Let’s Play a Game: Fixing SPECTRE

There have been a fair number of really thoughtful critiques of Spectre since it came out. Critiquing movies is a very valuable enterprise — it helps makes us better moviegoers, which in turn helps us demand better movies — but saying “that sucked” is easy. Figuring out why, and what could have made it better? Much, much harder.

Obviously, I’m not trying to imply that I could have written the movie better on the first try. This is just an exercise.

The Problems

1. The Blofeld “reveal” and everything associated with it: “cuckoo,” Franz Oberhauser, “I am a supervillain because Daddy didn’t love me,” “author of all your pain.” This is the most glaring issue, and the one I’ve seen most often addressed in critiques, so I won’t beat the horse much. Christoph Waltz is an extraordinary actor; it is freakin’ known, Khaleesi. But he comes off way less threatening in this film than Javier Bardem did in Skyfall, and I’d argue it’s because of the script. Blofeld does not, at any point, show us why we should be scared of him, and his overly intricate backstory mystery only makes him less threatening. His continuous failures (mentioned in point 3) do even more damage to his menace.
2. Madeleine Swann < Vesper Lynd. If Bond is going to quit MI6 and walk off into the sunset with a lady, she needs to be just as impressive and badass as Vesper. Moreover, we need much better evidence that she’s The One than Blofeld’s throwaway line about the daughter of an assassin being the only one who could understand Bond. She almost manages this in refusing to jump in bed with Bond seeking solace for her dead daddy — but then goes back on this statement, what, ten film-minutes later? She’s never shown to be Bond’s equal intellectually or emotionally; there’s no reason for him to choose her over the exciting spy life.
3. Bond is never disadvantaged. In Skyfall, Silva almost always has the upper hand — even when he’s imprisoned, he never loses his aura of being exactly where he wants to be (for obvious reasons: how can you lose when you have “Summon Train” in your spell slots?) — and Bond is almost always disadvantaged (physically and psychologically unfit for duty, in conflict with M, barely scraping by in combat).
   In Spectre, Bond is only occasionally surprised, and Blofeld constantly gets one-upped. His only successes are (1) capturing Bond in the desert (which doesn’t stick) and (2) being “the author of all your pain” (which is so shoehorned as to be meaningless and is telling rather than showing). This all ties back to Blofeld’s unconvincing villainy. (And I know that one of the “draws” is that Bond films feature a badass, unflinching, totally-in-control protagonist…but surely we can do better than just another indulgent Bond flick. Skyfall wasn’t. Casino Royale wasn’t.)
4. Bad Guys Inc. is neither threatening nor noticeably evil. What’s Spectre’s plan? What are they doing, and to what purpose do they do it? It seems they orchestrate a couple bombings and sex-tradings, and they’re clearly invested in Nine Eyes, so that they can…what? Contrast this with Skyfall, which had clear stakes: Silva is blackmailing M, threatening to release names, and agents will die if she doesn’t react.
5. Lack of thematic heft. Maybe Spectre’s theme was just too subtle for me to grasp, or maybe I’m right in saying that it had no higher purpose. There was no thing-behind-the-thing. That’s not necessarily bad — but action movies are always the better for strong themes. The Dark Knight’s concern with the nature of man made it a great film. Skyfall brought up extremely relevant ideas about the nature of leadership, and tied them into Bond’s character arc.

The Story

Everything leading up to the infamous “cuckoo” line remains much the same: Bond kills Sciarra in Mexico, weathers New!M’s annoyance, teases Q, debriefs Moneypenny (we don’t see the faded picture brought back from Skyfall), and drives off to Rome with his cheeky grin (he’s cocky this time around; he’s beaten his fair share of supervillains, he’s at the top of his game). He nails Sciarra’s widow, tells the bouncer he’s Mickey Mouse, etc. It’s all very fun and classic Bond.

At the Spectre meeting we have our first change. The leaders of Spectre are no longer faceless suits; now there are people among them wearing bishop’s robes, decorated military uniforms, etc. There are a few police, as well, but no one in the room looks particularly concerned.

Instead of a business meeting, it almost feels like a party. People are drinking, laughing, talking shop. Bond draws a couple weird looks, but they’re not worried. Waltz is moving around the crowd, shaking hands, totally calm. He runs into Bond.

“James, isn’t it?” he says. “I was hoping we’d meet you tonight.” Bond doesn’t recognize him. He plays coy, and Waltz shuts him up. “We’ve got very special entertainment coming up. You won’t want to miss it.”

Bond is nonplussed. He hears a few people mention their business interests — trafficking of the sex and drug varieties, who’s going to kill the Pale King now, etc. — and his hackles are up.

Waltz draws everyone’s attention. “We have special guests tonight. If everyone would please welcome MI6 agent James Bond.” Applause and laughter from everyone. Bond weathers it pretty well. “And, to cheer her up on this dreary evening, we have invited dear Lucia Sciarra.”

Doors open and Lucia is led in. She’s beat up. The group claps politely. Bond looks briefly shocked but keeps his cool.

