Jeremy’s Tophunder №15: Skyfall

8 min readApr 24, 2020

The “Golden Age” of Hollywood started sometime around 1915, and lasted into the 1960s. In the 1960s, however, there was a monumental shift in the approach to filmmaking. Instead of the producers and the studio being the driving creative force behind a movie, the director became the authority. Directors like Stanley Kubrick, Mike Nichols, Roman Polanski, Woody Allen, Francis Ford Coppola, and Martin Scorsese swiped creative control away from the studios, and for the most part, Hollywood never looked back.

Sure, there are still a few instances of the studio driving the bus (the easiest example being the Marvel Cinematic Universe, where studio head Kevin Feige seems to have the final word), but for the most part, even with big-budget franchise movies, the studio makes a point to find a good director to run the show. That’s how you end up with the Christopher Nolan Batman movies, J.J. Abrams at the helm of Star Wars and Star Trek, Christopher McQuarrie writing and directing the last two Mission: Impossible movies (both of which have been spectacular), and a half-dozen other examples that I won’t bore you with.

The James Bond franchise was about 40 years late to the party.

Don’t get me wrong — it’s not like James Bond movies were bad. But for a while there, they were all just kind of the same. GoldenEye was pretty good (but probably not as good as you remember it — its reputation is propped up a lot by the N64 game), but then Tomorrow Never Dies, The World Is Not Enough, and Die Another Day all basically seem like the same movie to me. I know one of them has Denise Richards, one of them has Halle Berry, one or two of them have a lot of scenes in the snow, and one of them has a dude that wants to start a global war to increase his TV ratings or something, but I honestly can’t remember which one is which and which which Bond Girl was in which movie. Going back further, I can’t even remember anything from The Living Daylights (and I’ve seen it probably three or four times), or anything that happens in really any of the Roger Moore movies other than Jaws showing up once or twice.

It seems like the Bond production team finally caught on that they needed to hire a good director to put together a good movie that could stand out. They certainly did that with Casino Royale (bringing back GoldenEye director Martin Campbell), and they tried their best with Quantum of Solace (Marc Forster) even though the story was lackluster.

Skyfall was where it really seemed like the tables turned. They brought in Sam Mendes (who won an Academy Award for American Beauty and also directed Road to Perdition, Jarhead, and Revolutionary Road), and seemingly for the first time ever, they had a top-tier director at the wheel. Mendes brought legendary cinematographer Roger Deakins and Academy Award winning production designer Dennis Gassner on board, and the three of them combined to put together the most beautifully shot James Bond movie of all time.

It started with probably the best cold open in Bond history at the time, riding motorcycles over the roof of the Grand Bazaar in Istanbul and then fighting on top of a train. It would later be de-throned by the ridiculous tracking shot that opened Spectre (and if you’re wondering, yes, I will link that video at every opportunity), but that was still three years away.

The rest of the movie lives up to that early promise, too. Judi Dench is as fantastic as she’s ever been, and it’s easily my favorite performance of hers (although I’ll cop to not being the target demographic for most of her movies). Ralph Fiennes shows up and provides some playfully antagonistic scenes with Dench and Craig, and certainly makes the movie feel bigger.

Javier Bardem’s Raoul Silva is probably my favorite Bond villain of all time. I’ve always preferred the Bond villains that feel real. Most of the time, they’re too megalomaniacal, or it seems like the scope of their influence is too cartoonishly big and their target of that influence (usually Bond himself) is too cartoonishly small. It’s one of the reasons I thought Spectre was just okay — as much as I love Christoph Waltz, he just didn’t feel like a real person, and Spectre didn’t feel like a believably real criminal organization. Silva does.

Which storyline seems the most believable?

A. A private banker who finances terrorism around the world decides to invest his money by shorting an airline stock and then arranging for the airline’s new state-of-the-art plane to be destroyed. When his plan fails and he loses millions of dollars, he sets up a high-stakes poker game to get his money back and re-pay his investors.

B. An MI6 agent hacks into China’s top secret files just before the UK’s handover of Hong Kong. The Hong Kong station chief at the time allows for the agent to be taken prisoner in exchange for the release of six other captive MI6 agents. After escaping custody years later, the agent becomes a cyberterrorist for hire and plans his revenge on the station chief that sold him out.

