6 / 10
Official trailer
The Day of the Dead
Spectre opens with a sequence the Craig era rarely topped. The camera follows Bond, in a skull mask and a skeleton suit, through the crowds of Mexico City’s Day of the Dead parade, into a hotel, up a lift, through a bedroom and out onto the rooftops, in what looks like a single unbroken shot. Then a whole building collapses around him, and Bond ends up fighting for his life in a helicopter spinning over the packed square.
It’s thrilling, gorgeous and confident, the kind of opening that makes an audience sit up and grin, and it promises a great Bond film. Sam Mendes, returning after Skyfall, clearly wanted to top himself, and for ten minutes he does. Nothing that follows lives up to it.
Spectre leaves me feeling cheated, and the opening is the reason. Mendes shows me he can still make a Bond film that crackles, then spends two hours on a family grudge. I like enough of it to sit through it again, which is where the 6 comes from, but I resent the gap between what it promises and what it delivers.
Everything Is Connected
The plot kicks off with a posthumous message from Judi Dench’s M, sending Bond after a shadowy criminal organization. He discovers SPECTRE, the villainous network from the Connery films, rebooted for the Craig era. And its leader turns out to be Franz Oberhauser, played by Christoph Waltz, who reveals that he’s been behind everything: Le Chiffre, Quantum, Silva, the deaths of Vesper and M.
This is the film’s big problem. Casino Royale, Quantum of Solace and Skyfall were separate stories with their own villains, and Spectre retroactively claims they were all part of one master plan. Nobody who watched those films in order ever suspected a connection. The retcon is clumsy and unconvincing, and it makes the earlier films feel smaller, as if their villains were just Oberhauser’s employees.
For Writers
Spectre retroactively claims that every previous Craig villain was secretly working for Oberhauser. The connection shrinks the earlier films instead of enriching them.
Linking earlier stories to a single hidden mastermind can feel deeply satisfying if it’s planned from the very start. Bolted on afterward, years later, it feels contrived, and it can undermine what readers loved about the earlier books.
If you’re tempted to reveal that everything was connected all along, check whether the connection deepens the earlier stories or cheapens them. Readers can tell the difference between a secret you planned and one you invented to tie things up, and they rarely forgive the second kind, however neatly it ties the threads.
Brother Blofeld
Worse, much worse, Oberhauser turns out to be Bond’s foster brother. After Bond was orphaned, Oberhauser’s father took him in, and young Franz, jealous of the father’s affection, murdered him and faked his own death. Now he’s taken the name Ernst Stavro Blofeld, and his entire criminal empire is apparently a way of getting back at his adopted little brother.
It’s a terrible idea. Blofeld, one of the great villains of cinema, a mastermind with global ambitions, is reduced to a jealous sibling with a grudge. It shrinks the character and the whole franchise. Waltz, a fine actor who won two Oscars for playing villains for Tarantino, does what he can, but he’s given almost nothing to work with. His Blofeld purrs, tortures and explains, and never feels dangerous.
This twist makes me groan out loud. I’d have cut the foster-brother business entirely and let Waltz play a man who wants the world, because a Blofeld with a childhood grudge is a soap opera villain holding a white cat. It’s a dismal way to shrink the most famous villain in the series.
For Writers
Blofeld turns out to be Bond’s jealous foster brother. A global mastermind is reduced to a resentful sibling with a childhood grudge.
Making a villain’s motives personal can deepen them, but only if the personal connection fits the scale of their actions. A family grudge can’t explain a global criminal empire without seeming absurd.
Match your villain’s motive to the size of their ambitions. Small, petty motives work for small-scale villains. A world-threatening antagonist needs a reason that’s just as big.
Blofeld’s great villains in the sixties wanted money and power on a global scale. Spectre’s Blofeld wants his brother to feel bad, and that can’t hold up a franchise. My article on why villain motivations fall apart goes further.
Rome and Hinx
The Rome section is stylish. Bond attends the funeral of an assassin he killed, seduces his widow, played by Monica Bellucci in a sadly brief role, and infiltrates a SPECTRE meeting in a candlelit palazzo, a scene shot like a Renaissance painting. He’s spotted, and there’s a night-time car chase through the empty streets of Rome between Bond’s Aston Martin DB10 and a Jaguar.
The chase looks great and feels oddly weightless, with little danger and a joke about a slow Fiat blocking the road. More exciting is Mr. Hinx, a silent, hulking SPECTRE assassin played by Dave Bautista, who kills with his bare thumbs and gives the film a physical menace its main villain lacks.
The Train Fight
The film’s best action scene is a brutal fight between Bond and Hinx aboard a train crossing the North African desert. The scene is a clear homage to From Russia with Love, and it’s fantastic: two big men smashing each other through carriages, walls and windows, until Hinx is dragged off the train by a rope tied to a barrel of cargo.
It’s old-school, physical action of the sort the Craig films do best, and Bautista is an intimidating opponent. The fight also leads to the film’s most sensual scene, as Bond and Madeleine, rattled and bruised, fall into bed in their shattered carriage. If I could keep one scene from Spectre besides the opening, it’s this one. Bautista barely speaks and doesn’t need to, and I think Hinx is the best villain in the film by a wide margin. That says more about the script Waltz was handed than about Waltz.
