I think The Spoony One recapped most of the non-spoiler stuff relatively well (honestly, I think his analysis has gotten a lot better recently), so my discussion is going to focus on the spoileriffic bits.

(SPOILER)First, am I the only person who seems to think that M is not dead? Not that I think that the movie goes out of the way to say she survived, but it certainly made a lot of effort to leave it open for interpretation.

There's all the talk about Bond's own death. The mention that it's pretty much the only clean way out of the system. Bond recommends she tries it. M's mention that she'll retire when the job's done. There's also no funeral, no coffin, no grieving or choking up by any of the secondary characters, nor by Bond himself after the scene.

Again, I'm not saying that it's a definite that she's alive, but I do think it was, intentionally, left as a possibility. And that she's currently retired on a beach with old man Kincaid (who still calls her "Emma"), doing shots with a scorpion on her hand (should have filmed that, would have been an awesome post-credits scene).


Second, if they did mean to kill her, they did it in the worst possible way. M is a strong character, and the death was weak. It left her impotent, powerless, and motionless, which did not fit the character. They needed something else to it. Examples:

Bond: "Why didn't you 'take the bloody shot', mum?"
M: "I trusted you to get the job done."

Pulls the scene full circle and makes it seem as though her refusal to pull the trigger was a deliberate act of faith in her agent, rather than just her being paralyzed with fear into inaction, which is how it appeared.

Another option: Have her take the shot. Again, this pulls back to the original point. It's worth expending an asset to eliminate the threat, and she is no different. Had she taken the shot then, we would have seen that apply to everything, even herself. Eliminating the threat takes priority, and the fact that you can't get a clean shot doesn't stop you from taking it. It would have been an incredibly strong way for the character to go out, especially since she didn't know Bond was alive at the time. Plus, we would have gotten to see Bond's rage at her death, which would have been epic.

It's not horrible, but it could have been a lot better pretty easily.


Third, I don't buy Silver as a villain. Spoony covered a lot of it with the basic problems with cyberterrorism, but there's one key point he missed. Namely, Silver's age. The guy is like 65. He was an agent until he was, what, 40, probably? A field agent is not a computer expert (yeah, ask Bond to hack M's office and see how far he gets), and you don't jump into things at that age and pick them up without being a total savant, which he clearly wasn't (wrong mindset). Had he been a computer savant/genius, he never would have become a field agent, he would have had a role more like Q's.

Fourth, how did he escape, exactly? I mean, I know he hacked all the doors open, ok, I can accept that. How did he kill the guards? He had no weapons, and was covered by multiple guards who (if they had any brains at all) would have started shooting as soon as the doors open, certainly before he crossed the ten feet between his cell and the first guard.

Fifth, Bond's psyche evaluation was bull. I'm not saying it's unrealistic, but simply that Bond's reactions were absolutely correct. As soon as "Skyfall" was mentioned, Bond failed his psyche evaluation. It doesn't matter how you answer that one. If you answer too quickly, you're putting something up to get it off your mind. If you answer too slowly, its because its deeply affected you. If you give a nonsensical answer, its because you are hiding something. If you give a logical answer, its because it still preys on your mind and you think about it. No matter how you answer that one, a psychologist can interpret it to say "yep, deep lasting unresolved childhood trauma". Bond's reaction was the best one, and the psychologist should be fired.


But, yeah, I liked it, and I think it was one of the better Bonds. And I did not expect to like it that much going into it. The characters and acting were grand.

Although there is something I'm wondering about now: We know this is Daniel Craig's last Bond film. So... (SPOILER)Why did they do such a great job setting up a new M and a new Moneypenny, yet we're going to get nothing to ease the transitions of Bond himself?

My sister actually had the idea that Bond is a Time Lord, which, when I got to thinking about it, actually makes a lot of sense. Not only does it explain the transformations, it also makes the whole "why are you still here" thing make a lot more sense. They aren't asking for Bond to retire or give up, they're asking why he's hanging on to a battered and no longer top-of-the-line body when he could just regenerate into a younger, stronger, healthier one. Of course, it still feels like death, and the current persona of the Time Lord doesn't want to give up, especially not when there's a job to do, so it holds on as long as it can, at least through the end of the current mission, before finally letting go and passing it on to the new self.