Skyfall - IT IS TIME

Yes, very traditional in a lot of ways, and many times where you'll have to switch your brain off unfortunately. This one has less interesting twists and turns than CR and QoS (which I still like despite it's flaws) but has much more personal insight for this Bond, about time too. The villain required an actor with the talent of Bardem otherwise he would have been unintentional comedy. Overall probably one of the most entertaining spy flicks.

I don't think that the plan required nearly as much coincidence as you make it sound in the spoiler; he didn't need all of that to play out as it did in the movie. But I still think the plot was annoyingly dumb:

It was absolutely beautiful, though. Entire sequences where every single frame would be beautiful on its own, and several of those sequences.

Wow, is the plot to this movie probably the stupidest thing I have seen in five or six years. Like, almost nothing anybody does makes any sense at all, if you sit back and think things like "What is this person trying to achieve?" It is Star Wars Prequels-level bad on that score.

Everything else about it, though, is excellent. Good action, great pacing, very nicely shot, and good acting from every person involved. Javier Bardem is amazing (and for the most part playing against type) and Daniel Craig continues to be probably the best James Bond ever. So if you are willing to turn off your brain and just watch lots of action, pretty girls, a lavish settings, here you go. I give it a marginal thumbs-up overall, because it was better than I was expecting.

The plot is contrived and doesn't stand close scrutiny but I don't think that it's anything like as bad as the Prequels. I also think it's a bit silly to claim that most characters do stuff for no reason, when their motivations are pretty clear for the most part - even Bond's, which actually makes 'Skyfall' basically unique amongst Bond films.

Finally, there's the plot and there's what the film is actually about: the former may not hold water but the latter is actually pretty solid, in my opinion.

MASSIVE SPOILERS FOR THE WHOLE MOVIE

The plot really doesn't make any sense. Just like in the Star Wars prequels, people continually do things for no real reason; things that don't advance their goals and often put their goals in terrible jeopardy. They do it because it keeps the movie interesting, as long as you don't think too much afterwards. Silva's (Javier Bardem's) overall goal is to embarrass and then kill M (Judi Dench). Bond's goal is to stop Silva from doing that.

Things go way off the rails about 10 minutes in, when Silva hacks into MI6's computers and somehow uses them to cause "a gas explosion" (how that could happen is unexplained and defies logic, but whatever). Although he wants to keep M alive at this point, he alerts her to the hack and it's only by chance that she gets stopped before the explosion goes off. They trace Silva's henchman and Bond locates him at an airport. Although we are told this guy's information is the most important thing on earth, MI6 sends James Bond alone with a pistol to capture and interrogate him. Bond presumably has lots of chances to do that at the airport, in the airport parking lot, or after the henchman stops at the Shanghai building, but inexplicably just keeps following the guy around. I guess in the office building we're supposed to believe that he has to move so slowly to sneak up on the guy that he never really catches him until it's too late. It turns out the henchman is there to assassinate somebody. The target has been lured to an apartment across the street by Severin and her bodyguards. Why they then assassinate this person through the ludicrously complex scheme of shooting him from an office highrise across the street is never explained. The target is right there in the room. Why not just have a bodyguard kill him, or have the henchman be hiding in the closet and burst out and kill him? It makes no sense, but it's there because it provides an action fight in a cool location, and allows Bond to see Severin and her bodyguards but not be able to catch them, so the plot can advance to Macau.

It's later established that Silva is waiting to see who cashes in the chip and is going to have that person killed. Bond cashes it in. Rather than immediately killing him, for some reason Severin comes to meet with him. She doesn't even really try to learn anything about Bond, so it's pretty unclear why she meets him at all, other than the fact that it allows the movie to give out a couple more plot clues and allows the characters to have some sparkling conversation in an exotic locale. Bond fights Severin's bodyguards and escapes onto a boat with her. This whole sequence makes no sense. I assume Silva's plan to get captured is already going, because his hard drive is already trapped. But if it is, it sure doesn't make sense that the bodyguards are actually trying to kill Bond (at one point, the only thing that saves him is his palm-coded gun). You need Bond to get you into MI6, but for some reason he tries to actually kill Bond (the reason: it makes the movie exciting). Luckily for Silva, Bond is not killed despite several people trying, and Silva captures him.

Silva then says Severin is now "superfluous" and kills her. This reinforces the idea that Silva intended all along for Severin to lure Bond to the island, but again if that's true why did he try to have Bond killed in Shanghai and again in Macau? I guess for the cool fights and action. As they are all standing there after Severin is killed, Bond stages a dramatic reversal, taking out all of Silva's henchmen while they all shoot at Bond. Again, why? We are later told that Silva at this point is trying to be captured because that is part of his plan. Why does he have all his men try to kill Bond? How does he know Bond will kill the henchmen, but not Silva himself?

