James Bond In Skyfall - - - - Part 13

[AnneFan]

Don't get me wrong folks, Skyfall blows Quantum of Solace out of the water.

I'm still debating which I prefer, Casino Royale or Skyfall. Both are solid. I don't hate Quantum, but it definitely doesn't compete with the other two in the same way.

 

[Omer Syed]

I'm still debating which I prefer, Casino Royale or Skyfall. Both are solid. I don't hate Quantum, but it definitely doesn't compete with the other two in the same way.

Casino Royale, definitely.

 

[The Englishman]

Look at all the James Bond threads popping up, I think that should be a sign that he needs his own section on this site....

 

[The Englishman]

Well, Batman Begins came one year before Casino Royale.

I think you need to see some classic Bond films and read some Bond novels. Not everything stems from Nolan, hell it even sounds like your giving Nolan the credit for making Bruce Wayne an orphan...lol

 

[Omer Syed]

Look at all the James Bond threads popping up, I think that should be a sign that he needs his own section on this site....

Tell me about it...

 

[Omer Syed]

I think you need to see some classic Bond films and read some Bond novels. Not everything stems from Nolan, hell it even sounds like your giving Nolan the credit for making Bruce Wayne an orphan...lol

It's not just merely, the orphan aspect.

10 Ways Skyfall Borrows From the Dark Knight Playbook

Rumors that Skyfall would borrow the playbook from Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy and serve up a “dark” James Bond left some people fuming and others positively buoyant.

The reality is better than either camp had reason to expect: In Skyfall, we get the gritty realism that defined Nolan’s bat-flicks and the previous Daniel Craig-starring Bond films, coupled with a colorful villain, a well-rounded protagonist and the compelling storytelling director Sam Mendes brought to American Beauty and Revolutionary Road.

Skyfall’s winning combination of sweeping cinematography, keen dialog and the requisite hero’s journey, along with traditional 007 staples like a rich score and gorgeous title sequence, let Bond soar to new heights. And even though Mendes has flip-flopped on whether The Dark Knight Rises influenced Skyfall — first he said it did and then he said it didn’t — there’s an undeniable whiff of bat clinging to the latest 007 film. And that’s a good thing.

Here are some ways the PG-13 Skyfall, which opens Friday in the United States, parallels the Dark Knight trilogy. Some are trivial, others speak to the power of both film franchises.

(Spoiler alert: Plot points from Skyfall and Christopher Nolan’s Batman movies follow.)

Pulse-Pounding Opening: Start with a bang. It’s a classic cinematic power play, and a Bond staple. Both The Dark Knight and The Dark Knight Rises hit viewers hard with intense opening sequences that signal, “You’re about to see an epic movie.” Skyfall does the same, coming out of the gate with a stupendously inventive chase sequence that will make you glad you’re watching the latest Bond on a big screen. (I wish I’d seen it in Imax.)

Give Mr. Grim a Sense of Humor: For the first time, Skyfall made me actually care about Craig’s heretofore dull-eyed take on Ian Fleming’s superspy — the actor loosens up in this film, cracking wise and showing a human side. It’s similar to the way The Dark Knight Rises added a little humor to Christian Bale’s scowl-and-cowl performance, but much more effective.

Bring Good Guy Back From the Brink to Save His City: At the beginning of The Dark Knight Rises, Bruce Wayne is depicted as a crippled-up recluse who gimps around his mansion with a cane. Later, he miraculously recuperates from a broken back (while doing a stint in yet another dark hole). In Skyfall, Bond goes missing and is presumed dead, but he’s really licking his wounds and playing killer drinking games on a beach somewhere. He’s beaten down and only gets pulled back into the game after a terror attack on his beloved London. (Batman’s motivation, as always, is to save Gotham.)

Put Your Hero in a Hole as a Boy: Bruce Wayne fell into a cave full of bats as a boy, a traumatic experience that made a mark on his psyche. A young James Bond, as revealed in Skyfall (although not actually shown on screen), spent two days in a priest hole after his parents’ death. When he emerged, he was changed forever.

Prove That Orphans Make the Best Crime-Fighters: In Skyfall, spymaster M proclaims that orphans make the best recruits. Anybody who knows Batman’s origin story would have to agree.

