It may be the UK’s biggest ever grossing film, but all that proves is that marketing can sell things. It doesn’t prove the film’s any good. Indeed, it isn’t too good in the following ways:
1. From a feminist perspective. Look what happens to the three female characters in the movie. The ‘girlfriend’ is shot in the head. The character of M is killed and replaced by a man. Moneypenny is pulled out of the field and reduced to the position of a glamorous secretary behind a desk. After all, as the refrain of the film goes, and as Moneypenny is told time and again, the action and lead roles ‘aren’t for everybody’. The refrain may as well be, the action and lead roles ‘aren’t for women’. Are there any more female characters? If you look closely, there’s a Turkish bird that James Bond shags on the beech. She isn’t allowed a single spoken line and she simply ‘disappears’. Shame.
2. The last third of the film isn’t about plot coherence, it’s about having an action sequence for a computer game. The old helicopter gunship appears yet again. How many Playstation Bond games have I completed with precisely this ‘final stage’ in it? Too many. I wouldn’t mind, but it really doesn’t make a lot of sense in Skyfall. The plot is thrown completely out of the window. One happened to the entire premise of the names of agents being revealed on Youtube week by week? We are never told. The plot is not central to this film in any way, shape or form. Shame.
And yet it made loads of money and the franchise is healthy once more. Hmm. I must learn from this. Maybe Empire of the Saviours should be rewritten so it has a helicopter gunship at the end. Maybe Hella and Freda need a bullet to the head.
