Spectre

Sam Mendes – 2015 – England

  

I admit I’ve been slow to embrace the Daniel Craig cycle of James Bond movies.  I didn’t have anything substantial against them except for the vague pull of nostalgia for Bond in the Cold War milieu where he was born and where he belongs.  The current Bond films are more well-made than the classics from the 60s, and Craig may even be the best actor who has ever played Bond, but a big part of the older films’ appeal was their tongue-in-cheek spirit.  They weren’t so respectable; they weren’t intended to win awards save occasionally for outstanding stunt work.  In a world swirling with heavily-Bond-inspired movies and TV shows, it’s hard to distinguish the aura of a new Bond film from the many offspring and imitators.  Having said all that, I still think the films are really good and I enjoy them.  After all those years, that opening gun-barrel logo and the Monty Norman fanfare still get me excited for something special, even if, by the films’ final acts, I often forget that these weren’t supposed to be just any old action flicks, but James Bond!  For me, Spectre is the best of the Daniel Craig series so far because of the efforts it makes to fold itself – and the previous three films – into the traditional Bond mythos; in which the powerful terrorist organization S.P.E.C.T.R.E. and its cat-loving president, Ernst Stavro Blofeld, are iconic elements.  It retroactively gives the former Craig films some added weight by establishing that they were not stand-alone episodes but that Spectre has been behind everything all along.  Christoph Waltz plays Blofeld with remarkable restraint considering his penchant for scenery-chewing and the limitless opportunities for such a character to be over-the-top.  Craig’s interpretation of Bond is more evolved than Connery’s, Moore’s or Brosnan’s, which makes him less cavalier about sex and death, which is appropriate for the 21st century, but it also erodes some of the icy cruelty that was a key aspect of Cold War-era Bond.  In any case, Spectre successfully perpetuates the modern Bond persona while also evoking classic Bond elements like Q, Moneypenny, the Aston Martin and most importantly a larger-than-life villain with grand designs for world domination.