C. The adoptive brother of James Bond becomes jealous that his father likes Bond more than him, so he murders his father and fakes his own death, and spends his life developing a massive multi-national criminal organization that aims to take control of the world’s intelligence data and get revenge on Bond.

It’s no contest, right? One of those is believable, and two of them are not.

And I get it, Bond villains are the bar for crazy. Any ridiculous, over-the-top bad guy in a movie will be compared to a generic Bond villain. It comes with the territory. But I like the villains that are (relatively) less ridiculous, less over the top, and less of a caricature. I think Silva fits that bill pretty well.

Skyfall introduces characters extremely well. We obviously don’t need much of an introduction to Bond, but in Skyfall, Craig is playing an older, more grizzled Bond, who has been shot in the shoulder, who seems to have maybe lost a step, who was presumed dead and returned to service, and is more cantankerous than usual. They set up that really well in the first act, in the scene where Bond is undergoing tests to see if he can re-enter the field, especially the word association exercise.

Skyfall also introduces a new Quartermaster — who had big shoes to fill after the two previous Q’s had either been -the- Q (Desmond Llewelyn, who appeared in 17 Bond movies) or John Cleese (one of the most iconic comedians in history). Skyfall subverted expectations by introducing the new Q as young and somewhat skeptical of the need for 00 agents. It’s one of my favorite scenes in the movie.

My favorite introduction, though, is Silva’s. We open with a shot over Bond’s shoulder, and an elevator lowers, its doors open, and Silva walks out. The camera is stationary for almost a full minute as Silva starts to walk across the room towards Bond, telling a story of how his grandmother taught him to get rid of rats that had infested an island. Slowly, the camera starts to zoom over Bond’s shoulder, as Silva continues to walk closer, until you’re basically watching from Bond’s point of view as Silva towers over you. It’s a phenomenal long take, more than a minute and a half long, and it accomplishes everything that it’s trying to. It’s a creepy, unsettling stillness as Silva walks towards the camera, and the scene gets even more unsettling as Silva starts to stroke Bond’s legs and chest while Bond sits with his hands tied behind his back. It’s never made clear whether we’re supposed to assume Silva is gay, or just the creepiest dude on the planet, but the scene works brilliantly either way. It just kind of gives you the willies.

The climax is also great, with Bond, M, and Skyfall gamekeeper Kincaid setting traps in the house reminiscent of Home Alone (and as a matter of fact, there are multiple videos on YouTube that feature the footage of Skyfall with John Williams’ score from Home Alone layered on top), and Silva and his henchmen falling right into the traps. It’s a beautifully shot scene, with some of the best action/effect sequences in recent memory, and serves as a great exclamation point for a movie that had clearly been building to one for the better part of two hours.

For my money, Skyfall is not only my favorite Bond movie, but also clearly the best Bond movie. It successfully subverts a lot of the expectations you would normally have. Bond is old and past his prime. Q is young. The villain is vaguely believable. We dive into Bond’s past. There isn’t a stereotypical “Bond girl.” It has dazzling visuals even in scenes with no action. Maybe that’s why it stands out so much — it feels decidedly not like a Bond movie for a decent chunk of it. The only real complaint I can come up with is that the movie once and for all put to rest one of my favorite Bond theories — that James Bond, just like 007, is a code name, hence why there have been multiple Bonds throughout history, and no one true origin story. Skyfall, however, establishes that this James Bond had parents named Andrew and Monique Bond, they died, and the orphaned Bond eventually became an MI6 agent.

Still, that’s a rather specific nit-pick. There really isn’t much about Skyfall that I don’t find satisfying. I really enjoy Daniel Craig as Bond, even though I’ve been disappointed by two of his four Bond movies, and only truly love one of them. But that one that I love is Skyfall, and I love it enough that it rounds out my Top 15.

(For a refresher on the project, I introduced it in a Facebook Post on Day 1)

Here’s our progress on the list so far:

4. Dazed and Confused

6. The Fugitive

7. The Dark Knight

9. Saving Private Ryan

11. The Big Short

13. The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring

15. Skyfall

17. Ocean’s 11

18. Air Force One

21. The Other Guys