Skyfall Dissected

***SPOILER ALERT: ENTIRE PLOT AND DENOUEMENT REVEALED***

In my last blog, I wrote about the story ‘templates’ we carry inside us, that we instinctively refer to whenever we watch movies – by which I mean, we have specific expectations of what seems ‘right’ in a story. Whether a film meets these expectations, and – crucially – how it meets these expectations is fundamental to our enjoyment of the movie.

We may know nothing of the film we are about to watch, but even so, I’d argue that our expectations are determined within the first few scenes of the movie. We know very quickly whether we are watching - for instance - a superhero movie, a heist movie, a romance, a tragedy and so on, and we therefore know what to expect from it – if not, the details of exactly how it will develop or end.

However, the James Bond franchise is fairly unique in that we have very specific ideas not just about what should happen but also how it will happen.

We know that there will be an opening action sequence that will try to outdo previous Bond movies, we know that the story will take us to a number of exotic locations, we know there will be two Bond girls, and we know there will be a villain who is intent on world domination who Bond has to stop at all costs.

The elements of a Bond film are so firmly established that they have been parodied many times over, not just in the original 1960s Casino Royale movie, but also in the Austin Powers films – and in numerous Rob Brydon impressions (“We’re not so different, you and I, Mr Bond”)

It’s inevitable that, as more and more Bond films have got made, the newer films have even come to reference the older films – whether intentionally or not. You can’t have a Bond film with skiing without invoking memories of On Her Majesty's Secret Service. Any rooftop chase, any traintop fight, any fight on top of an aircraft, any car, motorbike or speedboat chase will invoke memories of the appropriate movie (at least for James Bond nuts like myself!). Even plotlines are being re-used, and as innovative as Skyfall is, you could argue it’s a repeat of the Goldeneye story – former British Secret Service Agent turns rogue, and plots against his former employers.

What I really liked about Skyfall is the way it embraces those traditions, storylines and plot elements and gives some emotional depth and resonance to them. I was interested to hear Sam Mendes talk about this on BBC radio’s Front Row programme, and explain how the writing team set out first and foremost to tell an engaging story, and only later did they add the ingredients we might expect from a conventional Bond film. In other words, the traditional Bond elements were made to serve the story, and not the other way round.

The R&D department in happier times

One simple example is the role that gadgetry plays (or doesn’t play) in the film. Whereas in previous films Bond is given unnecessarily sophisticated devices, in this film, much is made of the fact he is given just a gun and a tracking radio. Indeed, there are two exchanges between Bond and the villain where they both take it in turns to gloat over their use of something so simple as a radio device. Having something so simple as a radio device is seen as ‘old school’ which is a key theme in the film. Bond uses a cut throat razor to shave, and just in case the audience have missed the significance of this, the writers have Eve commenting on this being something very traditional. Later in the movie, Bond drives ‘M’ in the Aston Martin from Thunderball, and then the denouement of the film itself takes place at Bond’s ancestral home, where Bond has only one shooting rifle, and homemade weapons at his disposal.  There’s clearly an agenda going on here – the film-makers are making a not so subtle point about the Bond films not needing to lean on technology and gimmickry for their dramatic impact (even though one could argue that previous Bond films have often done the opposite). They’re recognizing that what Bond does best is real-life stunts and live action chases. And of course, Bond kills Bardem’s villain not with a gadget dart fired from under his wrist, or with an exploding pen, but with a simple knife in the back.

I liked the way that, even when the makers of Skyfall do the standard Bond stuff, they manage to do something a little different with them. Mendes opens the film with a long shot of Bond where Bond walks into focus – which I see as a riff on the famous gun barrel opening of the traditional Bond films (the traditional Bond opening sequence in fact occurs at the end of Skyfall). Then there are the one-liners that Daniel Craig delivers in as humourless a way as he can possibly contrive. His comment ‘A waste of good whiskey’ when the first Bond girl is killed in the William Tell scene is really laced with heavy irony, and is not meant to invite audience laughter. When Craig walks through the train carriage having leapt off the digger he makes a very subtle adjustment of his cuffs – the kind of gesture that occurred frequently in the Brosnan films, but is somehow less cartoonish as acted by Craig. Again, a very small detail, but I also enjoyed Craig’s reactions in fighting in the casino circled by giant lizards. Twice he gestures the lizards to the bad guy he’s fighting, in a way that draws his combatant’s attention to their mutual danger, and (I thought) to the absurdity of the situation. In previous films, Bond (and the audience) wouldn’t have batted an eyelid at something so unrealistic. Craig’s reaction here again serves to make his Bond much more rooted in the ‘real’ world.

Skyfall’s villain does indeed live in a secret base on an exotic island location, but this base is simply a deserted town – but if anything, this creates a bigger dramatic impact for being more realistic and not being, for instance, a rocket complex hidden inside a volcano. The sobriety of this particular Bond is underlined by his lack of a triumphant one-liner when he kills Bardem’s villain.  His comment ‘Last rat standing’ seems to acknowledge that this is in some ways a pyrrhic victory – which indeed it turns out to be when M dies a few minutes later.

