6/1/2023 0 Comments Spectre film length![]() All of its standard elements have passed into the general language of action cinema and become bland, and yet any attempt to avoid using them will be received as a failure of brand identity. Which is exactly the issue: the Bond franchise has been running for 53 years. I should think the whole thing would be quite exciting for any 12-year-olds who haven’t seen a single one of the Fast & Furious films and presumably such 12-year-olds exist, and will be taken to this by elder family members with fond memories of being taken to Bond movies themselves as children. There’s the high stakes manoeuvring through Those Ever-So-Narrow European Streets there’s The Bit Where Bond Drives Down A Flight Of Stairs there’s some by-play involving Clever Car Weaponry Installed By Q. ![]() ![]() It’s not a bad car chase as car chases go, which is to say I managed to stay awake for its whole length. Further clues will lead him to further picturesque locales, where further set piece action sequences will occur.īut let’s briefly consider the car chase, as the perfect emblem of the challenges facing a new Bond movie in the year 2015. The car chase occurs in Rome, where Bond has gone in response to a clue he picked up in Mexico City, after a brief detour back to London in order to be dressed down by the new M (Ralph Fiennes, four-square and dull in this role after the long years of Judi Dench) and expressly forbidden to go off on any more unauthorised jaunts. But his imagery is telling us the same thing Madeleine will tell us later: that there are two Bonds, that the driven government assassin is a mask for the real 007, who lost his true love in Casino Royale, lost his surrogate mother and his childhood home in Skyfall, and now stands to lose… but hold that thought, we’re up to the car chase. All of this is incidental to the usual Bond pre-titles action sequence, which here involves collapsing buildings, a cat-and-mouse chase, and a fight aboard a could-crash-at-any-second helicopter, so Mendes has to be given points for economy. He’s dressed as death, and accompanied by a woman wearing the colour of desire. Bond enters the film as the inhabitant of a black and white moral universe, but also as a participant in a pageant where no one is what they seem. He will shortly take her inside, kiss her, and ditch her unceremoniously for a roof-top assassination attempt.ĭirector Sam Mendes, back for his second Bond after the more impressive Skyfall, likes his visual symbolism, and he deploys it neatly enough here. (There is such a thing as too much subtlety, and that is not going to be this film’s problem.) He’s in Mexico City, in the middle of a strikingly well shot Day of the Dead parade: the creams of the building facades and the white road dust all drained to bleached-bone hues, the people all in black or white costumes, with the sole exception of the woman at Bond’s side, who wears dark red. Its writers clearly intend it as the triumphal conclusion of the arc that began with Casino Royale in 2006, and it opens with Bond hiding behind a mask. Spectre, the final Daniel Craig Bond movie, would be a stronger film if it were less intent on finding complexity where there isn’t much to be had. ![]() He can be gentleman and bastard at once, but there are not two Jameses. Also, of course, far too hardened a bastard for us to doubt that he sees Madeleine’s vulnerability – her father has just died – and trusts that the right moment to join her in some bed or other will be along soon enough. She’s drunk – hence the double vision – and he’s amused, but he’s far too much the gentleman to take advantage. James Bond is sitting quietly by the bed on which Lea Seydoux’s Madeleine Swann is sprawled as she makes this pronouncement.
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