Just saw Spectre. What a dull, dreary, lifeless mess!
Feb 5, 2018 16:08:55 GMT
Nalkarj and geralmar like this
Post by The Social Introvert on Feb 5, 2018 16:08:55 GMT
For a video version of my thoughts on the film, see here:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=MkhqXmpivGI
(contains spoilers)
For a text version, see below:
Spectre is the latest Bond offering, directed by Sam Mendes coming off the critical success of Skyfall, starring the increasingly bored looking Daniel Craig as the apparently charismatic and charming secret agent. Like with most Bond movies, it involves car chases, secret codes and funky gadgets. Like with most Bond movies, there are over the top villains, love interests, secret lairs and the fate of the world at stake. But unlike most Bond movies, Spectre is exceptionally boring.
Craig, for starters, really needs to go. He was great in Casino Royale but then became increasingly static and dreary as the films went on, up to a point where the wooden plank from Ed Edd and Eddy provides more charm. It has honestly come to a point where his performances as Bond are harming the films, giving me incentive to absentmindedly yawn throughout this movie and gradually drift off.
The film itself doesn’t help. The colours are so washed out and void of any personality, a common trend in today’s age with directors senselessly faffing about with colour correcting and camera lenses. Remember that terrific looking skyscraper fight from the last film? Well, don’t get your hopes up, because there’s nothing that good looking in this film.
The cinematography in this film was painfully irritating. The director of photography needed to be fired as soon as they saw the first dailies, because there is an irrational habit the film has to have huge chunks of the screen out of focus. I don’t know what Mendes was going for but it is distracting when, for example, a character is sitting in the foreground taking up most of the screen, but the camera is focused on a character in the background. So what we get is a huge pixelated blob on screen and a concentrated minuscule point of focus in the back. I mean, is he taking the piss? This is basic film school stuff. And it happens so many times throughout the film it was like the movie was being filmed by a kid working out how a camera works. So many shots were out of focus and when a shot changed it made it even worse, because clearly the DP didn’t take time to analysis where the audience point of focus would be, because you’d be looking at the top left hand side of the screen because that’s the only thing you can see clearly, and then in the next shot the blur would be in the top left corner and your eyes would be frantically searching for what you’re supposed to be looking at, which was especially infuriating in the quick cut filled action scenes.
Speaking of the action scenes – how boring were they? I’ll give you the opening helicopter fight, that was pretty good and there was a particular part where the chopper moved in such a way that I actually got butterflies in my stomach, but aside from that, just like the plot, the characters, the colours…it was just dull. There was nothing of any note. Take the car chase in the middle of the film, between Bond and Batista – it felt like a Friday night ride around the city, not a life and death hunt. Bond even has enough time to phone up Moneypenny whilst getting chased, sluggishly asking her to search for things in order to lethargically plod the plot along. He’s in the middle of a high speed pursuit, I mean come on!
Surely the worst offense of this film is the plot and everything that comes with it. They recycle the story from the last one by having someone who shares the past of James Bond and has decided to become a villain and exact revenge. It also turns out that the villains from previous films are working under one evil shady organization called S.P.E.C.T.R.E. OK there’s nothing wrong with that, I dig the conspiracy angle and it is something that was done before, but in the Connery era the reveal of S.P.E.C.T.R.E was well built up throughout several movies until we finally see the man in charge of it all, but what they’ve done in this movie is essentially clumsily retcon the last three movies and remove the emotional impact of Silva and M’s arcs from Skyfall. There’s loads of holes regarding the S.P.E.C.T.R.E organisation connection and very little spy work is done from Bond and co. He ambles from set piece to set piece picking up a name which Moneypenny googles for him until he ends up at the evil villain’s lair who happens to be Ernst Stavro Blofeld, re-introducing a famous Bond villain of the past and, I can’t believe I’m saying this, but it turns out his dad adopted Bond after James’ parents died and treated him well, and Blofeld got jealous and killed his own dad after which he became an evil maniac bent on revenge, and all that’s happened since the Bond films were rebooted is Blofeld messing with Bond being, as he puts it, “the author of all [his] pain”. Ooof. There’s just so much wrong with this. Blofeld as Bond’s long lost brother? Are you taking the piss? Who actually thought this was a good idea when they were coming up with concepts for the film? How exactly did they expect audiences to react? Daddy issues? Sibling rivalry? What were they thinking? When you think of those old Sean Connery Bond films, which I’m a really big fan of, with the villains and their over-the-top world domination plans, volcano lairs, monologues and over-elaborate schemes – it’s crazy to think that their motivations and schemes seem sensible and reasonable in comparison to this Blofeld. And what was the point of even having the reveal that the villain’s name was Blofeld and not whatever they called him throughout the film? What does it actually add to the film? It’s a shame because Waltz is a pretty good actor but they gave him absolutely nothing in this film, and he comes off as completely harmless and a bit slow.