Silva is put in prison at MI6, and tells M what is going on. M leaves for a meeting at parliament (or whatever that is), and Q tries to hack into Silva's laptop. By doing so, he inadvertently sets off the trap and the laptop actually hacks into MI6. We're told now that this was Silva's plan all along: to be captured so his hard drive can hack into MI6. This makes no sense. In the first place, it's already established that he hacked into MI6 from the outside. Whatever he wanted to do, he already could have done. On top of that, there's no explanation why he needs to be physically captured and then escape, rather than just letting MI6 get the latptop back. He does nothing of any use (to him) while he is captured. What does he need to be captured for? The answer: because it provides a cool escape sequence for the movie as Bond chases him through the tunnels. How did he even know M would be summoned to parliament, and that she would agree to go? How did he know Q would set off his laptop trap at just that moment, not too soon and not too late? There's no way, but it allows a cool chase sequence and allows M to be put in peril. (We know that this was all part of the plan, because Silva already has a bunch of stuff pre-set to deal with it -- explosives in the Underground, police uniform, etc.)

Somehow the laptop is programmed to do a bunch of stuff that lets him escape (open doors, etc), but there is zero explanation of how he set that up in advance, given that MI6 just moved headquarters like a day ago. Bond pursues him through the Underground, but at the crucial moment Silva triggers an explosion that causes a train to crash through the roof, cutting Bond off so Silva can escape. How on earth he knew Bond would catch him at that specific place is never explained, but he must have since the explosives are all rigged. Why Silva would want to wait until Bond might have shot him (rather than, say, using his abilities to crash a train behind him long before Bond got there) is never explained. The explanation is "because it allows a cool scene where Bond almost catches Silva, and then there's an awesome train pile-up."

Silva disguises himself as a policeman and takes the Underground to Parliament. There is this ludicrous sequence where we're expected to believe that MI6 allows a terrorist group to walk into Parliament and shoot everyone because M doesn't want to look weak in front of the Defense Minister. That whole thing is so fucking absurd and makes no sense. Call Parliament, call out the Army, shut the place down, your entire government is about to get murdered by terrorists. You're sure not going to look any less weak when Silva kicks the door open and starts blasting everyone. What if he had killed the minister and M? But doing it this way allows for the cool shootout in the Parliament room. Silva, who up to now has been a genius criminal mastermind who has every single thing planned out to a T, apparently has no plan to kill M other than "I'll walk in there and shoot the place up with my pistol." After this massive, intricate plan that involved getting captured, multiple computer hacks, pre-placed explosives, police uniforms ready to go, etc etc., he gets thwarted because he can't shoot straight and Bond makes a smoke cloud with a fire extinguisher. Where are all your carefully placed explosives and computer hacks now? Did you really have no plan at all once you got into the Parliament building? This makes zero sense. But it's necessary to get to the big setpiece ending.

Bond then decides to lure Silva in by using M as bait. Rather than setting something up with other agents or whatever, for no reason at all he decides to set his trap at his abandoned family home, which is completely indefensible and has no weapons, and he takes no allies at all with him. It's established that he's going to lead Silva there by laying a false computer trail for Silva to follow. You could have that trail go anywhere. You could lay it anytime you want. Why does Bond choose Skyfall? Because it's a cool locale for a shootout. Although we're told this is a trap being laid by Bond, he does not take anything with him out of which to make a trap: no weapons, no vehicles, no soldiers, nothing. He could have an entire Army brigade waiting there when Silva shows up with his truck and helicopter. Why not? Because that wouldn't put Bond and M in peril. Also, how does Bond know that Silva will take the bait, rather than going into hiding and using his amazing hacking and planning skills to lay a new trap for M when she least expects it? No reason, other than the movie needs it to happen to get to the big finish. How does Silva even know M is with Bond? For that matter, why does Bond really take M with him, exposing her to deadly danger, rather than dropping her off somewhere along the way? Well, because all those things have to happen for the big finale to happen.

So instead we get Bond, M and Kincaid booby-trapping the house with whatever they can find around. Then Silva shows up and, despite the fact that he's been established as the world's most meticulous planner, he has his men just walk up to the house in a wide line in broad daylight, but for some reason doesn't use his military helicopter yet. The reason? Because it will be a cool new element later in the fight. The mercs walk past Bond's parked car without even glancing inside, because they are I guess idiots. If they had looked in and saw Bond, which is the only natural thing to do, the whole movie is over. But they don't, so Bond gets to ambush them from behind and then miraculously escape. Rather than all cornering and killing him, a bunch of them just go into the house, setting off booby-trap after booby-trap and getting ownzored by an old man with a birding gun and no military training, despite the fact that they have assault rifles and are elite mercenaries but I guess forgot to put on any body armor before this firefight. Then they get up to the second floor, where for variety they get owned by an old lady.

Silva shows up with a military-grade helicopter and starts blowing the house to pieces. Why he didn't just do that to start with is never explained. He walks around tossing incendiary grenades in all the windows. Then he tells everyone not to harm M because he wants her himself. AFTER HE HAD THE WHOLE HOUSE SHOT TO PIECES AND SET IT ON FIRE. Okay. She and Kincaid escape out a secret tunnel and, although two seconds ago they were guerrilla-warfare experts, now they are complete idiots and use a flashlight on their way to the church and turn the lights on there. Nice move. But the movie couldn't get to the next part without it. Bond is all Those alien bastards are gonna pay for shooting up my ride and rigs a bomb out of two LP canisters and that somehow brings down a military chopper flying outside the building, and kills almost all of Silva's henchmen. Silva goes to the church and there's that moment where he tries to get M to kill them both, but Bond throws a knife into his back. Luckily that doesn't cause him to convulsively set the gun off or anything. Rather than kill M with the last of his strength, he turns around and for some reason tries to walk to Bond, despite the fact that he's now mortally wounded and outnumbered 3 to 1. Then the movie ends.

