Spectre, one year later (Page 6 of 6)

I loved this movie when it was first released and even called it the best Daniel Craig bond movie. Now, four years later I definitely do not hold the same opinion. It just seems to get worse on every rewatch, where I point out more and more flaws than ever before.

My issues:

* Poor Bond girl
* The entire love plot between them just seems to go nowhere and they have no chemistry
* The entire character of C (I hated him the first time I saw SP)
* Its just all action but very little plot in a film that feels flat and depressing
* It should have been split into two parts with the route they went
* No real climax
* The train fight - I didn’t actually like it that much. It feels poorly made
* Bond having hardly any gadgets in that Aston Martin
* Hinx - no character development or interacting on screen with a Blofeld and did he die or not?

It’s not a bad movie, but it feels like so much was crammed in.

I feel like Spectre is almost a litmus test for what individuals want from a Bond movie.  If you want a series of recycled allusions to earlier Bond movies, particularly the less realistic latter ones of the Moore era, then I’d say you probably enjoyed the film very much.  Personally, I find it to be a monumental wasted opportunity.  We get the Day of the Dead sequence, which is Mendes version of the of working in some of the voodoo-esque imagery from LALD (he is on record as being a big fan of that film), Hinx is just a modernized Jaws, the most benign car chase in Bond history (they’re literally side by side in their cars looking at each other and not doing anything), we get the FRWL train fight, and last but not least Blofeld for the sake of Blofeld.  It’s just so obvious that Mendes was throwing the Bond kitchen sink into this film, plot be damned. I could almost chalk all of that up to creative license and a filmmaker wanting to make something more lighthearted if not for the egregious decision to retcon the previous three films into a ludicrous it’s-all-connected mishmash. It’s totally disrespectful to the artistic visions of Campbell and Forster, but beyond that it’s just plain lazy storytelling. Skyfall, IMHO, worked because the dip into Bond’s background felt like an interesting one-off exploration.  But Spectre, again IMHO, is definitely a case of going to the well too many times. It felt so forced that it sucked all of the enjoyment out the film for me.  I would’ve given anything for a straightforward Bond-on-a-case film in the vein of Goldfinger.  All that being said, I remain optimistic for what I’ve seen from NTTD.  The fact that Cary Fukunaga is a younger (and immensely talented) filmmaker without the generational baggage of having to serve some arbitrary notion that Bond should be ‘fun’ just because that’s what we remember from growing up gives me hope.