Bond's Brave New World

Skyfall

Directed by Sam Mendes

Four Stars

If Sam Mendes’ splendid “Skyfall”, the latest installment in the James Bond franchise, reminds us of anything, it is probably that the vast majority of the Bond films we’ve seen through the years just haven’t been very good. Protected by the cloak of a durable formula, iconic score, and the innate magnetism of a transcendent cultural icon, almost always enjoyable, usually clever, though seldom thrilling, the series has existed safely in cruise control for decades. “Skyfall”, however, is thrilling. One would need to go back, way back, back through the Pierce Brosnan years, back through the Timothy Dalton years, back to perhaps Guy Hamilton’s “Live and Let Die” in 1973 to find a Bond film this heedlessly inventive and captivating.

With Daniel Craig firmly established in the coveted role, and with the library of Ian Fleming’s famed spy novels now exhausted, the series finds itself looking both forward and back. Craig is probably the most removed from Bond’s longstanding cinematic persona, but also probably the most faithful to the character in Fleming’s books, who was less debonair womanizer and more broken antihero. He is, in many respects, the perfect Bond for the post-recession era, sleek and sparse, stripped of the extravagance and the smug flippancy that earlier had been defining characteristics.

And that old guard is in the crosshairs this time around. Never has a Bond film been so reflective. “Skyfall” confronts the changes to the world’s political and technological landscape that have made the world of on-location espionage seem passé. The threat of the 21^st century is not in missile silos and mad scientists but in cyber warfare. Information is the new weapon, and its accessibility is international security’s greatest vulnerability in the digital age.

While Javier Bardem’s former MI6 agent-turned Oedipal hacker Sylva embodies this contemporary shift, he remains a Bond villain in the classic sense. Quirky, brilliant and insecure, he is more caricature than human, with a clever and eccentric physical deformity and wildly animated mannerisms. Bardem, who had previously created the greatest movie villain this side of Hannibal Lecter with Anton Chigur from the Coens’ “No Country for Old Men”, is an astute choice, immediately joining the ranks of Bond’s most memorable foes.

Sylva’s weapon of choice is a hard drive, compromised through ambiguous means, containing the names and locations of most every undercover MI6 and CIA agent in the world. Loss of the disc instigates doubt in the British government as to the competency of M (Judi Dench), the head of MI6, as well as the agency’s continued relevancy in this brave new digital world. M is called to testify on behalf of her methods, and defend the persistent need for field agents in the preservation of national security.

The hearings come at a time when Bond himself is presumed dead after a failed mission to recover the missing hard drive. That he survives is hardly a surprise, but there are trepidations about his return. Like M, Bond belongs to a different time. Though the spy hadn’t aged a day in five decades, it is finally suggested here that he has perhaps lost a step. There’s some grey in that perpetually perfect hair. Like the romanticized era that Bond belongs to, he himself is growing old.

Bond works his way back into the ranks, and leads the charge to wrangle Sylva, but the spy’s physical resourcefulness is surpassed by Sylva’s cyber-trap setting. His efforts revolve around a peculiar desire to capture M, for reasons I won’t spoil, and there is a splendid chase scene at the heart of MI6 as Sylva closes in on M during her competency hearings.

All of this establishes a ploy by Bond, with M in tow, to lure Sylva to battle beyond the reach of his intel and surveillance. The two head to Bond’s childhood estate in the Irish countryside, as if traveling back in time, where the score can be settled the old-fashioned way – with gun in hand. “Someone has to pull the trigger,” Bond ensures Q (Ben Wishaw) earlier in the film, and Bond still must do what Bond does best.

In the end, “Skyfall” succeeds in simultaneously acknowledging the new world order to which the James Bond series must now adapt, and celebrating the romance and the exotic intimacy of the world it must leave behind. With Fleming’s novels all now adapted, Mendes and writer Neal Purvis have taken the opportunity to add to the Bond mythology and to lay the foundation for a new direction that inoculates the series itself from irrelevancy. The film’s story is a parable for the series’ own durability. “Skyfall” is an honest and frank self-examination, courageously refusing to cling to its dated methods, even as it demonstrates their enduring worth.