All along, I guess the point is that Silva wants to embarrass M and kill her. There were a zillion easier ways to do that, given that he was already hacked into MI6's computer, and had their hard drive of agents. Bond breaks into her house with zero problem early in the movie, and it's shown that she has no servants or bodyguards. You're telling me Silva couldn't find some better way to get to her than storming Parliament? You could have just captured her at her house and given her the same speech you gave her at MI6 and killed her. And all along, Bond is trying to protect her. Which he does by taking her far from any protection into an indefensible location where she is killed.

That's actually my other big problem with the movie:

It says something that as many problems I have with the plot and the tone of the whole thing, I still more or less enjoyed it. (And I still liked it better than Quantum of Solace). And at the end, when they're basically re-establishing the franchise, I was thinking, "okay, great, now I want to see the movie that you're building up to with these scenes, instead of the one that I just finished watching."

Rywill: that's a long-winded way of saying that the movie didn't work for you. There's also some stuff in there that's wrong (e.g, that wasn't parliament, and MI6 didn't just let Silva walk in - they tried to warn M; even if M hadn't been delayed on the bridge, the likelihood is that she still wouldn't have been in her office when the gas main exploded; and so on). It's late though and I'm not sure i want to write a rebuttal in any case, because if the film didn't grab you then it didn't grab you. Your loss, because despite the superficial silliness, there's a lot going on on this film.

The plot is really, really coming off like they adapted TINKER, TAILOR, SOLDIER, SPY for the Bond universe.

No, it is a largely accurate summation of utter nonsense in the movie's plot. I liked the movie--definitely better than Quantum of Solace, although it's no Casino Royale--but that doesn't make its ridiculous plot any less ridiculous.

Spoilers

Rywill's assessment is hung up on Silva's plots being masterminded. I don't see them that way. He's out for revenge, but not a in a bloodless way. He wants M to feel his betrayal. He wants to demonstrate his resourcefulness as a double O and make M regret her choice (the same kind she makes in the opening.) I don't want to defend a dumb plot too much but the motivation is clearly different from typical world dominating Bond villains or the ego minded betrayals of Sean Bean's 006 or Electra King. That not enough of that is shown is the fault of the script not the actors or directing. Silva does a lot of waiting. He wants to engage in a chess match with M and in turn Bond. He wants to evaluate Bond and see if they can be the two rats he imagines. That's why he's always letting his henchmen try to kill him but not willing to pull the trigger himself. He'd finally have to admit he's the lonely rat he is. He struggles to kill M because he doesn't really have a plan. Storming the hearing wasn't part of a big plan, it was a reaction. He's resourceful and connected, like a good double O, but he doesn't have dreams of power over anyone else. Now I'm not saying that anything is smart about the plot, but there is at least a motivation. When Silva explodes holes for coincidentally timed trains, we're supposed to assume he's got lots of holes rigged for falling trains. He's not the Joker, the chase isn't the sole point to him. It doesn't prevent it from being a stupid way to escape, but it does make sense as a battle of resourceful double Os.

The script was rather poor. The "he planned it all" line was emblematic of how confused and awkward it was as a plot, but the characters found a heart in this movie despite the script. Kind of like the Star Trek reboot, we can skip the nonsense that the writers couldn't work out and just get to the characters.

It really isn't at all. It's a very traditional Bond flick in most respects.

STILL SPOILERS

I understand what his motivation is. The problem is that it doesn't mesh at all with the way things happen in the movie. If he needs Bond, or wants him around (which is pretty clearly the case, once they reveal that he planned on getting captured), he shouldn't have his henchmen trying to kill Bond at every turn. And if storming Parliament (I'll keep calling it that because I don't know what else to call it) wasn't the plan, why does he have explosives rigged in the Underground tunnels and police uniforms ready to go? Why does he decide to attack her in a heavily-guarded building rather than just waiting until she's on the road or back at home? And if that wasn't the plan, what WAS the plan, and why didn't the plan work? From the time he gets captured (which we know is planned) up to the time he gets to the hearing room, everything seems to go exactly as he expected. His henchman is there in the train tunnel to pass him a uniform, his bomb (or bombs!) is set in the tunnel, his other henchman is at the train stop in uniform with a police van, etc. There's no way all that got set up on the fly, right? That was the plan.

I agree that if you ignore the really, really dumb and senseless plot the rest of the movie is good. I gave it a thumbs up! The meta-themes I don't think are that impressive (old & busted vs the new hotness, etc) and I wasn't that into exploring Bond's painful childhood. That stuff was all very average ("Sometimes the old ways are best"; "He's driven because he's an orphan!"). But the action sequences were great, it was shot and paced perfectly, the acting was all good (especially Javier Bardem), the dialog was mostly witty and deftly delivered. It's a summer popcorn movie, which is fine, but you can't get around the fact that although the characters have clear motivations, what they do usually does not fit with those motivations in any sensible way. If you want to achieve X, you are doing almost the opposite of the best way to achieve X.