And there’s lots of other contrived things too, like a magical ring that connects all previous Bond baddies, Blofeld’s torturing of Bond in a pair of slippers with some computer needles which were supposed to be so painful that it affects his balance, memory and motor skills but it pretty much does nothing as seconds later he escapes and is able to shoot down bad guys effortlessly before they’ve even raised their guns. Blofield must’ve gotten construction plans for his base from Emeror Palpatine seeing as though Bond destroys it all by shooting one pipe and Ernst also has the ability to teleport to London hours after he is blown up and conjure a ridiculously convoluted maze game for Bond instead of just, you know, killing him. The script is just…an absolute shambles. Nothing works. The love interest side plot is hilariously inept too. The girl in this film even goes as far as to mock the trope, saying something like “Is this the part where I’m supposed to fall into your arms?” and then minutes later she does exactly that. Then she’s all like “take me with you” then it’s “I can’t come with you, this life is bad”…this whole film is just all over the place.
The dialogue is completely flat and fails to keep the film interesting. Away from Bond’s adventures all over Europe in London M and a new guy C but heads over the relevance of the 00 programme, and there is some real cringeworthily on-the-nose lines about surveillance and privacy. They couldn’t even leave the good lines alone – for instance, M counterattacks an insult from C by saying “I guess we all know what C stands for” which gave me a chuckle because you obviously know what he’s thinking of, and then he follows it up with “careless”, which was a bit of awkward tumbleweed moment.
I thought Skyfall was contrived with the convenient subway trains and such, but this movie just goes too far. The film feels like it was broken up into 10 different chapters written by 10 different people who had no communication with each other at all. Even if the script was sorted out before filming it wouldn’t have helped much, because everyone including Mendes, Craig and Waltz, the authors of all our pain, are all half-arsedly phoning it in, Bond spends more time posing for the camera than doing spy work, and all in all it is just a stupendously dreary and lifeless entry into the franchise. 4/10.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=MkhqXmpivGI
(contains spoilers)
For a text version, see below:
Spectre is the latest Bond offering, directed by Sam Mendes coming off the critical success of Skyfall, starring the increasingly bored looking Daniel Craig as the apparently charismatic and charming secret agent. Like with most Bond movies, it involves car chases, secret codes and funky gadgets. Like with most Bond movies, there are over the top villains, love interests, secret lairs and the fate of the world at stake. But unlike most Bond movies, Spectre is exceptionally boring.
Craig, for starters, really needs to go. He was great in Casino Royale but then became increasingly static and dreary as the films went on, up to a point where the wooden plank from Ed Edd and Eddy provides more charm. It has honestly come to a point where his performances as Bond are harming the films, giving me incentive to absentmindedly yawn throughout this movie and gradually drift off.
The film itself doesn’t help. The colours are so washed out and void of any personality, a common trend in today’s age with directors senselessly faffing about with colour correcting and camera lenses. Remember that terrific looking skyscraper fight from the last film? Well, don’t get your hopes up, because there’s nothing that good looking in this film.
The cinematography in this film was painfully irritating. The director of photography needed to be fired as soon as they saw the first dailies, because there is an irrational habit the film has to have huge chunks of the screen out of focus. I don’t know what Mendes was going for but it is distracting when, for example, a character is sitting in the foreground taking up most of the screen, but the camera is focused on a character in the background. So what we get is a huge pixelated blob on screen and a concentrated minuscule point of focus in the back. I mean, is he taking the piss? This is basic film school stuff. And it happens so many times throughout the film it was like the movie was being filmed by a kid working out how a camera works. So many shots were out of focus and when a shot changed it made it even worse, because clearly the DP didn’t take time to analysis where the audience point of focus would be, because you’d be looking at the top left hand side of the screen because that’s the only thing you can see clearly, and then in the next shot the blur would be in the top left corner and your eyes would be frantically searching for what you’re supposed to be looking at, which was especially infuriating in the quick cut filled action scenes.
