Skyfall (2012)

The Best Bond Film

Skyfall is the best Bond film ever made, and I’ll argue that with anyone. Twenty-three films in, it found something new to say about a character everybody thought they knew. Goldfinger set the template. From Russia with Love is the best spy story. Casino Royale is the best reboot. Skyfall is the only one that’s genuinely about something, the only one that makes you care about a character other than Bond, and the only one that ends with a death that feels like a real loss.

It’s also the most beautiful. Every frame of it looks like a painting, and that isn’t an exaggeration. It’s what happens when you give the greatest cinematographer alive a billion-dollar franchise and let him light it like an art film. The money is on the screen, and so is the taste.

Istanbul

The film opens on a chase across Istanbul. Bond and a field agent named Eve are pursuing a man with a hard drive containing the identities of undercover agents. Cars through the market. Motorbikes across the rooftops of the Grand Bazaar. A fight on top of a train that Bond wins by taking control of a digger on a flatbed car and tearing the roof off the carriage.

Then M, in London, orders Eve to take a shot she doesn’t have. The bullet hits Bond. He falls a long way into a river, and Adele starts singing over a title sequence of graveyards, reflections and sinking bodies that tells you this film will be about death and returning from it. It’s one of the great opening sequences, and its ending sets up the whole film. M chose the mission over her agent. She’ll do it again, and she’s done it before.

Bond Comes Back Broken

Bond lets MI6 think he’s dead, and for a while he seems content to stay that way. He drinks on a beach, sleeps with strangers and plays drinking games with scorpions. Then he sees the news that MI6 headquarters has been bombed, and he comes home. He’s older, out of shape, shaky with a gun and failing every test the service sets him. M passes him anyway, because she needs someone she can trust, and he’s still the only one.

Daniel Craig plays this beautifully. His Bond has always been physical, and here the body is failing him. The film asks directly whether he still belongs in the job, and it doesn’t give the easy answer. The tests he fails are real, and the film makes us sit with the idea that the service might be right to retire him.

That’s a brave choice for the twenty-third film in a franchise built on invincibility. Bond is usually the most capable man in any room. Here he’s the one the room is worried about, and every action scene after this carries the question of whether his body will hold up.

Silva Walks In

Raoul Silva’s introduction is the best villain entrance in the series, and it tells you in one unbroken shot that this villain will be different from every one before him. Bond is tied to a chair on an abandoned island city, and Silva walks slowly toward him down the length of a huge room, in a single continuous shot. As he walks he tells a story about his grandmother’s island and the rats in a barrel who ate each other until only two were left.

By the time he reaches Bond, you know exactly who he is. Javier Bardem plays him camp, playful and deeply frightening, and the scene that follows, Silva flirting with the captive Bond while explaining how he’ll destroy M, is unlike anything the series had done before. Bond’s reply, suggesting this might not be his first time, is the best line Craig ever had.

Silva Is Right

What makes Silva work is that he has a case. He was one of M’s best agents, working in Hong Kong. When an operation went wrong, she gave him up to the Chinese to save six others and the handover of the territory. He was tortured for months. He bit into the cyanide capsule in his tooth, and it didn’t kill him. It destroyed his face, and he survived.

In his first scene with M, he removes a dental plate and shows her what was done to him. The film never tells us she was wrong to do it. It never tells us she was right. It makes her live with it, and it makes the audience decide how they feel about a woman they’ve trusted for seven films.

That’s why the film has weight. Bond is fighting to protect a woman who did to Silva exactly what she did to Bond in the opening scene. He knows it, and he protects her anyway. Loyalty to someone who has already proved she’ll sacrifice you is the emotional core of the film.

Tennyson at the Inquiry

Silva’s capture turns out to be his plan, a trap that uses MI6’s own systems against it and turns its headquarters into a prison that can’t hold him. He escapes into the London Underground, and heads for the public inquiry where M is being questioned by politicians about whether the double-0 section should still exist. The committee treats her like a relic, and she lets them talk.