It would have been a lot better, actually, if it was closer to what caesarbear imagines it was: if Silva was trying to kill Bond and got captured because Bond outwitted him at that point, and then somehow escaped by improvising a way out, and both sides are having to improvise and adapt to the other as Silva tries to kill M and Bond tries to save her. But the movie makes pretty clear that Silva's scheme all goes entirely according to his dastardly plan up until the point where Bond hustles M out of Parliament in a cloud of CO2 smoke.

Spoilers

He didn't know Bond, at least not in person. He didn't know if he could be a changed rat like him or not. If his henchmen do kill him, it doesn't interrupt his preoccupation with M.

So that he can escape capture. Going after M in public became a new goal.

Because he has the opportunity to do so. It shows his skill and leverage.

His plan was to make M suffer for her sins. Whether from a distance or up close. Him being captured triggered an escalation in his violence.

This was all leverage. He expected his capture, but I don't think he planned it. He was genuinely surprised when the air cavalry showed up to capture him. But when he was captured he just needed to wait for someone to connect to his laptop to make his escape. Once he was free, all he had to do is contact his henchmen in London (perhaps the ones that caused the gas explosion) and tell them to bring a police uniform.

I don't really read the themes as old vs new. I saw it as Bond becoming more accepting of who he was. In the earlier two Craig movies he's struggling with M about the nature and character of his work. In this movie he's entered a maturity about what he is as an agent. Thus the whole literal burning of his past.

Aside from one or two lines - "he planned the whole thing" "he's always been one step ahead", etc, which are the worst kind of lazy crappy thriller lines - there isn't a clarity that everything went according to plan as you point out above. There is a clarity that Silva has the upper hand but is a bit conflicted with how to use it. The script does want to make Silva a mustache twirler. The writers did try to make a lazy Joker-esque villain. Somewhere along the way the rest of the creative forces in this movie turned that into something else. It would have been nice to see better Silva vs Bond material, but in the end, Silva was just a foil to Bond and not a true adversary.

Which is also weird, since this incarnation of Bond doesn't have much past to burn. He fell in love, was betrayed, and then lost his mother figure. I read that the bit with Bond's upbringing was invented for the movie, and the books deliberately avoided going into his past -- which means that they invented this stuff for this movie just to destroy it.

And then, what metaphorical past are they burning? They ended by launching straight into franchise-building for the subsequent movies. And this was the most Bond-like of any of the Daniel Craig movies -- he's seducing women and leaving them to die, he's fixated on his Dr. No car, they've even brought back a little of the "gay people are weird and at least a little bit evil" undercurrent from Diamonds Are Forever. (To be clear, that didn't bug me at all because it wasn't PC; it bugged me because it seemed so old-school). I just can't wrap my head around what they were trying to accomplish with this movie in terms of the whole series. If they were burning anything, it was just the last two films of the extraordinarily successful reboot/modernization.

I like your comparison to the Star Trek reboot; it really did feel like everything had such a momentum that you almost didn't notice how nonsensical the plot was.

They followed what Fleming wrote, albeit late in his run of novels, but early in the movies' span. Scottish father Andrew and Swiss mother Monique Delacroi, died while mountain climbing in the French Alps. Little Jimmy Bond was 11.
Sony's history, updated for a Bond who is 44 in 2012 (the original novel Bond would be 92).

Not sure how that means that its not also a summary of why the movie didn't work for him. There's also a lot of subjective interpretation going on.

It's Sunday morning, I'm tired, so... I don't think this will be a rebuttal, just my take on things what happened.

Bond's objective is to find out who Patrice gave the HDD to. Capturing him immediately won't necessarily advance that objective and killing him straight up certainly won't. Ultimately, Patrice' death is an accident. As for why Severine or her bodyguards didn't kill the target (assuming that they were her bodyguards - I'm honestly not sure because she and they are introduced later), presumably part of Silva's approach is to use Serverine to compromise the target and then have someone else finish him/her off. I'm not sure that it's important though.

I don't think it's established that Silva intends to kill whoever cashes in the chip at all. They're expecting Patrice to turn up at the casino to collect his payment, not Bond. Severine wants out, so there's some motivation for her character to speak to Bond, but yeah - convenient opportunity to insert some exposition and start to establish Silva. Speaking of which, the palm-coded gun is a bit like the defibrillator in the Aston Martin in 'Casino Royale' or any of the other gadgets in the 20 pre-Craig films: really really bad Chekhov guns (a literal gun in this case and a literal gun in a briefcase in a previous Bond). For the rest, this is where subjective interpration comes into it - your assumption is that Silva's plan is, and always was, to meet Bond, be captured by him and to use that as the basis for humiliating MI6 and escaping. The problem with this is that Silva's plan doesn't necessarily hinge on being captured by Bond and may not even hinge on being captured by MI6 at all, really. His goal, after all is to embarass M and, ultimately, kill her. Being a criminal mastermind (and a former MI6 agent), he has a contingency plan that covers if/when he gets captured by MI6 but I don't think he needs to be captured.

Silva is unreliable. It's just as - in fact, more - likely that he killed Severine because she had been compromised. He's not stupid: he would have known that Bond wasn't working alone in Macau.

