Movies: Skyfall

I feel like I’m too young to review a James Bond movie. So if I were to say Daniel Craig is a damn good Bond, I’d probably be stepping on a lot of toes. So let’s just keep it between Pierce Brosnan and Daniel Craig, the Generation Y Bonds.

In my eyes Pierce Brosnan, will always be the Bond. I grew up with his face plaster to the name, whenever somebody says Bond, I think Brosnan, but that being said, they’re both great Bonds but in their own way. So I won’t draw comparisons between the two, rather I’ll just review Skyfall as if it’s part of a brand new trilogy of movies unique unto its own.

Unlike Casino Royale and Quantum of Solace, Skyfall doesn’t follow the story line of the former, instead it is its own new story. In a sense it was a mini reboot of the Bond series within this era in that it introduced all the pivotal types of characters to the movies before the Daniel Craig era, that being the gadgets, Q, the classic cars and so on.

After a failed mission with the apparent death of James Bond and the retrieval of a hard drive containing a list of national agents that are working undercover within various terrorist cells around the world, MI6 falls under the attack of a cyber-terrorist organization with no clues as to who is heading this terrorist organization.

Bond, completely off the radar thanks to his apparent death, discovers this via news and returns back to duty. In a newly relocated MI6, Bond is put back in the field to find and eliminate the leader of the organization behind the attack.

Of the three movies, Skyfall felt like the Bond movie. The others I felt like they were trying to humanize Bond a lot. Which is ok, not that I have a problem against it, but it felt like it lacked a certain charm that most Bond movies had.

Easily, this was the best of the series. It captured all the necessary Bond moments, like the car chases, the action sequences, the lovely women. But to top it all off, the villain, was truly a villain. Instead of some sort of white collared, “just wanna get rich” villain.

Bardem played Raoul Silva, an ex-MI6 agent turned rouge, on a little revenge trip, looking for those he felt had betrayed him while in captivity. Ranging on genius, Silva’s tactics were always precise, making him consistently two steps ahead of MI6. This guy was a villain, like an, “I just want the world to burn” kind of villain, which is exactly what this series needed.



Should you go see it? Totally. If you've ever seen a Bond movie, and were kinda ho-hum about the last two, this will definitely make up for it. For it is, more or less, a homage to what Bond films should be.

Case and Point
Skyfall is: what GQ would be if they had a gun collection.