![]() Notably, you don’t have to have seen the 20th-century Bond films or even the more recent ones to enjoy the stuff it’s harkening back to. Still, after the cooler critical reception for Quantum Of Solace, and in following it, Skyfall is at once a clean break and a more specific nostalgia fest. The film also ends with Greene being killed by his superiors for his failure, another SPECTRE trope that’s polished up for this new lot. White and his colleague, arch-villain Dominic Greene (Mathieu Amalric) are set up nicely as the equivalents to Blofeld’s subordinate numbers in the older films. Quantum Of Solace may have had the “gang’s all here” syndrome of casting that so many sequels do nowadays, but for all its flaws and production problems, that film successfully presents us with a modern, off-SPECTRE alternative, replacing insane megalomaniacs with corrupt disaster capitalists – the sort of enemies it imagines 007 might spend the next decade fighting. As a philosopher might say, (but probably wouldn’t) – if SPECTRE did not exist in the Bond universe, the filmmakers would have to invent it. SPECTRE provided that back in the early days of the franchise and it’s intended to do the same for these movies too, but with a lot more backwards working-out.īut Blofeld and his cronies hadn’t appeared in the previous Craig-era films, even as they went back to 007’s roots. ![]() The Avengers had only just assembled when Skyfall topped the billion-dollar mark, but only three years later, Spectre seems borne a desire to retrospectively lash dangling threads from largely standalone adventures to a fan-friendly hook. Looming large in the background of Spectre is the dawn of the cinematic universe. But the reference to departed characters is really only part of the patchwork of callbacks and retcons that glue the different parts of this film together.īefore we get into how, this is your last warning for SPOILERS for Spectre and the preceding Craig-era Bond films, which will commence after this picture of Franz Oberhauser, Completely Normal Antagonist… Ghosts from the past Nevertheless, the title Spectre (in title case, not all caps) was chosen for its double meaning, and the finished film dwells heavily on death and past trauma from its opening epigraph – “The dead are alive”. ![]() Such difficulties undoubtedly affected the creative direction of Spectre, more so than the absence of Bond’s most well-known adversaries had ever bothered them before the rights situation was ironed out. Ultimately, the brain behind this shadowy cabal turns out to have a very close connection to Bond himself.Ĭoming after the billion-dollar box-office success of Skyfall, this is a transparent effort to capture that same effect, but despite a slightly longer than intended gap between the films, this outing had a revolving door of writers, budget disputes between Sony and Eon, and other disruptions over the course of development and production. While the new M lobbies for the continued relevance of spies, 007 races off in pursuit of a rare lead about the organisation behind all of his most recent scrapes. As discussed in our Skyfall retrospective, returning director Sam Mendes wilfully puts the franchise in reverse, but for this sequel, it’s tough to overstate the impact of Eon Productions settling a 50-year legal battle with Kevin McClory’s estate when they did, because they bring Blofeld and SPECTRE back in the very next outing.Īfter a messy off-the-books assignment in Mexico City, Bond finds his job under threat by an impending merger between MI5 and MI6. The meteor that’s been headed for the Daniel Craig era all along has a name, and it’s Ernst Stavro Blofeld. ![]() However, some of us are still left scratching our heads about the way in which the film imposes continuity upon a franchise once defined by standalone adventures. In the seven years since the film hit cinemas, the reassessment of Spectre has happened fairly quickly because it was “the most recent James Bond movie” for longer than any film that wasn’t eventually followed by a reboot. Try three issues of Film Stories magazine – for just £1: right here! ![]()
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