5/31/2023 0 Comments Spectre movie![]() ![]() In Spectre, though, Mendes and writers John Logan, Neal Purvis, Robert Wade, and Jez Butterworth seem determined to convey the sense of some continuity coming to a climax, of things being wrapped up retrospectively. Characters have recurred, but each episode essentially started as a tabula rasa, just as each sequence within each film seemed to have no real relation to the ones that preceded it: the films are structured like musicals, a succession of novelty numbers, with the big production number usually at the end (but sometimes, as here, right at the start). In the past, Bond films simply succeeded each other, leaving no trace from episode to the next. So the whole business of Spectre being built on the principle of looking back seems to me essentially pointless. What’s his motivation? Tenacity, moral certainty, and the merest soupçon of Martini-dry wit. ![]() But frankly, who cares? Bond doesn’t need much character nuance. Spectre similarly gives Bond a troubled past-troubled pasts, and the Unresolved Issues that accompany them, being mandatory these days, whether for The Doctor, Harry Potter, or the Marvel pantheon of heroes. Some Bond films have tried to give 007 an inner self: On Her Majesty’s Secret Service and Casino Royale, where he suffers the pangs of lost love, and Skyfall, centered on his Oedipal relation to authority, as embodied by Judi Dench’s M. But the actors always cohere within strict limits to a template: a white British male (although rumors persist that he won’t always be white), taciturn but prone to the odd wisecrack, unstoppably athletic but unflappable, self-contained enough to go through hell without ever breaking a sweat, and always ready to slip back into a fresh tux (can you imagine Bond smeared with grit in a singlet, like Bruce Willis in Die Hard?). Daniel Craig may be very different from Sean Connery, who was very different from Roger Moore or Pierce Brosnan or Timothy Dalton (although the problem with George Lazenby was that he was too similar to the Connery prototype, in a pale carbon-copy way, to be remotely interesting). But unlike the Doctor, whose age, appearance, and manner fluctuate wildly, he also stays essentially the same. The Doctor, an extraterrestrial, can actually transform his body, with each mutation also radically and unpredictably changing his personality-which has proved an ingenious way to keep the series going despite 12 different actors playing the lead.īond, as we know, also regenerates: that is, he can be recast. ![]() Each also has the capacity to regenerate. As heroes, Bond and the time-traveling Doctor have one obvious thing in common: they each represent a last line of defense, a final bastion of strength, faith and ingenuity, each one alone capable of (repeatedly) saving the world. No (62), and the start of the BBC TV series Doctor Who (63). There’s only a year between the first Bond film, Dr. But it’s a certain kind of indestructibility that makes him, and the series, interesting. Of course Bond is indestructible, that’s the point. The narrative proper-after an extended action prelude, and Daniel Kleinman’s title sequence, big on octopi and symmetry-begins with Bond’s boss, the peppery new M (Ralph Fiennes), warning him that the British government is thinking of wrapping up the licensed-to-kill “00” category of operatives. The closing credits end, as ever, by telling us that Bond will be back, but the film constantly raises the possibility that perhaps he won’t-or at least, not as Daniel Craig, who has been fairly cantankerous when asked about the prospect of playing the part again. What’s most interesting about this episode of the series is the way that it’s concerned, very unusually, to offer some sort of closure or finality. You won’t be disappointed-well, not too disappointed. Still, Sam Mendes has once again brought a lavish feast of effects to the table, and applied them with seriousness and grace, as well as the mandatory brio. Let me say that I half share my colleagues’ enthusiasm for Spectre-personally, I had my own unexpected burst of belated 007 enthusiasm with Skyfall, arguably the most elegant, sophisticated Bond film ever. ![]() Yes, nostalgia has a lot to do with the appeal of Spectre-it’s no accident that its heroine, played by Léa Seydoux, has the brazenly Proustian name Madeleine Swann. You can also tell by the hyperventilating enthusiasm of British critics in general, many of them males of a certain age-by which I mean that the modified Aston Martin that 007 drives in this film will remind them unfailingly of the Sixties Corgi toy Bond cars that my generation eagerly collected. You can tell by the British box-office figures for his latest outing Spectre: £41.3 million ($63.15 million), since its release on October 26. ![]()
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