My latest, in The American Interest:
About ten minutes into Skyfall, the new James Bond film, I was already in love. Not because of the long, opening chase scene, which among its obligatory demolishment of fruit carts and motor vehicles, did feature one brilliantly iconic moment when Bond smartly straightens his cuffs after the narrowest of escapes. No, the moment I succumbed came shortly after the chase ended, during Daniel Kleinman’s splendid opening titles, as Adele sang the film’s title song. As the female sihouettes swirled into one another and Adele’s big, brassy, bravura voice asserted itself over the soaring strings and propulsive beat, I was transported into the heart of Bondlandia, where I was once again a 13-year-old fanboy, watching Maurice Binder’s sensuous opening titles, listening to Shirley Bassey’s dramatic, dominant voice, and waiting for Sean Connery to prowl onto the screen like a tuxedo-clad panther. From Skyfall’s early moments, director Sam Mendes showed that he had captured the essence of the signature Bond movies, and happily, for the next two hours plus, he never relinquished it.
The opening chase, the elaborate titles, the anthem—Mendes keeps these Bond movie traditions, and cannily lets others go. Unlike the films of the Connery and Roger Moore eras, the number of women in the film falls below regulation harem levels, and the most important female character is Bond’s boss, a stout, sharp-tongued civil servant who probably hasn’t been seduced since Brezhnev was in his heyday. Q is back, but Mendes shrewdly reinvents him as a young computer nerd who disdains the Hammacher Schlemmer-style exploding gadgets that were a signature feature of Desmond Llewelyn’s long, fusty tenure as Q. Other Bond indicia are firmly in place. The scriptural “Bond, James Bond’’ signature introduction flows in naturally, and the essential “shaken, not stirred’’ instruction receives a clever twist. The fanfare of John Barry’s “James Bond Theme”, a brilliant brass and bass guitar-based totem of Swinging London, nudges into the picture a couple of times, but isn’t deployed in its entirety until fairly late in the film, when 007 takes the tarp off his still gleaming Aston-Martin and roars into the night.
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