Fifty years of Bond, and Skyfall is the series looking itself in the mirror: is this old man still fit for purpose? The answer arrives with a digger in a train carriage and a shrug.
The plot
After a mission gone sideways — shot by his own side, presumed dead, enjoying a brief retirement of drinking games and scorpions — Bond returns to an MI6 under siege. A hard drive full of undercover agent identities is loose, and someone with intimate knowledge of the service, and a very personal grudge against M, is behind it: Raoul Silva, a former agent she sold out years ago.
The villain
Javier Bardem’s Silva is a hair highlight away from parody and instead lands as the series’ most unsettling modern villain: brilliant, wronged, theatrical, and heartbreakingly damaged. He doesn’t want the world. He wants M to watch everything she built burn. The interrogation scene between him and M’s captured 007 is the highlight — two survivors of the same machine, comparing scars.
The girl
The Bond girl of the night is Sévérine — Bérénice Marlohe, playing a woman caught in Silva’s web for a single doomed act. She’s glamorous, tragic, and gone too soon; the film treats her fate with a coldness that critics have rightly argued about ever since. The emotional centre of the film, though, belongs to M herself — Judi Dench’s final, finest hour, and the only Bond relationship the finale is truly about.
The verdict
Roger Deakins made the most beautiful Bond film ever shot — the Shanghai tower fight in silhouette, the burning lodge under a red sky. The ending, all Aston Martin and ancestral home, is Bond mythology folding in on itself in the best way.
Filed: 4.5/5 — let the sky fall; we’ll stand and face it, etc.