Skyfall

“Skyfall” starts out like any other James Bond film with the secret agent battling a bad guy on top of a train.  We settle back and get ready for the fun.  But the mood shifts – not just in the picture, but in the series.  Bond is wounded and presumed dead.  We know, of course, he isn’t really dead because, even with a senior discount, the tickets were a little costly, and they’re not going to get us to vacate our seats ten minutes in.  Our hero reappears with a drug and alcohol problem that gives him the shakes so every time he shoots at something, he misses. We fogies are not surprised.  We learned long ago that which does not kill you is liable to make you weaker. 

It gets worse.  Bond is in handcuffs, and the bad guy opens his shirt and begins caressing the super spy’s manly torso.  He makes a lewd suggestion, implying that Bond is in for a new experience.  James replies, “What makes you think this is my first time?” 

Huh?

Sean Connery’s Bond in “Goldfinger” converted Honor Blackman’s Pussy Galore to the side of the good with a roll in the hay.  The tradition of the Bond girl started with Ursula Andress in “Dr. No.” When Connery removed a sea urchin spine from her foot using his teeth, that was kinky enough for 1962. Bond picked up women everywhere and ended up with one as the picture closed.  He’d turn off the homing beacon on the life raft and drift away into the vast ocean and the movie-goer’s imagination. 

Fantasy was the main attraction.  Bond could identify a Faberge egg at a glance, but you never saw him in a museum or a library. He executed impossible shots, but never frequented the firing range.  He had sex without complications.  When he was finished with the women, they disappeared, and casting began for the next picture. 

The old Bond movies were comedies.  The villains he conquered were larger than life.  It may have occurred to you as it did to me that the undersea or island hideouts would have been pretty easy to find, having required engineers, contractors, shipments of building materials and huge labor forces.  No one ever explained how a functioning orbital rocket was conveyed into an underground lair without anyone knowing about it.  You chuckled at Bond girl’s names such as Dr. Holly Goodhead, and when your hero dispatched a bad guy, he always had a quip. 

James Bond was a man without a past, and “Skyfall” changes that.  You realize that, if he can shoot and miss, the old rules don’t apply.  Although Bond is English, the movies are American, and maybe we were a little cockier in 1962, less than twenty years after World War II when we were still getting used to being a superpower.  Now we feel older and a little shaky.

But perhaps that’s too psychological.  It may be that all the super villains have been done.  Nuclear devices with digital countdowns are passé. We were getting a little tired of them, and Austin Powers dealt the final blow.  Bond had to change. 

The critics are divided.  Some are nostalgic for the old hero, and others say this is the best Bond film yet.  I’ll still watch a James Bond marathon on TV, but I liked the new movie.  As a fogy I still find James Bond a fantasy figure.  Even though he is diminished, I like to see him fighting hard and doing pretty well.