Spectre (Sam Mendes)

[Mysterious Dude]

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2379713/

[Morris Schæffer]

Ah there it is finally, the Spectre Thread. As a longtime Bond fan I enjoyed this movie and would argue that lenser Hoyte van Hoytema is one of the movie's true champions. It looks really fantastic. Like Skyfall, this is a very similar movie, sort of plausible, tackling some interesting issues, but something was off. The action looked great, but didn't thrill. A nighttime chase through Rome looked like a trailer for a Need for Speed game and a late in the game escape packs all the fireworks you could ask for, but again, stakes-free, all-too-easy even while I'm enjoying the resulting shot from a purely visual standpoint. Biggest dud was Bellucci who gets pumped by Bond for information and then swiftly abandoned. "Finally a Bond girl Bond's own age!" the hype machine screamed, but that was a lie. Once more, Bond and romance are two words that don't mix well as I felt there was scarcely any chemistry between Craig and Seydoux. They need to stop digging into Bond's past.

[number8]

From the reception I thought this was going to be terrible. But it's not. It's worse: it's just completely ordinary and unimpressive. I don't know how you could make a 2.5 hour movie and make everything feel so rushed.

[Mr. McGibblets]

This is a movie that exists.

[Grouchy]

Marginal yay. I'm a fan of Bond, but even for the franchise's usual standards this is painfully conventional.

I'm also bummed that Christoph Waltz rose to celebrity status only to become a parody of himself in only six years.

[Stay Puft]

Like Skyfall it's enjoyable some of the time (that helicopter opening was a pretty cool stunt, outside of the obviously faked master shots) but ultimately overlong and drags a lot of the time. The plot is straightforward and the storytelling is uninspired (at one point there's a car chase that exists to prop up even more exposition and I'm like zzzzzz). And don't even get me started on the revelations (aka retcons) Bond discovers. I was howling. Nobody stopped to think how fucking stupid that was going to sound? I was already down on Skyfall because of its weak scripting (getting caught was part of my plan like zzzzz) but the writing in Spectre sinks it even harder. No Deakins to take it all up a notch this time, either.

I liked the way Skyfall set up a new status quo with M, Q, and Moneypenny. I would have been happy if we just got Craig being Bond. The icon. Just living it. I didn't hate Spectre, but it doubles down on precisely the elements of the Craig films I haven't liked (his past, the shadow of his relationship with Vesper, etc.) and amps up the stupidity of it tenfold. So a definite nay.

[Mysterious Dude]

Skyfall did a few things that I thought made it a much more interesting film than most other Bond films. I really liked the meeting with Q in a museum. It was just different from past Q scenes. "Were you expecting an exploding pen? We don't really go in for that anymore." In Spectre, they're back to meeting in an underground lair, showing off the car, and Q gives him an exploding watch. I felt like everything interesting about Skyfall was tossed out for Spectre. Bond's aging is never mentioned. Moneypenny is back to being a secretary. And our villain has a giant complex in a crater. So ordinary.

[Henry Gale]

Ended up getting turned away along with maybe a hundred others from a super early, total mess of a screening for The Revenant, so decided to finally see this instead with the friends I'd dragged out to the promise of new Leo and Innaritu.

Maybe it was just with that damper off the bat and all but a few people I tend to trust critically and IRL lowering my expectations for this significantly, but I miraculously really had a good time with it despite all the clunkiness that was clearly also there on display.

A much better companion to Skyfall than Quantum was to Royale. But weirdly, whereas Forster's lightweight epilogue made me appreciate Campbell's top-tier entry even more, this more recent film of Mendes' oddly made me wonder if his Skyfall was really all that. Definitely not able to say I think it's better than the last, but it definitely stands on its own more interestingly for me, as sloppy as it often feels, with questionable canonical liberties taken.

It feels like a movie trapped in another time, from the script to Hoyte's cinematography supremely handsome but significantly more retrograde-feeling than Deakins' vibrant, run-of-the-spectrum, sharp digital work, but I dunno, I oddly really liked it, despite clearly seeing and acknowledging what it is. Sometimes expectations are really are everything. I even loved the opening credits despite thinking the Sam Smith theme is bunk!

My relationship with this movie is like the one-night stand Bond had with Bellucci's character. He goes for it because it's Monica Bellucci, but there's no reason it needed to happen, and probably won't think much about it later or have much fun defending it.

[Stay Puft]

So it turns out that, yes, Radiohead was asked to write a theme song for Spectre. We know they went for Sam Smith in the end.

Here's what Radiohead came up with:
https://soundcloud.com/radiohead/spectre

[number8]

That doesn't feel like a Bond song, which probably would have made it the better choice.