Speaking of the action scenes – how boring were they? I’ll give you the opening helicopter fight, that was pretty good and there was a particular part where the chopper moved in such a way that I actually got butterflies in my stomach, but aside from that, just like the plot, the characters, the colours…it was just dull. There was nothing of any note. Take the car chase in the middle of the film, between Bond and Batista – it felt like a Friday night ride around the city, not a life and death hunt. Bond even has enough time to phone up Moneypenny whilst getting chased, sluggishly asking her to search for things in order to lethargically plod the plot along. He’s in the middle of a high speed pursuit, I mean come on!
Surely the worst offense of this film is the plot and everything that comes with it. They recycle the story from the last one by having someone who shares the past of James Bond and has decided to become a villain and exact revenge. It also turns out that the villains from previous films are working under one evil shady organization called S.P.E.C.T.R.E. OK there’s nothing wrong with that, I dig the conspiracy angle and it is something that was done before, but in the Connery era the reveal of S.P.E.C.T.R.E was well built up throughout several movies until we finally see the man in charge of it all, but what they’ve done in this movie is essentially clumsily retcon the last three movies and remove the emotional impact of Silva and M’s arcs from Skyfall. There’s loads of holes regarding the S.P.E.C.T.R.E organisation connection and very little spy work is done from Bond and co. He ambles from set piece to set piece picking up a name which Moneypenny googles for him until he ends up at the evil villain’s lair who happens to be Ernst Stavro Blofeld, re-introducing a famous Bond villain of the past and, I can’t believe I’m saying this, but it turns out his dad adopted Bond after James’ parents died and treated him well, and Blofeld got jealous and killed his own dad after which he became an evil maniac bent on revenge, and all that’s happened since the Bond films were rebooted is Blofeld messing with Bond being, as he puts it, “the author of all [his] pain”. Ooof. There’s just so much wrong with this. Blofeld as Bond’s long lost brother? Are you taking the piss? Who actually thought this was a good idea when they were coming up with concepts for the film? How exactly did they expect audiences to react? Daddy issues? Sibling rivalry? What were they thinking? When you think of those old Sean Connery Bond films, which I’m a really big fan of, with the villains and their over-the-top world domination plans, volcano lairs, monologues and over-elaborate schemes – it’s crazy to think that their motivations and schemes seem sensible and reasonable in comparison to this Blofeld. And what was the point of even having the reveal that the villain’s name was Blofeld and not whatever they called him throughout the film? What does it actually add to the film? It’s a shame because Waltz is a pretty good actor but they gave him absolutely nothing in this film, and he comes off as completely harmless and a bit slow.
And there’s lots of other contrived things too, like a magical ring that connects all previous Bond baddies, Blofeld’s torturing of Bond in a pair of slippers with some computer needles which were supposed to be so painful that it affects his balance, memory and motor skills but it pretty much does nothing as seconds later he escapes and is able to shoot down bad guys effortlessly before they’ve even raised their guns. Blofield must’ve gotten construction plans for his base from Emeror Palpatine seeing as though Bond destroys it all by shooting one pipe and Ernst also has the ability to teleport to London hours after he is blown up and conjure a ridiculously convoluted maze game for Bond instead of just, you know, killing him. The script is just…an absolute shambles. Nothing works. The love interest side plot is hilariously inept too. The girl in this film even goes as far as to mock the trope, saying something like “Is this the part where I’m supposed to fall into your arms?” and then minutes later she does exactly that. Then she’s all like “take me with you” then it’s “I can’t come with you, this life is bad”…this whole film is just all over the place.
The dialogue is completely flat and fails to keep the film interesting. Away from Bond’s adventures all over Europe in London M and a new guy C but heads over the relevance of the 00 programme, and there is some real cringeworthily on-the-nose lines about surveillance and privacy. They couldn’t even leave the good lines alone – for instance, M counterattacks an insult from C by saying “I guess we all know what C stands for” which gave me a chuckle because you obviously know what he’s thinking of, and then he follows it up with “careless”, which was a bit of awkward tumbleweed moment.
I thought Skyfall was contrived with the convenient subway trains and such, but this movie just goes too far. The film feels like it was broken up into 10 different chapters written by 10 different people who had no communication with each other at all. Even if the script was sorted out before filming it wouldn’t have helped much, because everyone including Mendes, Craig and Waltz, the authors of all our pain, are all half-arsedly phoning it in, Bond spends more time posing for the camera than doing spy work, and all in all it is just a stupendously dreary and lifeless entry into the franchise. 4/10.
