For Fresh Eyes Only: Casino Royale, Quantum of Solace, Skyfall, & Spectre

Welp. I did it. After setting out nearly two years ago to watch every James Bond movie for the first time, I’m finally caught up just in time for the 25th film to be released. There've been a lot of ups and downs including, but not limited to, constant delays, my own waning interest, and Thunderball, but I’ve actually finally finished this godforsaken series of articles that I’m guessing started diminishing in quality around 20 entries ago. 

I had a lot of ideas about what might come of this series, but I never could have predicted that my main takeaway from doing all of this would be that I just don’t give a shit one way or the other about James Bond.

There are great movies in this series. The ones that come to mind immediately are Dr. No, From Russia With Love, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, Goldeneye, Die Another Day, and one of the four that I’m about to discuss, but do I feel like I’m going to revisit any of those anytime soon? No, I do not. Probably not ever. The rest of the series kind of lives in my mind as this nebulous mash of different moments and ideas. Nuclear warfare, silly gadgets, sexy women, cool opening credits sequences, a cool guy who can do literally anything at any time given the circumstance because magic. I respect the series’s legacy and wish it was my thing, but it’s just not.

Casino Royale is the great one in this bunch. The movie immediately sets itself apart with that incredibly fast-paced opening and flies by from there. It’s exciting, fresh, and Mads Mikkelsen does ball torture on Daniel Craig. The card games are just as exciting as a high-octane car chase. It very much fucking rules and is easily my favorite Bond movie. It recontextualizes Bond in the smartest ways and Craig makes this very much irrelevant character feel vital and exciting again. Chris Cornell’s “You Know My Name” is a gorgeous piece of music and he was an inspired choice. Director Martin Campbell knows how to make a damn good movie, and he does it. 

Marc Forster, on the other hand, doesn’t and does not. Quantum of Solace is a cruel mess of a movie. I was excited when I heard this was an edgier Bond film that came in under an hour and fifty minutes, but unfortunately it does not feel like it. Even with that lean run-time, the film manages to fit in what feels like an hour-plus of nothing. The action scenes themselves are edited so poorly that frankly I don’t even know how they made it to the screen in this state. Every now and then an interesting visual choice is made, but you get to enjoy it for all of a second and a half before the camera rapidly cuts again. The movie’s also pointlessly dark and cruel, as if it’s daring you to stop watching, and Jack White and Alicia Keys’s godawful theme is a tragedy. 

Skyfall is a trickier one for me. The idea of using one of pop culture’s most undying figures to explore themes of mortality is an interesting choice to be sure. Adele’s theme, as overplayed as it was, is fantastic. Nobody can shoot a movie like Roger Deakins, and the king is at the peak of his powers here. Even still, the film did almost nothing for me. Not even Bardem swinging for the fences did anything for me. I fell asleep an hour and a half into the movie and woke up to see M dying and I frankly didn’t care all that much to go back and see how or why that happened. I did, of course, and the final hour’s exploration of Bond’s backstory is not something I was all that interested in.

And finally we have Spectre. 

I will be making one final post in this column for No Time To Die. I’m looking forward to finally being in the conversation with one of these movies rather than 50+ years behind it. I think having that experience with that movie will ultimately decide how I feel about the series as a whole. I’m looking forward to it, I think. 

Marcus Irving will return to discuss No Time To Die.