For Writers
The train fight between Bond and Hinx is brutal, physical and easy to follow, and it’s the best action in the film by a distance.
The most memorable action scenes are often the simplest: two opponents, a confined space, a clear goal and nowhere to run. The reader can follow every blow, and the stakes feel immediate and personal.
When you write action, resist the constant urge to add more spectacle. A tight, well-staged fight between two evenly matched characters in a small space will stay with the reader longer than any explosion. Craig and Bautista, smashing each other through a dining car, are proof that simplicity beats scale every single time. Action Writers’ Phrase Book is worth a look on this.
Madeleine
Léa Seydoux plays Madeleine Swann, a psychiatrist and the daughter of Mr. White, the Quantum operative Bond has pursued since Casino Royale. She’s intelligent, cool, independent and resistant to Bond at first, and Seydoux is a strong presence. But the romance feels rushed, and when Bond declares his love for her in the final act, it’s hard to believe after so little time.
Compared with Vesper Lynd, played so memorably by Eva Green, whose relationship with Bond was the heart of Casino Royale, Madeleine is underwritten. The film asks us to accept that Bond is ready to give up everything for her, and it hasn’t justified that.
The Crater and the Drill
Blofeld’s base is a sleek, isolated facility inside a desert crater in Morocco, full of computer screens and surveillance equipment, and it’s there that he tortures Bond with a drill to the head, aiming to erase his memories of Madeleine. It’s meant to echo the famous torture scene in Casino Royale, and it doesn’t come close to matching it.
Bond escapes far too easily, shooting a watch-bomb into a gas line and blowing up the entire base with one shot. It’s absurd, a one-bullet shortcut, and a lazy convenience the Craig films had avoided until now.
That’s the moment I stopped believing in the film. A single bullet into a gas line takes out the entire base, and Bond strolls out with Madeleine like they’re leaving a dinner party. After Casino Royale made pain matter, that shortcut feels like the series giving up.
Nine Eyes
The subplot back in London involves C, played by Andrew Scott, a smug new intelligence chief who wants to merge MI6 with MI5 and create a global surveillance network called Nine Eyes, which SPECTRE secretly controls. Ralph Fiennes’s M fights to save the double-0 program, with help from Ben Whishaw’s Q and Naomie Harris’s Moneypenny.
The idea is relevant, about surveillance and the obsolescence of spies, but it’s handled clumsily, and C is obviously a villain from his first scene. The subplot exists to give the supporting cast something to do while Bond is away.
After Skyfall
Spectre had an impossible act to follow. Skyfall, Mendes’s previous Bond, had been a critical triumph and the first Bond film to earn more than a billion dollars. Expectations were enormous, and the production was reportedly rushed, with the script still being rewritten during shooting.
You can feel the strain. Spectre borrows heavily from Skyfall’s themes, including the dead M, the threat to the double-0 program and Bond’s childhood trauma, and from classic Bond, with the train fight, the crater base and the white cat. It’s trying to be both a sequel and a greatest-hits album, and it manages neither.
Bellucci’s Cameo
Monica Bellucci, at fifty, became the oldest actress ever cast as a Bond woman, and the film made a lot of noise about it in its publicity. She’s magnetic in her few scenes, a grieving widow who knows she’s in danger and chooses Bond anyway.
Then she disappears after about ten minutes of screen time. Wasting a gifted actress and an interesting idea is typical of a film that’s full of promising ingredients it doesn’t know how to use. Losing Bellucci after ten minutes is the worst of the film’s lapses, because she’s more interesting than the romance the film trades her for. I’d have happily followed her story for another hour.
Walking Away
The film ends with Bond confronting Blofeld on Westminster Bridge after a helicopter crash. He has the villain at gunpoint, and he chooses not to kill him. He walks away, leaving Blofeld to be arrested, and drives off with Madeleine in his old Aston Martin DB5.
It was clearly designed as a possible ending to Craig’s run, a Bond who finally chooses love over killing. The idea is nice, and it doesn’t feel earned, because the romance is so thin. No Time to Die, six years later, would pick up the story and give Craig a far more powerful farewell.
A Pretty Mess
Spectre looks gorgeous. Hoyte van Hoytema’s cinematography is rich and elegant, the locations are spectacular and the action, at its best, is excellent. Sam Smith’s theme song, Writing’s on the Wall, won an Oscar, even though many fans found it limp.
But the story is a mess. The retcon, the brother twist, the thin romance and the weak villain drag it down, and at close to two and a half hours, it’s far too long. It was a big hit, earning well over eight hundred million dollars, but it felt like a franchise going through the motions.
Craft Note
Craft Note
Spectre tries to unify four films into one story and ends up diminishing all of them. Its best moments, the opening and the train fight, are self-contained. Its worst are the ones that try to explain everything.
Retroactive connections between stories are risky. They can add depth, but more often they shrink what came before.
Before you tie your stories together, make sure the connection makes each of them richer. If it shrinks them, leave the stories separate.
Beautiful, and Tangled
Spectre is a 6, and I think that’s generous to the story and fair to everything else.
The opening, the train fight, Bautista and van Hoytema’s photography are worth my time. The retcon, the foster-brother Blofeld, the thin romance and that one-bullet escape are the reasons it can’t climb higher, and I blame the rushed script for every one of them. It has the look of a great Bond film and a story that keeps letting that look down.
