So I finally saw Skyfall. I was very excited to enjoy the new James Bond picture while hanging out with some good friends last night. But, unfortunately, the film wasn't everything I was hoping for. Luckily the company made up for it :-)
It’s quite easy, both during and after the film, to note with solemnity and perhaps a little jadedness the effect of postmodernism on the James Bond franchise. Beginning with the Daniel Craig Bondian era, Bond has been made the transition from super-hero, robot-like but suave and jingoistic, to antihero, unshaven and unruly and all that comes with it. The signature James Bond tune was played to grand and sometimes comedic effect, though whether that latter bit was intended it’s difficult to say. From a director like Sam Mendes, the voice and vision behind American Beauty, one would expect a more exquisite character portrayal, and he instead seemed to have gotten grossly caught up with Bondian conventions and myths, shifting the Bond needle ever closer to “vulnerable” and farther from “untouchable.” Formally speaking, it was an exercise in high-tech filmmaking. Nothing else really need be said on that topic, besides for a severe condemnation of the filth included in the lyrical signature Bond animated intro, which lacked any sort of creativity and beauty and just seemed really to be an exhibition of the new sorts of things computer design is capable of. Recall Jean Renoir and his discussion of the beauty of an art unequivocally declining with the increasing perfection of the tools of the craft (i.e., technology). To put it succinctly, Mendes accepted probably a rather large paycheck in order to make incessant homages to the specific Bondian conventions, iconography and mythology, not to make a truly great film.
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