The first shot in Spectre begins above a carnivalesque party during Mexico's Day of the Dead; the camera then comes down to the ground, weaves among the masked revellers dressed as skeletons, glides into a hotel door, up the elevator, out of the elevator, slips into a bedroom where Her Majesty's secret agent kisses a woman, then follows him out of the window -- "I won't be long", he tells her -- then it goes up again to see Bond sneak across the roofs to a spot where he performs his first assassination in this 24th James Bond movie.
It is a very impressive opener and Hoyt van Hoytema's cinematography is one of the best elements in this serious, entertaining and yet somewhat routine instalment. The director is Sam Mendes, returning after the phenomenal success of Skyfall. Perhaps not surprisingly, Spectre cannot match the emotional gravity that made the previous film if not the best then the most soulful Bond film ever.
As in the past three movies with Daniel Craig as 007, we continue to see the admirable evolution of the age-old franchise, which now puts Bond and the MI6 in the post-Snowden age of tyrannical digital surveillance that renders foot soldiers and suave agents obsolete (that's the constant threat to this 53-year-old series). But as a drama -- and Skyfall works so well because it's both a thriller and a drama -- Spectre's punches aren't as heavy. And as someone who loves the idea of a Bond woman more than a Bond girl, I thought we'd see more of Monica Belucci than what we actually did here!
So what we have and what we enjoy, is Craig's tough charm, Christoph Waltz's slick villainy, Lea Seydoux' slinky beauty, Ralph Fiennes' earnest M and Ben Whishaw as the hipsterish Q, all set in bravura set pieces, exotic locales and kinetic chase sequences.
Spectre also spins the threads of conflicts and characters that go back to the early Ian Fleming's stories -- Spectre is a secret organisation first heard of back in Dr. No, the first Bond movie in 1962 -- while slipping in Bond's childhood ordeals in a bid to ground this fantastical character more in cinematic reality (again, Skyfall does this more convincingly).
What's at stake here is the control of information. After the former M (Judi Dench) was killed, Bond receives her posthumous message to track down an underground organisation, sort of the Illuminati without the supernatural bend, chaired by a man called Oberhauser (Waltz), who pulls strings in many governments and possesses the all-seeing eye of surveillance technology.
Chasing leads, 007 is kite caught in the hurricane that blows him to the rooftops of Mexico, a villa in Rome, snowy Austria where he meets Madeleine Swann (Seydoux, but why this Proust reference in the character name?), who then follows him to the desert of Morocco. The franchise's attempt to remain relevant means Bond and his MI6 colleagues are now battling not just another eccentric billionaire, but the 21st century system of information trafficking, made worse by dictatorial impulses of bureaucrats that, as M suggests, are destroying "democracy" (M, always political, made a jibe at "unelected" officials with so much power, oops).
As Bond physically sweats to get his job done and get his girl safe, Q, no longer a weapon guru but a cool hacker, fingers away on his laptop trying to break into some high-security mainframe; it's hard to say who actually saves the world.
It's also quite funny that one of the climactic escapes still features a countdown clock in red digits -- something so un-21st century -- which shows that no matter how the recent Bond films have evolved into a sophisticated, sombre narrative, sometimes it's the simple thrill (wrought with mild stupidity) of vintage Bond that will keep compelling us to watch the longest-serving secret agent of all.
