a spectre draws near!

New movie, so, spoilers.

If Skyfall set the new tone for James Bond by catapulting him from the 1970s -- where he's been stuck since the end of the decade like your uncle Luke who can't let go of his polyester wide-collared button-down -- into the modern age, then Spectre is a return to bad habits by washing Skyfall in an entire tub of OxyClean until the barbecue sauce stains come out. It is by no means a bad movie, just going from zero to more-of-the-same in about 3.1 seconds.

Let's set up a little comparison: Skyfall is to James Bond as Die Hard is to 80s action movies. No doubt many of the unkillable ain't-got-time-to-bleed heroes of the hair metal era took a thing or two from the master himself. But Die Hard made Commando look like the G.I. Joe doll he was: a plastic, two-dimensional and otherwise flawless robot -- it's difficult to understate what John McClane, a hero who bled, cried, got tired and screwed up his marriage, did in the face of action heroes who were otherwise a bulletproof hybrid of man and backhoe. Likewise, Bond as a franchise was basically unchanged since the Sean Connery era, and Skyfall put a bullet right between that one's eyes.

Now that I think about it, Skyfall probably should have been the second movie and Spectre the prequel. We've known about unlimited/unquestioned government surveillance for some time now, but the more recent development is the dangers of hacking en masse, which was more Skyfall's techno-anarchist baddie's thing, are perhaps the larger concern when it comes to privacy. One thing I really hate that movies do is assume that everyone computer, phone, camera and garage door opener is on some kind of Wi-Fi network and can be hacked into and taken over by a few nerds and rapid typing. Speaking of Die Hard, #4 mangled this worse than almost any other movie I've seen. Good job.

Anyway, hacking on a "Tarje" or Office of Personnel Management scale is only possible because of how data is stored and if you think of hacks as a natural by-product of the Internet existing, logical. Likewise, the tech industry is not only complicit in government snooping, but its obsession with mass storage, cloud computing and data backup lends itself toward mass collection. The best prisoner, after all, is the one who locks himself up. Large, centralized databases make big targets to unsavory folks. But probably the best argument I've come across against such bulk dredging is that it provides too much useless information through which to sift and not only doesn't work, can't work. The volume is so huge that the government pays wads of taxpayer dollars to millions of private contractors, and to me it's sort of amazing that there has only been one Ed Snowden thus far. And since we've seen the kind of damage one singular person can do the structure as a whole, casting a wide net for (comparatively) cheap private labor doesn't exactly give me much comfort. Plus, I don't exactly want some 23-year-old Reddit addict knowing that I bought baguette pans on Amazon. 

Alright, back to Spectre. Government spying bad. Like the way Silva in Skyfall modernized the individual Bond villain, Spectre tries to drag the rest of the component parts that make up a Bond movie into the future as well. Problem being that such things were silly in the Fleming novels and remain silly to this day. Spectre itself is a massive criminal network pushing the world to adopt its spying measures by committing acts of terrorism to scare governments into it for... reasons? Good megalomaniacs are hard to come by and as creepy as Christolf Waltz gets, he doesn't come close to John Huston in Chinatown. He could've just as easily become a bank or insurance company CEO and had a similar amount of government influence and lived a life of needless violence away from the prying eyes of law enforcement, so the entire Stonecutters thing has a cartoony feel.

There are further attempts to humanize Bond -- give him the full McClane so to speak -- but they fall sort of flat. Monica Bellucci had the potential to be a great Bond Girl (or Bond Woman has Daniel Craig himself pointed out), but all we get is a PG-13 sex scene and a quick PG shot of her in some sexy lingerie that she somehow had time to put on between assassination attempts. She's never in the movie again. Lea Seydoux does a nice turn as the actual Bond Girl, but as Ash pointed out, why does she have a French accent if her dad is Austrian, and why does that accent start to go away at about the three-quarters mark? Another way Spectre fails to live up to its predecessor is trying to have a tough Bond Girl, and Seydeoux is at turns tough and icy, but then all hot and bothered for some Bond action and really doesn't do much else. Skyfall did this better to by making the ultimate Bond Girl "M," which works as a far better humanizing force: Bond only knows the job, so having his boss as his lady tugs at whatever heartstings he has left even more, and there's no possibility of humping, which forces Bond to understand her as human and not an ambulatory penis receptacle. It hurt when she ate it.

Finally, Waltz himself does a turn as Bond's long-lost sort of adopted brother and man does this go nowhere. I don't know if it was intentional or not, but the entire thing made me want to see the movie from Waltz's point of view: a kid who had his childhood stolen away by an adopted stranger and used the drive as a rise to prominence and vehicle to exact symbolic revenge.

Oh wait, that's Old Boy.

Waltz is a good actor and all, but I got a sort of Gary Oldman in Book of Eli feel from it, where some studio head said to another, "Hey, Terry, who does creepy really really well?" and Terry responded "You know, this movie sounds suspiciously like some Korean flick I saw a while back and, hey, where'd you get a hockey sti--" *WHACK*

But the biggest sin of Spectre is also its largest departure from Skyfall. See, Skyfall worked because it spent a lot of time distancing itself from other James Bond movies and really pulled new fans into the fold. When we saw it, Ash went into the theater feeling like I was dragging her to some stupid dude movie  and left singing the theme song. Spectre (which means, by the way, Special Executive for Counter-intelligence, Terrorism, Revenge and Extortion, but you wouldn't know that from seeing the goddamned film named after it) references not only the Daniel Craig movies but goes back to the Connery era -- the entire torture scene is pretty much lifted from Goldfinger with crappier dialog. Even for people in their 30s like my, James Bond is kind of old, and the references were so many and so frequent it's like the Spectre was just a cut-n-paste job of other, arguably better movies.

That, or they just ripped off freaking Old Boy.

The rumor is that Craig is done with James Bond, and I suppose the future is a little brighter given the fact that World War 3 might just start if they don't cast Idirs Elba.