Waltz makes a few jokes about Lucia being the sort of woman who doesn’t stay single for long, the sheets never get cold, etc. He gives Bond the cheesiest grin and then one of the henchmen shoots Lucia in the back. Waltz is still grinning.

Bond loses it and tries to fight his way forward; henchmen are on him in a hot second. He tears through several of them, and then Mr. Hinx has him in a headlock and three dudes have guns trained on him. Waltz talks to Lucia as she dies. “Your husband helped our organization become what it is today,” he says. “But we both know how easily he can be replaced.” He tilts his head at Hinx, indicating that they have found someone to assassinate the Pale King.

Bond slips away by the skin of his teeth and calls Moneypenny on the road, while Hinx follows him. This time, rather than asking her to search up Franz Oberhauser, he demands to know who these people are. They meet with no attempt at secrecy; they murder a woman while surrounded by cops. What’s going on?

…I can’t fix the chase scene.

Back in London, M, Q, and C attend the vote for Nine Eyes. This plays out as before with the single opposing vote and M grilling C afterward, but this time C is slightly less obnoxious, more idealistic. He seems to believe that the 00 program is not only obsolete, but actively harmful. M gives his inspiring bit about the value of men in the field who make the horrible call of whether someone gets to live or die. C replies that Nine Eyes will be able to see the entire world in a glance; MI6 will see terrorist attacks coming before the perpetrator can buy his first barrel of explosives. But a man in the field can be bought, misled, or simply insubordinate. He plays Bond’s phone conversation, then quips that he’s not overawed by the “one man with a gun” model of intelligence.

Bond meets with Mr. White and gets his lead for Madeleine and L’Americain. When he tells Swann about her father, she angrily orders him out — and immediately starts preparing to leave once he does.

Bond gives Q the octopus ring. He sees Madeleine leave, but she doesn’t get far; Hinx arrives and captures her, leading to another chase scene I can’t fix.

After neutralizing Hinx, Bond and Swann meet with Q, who has not turned up much with the octopus ring except that there have been others like it, usually found on the bodies of terrorists. Madeleine jumps in to serve as Ms. Exposition: they’re all working for Spectre, a shadowy group made up of incredibly powerful, ambitious people. Q recognizes the name, but argues it’s an urban legend. If a counterintelligence agency existed and opposed MI6, surely they would know about it. Madeleine agrees. “Your superiors do know about it,” she says. “And there’s nothing they can do.” Spectre’s leaders have bought all the right people; even when some of them are imprisoned or killed, more rise up to take their place.

Spectre brings out the worst in the human species, she tells them. And it can’t be stopped; not with bullets, not with brave men. Their leader, Franz Oberhauser, is not some lynchpin to be removed. The worst they could do is inconvenience the organization.

Bond brushes this off; he and Madeleine make for L’Americain. Madeleine is clearly shell-shocked from her ordeal so far and takes a shower. She makes it very clear to Bond that he won’t be joining her.

They find Mr. White’s stash of clues and head to the desert by train. Meanwhile, in London, the holdout African vote swings in favor of Nine Eyes. M confronts C, heavily implying that C somehow orchestrated a terrorist attack to further his political goals. C is outraged that M would accuse him of something so despicable. “If this is the kind of logic the 00 program uses to ‘get its man,’” he says, “I feel proud to have ended it.”

Bond and Swann talk on the train, but this time there is more to their conversation than Bond extolling the virtues of the Sig Sauer. Madeleine pegs Bond as a maladjusted young man who struggles to connect because of numerous failed relationships in his past. She sees right through him; she’s a trained psychologist, she reminds him, and her father was an assassin. She can read Bond like a trashy magazine.

Bond — and the astute portion of the audience — recognizes the parallels to his first conversation with Vesper. He changes the subject back to guns.

Hinx attacks Bond and Swann on the train. They beat him; Madeleine gets a meaningful hit in against Hinx, rather than being a two-second distraction. Relieved and exhilarated from the fight, the two leads get busy in their train compartment.

They arrive at Oberhauser’s compound. The mind games play out much the same way; they’re welcomed in with no problems, Bond gives up his gun, Swann finds a dress on her bed. Bond finds pictures of M and Vesper in his room, but (obviously) no skiing-with-Satan pictures.

Oberhauser welcomes Swann and Bond to his meteor room. Instead of waxing eloquent about how James entered his life and stole Daddy’s love, this time he’s simply pissed about the times Bond mucked his plans. Quantum existed as a subsidiary of Spectre, and Bond’s successes against them have made Oberhauser’s life troublesome.

He shows off his panopticon room and brags that soon, he will be connected to all the information in the world — we see Bond blink, making an intuitive leap, but he says nothing. Oberhauser plays the clip of Bond and White; Bond urges Madeleine to look away. She does, but Oberhauser grabs her face and forces her roughly to stare at the screen. Bond tries to interfere, but doesn’t get far before a billy club brings him down.

Bond wakes up in the torture room. Oberhauser notes that Spectre has a very specific policy about troublesome people: buy them or remove them. Mr. Hinx was supposed to fix the problem, but now….

“It has been a long time since I involved myself,” Oberhauser says. “I don’t want to get lax, you know? Old and fat and lazy? How boring.”

