardem’s whateverhisnameis predict the incredibly complex sequence of events that would take him from China to London and blowing up the Underground at a pivotal moment? Did it involve memorising the Tube timetable months before?
All of which shouldn’t matter in a Bond movie. Skyfall is a series of set pieces joined only by a loose narrative thread. But to describe it as the best Bond yet, as some critics have, requires you to overlook the substantial moments when the Bond corporate franchise invades the screen, so that the moviegoer is suddenly aware that the only suits on screen are not just those worn by Bond.
The Aston Martin is one such moment. The Bond universe becomes a Bond parallel universe, in which bits of other films can come dropping in. It has no more value than the TV ads in which the Bonds were spliced together into a single car chase. Daniel Craig might as well have been handed the keys by Sean Connery.
But it is in its product placement that Skyfall most obviously fails. It so repeatedly smashes down the fourth wall that the only surprise is that it doesn’t ultimately reveal the logo for a leading brand of bricks. The opening scenes are hilariously egregious in this regard, but its funniest moment is when Bond takes out a Sony phone so unimpressive it would hardly have been more jarring if Bond whipped out a tin can attached to a piece of string.
Moonraker is generally considered the nadir of the Bond series, a laser-battles-in-space farrago whose chief quality was the producer’s embarrassing reaction to the Star Wars phenomenon. Skyfall features excellent set pieces, but in some ways it gives Moonraker a rival. You watch, and you don’t see Bond. You see the producers. You see the franchise. And you see an Aston Martin that might as well be shooting lasers in space.
@shanehegarty
