Skyfall: a short review

When sat before a Parliamentary Select Committee - accused of wilful disregard for the lives of her agents lost for her neglect - M reads from Tennyson's Ulysses, a poem once used to sell UBS products. And whilst Skyfall film sells us Adidas, Heineken, Omega and Jaguar, it does so no more than Friday Night with Jonathan Ross or Alan Carr Chatty Man promotes a book or a record - and certainly no more than almost any mainstream American film of the last 85 years  - the point being the poem itself. Why? Because the Bond franchise is made by its villains. In 50 years there has not been one Bond to match the supple plots of Hitchcock or Wilder - or even an attempt. Spies, femmes fatale, the shady extra-judicial world of international politics: the subject matter fecundly waits for a sophisticated treatment - and yet we have Moonraker.



Instead, Bond is used to gaze at the evil in the world. Russia. Voodoo. Germans. The media. And sometimes: within.

The villain of Skyfall is Bardem's Silva. He grins laciviously at Bond, has a prosthetic bridge and moves from vintage Scotch to murder as coolly as if he were passing between rooms in a house for the same reason that Von Rothbart jumps around the stage like a tweaker in Swan Lake or Richard III is depicted with a hunchback: evil is disharmonious. It is the devil's work.

But for his disharmony, Silva is just Bond on a left-forked path.


But he is the enemy within. That's why the film is set in London, why he dresses as a bobby - that almost sacred, usually gunless beat cop - why he hacks at will into Britain's most sophisticated computer system. The danger within, the terror within - be vigilant, this film whispers, for just as Russia was yesterday's evil, that is today's evil.

Whilst Skyfall does not transcend The Bond Genre; whilst it revels in a kind of Saxon page-as-to-Norman  knight patriotism of fealty to the Establishment (and Tennyson was Poet Laureate), it is saved by Silva.
If he were offered the opportunity to read a poem - which perhaps he should have, as his life is dedicated in a sense to M - it would be ee cummings, Mayakovsky or Pound. Concrete; difficult or self-defeating to recite; sublime; tragic.