Bond is dead, long live Bond.
CmdrAtticus
United StatesPosts: 1,102MI6 Agent
Thought this is an interesting take on Bond's character in the last film.
It's from an article in the website "We Got This Covered":
....Silva’s warpath eventually forces Bond to hide M, using his vintage Aston Martin DB5 as an impromptu DeLorean that takes them back in time, “where we’ll have the advantage.” Holed up in the decrepit Skyfall Manor, Bond, M, and gamekeeper Kincaid prep a last stand meant to draw out Silva. Setting a Western showdown in a Scottish moor (the alpha Bond’s homeland) makes for an inspired finale, breaking tradition with the bombast of most Bond climaxes. It’s an intimate environment, made all the more so because of Bond’s childhood connection to it, and Skyfall becomes the stage for Bond’s true rise from the ashes.
Fittingly, Bond works through his unresolved familial issues (the source of his disdain for authority, according to the MI6 shrink) in a firefight, aided by both the woman who has been a surrogate mother to him, and Skyfall’s resident man of the house. The process is one of utter destruction: Silva tries to smoke them out of the house with a helicopter and incendiary grenades (unaware of a secret tunnel system), but Bond turns the tables by intentionally blowing up the last real trace of his original identity. He bristles at the annihilation of his Aston Martin (another first), yet bids farewell to the place he grew up in as callously as if it were Blofeld.
But shouldn’t Bond want to return home? Isn’t that the crux of the kind of character-based storytelling that Skyfall is attempting, and why the writers felt the need to include M quoting “Ulysses?” If we consider Bond the everlasting icon, instead of Bond the man, then he’s really more of a Sisyphean figure than a Homeric one; the home he’s trying to return to isn’t a place, it’s an identity. James Bond, the true, legendary James Bond, has no home other than England. He has no parents or origin, he simply exists, saving the world, getting the girl, and looking damn good doing it, whenever we need him to, for as long as we need him to. It’s that ascension to the immortal status of a true 007 that Bond has been working towards all film. In destroying his personal history, Craig’s Bond has nearly come full circle.
I THINK this is one of the reasons the film so resonated with the critics and audiences and placed it at the top or near top of the series. When Silva asks Bond what his hobby was and he simply says "resurrection", to me it is the one word that sums up the whole destination the film was journeying to.
Not only was Bond resurrecting his physical and mental abilities after suffering the trauma of near death and wrestling with his own purpose in life, he was resurrecting his identity after finally disposing of the ghosts of his personal past (his childhood home that he despised and the lonely, orphaned boy he once was) and EON completed the resurrection of the reboot of the series by ending Dench's role and replacing her with someone who may be more of "brother" than a father figure to Bond and reintroducing Bond's "family" at MI6 but back in their old familiar surroundings (M's office with the double padded doors).
It's from an article in the website "We Got This Covered":
....Silva’s warpath eventually forces Bond to hide M, using his vintage Aston Martin DB5 as an impromptu DeLorean that takes them back in time, “where we’ll have the advantage.” Holed up in the decrepit Skyfall Manor, Bond, M, and gamekeeper Kincaid prep a last stand meant to draw out Silva. Setting a Western showdown in a Scottish moor (the alpha Bond’s homeland) makes for an inspired finale, breaking tradition with the bombast of most Bond climaxes. It’s an intimate environment, made all the more so because of Bond’s childhood connection to it, and Skyfall becomes the stage for Bond’s true rise from the ashes.
Fittingly, Bond works through his unresolved familial issues (the source of his disdain for authority, according to the MI6 shrink) in a firefight, aided by both the woman who has been a surrogate mother to him, and Skyfall’s resident man of the house. The process is one of utter destruction: Silva tries to smoke them out of the house with a helicopter and incendiary grenades (unaware of a secret tunnel system), but Bond turns the tables by intentionally blowing up the last real trace of his original identity. He bristles at the annihilation of his Aston Martin (another first), yet bids farewell to the place he grew up in as callously as if it were Blofeld.
But shouldn’t Bond want to return home? Isn’t that the crux of the kind of character-based storytelling that Skyfall is attempting, and why the writers felt the need to include M quoting “Ulysses?” If we consider Bond the everlasting icon, instead of Bond the man, then he’s really more of a Sisyphean figure than a Homeric one; the home he’s trying to return to isn’t a place, it’s an identity. James Bond, the true, legendary James Bond, has no home other than England. He has no parents or origin, he simply exists, saving the world, getting the girl, and looking damn good doing it, whenever we need him to, for as long as we need him to. It’s that ascension to the immortal status of a true 007 that Bond has been working towards all film. In destroying his personal history, Craig’s Bond has nearly come full circle.
I THINK this is one of the reasons the film so resonated with the critics and audiences and placed it at the top or near top of the series. When Silva asks Bond what his hobby was and he simply says "resurrection", to me it is the one word that sums up the whole destination the film was journeying to.
Not only was Bond resurrecting his physical and mental abilities after suffering the trauma of near death and wrestling with his own purpose in life, he was resurrecting his identity after finally disposing of the ghosts of his personal past (his childhood home that he despised and the lonely, orphaned boy he once was) and EON completed the resurrection of the reboot of the series by ending Dench's role and replacing her with someone who may be more of "brother" than a father figure to Bond and reintroducing Bond's "family" at MI6 but back in their old familiar surroundings (M's office with the double padded doors).
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