M wasn't summoned to parliament. She was called in front of an enquiry (which may or may be of the parliamentary variety - I'm about 90% certain that it was) to investigate the events that Silva set in motion: the bombing of MI6 and the release onto the internet of the names of four deep-cover operatives, some of whom have been killed in a public and gruesome fashion. M has no choice but to go.

Some characters say that Silva intended to be captured all along - maybe he did but my read is that he didn't need to and none of these characters have a direct line into his head.

MI6 moves headquarters before they learn that their new nemesis is, or was, one of their own. After his capture, someone specifically mentions that Silva would have known the protocols for an attack on MI6' London building, so that aspect of it isn't that far out. I mean, you know, relatively speaking.

There are two aspects to the train thing. First, part of the plan involves sparking a panic in London, by triggering a terrorist attack; this lets Silva and his henchmen use the panic and their disguises to get around with impunity and also makes it easier for them to get close to the location in which M is being questioned by the committee. The other aspect, of course, is that the timing and location are ridiculous and of all the things that are silly about this film, this was the silliest, for me and the point at which my suspension of dis-believe was most stretched.

Again, it wasn't Parliament, the 'entire government' wasn't threatened in any way and it kind of gets into the heart of the film and why I enjoyed it overall. Silva is a moustache-twirling criminal mastermind in the classic Bond sense but crucially his end-goal isn't world domination or holding the United States to ransom for 1 million dollars or any of that stuff. Rather, it's a personal vendetta against M; killing her by destroying the building she's in wouldn't reflect the personal aspect to this: he needs to do it himself.

(I've sort of run out of steam here, so forgive me if I don't get into the other stuff you criticised. I think it's fair to say that we both agree that there's a lot of contrivance and coincidence driving things forward in 'Skyfall', but that it was less of a problem for me because I think the film is about more than the nuts and bolts of what happens on the screen or the machinations of Silva's plans. It's all about the sub-texts, yo.).

Massive spoilers continue to follow in this post.

While the plot is a litttle wonky and I'm not sure I liked this film as much as some others seem to have I don't think it was as nuts as some of you seem to be making out.

You seem to be making a big assumption throughout this first section that Silva's entire plan rests on being captured and that Bond must be the one to do it. Even if we assume that he does want to get captured either to give him easy access to talk to M face to face, or just to show off how easily he can escape the clutches of MI6, there is no reason why he has to care who manages to capture him. He knows MI6 will want him alive because of the hard drive but he doesn't have to care which of their agents brings him in or even when, after all more failures is more embarrassment for M. This film is setup as a sort of 'love' triangle, both Bond and Silva have a powerful mother-son style relationship with M but at the beginning of the film and even toward the end they are never really driven by intense emotions toward each other. Silva wants M to suffer and die at his hands for, as he sees it, disowning him as a 'son' figure while Bond starts out conflicted towards M but ultimately decides that 'blood' is thicker than water and that he wants to protect her. Its those conflicting goals that drive the film rather than any particular personal issue between the two of them. Bond only cares about stopping Silva in the context of protecting M (both professionally and physically) and Silva only cares about Bond when he gets in the way of his goals.

Apart from the standard movie trope that modern computers control everything and that they can all be remotely accessed in service of the gas explosion the rest of it isn't that hard to pull off. if he can create a gas explosion remotely we can assume that he is also able to time when it happens and monitor the location of M so that it happens when she is out of the office. There is a plausible explanation for the Shanghai assassination setup; the fake 'bodyguards' and bond girl are presumably undercover to lure the target to the kill zone and their movements will likely have been noticed. They may be asked questions/forensically examined by police/whoever the target was working with. Its much easier to merely set up a killing and get away with it than to deal with the actual business of murder themselves and then worry about stories lining up, bullet trajectories, gunshot residue etc. As the assassination actually took place in the film, all the people in the room with the victim would have easy and plausible accounts of their behaviour that would be consistent with being who they appeared to be to the victim. As far as they knew, they could tell the authorities, a bullet came through the window and killed their associate and they are all very shocked by his death.

This all makes sense if we assume that Silva is still running his day to day operations as normal and doesn't care about Bond until he learns who he is later. I suspect at some point he is clued in by his henchmen that a highly trained operative has impersonated one of his contract killers, murdered some of his men, is coming out to his island and has likely seduced his girlfriend. Then he probably figures out that M is at last on his trail so he decides to just let Bond come so he can see who this MI6 agent is personally and ask him questions about M. He probably really does feel slightly betrayed by his girlfriend (as much as a man so obsessed can still feel) but he still doesn't care if Bond lives or dies as his plans continue whether it is Bond or someone else who eventually captures him. He also is consistently portrayed as ruthless with no regard for any of his subordinates beyond their function in his objectives regarding the embarrassment and killing of M.

The escape is elaborate but we can assume that he has had it planned it out as a showy contingency for some time. It is established that he was a former MI6 agent and even if he didn't learn it during his service he is a master hacker and so would easily have had the opportunity to learn of the MI6 plan to relocate the ministry underground in case headquarters was ever breached from outside. I believe all his hack program was setup to do initially was to shut down all the power on base which, along with is prior knowledge and his superior training allowed him to escape into the tunnels, not hard to set up in advance, and the move of HQ itself was definitely something that had been underway for more than a day with all the Bond recertification, Macau antics and so on. We see at least three different nights in filmed scenes after the gas explosion (M's house, Shanghai assassination, casino in Macau) and can infer several more. You have to recall that part of this MI6 relocation was precisely to cut MI6 off from the outside so that it was impossible to breach from the outside and thus safer. I suspect Silva wanted to show that he could still reach them even there.