Just before he arrives, M answers her critics by reciting the end of Tennyson’s Ulysses: that though much is taken, much abides. They are not the strength they were in the old days. They are strong in will, to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

Judi Dench delivers it perfectly, quietly and without any sense of performing, and it’s the thesis of the whole film. An old woman defending an old way of doing things, in a room full of people who think she’s obsolete, a few seconds before a man she betrayed walks in and opens fire.

Deakins

Roger Deakins shot it, and every sequence looks extraordinary. He treats each location as a separate colour and mood, and the film moves through them like chapters. Shanghai is blue glass, Macau is gold and red, Scotland is grey stone and orange fire.

The fight in the Shanghai skyscraper takes place in silhouette, two dark shapes struggling in front of a huge glass wall lit by a jellyfish advertisement outside. The casino in Macau is lit by floating lanterns and dragons. The London sequences are cold blues and greys. The final act is all fog, firelight and the black outline of an old house.

Deakins lost the Oscar that year, and it remains one of the great scandals of the Academy. Very few blockbusters are this beautiful. None of the other Bond films come close. You could freeze almost any frame of the second half and hang it on a wall.

Skyfall Lodge

The last act moves to the Scottish Highlands and the house where Bond grew up after his parents died. It’s a strange, stripped-back ending for a billion-dollar film: a stone house, an old gamekeeper played by Albert Finney, a few shotguns, a priest hole and a lot of fog.

Bond and M booby-trap the house with whatever they can find, nails, gas canisters, dynamite, like a very grim Home Alone, and wait for Silva’s helicopter. Kincade, the gamekeeper, turns out to be handy with a shotgun and utterly unimpressed by any of it.

It works because the film has spent two hours taking things away from Bond. By now he has no department, no gadgets, no status. He has the place he came from and the woman who sent him out into the world, and he’s going to fight for both of them.

The Chapel

M is wounded in the fight. She and Bond reach the small chapel on the estate, and Silva finds them there. He presses a gun into M’s hand and his own head against hers, begging her to shoot them both. She doesn’t. Bond kills Silva. Then M dies in Bond’s arms, having told him she got one thing right.

It’s the most moving scene in any Bond film, and the film earned it: two hours building a relationship the series had always treated as a running joke, a stern boss and her difficult employee, and then paying it off with genuine grief.

Albert Finney, as Kincade, the old gamekeeper who remembers Bond as a boy, gives the ending its warmth, and he stands in the chapel doorway like the last witness to a life Bond has spent decades refusing to talk about. The film buries M there in spirit, along with Bond’s childhood, and sends him back to London with nothing left to lose.

Fifty Years

Skyfall was made for the franchise’s fiftieth anniversary, and it’s full of the past. The Aston Martin DB5 from Goldfinger comes out of storage. Q returns as a young man who is better with computers than guns, and the running jokes about exploding pens are gone for good. Eve reveals her surname is Moneypenny. Ralph Fiennes takes over as M, and the last shot is his office, with the old padded door.

None of it feels like a checklist, because it all arrives while Bond is being stripped of everything else. The film takes away the modern world and hands back the old one, and by the end, the series has been reset to 1962 with a new cast. It’s the cleverest anniversary gift any franchise has given itself.

The Best of Fifty Years

Bond films are usually about spectacle. This one is about people, and it never sacrifices spectacle to get there. Every action scene exists to push the relationship between Bond and M one step further, so that by the chapel scene, every explosion has been paying into the same emotional account.

It has the best villain, the best photography, the best music the series has had in decades, and the only emotional ending. It’s a film about loyalty, age and the cost of doing a hard job for people who may not deserve it. Those are grown-up subjects for a franchise built on gadgets and martinis, and the film treats every one of them seriously. And it still has a man tearing the roof off a train with a digger.

Spectre, the follow-up with the same director, shows how hard this was to pull off. It had all the same ingredients and almost none of the result. That’s the best evidence I know of how much judgement it took to get Skyfall right.

Craft Note

The Verdict on Skyfall

Better. It’s a 10, the best-looking and best-written Bond, and the only one that makes you care about M. Watch it on the biggest screen you can find, and watch it after Casino Royale, so you see the whole arc from beginning to end.

Frequently Asked Questions