Is it? That was one of the things I couldn't get a handle on; I had no idea what the gap was between QoS and Skyfall.
Bond has always been a complete misgynist asshole around women, and I'm sure Bill is right that times changing is why it looks more ugly now, but yes, I felt the same way around that point without quite knowing why exactly. You post put words to how I felt. Lenny Henry on why James Bond has no preferred brand of condom like he has drink: "Everytime James Bond snogs with a woman the next time we see her she's being shot, or strangled or drowned. This is an extreme form of contraception!"
If not the 00 status, that he was getting too old for the job and looked like shit, definitely (I watched it again right before Skyfall was released and was thinking that they reused some of the dialogue). I don't think think there's much gap, I think it's close to real time.
Spoilers will follow. I have mixed feelings. The opening credits were, I think, my favourite ever of all time. Lots of little moments in the film were cool. I didn't really mind the fact that the plot didn't make any sense, although I would have preferred it to be slightly more grounded in reality. It's a Bond movie, people build space cannons and ask for a million dollars not to kill the world, that's kind of the mythos, fair enough, although the two previous movies had seemed to move away from that stuff. Three things did really bug me, though. One, the sexism, which others have talked about better than I think I can. Using sex slavery as a kind of casual fill-in on a character's background is not cool. Walking nakedly into the shower of someone who has semi-flirted with you one time as a way of letting them know you want sex is skeevy as hell, even if the answer ends up being yes. Combined with his knowledge of her past... look, I get it, she's a sexy cartoon character, not a real person, and Mendes/ the scriptwriters didn't spend more than 15 seconds thinking about this wank fantasy before moving on to the next thing, but if you bring in something as real and ugly and deeply unerotic as real-world sexual slavery, you're going to create all kinds of ugly associations in people's minds. Don't use it as a cheap fucking throwaway. Two, I hate it when a movie has a THEME and the dialogue reminds you of this THEME over and over in order to make sure you correctly interpret the events of the movie through the lens of this THEME. In this case, the THEME was that Bond Is Getting Old, Is He Past It???!!!!???!!! That's fine, actually. You can raise that question and try to do something with it. If you unsubtly remind me that this is the THEME you're going for every two minutes, then I'm going to want to throw things at the screen. The scene with the New Q in the art gallery was the worst offender, but it really was grating how often it came up. Finally, there seemed to be some kind of weird un-rebooting of the previous two movies. It feels like Mendes watched them and went, what, they threw out all the camp stuff about exploding pens and invisible cars and people being eaten by sharks with lasers on their heads? But I love that stuff! I'm going to bring some of it back in, and then explain to the audience that I'm only bringing some of it back, and then tie it into my THEME of Old Dogs Learning New Tricks. See, the character is like an old guy learning how to be an agent in a new and changing world, and the film is like an old IP that's being brought up-to-date without losing its distinctive qualities! I'll make some heavy-handed allusions to all this in the dialogue, people love that shit! Yeah, I don't know. Something about trying to be too clever by half in ways that actually aren't all that clever, and forgetting to just Tell Me A Damn Story.