Once he escaped I assume that his actual assassination attempt on M was fairly opportunistic. He clearly had some gear stashed down in the tunnels to trigger the explosion and, I'm assuming, to communicate with his henchmen that the escape contingency was now go. Once he was out of the underground he decided to have a pop at M because she was out of the building and vulnerable but he might just as easily have escaped and used his control of the MI6 systems to cause more havoc.

First up, that's not parliament; from what I could tell I think it was a parliamentary inquiry, or perhaps a select committee hearing, and they are pretty low security affairs in the UK (you might recall Murdoch getting a pie in his face at one of these earlier in the year). Secondly, that definitely isn't the entire government under threat at the most there is probably one minister, the head of MI6 and some backbench MPs, the amount of security shown on film there seemed pretty representative. I'm assuming that the shooting was opportunistic after the planned escape because it makes more sense that way and there is no reason to think it was planned rather than a lucky bonus for him that M was in a vulnerable position right after MI6 triggered his escape plan for him. Also the amount of information M gets on the nature of the threat is not exactly detailed and Bond and team aren't aware of the extent of it either because Bond doesn't actually have eyes on Silva until it is too late. We, as viewers, know he has a small group of armed men headed for the inquiry. Bond has his gut instinct and the knowledge that Silva has escaped and hates M.

Why does Bond kidnap M and take her to Skyfall?

• Bond has huge trust issues, he's not even certain he can trust M. Its not in his nature to rely on other people.
• Bond underestimates the resources that Silva can bring to bear in the UK.
• Bond believes that the political fallout from Silva escaping MI6 will make it hard for him to protect M and deal with Silva.
• Bond is unsure as to how much Silva has penetrated MI6 and he knows that he is clearly ahead when it comes to anything that is even remotely connected to computers. He hints at this last part when he says that Silva has always been one step ahead.
• Skyfall is remote, defensible and it has no high technology that can be turned against him. And of course Bond knows it better than anyone else.
• He knows that Silva will be hot on his trail, in fact he expects him sooner than he actually comes but he wants him to think that they are hiding out rather than laying a trap to turn the game around thus the low tech approach.

Some of this is standard movie trope stuff but Silva's broader plan isn't completely ridiculous. He suspects a trap which is why it takes him longer to arrive and he is also ruthless when it comes to springing that trap. I figured he deliberately sent in that first wave of goons to trigger whatever traps Bond had set so that he could swoop in afterwards when their resources were largely expended. He doesn't care about his people because he is obsessed with only one thing - killing M. To be fair to the mercenaries we don't know how elite their training is and getting killed by an old man specifically lying in wait for you with a shotgun is no real shame even if they were top of the line, also fancy body armour isn't that great against a shotgun.

Bond isn't trying just to protect M, he is also trying to catch Silva. I suspect that if M really did just turtle up that Silva would just wait her out.
The flashlight was a bit stupid but understandable, at the time M is already badly injured and the old man is more worried about getting her to the building without falling over than the goons. I presume he is hoping Bond has somehow managed to overcome them, after all if Bond is dead and hasn't taken out the mercs then they are doomed anyway because the goons would easily find the two of them in the morning.

That's probably enough rambling :) Anyway I hope it helps soothe some minds that were overly troubled by the realism of a James Bond film; a franchise that we should not forget has recently featured a cloaked car surfing a giant wave created by a space laser beam melting a glacier.

This'll be my last one and I promise I will be short this time. The plot isn't really the point of this movie anyway. Basically, what you guys are describing is a better idea for a movie, but not the movie that they made. It's super-clear in the film that Silva planned everything up to when he gets to the hearing room. There is a big change in Silva from before then (when he is always confident, mocking, smiling) and after Bond escapes with M (where Silva becomes angry, frustrated, and starts having to order his men what to do). There are complex movies out there where a character saying "He planned the whole thing!" might be just what that character thinks, but not actually so; this is not one of those movies. This is a movie where a character saying "He planned the whole thing!" is the screenwriter revealing to the viewer that he planned the whole thing. If they wanted this to be improvisation, it would have been very easy to use a two-second throwaway line (e.g., as Silva escapes, he radios a henchman that "Plan B is in effect" or whatever; as he gets into the police van, he says "Head to Parliament"...OKAY IT'S NOT PARLIAMENT, I AM JUST USING THAT FOR SHORTHAND). They don't do any of that because the movie's plot is that he planned all this. I don't think any other interpretation is supported by the movie, not even close. The movie is super-clear about what Silva had planned. The stuff about why Bond goes to Skyfall, that proposed explanation is just laughable. There's no conceivable way that it's safer to go there alone with no weapons than to go a zillion other places he could have gone. I mean, the movie itself shows that all of them could have been killed a thousand times during that fight. It's a really, really stupid plot point that they don't even try to explain; they just want a cool, photogenic, and symbolic/meaningful-to-the-character place to stage the finale, so they have Bond go there.

