Spectre review

Loved it. 9.5/10 would watch again and again and recommend to all Bond enthusiasts. Here's why. Major spoilers ahead. You have been warned.






























Still here? Great. Get ready to read.

**The bad**

Let's start with the obvious. The plot was weak. This "global surveillance" trope seems to be everywhere (see Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Blackhat, etc.), and I've never seen it done well.  I could go on for a while about this, but I digress. The point is, that alone nearly killed the plot for me.

Personally, I didn't like the action sequence in Mexico City.
* The facade of the one building just has to fall, and it has to fall in such a way that it takes out the building across the street, where Bond just so happens to be. Then the entire building is collapsing and Bond has to have 2 (3?) Call of Duty moments of just barely grabbing something to save his ass.
* Bond needs to assassinate someone (who probably has bodyguards) across a street but he takes a *tiny submachine gun*. Practical for concealed carry, yes, but he had no reason to carry concealed (he could have picked up a gun stashed somewhere on the rooftops). He then proceeds to go full sniper mode on the bad guys without so much as an optic. I know that he's Bond, and that SMG fire is accurate over that range, but he's using a gun for the complete opposite of its intended purpose and he's making his job harder than it needs to be. Also, a bigger gun would have been more macho. IMO, the UMP from CR/QoS would have been perfect.
* Bond stealth-follows the bad guy through the crowd, despite being extremely obvious from the other angles.

The sex between Bond and Widow felt forced and even a little rape-y. IMO, it would have worked out better with a little more development about how Widow hated her husband and Widow being in general more receptive.

It would have been nice to see Widow a little longer. That said, she performed her 2 functions (intel and sex), and keeping it short is a nice way to illustrate Bond's fast-paced lifestyle as well as keep the spirit of the Bond character.

Moneypenny never does anything. She's just there. Wasted opportunity IMO. I was really looking forward to her acting like the field agent she was in Skyfall, but instead she just hovers around the other characters. This was the exception to "good character development" high point.

Hacking, bro! Q hacking the System was just a Linux machine shutting down with some random red letters and pauses for typing.

Why the fuck is there a trampoline and holes through 7+ floors straight to it? It's like Blofeld wanted Bond to win. Readers, is there a plot explanation to this that I missed?

Also something I may have missed: How do we get from Random Assassin randomly assassinating the Spanish dude to "Bond, I've been expecting you"?

Bond got out of World Domination HQ altogether too easily. Into as well, to a slightly lesser degree.

"Bond will return..." NO. NO NO NO. The entire point of the ending was that Bond is done.

**The good**

This movie was hilarious. Some specific instances:
* At least one Bond (Pierce Brosnan in Die Another Day and Sean Connery? in some other one where MI6 give him a "burial at sea") has a suit or similar under some other kind of dress. This Bond one-ups all of them by *wearing a suit under a suit*.
* He's gunning down the baddies, and then the whole house blows up and there's a look on his face like "What the fuck did I just hit?"
* His last ledge falls and it looks like he's done, but he lands on a couch. And he doesn't pop off a Pierce Brosnan one-liner, he just looks at it and picks himself off.
* Shortly after, the head baddie (who somehow also survived) stumbles out and runs into Bond. He looks at him like, "You're the guy," and Bond looks back like, "I'm the guy." And then they take off.
* Tentacle porn.
* M tells Bond he has to meet with an important government guy who turns out to be none other than *fucking Moriarty*. I spit out some popcorn over that.
* Who's that guy behind Widow's door? We know Bond ends up banging her from the trailers, is it him? Wait, who's that other guy and what's he doing here? Bzzt. Bzzt. "Saved your life!"
* When White's daughter gets abducted, one of the henchman uses the ridiculous double-barrel 1911.

This movie was also classically Bond. It played true to the character and the franchise. Some specific instances:
* "They're meeting in 4 hours." Bond internally goes "Great, plenty of time!" Proceeds to bang the widow of a man he killed (and she knows he did it), call up his bro Felix to take care of her, then heads off to infiltrate a top-secret meeting of the world's most powerful crime network.
* Sits in a drunken stupor, interrogates a mouse, notices the mousehole, takes another drink, then punches a hole in the wall, causing the girl to wake up and take a look.
* The cat. A Bond staple.
* The car. See above.
* Blofeld. See 2 above. I agree that he came in and out quick, but personally I'm glad we saw him at all. Prediction: the next Craig movie will be about Blofeld breaking out and Bond being called out of retirement. Regrettably, we've already seen this twice, with a few variations: 1. end of Casino Royale, and 2. beginning of Skyfall. The difference is that in Casino Royale, he gets back into the field driven by revenge, and in Skyfall, by a sense of duty. I'm guessing that either, A. Bond will at first want to stay off the field with White's daughter, but duty will eventually prevail (since there's really nothing compelling MI6 can offer him as a reward), or B. White's daughter will die, and Bond will go for revenge. Either way, we've seen it before.
* "Q I need this" "Q I need that" Bond is an asshole. Also, "Let me steal your car and wreck it, again." First I put this in The Bad, because I found it annoying, but then I realized this is exactly what Bond does in other films.
* "What do we do now?" You bang, obviously.