Make Him Lord of a Manor: We all knew about stately Wayne Manor, but who knew James Bond had a mansion in the family? In Skyfall, 007 returns to his boyhood home — a large estate on the Scottish moors. It’s in disrepair, was sold when Bond was missing and presumed dead, but there’s a definite bat-echo in these scenes.

Give the Hero a Hot Set of Wheels: Nolan’s Batman has the Tumbler and the Batpod; Bond keeps a vintage Aston Martin DB5 in a secret garage. The first glimpse of the immaculate automobile will get 007 gearheads revving.

Make the Villain Memorable: Can you even remember the names of the villains in Casino Royale and Quantum of Solace? I can’t without a little Wikipedia memory boost. Casting Javier Bardem as psychotic cyberterrorist Silva might not have been the master stroke of putting Heath Ledger in the Joker’s smeared makeup, but it’s damn close: Bardem plays Skyfall’s big bad with the same sort of relish, turning Silva into a Bond villain for the ages. This twisted character might have been all camp in a lesser actor’s hands. I only wish Bardem had gotten more screen time.

Give us a Peek at Family Gravestones: Both The Dark Knight Rises and Skyfall show their heroes’ family burial sites.

End With a Wink at the Future: At the end of The Dark Knight, Nolan played the Joker card. In the final minutes of The Dark Knight Rises, we got a hint at a possible bat-future with a last-minute character reveal. The same sort of thing happens in Skyfall, giving us a glimpse of the franchise’s promising future.

http://www.wired.com/underwire/2012/11/skyfall-dark-knight/

 

[Omer Syed]

Interesting read on Film School Rejects.

Hitchcock, Bond, Batman and the Ingredients of ‘Skyfall’

The Ingredients is a column devoted to breaking down the components of a new film release with some focus on influential movies that came before. As always, these posts look at the entire plots of films and so include SPOILERS.

The James Bond series is something of a hub in the course of film and pop culture history. As iconic as it is on its own, it tends to be informed by other material as often as it does the informing. In the beginning, for example, the movies were highly influenced by the works of Alfred Hitchcock. Author Ian Fleming even wished for Hitch to direct the first movie adapted from his 007 novels. And Cary Grant was famously sought for the part of Bond, which would have been interesting had he continued with the second film, From Russia With Love, given how much it calls to mind North by Northwest.

Instead, little-known Sean Connery embodied the character, and after the first two installments made the actor famous, Hitch cast him in Marnie. As usual, the director capitalized on a movie star’s pre-existing notoriety, his screen value, which makes it quite difficult for us to see Connery’s Marnie character, Mark Rutland, as anything but James Bond as a wife-raping publisher. Hitch went another step with his next film, Torn Curtain, which was an admitted direct response to the 007 films. He wrote to Francois Truffaut in 1965:

“In realizing that James Bond and the imitators of James Bond were more or less making my wild adventure films, such as North by Northwest wilder than ever, I felt that I should not try go one better. I thought I would return to the adventure film, which would give us the opportunity for some human emotions in situations that were not so bizarre.”
​

With years under its belt, the Bond series has become like a mobile library, loaning out this and that plot line and character archetype for parody or knockoff, while also taking in second-hand stories where it can. It’s incredible that for so many years the franchise inspired copycats the world over, and yet once Star Wars came out the Bond producers had to go and sell itself short with a knockoff. The constantly ripped off became the rip off with Moonraker, and it’s no wonder many fans think it the worst of all the 23 films.

Just before that one, The Spy Who Loved Me seemed to have a little fun with Steven Spielberg’s Jaws. While sharks have been a staple for Bond villains since the beginning and so nothing new to this sequel, the introduction of a henchman named “Jaws” (also seen in Moonraker) had to have been an intentional nod to the horror blockbuster, which was a much greater hit than the Bond movies had been of late.

So, it isn’t too much of a bother when the series looks to other hits for inspiration. Like how Quantum of Solace appears to be mimicking the Bourne series’ editing style (the fault there is in the choice, not in the choosing). And like now, the way Skyfall is being discussed as a Bond movie that borrows a lot from Christopher Nolan, specifically his Batman films. The conversation isn’t exactly negative. Wired‘s Lewis Wallace intro’s a list of “10 Ways Skyfall Borrows from the Dark Knight Playbook” by writing, “there’s an undeniable whiff of bat clinging to the latest 007 film. And that’s a good thing.”

