New Bond's out. The cinema was absolutely packed. Because I'd been dawdling at home getting dressed and drying my hair, OH said, when I asked, that there was no point in taking the car since walking would take just as long. So we walked. Five minutes before we reached the cinema, the heavens opened and we were drenched. I looked like a drowned bat in my black woollen poncho and probably smelt like a dead sheep, and unfortunately, by the time we arrived, the auditorium was packed so everyone could see my discomfort. I tried not to look anyone in the eye so I don't know if there was any pointing. What was worse, OH had only bought ONE bucket of popcorn, not two, as I had instructed him. "This film had better be bloody spectacular," I hissed at him, "And I am not getting into a debate over whether a seat is good enough or not. If you don't like where I am going to sit, remember, I've got the popcorn." It was not an auspicious start.
The film was entertaining enough though. There was a lot less of the silly gadgetry. The new Bond is on a tight budget, for example, the geeky young and bespectacled Q meets Bond in what I think is the National Gallery (free entry) instead of an expensive, taxpayer-funded laboratory, and all he hands over is a case with a personalised gun and a radio transmitter. Back to basics, clearly, and in a metaphorical sense too. This is all about soldier-boys protesting against the bosses-parents who send them to do terrible things and who then let them down. It's essentially the Bourne Supremacy without that series' remarkable feminist insight: in Bourne, it's paternal figures, shadowy CIA department heads or experimental psychiatrists, who seduce boys into wanting to become Nietzschean supermen. Bourne is all about the failure of that model, and the sons' protest against it and their desperate attempts at expiating the guilt that comes from a lifetime of killing people supposedly on a nation's behalf.
But this is the James Bond series, and despite the at times surprisingly grown-up dialogue, Bond would never dare have staged an oedipal rebellion against a male M -- fathers, after all, are sacrosanct in the Bond Universe, but now that it's Judi Dench's M, the film marshals not just one boy with arrested development but two -- Bardem's baddie, and Bond himself. They all have "problems with authority" but it's female authority, not male authority that they have a problem with, which is most obvious at the end of the film when Bond performs a greeting to Ralph Fiennes's new M that is so sphincter-clenchingly submissive you want to laugh like a witch. Not so much Skyfall, more like Kneefall.
So as films go, if you leave your female identity in the cloakroom, there is much to enjoy here. But if you don't, you just sit there and chomp through the popcorn and wonder why it is that in the 21st century, female MI6 agents can still not drive or shoot straight and end up leaving active service to become M's new Ms Moneypenny. Or -- and OH pointed this out -- why the only "jump" Bond gets is with the character of a former child prostitute. Who ends up dead.
Even Judi Dench's uebermother M is pretty useless in urban warfare -- she can't shoot straight either! By the time she breathes her last in a Scottish chapel, having been cried over by two clapped-out agents, one of whom has just blown up his ancestral home, my popcorn bucket is empty and I seriously wonder where they can take the franchise from here.
There is a narrowing of the focus in the series -- in Skyfall, even the compulsory globe-trotting looked random because the real focus was Britain and its icons. And boy, are they in the firing line. Not sure how many have noticed this but in film, Britain's landmarks have taken a serious pounding in recent years. I wonder why that is. In V for Vendetta, the (obsolete) Old Bailey and the Houses of Parliament exploded in a joyful celebration of antifascist rebellion and in Skyfall, the scary MI6 ziggurat by the Thames is also blown up. Same with the London Underground -- that one takes a hit too. The film makes the whole power structure look so terrifyingly easy to subvert, and the way in which Bardem's villain exploits fancy dress to blend into the sea of police officers who always seem to be there these days appears scarily doable, especially in the confusion of an engineered emergency, so much so that you really wish this scenario has already been played through and risk-assessed against.
Apart from that, I missed the mid-nineties Daniel Craig from almost-forgotten tv movie gems like The Ice House when his affair with Kitty Aldridge's potential murderess practically set fire to the furniture. In the early 2000s, he was also great in Enduring Love (although Rhys Ifans was better). He's doing the best he can to humanise the Bond franchise, and an older, sourer, sadder Bond is actually more appropriate than the eternally irresponsible, insight-free, emotionally disconnected boyishness of previous incarnations.
They have to privilege character development anyway because with the way the world is going, Austerity Bond will probably include even more realistic challenges. In the next Bond, Q will be wearing charity shop clothes and NHS-funded spectacles from the Specsavers cheapo range. They'll meet over a thin decaf at Wimpey's and Q will hand Bond an asthmatic pre-paid second-hand Samsung D900i mobile with a battery life of half a day and an only intermittently functioning internet connection. And instead of a handgun, Q will hand Bond a staplegun. Instead of the Aston Martin, now blown up, Bond will be given an Oystercard and a pair of trainers.
The scope of the plot will have to shrink accordingly. You could set Austerity Bond in a mid-size corporation. The evil IT department is imposing a new system and a newly arrived mid-level manager is starting to build his empire but the Accounts department is resisting. IT operatives use blackmail to bring the accountants into line -- can Bond subvert their schemes armed only with a chipcard, £30 photocopying credit and a 227g bag of Lidl gourmet coffee for the office percolator? It'll have you on the edge of your ergonomically designed deskchair.
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