(spoilers follow, so consider yourself warned)
Bond movies have been a favorite of mine since childhood. I remember watching marathons of them on early satellite TV with my cousins. Even the campiest ones, Moonraker and Diamonds are Forever, are highly entertaining in their own way.
Somewhere along the way, though, the people in charge decided to sacrifice the humanity of the character for eye-catching spectacle. The person of Bond was obscured by sharp suits, fast cars, faster women with lurid names, and semi-witty banter filled with double entendre. During the films just prior to the Sony reboot, only Timothy Dalton had a few moments where the man who was pulling the trigger was allowed to show at all. Of course, even those glimmers were then hastily covered up by Wayne Newton and ninjas....
I love the Daniel Craig Bond films. Especially after I went on a kick and read several of the original Ian Fleming novels last year, I think Craig's Bond is closer to the original feeling of the works than almost any of the others since the first two Connery films. In Casino Royale, we see the beginning of the transformation that is going to create him, and it is brutal in every possible way. The scene where Bond has to kill a man to earn his 00 status is harsh, and I think it was the right way to start the series because we see the price of it graphically. Sure, he looks damn fine in a suit and is still suave with the ladies, but for the first time in any of the movies, we see the private moments and understand what is being laid down and given up for him to become 007.
The other films in the series have been a slow build, bringing in characters we know in a way that contextualizes them to a degree missing in the older films. M (both of them) have flaws and personal agendas, backgrounds that reappear. Moneypenny is fiesty, and we can finally understand why she feels the way she does about Bond; she's taken out of the 1950s adoring secretary mold. The new Q is more than a deus-ex-machina, and his personal skills are on display more than an endless supply of improbable gadgets. Even the villains have been getting more personal and complicated. Thus, after the end of Skyfall, all of the players are on stage and we were finally ready for Spectre.
I have heard a lot of criticism for Spectre, and I guess I understand some of it after Skyfall, which as far as I am concerned stands as one of the top Bond films ever made, but I think people are missing the point. Bond evolved during the run of the reboot films. He suffered and matured. Increasingly, even though he continued to be flawless in the performance of his duties, he was growing hollow inside. That's where we meet him in Spectre, the cynical mask over something almost completely dead inside him, the man who is ready to take out one last enemy and die in the process.
Enter Blofeld, one of the archetypal Bond superfiends. It isn't easy to do him well because he is utterly evil, mostly insane, filled with hatred, and backed by an army loyal to the point of fanaticism. There's a reason why he's the model for Doctor Evil from Austin Powers. With a poor portrayal, he's camp, and there are certainly examples of that in the earlier films.
Christopher Walk does one of the best supervillains I've ever seen. He really sells the broken mind of Blofeld, the fact that everything he is doing seems utterly reasonable and important to him. There is no camp in this Blofeld. The scene in which Bond is put into the chair toward the end to be tortured is spare, and unlike so many of the Bond villain traps, it is not overly elaborate or too far beyond the range of what is possible in the real world. The fact that Bond has past experience with him, that Blofeld has been destroying things in Bond's world for almost all his life, was a perfect touch to me. It was something Bond knew subconsciously and was chasing, but the perfect symmetry of it, and the childish hate of Blofeld for the "cuckoo" who he perceives as having taken his father's affection made sense.
And I wish we had seen more of the backstory. I keep feeling like lots of this movie wound up on a cutting room floor somewhere since it clocks in at 2.5 hrs anyway. I wonder if they will release an extended version of some kind. I kind of hope they do. Parts of the film felt like we were only seeing moments that had to be kept. Lots of the stuff with Blofeld felt that way.
Then there is Madeleine. She's a little bit young, to be sure, but she's a good match. I like that she outright rejects Bond at first, reminding him that there are some women who won't just leap into his bed because he's tasty. I like that she shows him up with the gun on the train, forcing him to revisit his assumptions about what she is capable of. I like that she is willing to walk away from him because she just can't watch him continue to do something that is destroying him. She makes him think about what it is he's doing in a way he hadn't allowed himself to do since Casino Royale. She's a little like what Vesper might have been for him if she hadn't been on Spectre's leash, only even more because of what she saw and experienced with her own father.
To me, then, in Spectre, all the pieces snapped into place. When the film began, we saw the Bond car as a single piece of chassis up on blocks, destroyed almost beyond the point of reclamation. It's a not-too-subtle metaphor for Bond himself. Q has it in restoration, though, and when we end, through all the revelations and the confrontation with Blofeld and he relationship he builds with Madeleine, both Bond and the Aston-Martin have been made whole.
I am sure there will be more Bond films. It's too profitable a franchise for the modern studios not to try to milk, but I would really be okay if there weren't any more for a long time, or if, Doctor-Who-like, the "Bond" who was in those films was not supposed to be the same man anymore. I think Craig's Bond has earned his happiness the hard way, and I'd like to think that he gets to enjoy it indefinitely.