Saw it tonight and that film is absolutely gorgeous. As for the plot, what Dan and Dermot described is very close to what I got out of it. Sure there could be better explanations baked in the movie and it's obvious that the visuals take precedence but what is there did not ever annoy me or confuse me. I do take it as a given that there are no reliable narrators in a spy film though so when newQ shouts about PLAN ALL ALONG!! I just took it for a hyperbolic reaction to getting his nose tweaked. Likewise, anything Silva says before the chapel scene is clearly to provoke responses rather than trying to inform.

I knew there was something else I wanted to address. I think you're probably the only person I've come across who read homophobia into that scene. To me it was the opposite. Not as loud a statement as making the character outright gay but introducing the tiny bit of sexual ambiguity that they did with Bond's "what makes you think it would be my first time?" quip was a quiet subversion of Bond's status as a hetero sex symbol.

I think the whole problem is that this takes it from being "sure there's plot holes, but it's a Bond movie" to "that makes absolutely no sense at all." I'd have to believe that they made a movie with excellent cinematography and competent everything else, with that large a budget, with that level of importance in the franchise, and that they said "Our villain's plan doesn't make sense in any conceivable way. Oh well. Action!" That to me seems even more implausible than Silva's scheme.

If he had just devised a reaction and had an exit strategy in place for the (likely inevitable) eventuality of his getting captured, that would still put him safely in the realm of criminal mastermind. Plus it makes it seem like Bond has actually had an effect on the plan (always good to have your protagonist doing things), and it still works with Bond's "one step ahead of us" line -- Silva needn't have planned everything down to the last detail, he simply had to have accounted for every last possibility, and he'd still be keeping Bond and MI6 from making any real progress against him.

The other version has Silva coming up with a plan where step 5 is to have minions give him a police uniform in a public Underground station that everyone can access, and step 2 or 3 was "get captured by MI6". There's no reason for his capture to be part of the plan, no tactical advantage to being inside MI6, and he gained nothing from it except perhaps a free ticket to London. (Which he probably could've afforded otherwise).

Most charitable version I can think of: maybe he wanted to be guaranteed a face-to-face conversation with M. But as already pointed out, he could've done that anywhere. Maybe he wanted to lull them into a false sense of security so M would have to go to the hearing. But the hearing was already required by his releasing the Agents' info; they were having the hearing regardless. Maybe he wanted to make sure that Q would try to "hack the hard drive," and therefore get Silva's virus into MI6's systems to be able to track M and the location of the hearing. But he'd already gotten into MI6's computer systems, he could've turned the hard drive over without requiring his own capture, and it would've been better for him tactically to be doing all that stuff from outside a plexiglass cell.

I've got a much easier time believing that the filmmakers allowed a clunky line like "He planned it all along!" than that nobody involved in the production realized that Silva's master plan was idiotic.

I think there's two ways people see homophobia there. One is, it does seem like Silva is basically threatening to sexually assault Bond. Bond is tied to a chair and Silva intimidating him, and it's a pretty tense scene where I think people are going "here comes another torture scene like in Casino Royale." But then Silva changes it up by making homoerotic moves, and I can see people thinking this is a whole new level of torture-threat. Bond pops Silva's balloon with his "What makes you think it's my first time?" rejoinder, which is a great way to end that scene. But I do think people are reasonable in seeing it as "Silva threatens to homosexually assault Bond." I didn't think it was some terrible homophobic thing -- straight guys do not want to be homosexually assaulted, whether they are homophobic or not -- but I see where people are coming from, even though I don't agree.

On another level, there's people having an issue because the bad guy is gay (or at least apparently gay), and then on top of that the gay bad guy uses his sexuality as a weapon. Again, I don't really see this as a homophobic thing (why can't a gay guy be a supervillain?!), but I understand where people are coming from when they say "Oh of course here we go again gay people are all either comic relief or crazy killers." But I thought it was fine. It was just another aspect of his character.

Okay, I can understand that. It didn't occur to me that Silva was using sexual assault as a threat, but maybe I'm naive? Something else that strikes me is that if Silva was actually Silvia, and she was using her sexuality to get under Bond's skin in the same manner, would people be annoyed in the same way?

Anyway, I've enjoyed talking about this, but I'm going to try not to for a day or two because I'm probably starting to get irritating.

I enjoyed it, it had a great plot for a Bond movie, albeit full of holes. It was gorgeous visually, and every actor was brilliant. I liked the callback to the Aston Martin, and since I've recently read a book that spent a lot of time in the underground warren of London, I appreciated the tangle of that scene.

This movie isn't going to stand up to scrutiny or deep thinking, and that's ok with me.

I think it's a great line, one of the only lines in the entire movie that struck me as particularly clever. But I don't think it does anything for Bond's status as a hetero sex symbol; I think it just is an example of Bond's status as completely unflappable, with the perfect response in any situation.