The movie is relevant to other films, while still being essentially standalone. This was my problem with Skyfall- it felt like a one-off. Spectre pays homage to Craig's previous work without it being plot-critical. I agree that some more exposition about SPECTRE and how exactly it links with the events of the previous movies would have been cool, but I can respect the choice not to go into depth on this, with how much Spectre already had on his plate.

What I liked best though, was how the movie developed its characters.
* There are parts of Bond that need to be addressed, but haven't yet. Skyfall started this. Someone on the Skyfall production team (don't remember who) said it best: "Bond is a bad guy, he just happens to work for the good guys." While I don't remember getting this impression from Skyfall, it's nice to see someone had it in mind. So the big question Spectre answers is, "Why does Bond do what he does?" And we finally get an answer to that. More importantly, it's not a typical macho Bond I-always-know-exactly-what-I'm-doing answer, it's "I don't know. I never really stop to think about it." IMO, this is a perfect answer to that question. It fits his character while also further developing it. In fact, as soon as Mallory et al. get to the safe house, Bond gets right back into it, planning and prepping the mission because that's who he is. Meanwhile, White's daughter is standing there watching Bond tailspin. I particularly liked the camera work in this scene.
* "James, I can't!" Bond assumes she's talking about the mission, because that's the habit he's fallen into. She points this out, distraught, then leaves. Doesn't even look back. The scene made me think she's made of sterner stuff than the stereotypical Bond girl, and also showed that she has agency and the ability to not hopelessly hang off of James's tux hoping for more penis. Camille is probably the best Bond girl in this regard. Shame there were so many problems with the rest of the movie.
* Mallory is in a bureaucratic position, but he was once a field agent too. This really shined when Random Assassin hits his car. Mallory escapes the crash, but he doesn't turn around and rescue Bond. He knows the mission is more important. In fact, this is exactly the same call that the last M made in Skyfall.
* Mallory also recognizes that he can't help Bond in the desert. It puts him in a tough position, and loses him some points with Bond's friends, but he's the bureaucrat MI6 needs.

Miscellany:

I appreciated the symbolism of having Mallory on one side of the bridge, and White's daughter on the other. It leans toward ham-fisted, but there's a fine line between too overt and too subtle.

I genuinely thought White's daughter was not going to make it, especially when she walked off alone. It's nice to see someone make it for once (Camille doesn't count here, as she's pretty much the anti-Bond girl), and it's nice to see Bond happy.

It was also a nice shock to realize that the camera in White's house *wasn't his*. I saw it, then I saw White's TV screens, and I thought that was the end of it, but it comes back like a brick.

**The not-so-ugly**
* I found Bond banging the widow to be excusable plot-wise because she says she didn't like her husband.
* White's daughter says she won't have sex with Bond, and then does so later.  What I think people forget is that she tells Bond off while she's drunk off her ass, and not 2 minutes later mumbles about being lucky to see 2 James's. On a related note, it was refreshing to see Bond not take advantage of her drunkenness, but realistically, there's no way the producers could have had Bond do anything else.
* "Bond didn't suffer at all from the interrogation!" That's because Blofeld was trying to hit a specific nerve. And he was seconds away from losing his eyes. Admittedly, the close shave with his eyes was obviously to build suspense, but in-universe, he nearly ran out of time (puts on sunglasses). It would have been nice to see him hurt more, though. At the very least, IIRC Blofeld hit Bond's optic nerve first. Why not make Bond struggle to see clearly, instead of expertly sniping all of Blofeld's guards on the way out?
* "Why not just kill Bond right away?" a. Because that's not what Bond villains do, and b. because Blofeld enjoys making Bond's life miserable, and if Bond hadn't been lucky with where the chair put his hands, Blofeld would have many hours of enjoyment in store for him.
* "White's daughter was ice-cold at first, but she sleeps with him in like 3 days!" I don't think this is a problem, as those 3 days were hella crazy for her and 2 people experiencing crazy together tend to develop an emotional bond. Bond probably just wanted to bang at first, but she helped him realize he's been in the profession too long and that made him grow to like her. That's exactly what Vesper did in Casino Royale, but it backfired when she sold him out and died.


Well, that's it (for now lol). Damn, I've been this for 2.5 hrs and accidentally wrote a review.

**Update 11/9**

Something I forgot to write about in character development:

Vesper Lynd comes up a lot, most notably a tape of her interrogation. Whenever Vesper came up, I expected some reaction out of Bond. And there was ... nothing. Bond has realized that Vesper is a relic of years past, and he's moved on (something he paid lip service to in QoS, then proceeded to go Terminator on Quantum and derail a national incident in the process). I found that these encounters and Bond's reaction to them, exemplified by the interrogation tape scene, lent a maturity to Bond's character.

**Update 11/15**

Miscellany:

Bond says he drinks "too much". From his tone, we can tell he doesn't actually think so, a point reinforced by how many more drinks he enjoys later in the movie. However, I like to think the series is finally acknowledging, if only tongue-in-cheek, that this guy is an over-his-head, off-his-ass alcoholic.