Wallace notes how Skyfall director Sam Mendes has “flip-flopped” on acknowledging Nolan’s influence, telling The Playlist that The Dark Knight was a “game changer for everybody,” then telling The Metro that he “didn’t feel directly influenced” and “would have made the movie the same way had I seen The Dark Knight or not.” Of course, there is the matter of Javier Bardem‘s villain, Raoul Silva, reminding many viewers of Heath Ledger‘s Batman baddie. Elsewhere, I noted how the character, primary motivation aside, “almost seems to also just be doing it all to have some crazed, anarchistic fun, like the Joker but more brilliant.”

It would be difficult to call Skyfall out on anything paralleling The Dark Knight Rises, though, and yet there are the coincidental opportunities. We can compare the “fan service” at the very end of the Bond film to a similar character reveal at the end of the Batman sequel. We can link the aspect of the respective heroes battling their own age. The way they like to fake death and take a hiatus. The way Silva is also a bit like Bane. Understandably, there have been plenty of mash-up trailers combining audio and video from Skyfall and Rises. But is it all just for nitpickery or a laugh?

Here’s Christopher Rosen’s criticism of Bond’s superhero-ness in The Huffington Post:

Bond is an orphan, whose parents died in a car accident. Not only is that classic superhero motivation (Batman, Spider-Man), but, as presented in “Skyfall,” it’s also kind of inconsequential. “Skyfall” doesn’t really bother examining what being an orphan means to Bond, nor whether his parents’ deaths affect his relationship with M (Judi Dench). In Nolan’s Batman films, the specter of Bruce Wayne’s dead parents hangs over the proceedings like a funeral dirge; in “Skyfall,” it’s an easy plot point used as shorthand to give meaning to a character who doesn’t require any more meaning. Bond is Bond; he’s been the same misogynistic, psychotic, alcoholic secret agent we’ve come to love over the past 50 years. There’s no need to turn him into Bruce Wayne.
​

Well, to a degree, Bond has long had commonalities with comic book heroes. His gadgetry has always been relative to non-powered “super” heroes like Iron Man and Batman. Indeed, the Nolan Batman films’ employment of Lucius Fox has obviously been suggested as being Q-like. Throughout the series, Bond’s villains have been a combination of Lex Luthor types — no more so than Max Zorin of A View to a Kill, with his earthquake real estate scheme right out of Superman: The Movie.

Meanwhile, some of the henchmen have seemed appropriate for the old Batman TV series. Baron Samedi from Live and Let Die comes to mind.
Let’s not forget, also, that the Bond of Skyfall is an evolution of the Bonds that have come before him. You can, as I have, think of each actor’s run as hosting a different individual who takes on the Bond moniker, none meant to be the same person. After The Bourne Legacy, however, it could be unwise for the Bond producers to even hint at such an idea. Still, the Ms and Qs are viewed as new people filling old shoes… As for Silva, his ex-MI6 status puts him very much into the Bond canon, calling to mind plenty of double-crossers and double-agents and dopplegangers, particularly GoldenEye‘s Alec Trevelyan.

Movies today are all in the soup, mixing with ingredients of the past, but the Bond movies are an extraordinary case. Skyfall is celebrated for being so conscious of the whole half century of these films while also moving forward. But it’s not necessarily forward or fresh or innovative in any way that we can expect future blockbusters or a whole subgenre to imitate it. That’s a rarity for mainstream cinema today, and we can accept that. But we also can’t fault it for being conscious of what is popular right now, especially when its influence is already sourced from the same past.

This week, Slashfilm’s Angie Han asked Bond producers Barbara Broccoli and Michael G. Wilson the big question, whether they’d be interested in Nolan directing an installment of the series. They didn’t have much to say on the possibility, but there is no more a reason for him to tackle Bond than there was for Hitchcock to when Fleming made that call. And not just because of the comparisons between Skyfall and his work. He’s already embedded in the process. And he’s already shown us his take on Bond by emulating the ski chase from On Her Majesty’s Secret Service in Inception. It’s a big swirl that comes back around, as Bond inspires Nolan inspires Bond, etc.

Do we even need to talk about how so many think Nolan is like a new Hitchcock? At this point, Hitch is just a grandfather to both Nolan and Bond through other Bonds. Nolan doesn’t seem to recognize the heritage (he tends to cite Welles and Kubrick instead), Mendes has acknowledged the North by Northwest connection to 007, but in time all the influences, direct and indirect, become hazy.