 The Bond villain parody - in happier times

Another feature I particularly enjoyed was the economy of the writing. Every scene is used to further the purposes of the plot. When Bond is taking his marksman tests, he can’t fire straight because of the shrapnel in his shoulder. He gauges out the shrapnel in his shoulder with a knife (thus showing this is a tougher Bond than previous incarnations), and the shrapnel is then analysed by the forensics team, which enables them to identify Bond’s assailant from the opening sequence. The last known sighting of this guy was in Asia, so Bond now jets off to Asia. In other words, the writers don’t just send Bond to exotic locations for no reason – they take care to establish a chain of logic that shows why he’s going there.

The economy of the writing can be seen even in the small details – in one scene, Bond is exercising doing pull-ups on a bar, after which he collapses through lack of fitness. In a later scene, Bond has to rely on his upper body strength to hold on to the bar under the elevator.  Without the earlier scene, the audience would assume this is easy for Bond. Instead, the earlier scene provides us with the information that Bond isn’t fully fit, and this therefore introduces an element of risk to the elevator scene as to whether he’ll be able to hold on (this being Bond, we obviously know the answer to that!)

  

Okay, so I’ve talked a lot about the way Skyfall takes the ingredients of a standard Bond film and does something slightly different with them – but I’d argue that this is only part of the reason why the film engages our interest.

I’d say that interest in the film is created by a number of key narrative strands: Bond’s rehabilitation and his attempts to prove he’s not a spent force; M’s attempts to survive the political fallout from the crisis engulfing MI6 and – in the last act of the film – the attempts on her life; and Mallory’s ascendancy to the head of MI6, and the audience’s changing attitudes towards this character. In other words, the film is held together by its character development.

At the beginning of the action, Bond is not just unfit and unproven - he’s assumed to be dead, and it takes the entire film for him to prove he’s got what it takes to continue in the Secret Service - both to his employers, and perhaps to himself.

He spends much of the earlier part of the film unshaven and failing fitness tests – and until the final act of the film, as he admits himself, it’s been the Bardem character who’s been taking the initiative. If we’re talking story templates, this is one of the most powerful there is: where an untried and untested character initially ‘fails’ but eventually rises above the odds to claim victory eg Rocky, The Matrix, 8 Mile and so on.

I’d say that the best way of understanding Skyfall is as a transitional Bond film. Essentially it’s a two hour swansong for Judi Dench as M. I say this, because – to some extent – Bond’s supposed death at the beginning of the film foreshadows M’s death at the end, and prepares us for it (late in the film, Bond’s underwater fight in the icy loch is in some ways a reprisal and reminder of the earlier underwater drowning scene).

So, the film is bookended by two key deaths: Bond’s supposed death, and M’s real death at the end. They’ve written the script so that, in dramatic terms at least, it’s seen as necessary that M does die as she is accountable for the deaths of various British agents and has made some morally dubious decisions. In the opening sequence, Bond wants to help a fellow agent who is about to die, but M orders him not to. Again, it’s M’s decision that Eve shoots without a clear line of sight with disastrous consequences for Bond. M chooses her own interests (the interests of Queen and Country) above an individual agent’s life. For the first half of the film, she’s under siege politically for her handling of the crisis, and it’s only when she’s allowed to speak during the hearing scene (just after the film’s halfway point) that events start turning in her favour.

And it’s at the hearing that we first see Mallory in a more sympathetic light, first, when he interrupts the Chair so that M can put her own views across, and then when he risks his life in the gun fight that ensues – thus proving he’s not the deskbound pen-pusher that Bond suspects him to be.  Mallory then walks in on Q as he’s laying a false trail for Bardem – and tacitly sanctions support for the unofficial operation that Bond is leading. In other words, at the same time the film is giving Judi Dench a good send-off, it’s also busily building up Ralph Fiennes as the next M.

I say that Skyfall can be understood as a transitional Bond film, but I wonder to what extent Daniel Craig’s reign as Bond can be seen in the same way. We are already three films into his tenure –even so, I think it’s telling that right at the end of this film he’s being asked (by the new M) whether he’s ready to start work. It’s also taken three films to establish the new Q (who hadn’t featured in the previous two films), the new M, and the new Miss Moneypenny. It’ll be interesting to see whether they continue with this approach in the next Bond film, or whether Craig Bond film 4 will be the equivalent of the first film with a new Bond.

Lazenby: the ultimate transitional Bond. But what a great movie OHMSS was!

It’s also interesting to note that technically Bond is only a few missions into his career, and yet a big theme of the film – as noted above – was about being too old for the job. I read this as a reference not to the character’s actual age or stage in his career, but as a reference to the Bond franchise. But still, it makes the chronology of Bond quite intriguing and contradictory – in exactly what mission did Daniel Craig’s Bond drive a 1960s Aston Martin? A question for another day and another blog!