I don't think anyone seriously believes that they're making it canon that Bond is bisexual or anything. For that matter, I don't think they conclusively say (or care, really) that Silva's homosexual. The only think that's clear is that Silva is familiar with Bond's history and reputation, and he thinks he knows exactly the thing that will make Bond uncomfortable. He says outright, "they didn't prepare you for that in training, did they?" It was another of the movie's attempts to say that Silva was the "new generation" and Bond was hopelessly old-school. Cyber-terrorism is a bigger deal than the Cold War, loyalty to England is outdated when there's a global market, and Bond's rep as a hetero lothario made him seem like an anachronism. That's why Bond's response was perfect: he wasn't just saying "you're not shocking me as much as you think you are," but "I'm perfectly aware of how much the world's changed, and I'm not as one-note as you think."

To be clear: I don't think it's a big deal at all; "Positive Portrayals of Homosexuals" is about 99,999 on a list of Things People Should Expect From a Bond Movie. I still can't think of any example of the Bond movies having a gay male character that wasn't a creepy, psychopathic deviant, but then the only other example I can think of is Diamonds Are Forever. So I was calling it out more as a case of Skyfall aggressively pulling stuff out of the back catalog than anything else.

Just to nitpick: homosexual guys don't want to be assaulted, either.

Yes, yes, put your nitpicks away, the point is Was Bond's reaction homophobic? and the answer is No. I am not saying that by negative inference homosexual men must like being raped.

I am interested in people's response to dermot's question, though, which is What if a straight guy were being sexually threatened by a woman? Is that threatening? Because it sure seems like "No," even though all of the other permutations (male of any orientation assaults either gender, regardless of victim's orientation; female of any orientation assaults female of any orientation) are. Is that just because of Bond's character, or because of societal mores in general?

Societal mores. There's a fantasy about someone who's attractive forcing themselves upon you, and so a hot woman doing to bond what Silva did would not be perceived by the vast majority of people as threatening.

If you would have put a woman in Bond's shoes and kept Silva, it would have been just as, if not more triggering, than the Bond scenario.

That doesn't mean that all three carry different weights of repulsiveness. On paper, anyone doing what Silva did, regardless of the gender of either party, should cause people to shudder.

Plus Bond was at an english public school & the Navy. Of course it isn't his first time at the rodeo.

Agree on the convoluted plot & looking fantastic. Must admit, if Bond can waltz into M's house, completely surprisng her, not sure why Silva didn't just do the same.

Other oddity - Bond at the end is re-instated by the new M with back slaps all round. Hang on a mo, Bond's unauthorised plan to use the previous M as bait to save her worked out so well that, um, M was killed. That would appear to be a grade A failure. But somehow he doesn't have the book thrown at him, or scapegoated for her death?

I like lists so here's my Skyfall list:

Liked:

- Daniel Craig. He really is a fantastic Bond and perfectly suited for the current take on the character.
- the cinematography. Possibly the most beautifully shot Bond film ever.
- great action sequences, without a bunch of shakycam nonsense. The opening, in particular, was tight, well-edited and exciting.
- terrific performances all around*.
- decent theme song. Almost makes me forget "Die Another Day".

Disliked:

- Komodo dragon eating bodyguard. I expected to see Jabba ho ho ho-ing up above.
- the whole end sequence at Skyfall seemed like a super-obvious bad idea (and it fails, so I guess it was!)
- M's demise. I think it would have been more effective if the stress of the Skyfall showdown resulted in a fatal heart attack after Silva had been eliminated. Bond wins, M loses.
- various plot holes/devices and rationalizations already covered in detail above. As Athryn said, these things don't hold up well to scrutiny but I'm okay with that, so this is not a strong dislike.

Undecided:

- Javier Bardem's performance. I sill haven't made my mind up on whether he walked a fine line between portraying a mad and eccentric villain or crossed over it into outright camp. He never came across as menacing to me, just an unhinged effete man wearing a bad wig (or with hair that successfully mimicked a bad wig). But maybe that was all he was supposed to be.

I lolled.

Re: Javier Bardem. I vote for outright camp, but I don't think that was a bad thing. Bond villains should always be a bit cartoonish.

I agree, camp villains are a Bond staple. I'm just not sure how camp Bardem was supposed to be. At times his character came across as almost comical and at others it seemed he was going for some kind of Lecter-esque thing with mixed results.

As a bit of trivia: Bardem's favorite Bond Villain is Jaws, so that may give you hints as to the level of camp he was going for.

His performance did remind me of Jaws' smart kid brother.

You're right, it was absolutely clear what you were saying it and what you meant, so I shouldn't have pointed anything out. The wording of it just struck me as weird.

And my answer to your question would be: Bond wasn't, the characterization of Silva was a little bit.

Oh, and the theme: didn't care for it. They took a swing at a modern take on classic Bond-theme style, and they missed. Each chorus is more overblown than the last, and the hook is just dull.

Wrong. The theme is awesome.

I caught this last night.

One thing I don't think anyone's mentioned so far: this film is long. Running time is 143 minutes, and with 10 minutes of waiting and 15 minutes of trailers you're sneaking up on 3 hours in a movie theater. Looking back, Casino Royale was 144 minutes but I felt it a lot more in this one. The plot just didn't justify the time in the same way as CR, imo.

That said: I liked it, I think? Bardem was a fantastic villain, and I generally buy into action movies on the strength of their villains. It just wasn't a home run in quite the same way as CR.

I have not seen this yet, but based on the reviews I've read, it would appear that we have an entire generation of reviewers for whom a home-invasion movie reference means Home Alone, and not Straw Dogs.