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.

Prometheus (Ridley Scott film): a review

Director Ridley Scott is a Geordie (well, basically) and as a Geordie, he's an Englishman. That means his idealism, that is: his ability to think about the non-material origins of life, is non-existent. Decades before Darwin matched the empirical evidence to Wallace's thinking and invented evolution, Napoleon called Britain a nation of shopkeepers, quoting Scotsman Adam Smith but twisting it in order to make fun of Britain's lack of idealism and the presumed effect of this paucity upon their fighting spirit. Le petit corporal was to be proved wrong in Iberia and Belgium, but the stubbornness with which the British have resisted all forms of idealism - from Hegel and Marx to Virchow's vitalism to fascism to Spengler- proved him correct off the field. Where a thing can't be measured, it isn't real in Britain. When one of our greatest minds kicks a rock and presumes that that refutes all idealism, that's when you know this sceptred isle sides with the bleeding obvious.

Alien, the film of which Prometheus is prequel, was a decent action film made superb by the outpourings disembogued from the perverted mind of HR Geiger, an aesthetic futurologist famous also for his Penis Landscape which landed Jello Biafra in trouble in the 80s. Prometheus attempts to go deeper than the homocidal shiny black exoskeleton of the xenomorph so familiar and beloved of movie fans and asks How did it come to be? within the larger question how did we (man) come to be?

The title of the film is a not-subtle clue to the moral dimension of the story of the mission of the spaceship Prometheus, a sparsely-crewed vessel travelling through space to a planet outside of our solar system to where all the prehistoric clues of primitive man on earth point tantalisingly and cypherously towards the fact behind creation myth. When you try to get knowledge that is beyond your ken, you will be burnt (or rather, chained to a rock in the Caucasus with adamantine bonds and have your regenerating liver pecked out by vultures). Where the crime of the Prometheus of Antique religion was the Titan's theft of the secret of fire from the Gods and his transmitting it to man, the crime of the crew of the eponymous spaceship of Scott's film is the attempt to 'steal' the knowledge of our origins through science. It's a theme Heidegger would have approved of. But that is where the philosophical gravitas begins and ends. It is a maguffin, a ponderous, oppilating set-up to the alien-based action, which is the 'burning' of the aforesaid moral.

The writers of Prometheus will have us believe that aliens, who look like hypertrophied marble statues of Greek gods, created man, promulgating every nebulous, mythological-fantastical guff ever uttered about the origins of man and technology on earth. Why they created man, we don't know. I suppose aliens is easier to believe than chance, and chance more than some other more veiled reason.

That Prometheus takes this line is unsurprising - because this is a prequel to Alien, let's be realistic -  but to use it as the plot and theme of the film betrays the English origins of its creator. What do I mean? I mean that the fact of aliens creating us doesn't answer anything, and it is the most tantalising yet inelegant set-up to monster action that I have ever seen. One of the characters in the film pursues the tantalising line and asks, "So where did they come from?" Scott makes no serious attempt to discuss or even to reiterate this excellent question. Prometheus fails to be the philosophical film it sort of hints that it wants to be and instead resiles to macerate in the drool-juice of its own gormless pretension.

The action scenes are plausible, the tension decent (the classic 'monster-tracker' beepers of the first Alien films are retranslated as a more sophisticated piece of holographic kit, but they're still there) and Fassbender is good as this instalment's inevitable is-he-good-or-bad android.
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