[dreamdead]

Reopened. Not sure how it got locked, but it doesn't seem to have been intentional.

[Irish]

The opening sequence here is gorgeous, and oddly there's a few beautiful, striking compositions after that. It made me wonder who shot this.

As for the rest: I think with Spectre, Craig's term as Bond has been a failure. This franchise hit a brick wall twice. Once when they ran out of source material, and once when the Berlin wall crumbled and the Soviet Union fell. It doesn't surprise me, on balance, that the gritty reboot quickly ran out of steam. They haven't had anywhere to go since 1989.

The one surprise: How far they've stretched the characters out of shape (and for no good purpose). No, Bond wouldn't sit with his back to windows. Twice. No, his apartment wouldn't look like that. No, Bond wouldn't be that openly surly and contemptuous to immediate superiors. No, the head of MI6 wouldn't mumble about "democracy" while at any kind of sigint conference. Nor would he be wary of surveillance states. No, Blofeld isn't a giggling twit. No, Tracy (???) isn't an assassin. No, not everybody in this universe is interconnected like some kind of incestuous game of hide and seek.

Spectre presents Bond as not only redundant, but also boring.

[Dukefrukem]

The opening sequence here is gorgeous, and oddly there's a few beautiful, striking compositions after that. It made me wonder who shot this.

As for the rest: I think with Spectre, Craig's term as Bond has been a failure. This franchise hit a brick wall twice. Once when they ran out of source material, and once when the Berlin wall crumbled and the Soviet Union fell. It doesn't surprise me, on balance, that the gritty reboot quickly ran out of steam. They haven't had anywhere to go since 1989.

The one surprise: How far they've stretched the characters out of shape (and for no good purpose). No, Bond wouldn't sit with his back to windows. Twice. No, his apartment wouldn't look like that. No, Bond wouldn't be that openly surly and contemptuous to immediate superiors. No, the head of MI6 wouldn't mumble about "democracy" while at any kind of sigint conference. Nor would he be wary of surveillance states. No, Blofeld isn't a giggling twit. No, Tracy (???) isn't an assassin. No, not everybody in this universe is interconnected like some kind of incestuous game of hide and seek.

Spectre presents Bond as not only redundant, but also boring.

This.

[Dukefrukem]

Skyfall did a few things that I thought made it a much more interesting film than most other Bond films. I really liked the meeting with Q in a museum. It was just different from past Q scenes. "Were you expecting an exploding pen? We don't really go in for that anymore." In Spectre, they're back to meeting in an underground lair, showing off the car, and Q gives him an exploding watch. I felt like everything interesting about Skyfall was tossed out for Spectre. Bond's aging is never mentioned. Moneypenny is back to being a secretary. And our villain has a giant complex in a crater. So ordinary.

My biggest complaint was our first introduction of Q in the other movie. They've made up for it here.

[Scar]

A big solid 'meh'

[TGM]

[MadMan]

I really enjoyed the hell out of this film. I figured I would be one of the few that digs it a lot. Also I now think that Craig is the best Bond. Well that and Connery of course.

[Dukefrukem]

That video makes this movie look so bad. Because it sorta is.

[Morris Schæffer]

That video makes this movie look so bad. Because it sorta is.

ahahaaha!! "On agent difficulty".

[MadMan]

I think of Honest Trailers as being nit picking and not really funny.

[transmogrifier]

This was fine. Not great, not bad...just fine.

[Morris Schæffer]

I think of Honest Trailers as being nit picking and not really funny.

Try to think of them as something not to be taken entirely seriously. That said, they're still more miss than hit for me too. But "agent difficulty" cracked me up because it's so true.

[Scar]

It's better than Quantum of Solace, and entertaining at times. Perhaps if it didn't come after Skyfall, it would be more enjoyable.

And I fucking hate Batista's double 1911 pistol.

[Skitch]

Finally got to see this...and I really liked it. This whole Craig arc has been really interesting. The opening song was horrible, though. Should've gone with Radiohead.

[Dead & Messed Up]

I enjoyed this up until the arrival of Lea Seydoux. After that, the film just felt more and more hacky (she says "I love you" after a day?!), and it relied more and more on me having kept up with the previous three films, and, weirdly, despite the Secret Connection between Bond and Oberhauser, that connection doesn't inspire anything in the way of emotion.

But that opening is grand, and the first car chase with Bond and Hinx has its pleasures, and the cinematography starts and stays with those slightly warmed-up whites throughout - in general, the film guns for shades of ivory, which ties back to the Day of the Dead, which I guess is meant to tie back to Oberhauser and his presumed death years ago and moreso Bond leaving a trail of dead in his wake over the prior three movies.