He delivers a monologue about torture that is markedly similar to the one in the film, this time revolving around Lucia Sciarra instead of the nameless Spectre agent. “There was no one inside her skull.” He begins to torture Bond with the needles. Screaming. Blood. For at least one shot, we’re inside Bond’s head as the room seems to tip sideways and Oberhauser gloats about how easy it is to disrupt Bond’s sense of balance. Bond looks ready to puke.

Oberhauser leers at Swann as he tortures Bond. “Do you love him?” he asks her. “What would you give me for his freedom? Would you take off all your clothes and dance for me? Give up all your earthly possessions? Sell me national secrets?”

Madeleine maintains a stiff upper lip and tells Oberhauser to go to hell. Oberhauser takes it in stride and tells her matter-of-factly that he will be removing Bond’s ability to recognize faces, so she had better say goodbye. Bond gets the watch to her; it explodes in time to save him from further torture.

Swann and Bond begin fighting their way out of the compound, though Bond’s balance is still wonky and it’s making his aim poor. Madeleine takes the gun — not enthusiastically — and Bond guides her strategy: “Shoot there, shoot there, wait. He’s cornered, another one will be hiding there.” They put bullets in a number of strategic places, rather than a single oil barrel. The compound goes up in flames.

They escape via helicopter, and Bond tells Swann (and the few members of the audience who haven’t caught on yet) that C is one of Spectre’s agents, and they need to shut him — and Nine Eyes — down as soon as possible.

They meet up with Q, M, and Moneypenny in London and debrief as before. As they mobilize, Madeleine admits to Bond that she’s been ignoring something for too long: she wants no part in this life. She understands if James can’t give it up. “I wish you could.” She leaves.

Bond & Co. hash out a plan of attack as they drive, but midway through Bond receives a cryptic text from Madeleine’s number, from which he deduces that she’s been captured and taken to Old!MI6. He sends M, Q, and Moneypenny to handle C at New!MI6 while he tears off to save Swann.

Meanwhile, at New!MI6, C is working late. There’s a prominently placed countdown clock for the Nine Eyes launch. He gets a notification from the computer — it’s found aberrant data. It shows him assorted video clips of Madeleine’s capture on the road and her being taken to Old!MI6 and tied up in a room. He tells the computer to notify police. The system confirms the police will arrive in five minutes, then informs C that the demolitions in the building have been set to a timer inconsistent with regulation. C looks out his window at the condemned building, and sets his jaw. He leaves MI6 at speed.

M, Q, and Moneypenny arrive moments later and shut down Nine Eyes.

Bond arrives at Old!MI6 and finds the graffitied arrows to guide him. Oberhauser appears (uninjured) behind the bulletproof glass (gotta get that iconic shot…that didn’t end up in the movie). Oberhauser sneers that Bond has proven more frustrating than he could have predicted; Oberhauser can’t simply kill him anymore. Bond has to be punished. Oberhauser taunts him with the opportunity to save Madeleine or himself before calmly leaving. Bond runs back into the building, opening door after door, screaming Madeleine’s name.

We jump to a door opening to reveal Madeleine tied up, gagged, surrounded by wires. She’s horrified to see that her rescuer is not Bond, but C. He unties her, faltering from nerves, and explains anxiously that a terrorist has got control of the demolition in the building, it’s going to be blowing up shortly, and they both need to get out of there.

Swann does not seem convinced that C is friendly. The moment she’s free she sprints out of the room. C follows her, looking confused and more than a little terrified.

Bond and Madeleine run into each other and have no time for romance. “There’s a bomb — ” “I know, this way.” As Madeleine runs to their timely exit via rope net, Bond spots C running down the corridor. C is relieved, and calls out to 007. Still convinced that C is one of Oberhauser’s allies, Bond shoots him. As C begins to bleed out, he mutters, darkly, “One man with a gun.”

Bond and Madeleine escape via boat as the building explodes. They shoot down Oberhauser’s helicopter, and Bond gets his moment of being The Good Guy by refusing to shoot Oberhauser dead in the face. Oberhauser threatens that as long as he lives, he will seek ways to claw the soul out of Bond’s life. Bond is mighty confident that this won’t turn out well for Oberhauser. M and Q arrive and arrest Oberhauser while Bond throws his gun away and walks into the sunset with Madeleine Swann.

We skip the scene of Bond collecting his Signature Cool Car from MI6 for two reasons: one, we’ve already shown him heading off for romantic bliss with a smart, capable woman who gets him and we don’t need to do it again.

Two, there’s one more scene before this movie’s done:

We’re at another Spectre office party. The mood is more somber than the last one. Someone offers a toast to Franz Oberhauser, who helped make their organization what it is today, and who will be replaced, but only with great difficulty; the Spectre members raise their glasses respectfully. The toast-maker goes on to say that in loss, there is always gain, and today, they welcome “a man who has come back from death and seen the entire world in a glance. In his new life, he has taken a new name, and new purpose: to destroy the people who murdered him in cold blood.”

He stands aside to reveal C, bound to a wheelchair, with a horrid scar over one eye. “Please welcome Mr. Ernst Blofeld.”