Now Nolan is off Batman, and who knows where that character is going? Back to the cheeseball days of television or Schumacher? And could Bond ever head back through its own corny legacy of cartoonish henchmen and jet packs and puns galore? It will really be interesting to see the ways in which the two properties continue to inform one another. And what else informs and becomes informed by them as well.

http://www.filmschoolrejects.com/features/in-the-soup-skyfall-ccamp.php

 

[Roose Bolton]

Bond always starts with a huge opener it's one of the main reoccurring elements, same with a the car and them trying to make the villain really memorable. These things existed in the franchise long before The Dark Knight Trilogy so if anything Batman borrowed from Bond there.

 

[Omer Syed]

so if anything Batman borrowed from Bond there.

Without a doubt, Nolan has been heavily influenced by the Bond films.

The snow sequence in Inception is an homage to On Her Majesties Secret Service.

Nolan turned Lucius Fox into Q, in the Batman trilogy.

 

[Doctor Jones]

Not just pop culture, but it's been classic staple in storytelling for many many years. It's the classic hero being alone and having to make it on his own.

One question: People who believe in the ridiculous Bond is just a codename theory always cite Dench's M as carrying over from the former franchise into this rebooted one. I think it's a different M, though that seems strange saying it. Can anyone clear this up? I just always thought it's suppose to be taken loosely and without that much serious thought.

 

[Rowsdower!]

Yeah, that's the one thing that feels odd to me about the new films. I never quite understood why they kept Dench as M, other than the fact that she's Judi Dench. Though she has been really great in the role, so I guess it doesn't matter.

 

[Ajendo]

Yeah, that's the one thing that feels odd to me about the new films. I never quite understood why they kept Dench as M, other than the fact that she's Judi Dench. Though she has been really great in the role, so I guess it doesn't matter.

That right there is the factual answer.

 

[OddBob]

I just always thought it's suppose to be taken loosely and without that much serious thought.

And that's the answer to all timeline and continuity questions about the series at this point. It's not something to be concerned about.

 

[TheVileOne]

If Bond is a codename then Felix Leiter is also a codename .

 

[Rowsdower!]

Bond is a codename.

It just so happens that all of the guys who have been designated that code name were actually named James Bond.

 

[redhawk23]

While Mendes himself has mentioned and influence from TDK I think its completely ridiculous to site comparisons between Skyfall and Rises considering that they were in production at the same time, The same for Begins and Casino Royale.

 

[redhawk23]

Not just pop culture, but it's been classic staple in storytelling for many many years. It's the classic hero being alone and having to make it on his own.

One question: People who believe in the ridiculous Bond is just a codename theory always cite Dench's M as carrying over from the former franchise into this rebooted one. I think it's a different M, though that seems strange saying it. Can anyone clear this up? I just always thought it's suppose to be taken loosely and without that much serious thought.

Casino Royale is basically separate from the rest of the series. They just happened to keep one of the same actors.

Basically imagine this, if they rebooted the Batman series with Begins, but Michael Gough stayed on as Alfred.

 

[Hunter Rider]

 

[metaphysician]

Its all the same guy, but the changes in appearance and backstory and era are real, too. See, James Bond is an incarnation of the Eternal Champion, and periodically grand cosmic forces hit his sphere with a hammer. . .

 

[Warhammer]

I always thought that those who supported the Bond is a codename idea were idiots. I mean, seriously. That's like saying that Bruce Wayne is a code name because Keaton, Kilmer, and Clooney portrayed them. I never understood how anyone could view it that way. The franchise in no way makes it seem like there were multiple 007s.

 

[Van Petrol]

Oh my goodness!

 

[the dmg]

It's not just merely, the orphan aspect.

http://www.wired.com/underwire/2012/11/skyfall-dark-knight/

The article could have at least picked a top ten of things that actually show TDK inspirations. What rubbish.

 

[craigdbfan]

We need more Berenice.

Seriously hope she gets other gigs and doesn't just disappear.

 

[Dark Knight]

She is so hot and she was so under utilized in Skyfall, it was frustrating.

 

[Pittman4Two]

She is so hot and she was so under utilized in Skyfall, it was frustrating.

Yeah, no kidding.

One of several frustrating points of the movie for me.