The Island Lair (SPOILERS).

Colonel Shatner

What did you think of the island lair that was used by Raoul Silva's organisation as their base of operations? The external shots of the place is actually a real place: the Japanese island of Hashima that got heavily industrialised and urbanised in the first half of the 20th century, abandoned since the mid 1970s.

Rauol Silva's inner sanctum, a renovated lobby area that was filled up with cobbled together giant mainframe terminals, was a particularily impressive area and was featured in a key scene in the movie's plotline. A courtyard area featured a tumbled down statue of Mao. The place seemed to have been used by Silva's organisation for many years and big enough to shelter a small army.

The island getting abandoned by the original inhabitants after a fake industrial accident is nearly as far fetched as a volcano getting hollowed out to house a rocket base though (but that's half the fun). )

Virgil37

Colonel Shatner wrote:

The island getting abandoned by the original inhabitants after a fake industrial accident is nearly as far fetched as a volcano getting hollowed out to house a rocket base though (but that's half the fun). )

Far fetched? there has been regions abandoned because of real industrial accidents (Chernobyl). Nowhere near in fantasy as the volcano, IMO.

I thought it was a cool villain´s lair. Much better than the one in QOS, much grittier and real that the ones in Brosnan years.

Thunderpussy

Thought it was an amazing location. -{
I didn't know anything about it but after watching skyfall
I looked it up on the internet. Seems a fasanating place
and well suited for a Bond film.

minigeff

There's a pic of DC filming on this set in the 'Bond on Set' book. Really annoying bit is that just outta shot, I was stood with a good friend of mine. If only the snapper had turned a little more ) bastard.

Anyway, the set only exists in real life up to about the second story, after that its all CGI. I just wish that while I was on set I'd been able to keep a small momento like a rock or something, especially when I was in the chapel our guide did make a joke of us taking a rock home and having a tommy tank over it, so through embarrassment I didn't ask if it would have been ok ;%

(Taking a rock, not having a public tommy)

Moore Than

A nod to The Man With The Golden Gun, and not the only one in Skyfall. The idea of getting the island abandoned might be a bit far fetched but it is pretty much an ideal location for a villains lair.

Lexi

I thought the abandoned island a great location for Silva, and the fact it was abandoned, added an extra element (perhaps a metaphor for Silva's feeling of being abandoned by M16??)

Anyway, nice and intimidating... just a shame we didn't see more of it.

In fact, I think that is what I'm struggling with in the whole movie.... we don't really stay in one place long enough to get emotionally attached. Apart from Skyfall... but even then, if you haven't read the books, you would know that Bond had an ancestral home....or that it was where his parents were buried. You just had to go on the ride and play catch up with how Bond feels, rather than been taken along with him.

Colonel Shatner

Lexi wrote:

In fact, I think that is what I'm struggling with in the whole movie.... we don't really stay in one place long enough to get emotionally attached.

A problem shared with Quantum of Solace.

Smoke_13

Thought it was a great location! The scene with Severine was excellent by the way. Not sure why they had to go with the whole "fake industrial accident triggered by Silva's computer" I didn't find that terribly believable.

They should have stuck with the true story of the island. (Which I confess I didn't know about until this thread - thank you Shatner.) What a great tie in to the movie. A place abandoned because it was of no use anymore. A place that had everything useful (coal) pulled out of it and was completely abandoned. Silva could have tied that into his own perceived agent experience, believing he gave MI6 everything he had and then was abandoned by them.

Gassy Man

It didn't do anything for me one way or the other. It just looked like an abandoned city set from a 50s era TV show (if you're a fan of Golden Age TV, you know what I'm talking about). We didn't really get to see much of it other than a few exteriors -- most of the scenes were in the room with the Internet servers. Since it wasn't really utilized much, there was no real geography to it. I got to know the volcanic lair in You Only Live Twice, for instance, much better.

Colonel Shatner

I agree that there should be a degree of padding and wandering about a location in order for people to take things in, and we didn't really get that with Severine's island (which also felt a lot like that creepy fake American town in the Expendables 2).

Also I noticed that the most visually interesting bases of operations have been used by MI6 in the last two movies, with the bad guys not having anything similar for their headquarters (I'd always imagined Quantum having something similar to the MI6's offices, training areas, and workshops only hidden in plain site in one of their corporate fronts).