Nevertheless, I was excited when MGM Entertainment and Sony announced Spectre. After all, I adored Skyfall and was pumped to see where Bond was gonna go next. Would he fight a new threat in Mexico City, as the trailer suggested, or travel to Tokyo again for some R&R? If Sam Mendes was on the project…well, it was bound to be awesome, right?
*Sigh*
Let’s get this out of the way: Spectre is enjoyable. It’s not great, but of the mediocre Bond entires, it’s the first to not be confusing, boring, annoying, or all three. Given how Quantum of Solace was all three combined, that says something (note to Hollywood: don’t assume that a man known for period-piece dramas will make a good action director.) It’s well-directed, shot beautifully, the music is great, it’s all-around entertaining. But it’s not good. And I think the reason is because of what it’s trying to be. I can’t explain why without ruining everything, so I’m going for a spoiler alert:
I’m not one to shy from enjoying fan-service films; after all, Star Trek into Darkness was fan-wanking with its villain being Khan, and while it lost itself in a poor recreation of a better movie…I liked it. It wasn’t fantastic, and Damon Lindelof is all-over the parts that weren’t ruined by Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman, but the drama was compelling, the last 30 minutes were engaging before the deus ex machina, and I thought the idea of knowing who and who not to trust was interesting. It’s a mess, but it’s fun and smart too.
Spectre, however, is pure fan-wanking. It didn’t have to be, there are interesting ideas behind it, but it is. And the underlying problem is its villain.
Let’s start with the elephant in the room: Cristoph Waltz. I don’t think he’s been in a lot of good movies outside of Tarantino, but he’s an incredibly-talented actor. He’s already won two Oscars by the age of 59, which is incredible given The Academy’s credentials for Oscar winners, and I’m sure he’ll continue to impress. However, he’s wasted in Spectre. The idea of having him play the villain isn’t bad, since he’s good at that, but every aspect about his character feels more like an an uninspired choice to play an old Bond villain that only fans of the franchise will actually give a damn about.
Wait, did I blow (see what I did there?) the twist too early? My bad.
Anyway, he starts out promising enough. We get an introduction in the SPECTRE organization, which is pretty much a conference room enveloped in shadow. That entire sequence is fantastic: everything from the shadows, to the suspense, right down to how the characters are introduced, is good stuff, and it leads to the assumption that something good might come of this. We see our first glimpse of Mr. Hinx (another wasted role in the film) as he kills a member of the organization, we hear Waltz’s character mention that Bond is in the room, and then we get one of the film’s best lines with SPECTRE’s security personnel telling Bond that he’s a dead man. (He doesn’t quite say it like that, however.) And then the film deviates for a while, only to return with Waltz’s official introduction halfway through the overly-padded story.
See, Waltz is the guy who orchestrated everything. And by “everything”, I mean “everything that’s happened in Craig’s Bond tenure”. He set-up the entire poker game in Casino Royale. He indirectly tortured Bond and Vesper for information, even getting Vesper to betray Bond so he could be shattered emotionally. He created Quantum as a puppet organization to lead Bond on a revenge spree. He even got the villain of Skyfall, Silva, to mess with Mi6, engage in confrontation at Bond’s childhood residence and kill M for giggles. And now, he’s infiltrated Mi6 through C, and he’s using wiretapping to make Bond a wreck in front of the newest Bond girl, Madeline Swann, before strapping him to a machine and lobotomizing him.
If this sounds ridiculous, you have good instincts. But what’s even worse is the underlying reason for why Waltz is doing this: he wants to mess with him. Remember the orphan thread from Skyfall, the one that sounded like it’d be a failure, but was actually the best part because of how it ended? Well, Spectre expands on that, with Bond being raised by a man who died in an avalanche when he was a teenager. The initial story was that the man’s son also died, but that turns out to be false when Waltz’s character’s revealed to be the one who orchestrated that too.
Why? Because he was jealous. He felt that, like the cuckoo bird, Bond supplanted his father’s love and left him to be eaten by predators. Being the paranoid little douchenozzle that he was, he made sure everything that’s happened in Bond’s life was payback. Believe me, it’s dumber and stupider than it sounds on paper, and even more ridiculous.
Oh, and he changed his named to Ernesto Blofeld. Because why not?
Now that I’ve gotten the big “WTF” twist out of the way, you’re probably wondering why this got approved. Was the franchise out of ideas? Was this a ploy to get long-time Bond fans, who were never that big on Craig’s tenure, to start caring again? Or was this an idea that sounded good in the writers’ minds, but not to everyone else? Either way, it’s dumb.
Bond blows up Blofeld’s facility with his watch, and he and Madeline make their way to back to London. After a brief goodbye, Bond returns to Mi6 headquarters and realizes that he’s been set up. He also discovers that Blofeld is still alive…which makes absolutely no sense. I don’t care if Bond movies stretch logic, we saw Blofeld die when Bond blew up his facility. Even if he survived the initial blast, we saw a wide-shot of everything go up into flames. Also, Blofeld, as well as all of his men, were taken out. Like Bond surviving his fall in Skyfall, the movie takes a leap in plausibility and leaves out crucial details to “keep the mystery alive”.
Two points of additional note must be made, both being pretty shameless. Firstly, when Bond shoots at Blofeld, his gun shots penetrate the visor separating them and make a SPECTRE logo from the cracks. How the image could be that precise is ridiculous, as Bond isn’t Vash the Stampede. And secondly, Blofeld’s scar on his face is eerily similar to that from the Connery era. Even if Blofeld survived that earlier explosion, how he could have a scar reminiscent of that earlier Blofeld doesn’t make sense without fan-pandering.
Anyway, Blofeld announces he’s holding Madeline captive in a nearby building that’s rigged to blow up. And then he runs off, obviously heading out to take down Mi6. Bond frees Madeline in time, goes on boat to shoot at Blofeld’s helicopter, and-through the magic of movie nonsense-succeeds at downing it atop London Bridge. I like that Bond doesn’t kill Blofeld, a nice change from formula, but at the same time this endeavour feels like it was over way too easily and quickly. Ironic, given how long this movie really is.
Spectre’s biggest problem is that it’s less a movie and more a nostalgia trip. Long-time fans will no doubt squeal at the return of SPECTRE and Blofeld, but everyone else? Meh. It’s not awful, and it’s certainly fun despite all its shortcomings, but when you have to resort to fan-pandering to tell a story…there’s a problem. John Logan, Neal Purvis and Robert Wade, the three screenwriters, have written for James Bond since The World is Not Enough, and while they’ve done far more shameless, one review described Die Another Day as “Bond celebrating his 40th birthday by getting drunk and passing out in front of company”, that doesn’t mean they aren’t suffering from fatigue.
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