James Bond Franchise (1962-∞)

[flyonthewall2983]

Teaser

[Finch]

Exquisite images as you'd expect from Deakins. Very foreboding. Liked what I saw. Might be the film to turn me from Mendes agnostic to follower. The only irritation was the trailer cue: no Bond cue, instead another variation of the tiresome Inception theme.

[Mr Sausage]

Already looks considerably more interesting and stylish than the last one.

[Niale]

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I dont care a PIN about james bond. But Im a sucker for these taschen books. The bond 50 set looks good too! Consumerism is in my blood. Nice about them including skyfall in the book... In a year or two the book will be behind the times though!

[flyonthewall2983]

Olympic teaser, complete with bombastic signature cue to make Finch happy

[stroszeck]

New International trailer

Something seems very off and non-threatening about Bardem's villain. Perhaps its the hair?

[Matt]

Silly hairstyles have never stopped Bardem from playing a terrifying villain.

[flyonthewall2983]

I think I joked about it before, but it turns out Thomas Newman really is doing the score for this. Good for him, it'll be interesting to see how his style meshes with the Bond world. Still no word on who's doing the song.

[Forrest Taft]

Still no word on who's doing the song.

Randy Newman? [-o<

[Roger Ryan]

Still no word on who's doing the song.

Randy Newman? [-o<

SPOKEN WORD BRIDGE
Randy:"Listen here Chicken Little, maybe you're just paranoid or somethin', but when you say the sky is fallin', people start gettin' scared. Now there's a bad man with a gun over there - he's very, very bad. The good guy, he's got a gun, too. And you know what? The good guy, he shot more people with his gun than the bad guy! The good guy's got lots of women. I think the bad guy should get some of that, too...I don't know..."

CHORUS
Randy:"Skyyy...fall"
Female back-up singers:"Look out below, look out below"

...or something to that effect.

[domino harvey]

No chance the real thing will ever be as good as that fake chorus

[Cosmic Bus]

Adele's theme song premiering on the 5th, which is apparently Global James Bond Day.

[edit] A 90 second preview clip has surfaced. \:D/

[Jeff]

Rave reviews from The Times, The Playlist, The Telegraph, Mirror, and The Daily Mail. Lots of comparisons to Christopher Nolan, and several suggest it may be the best Bond film yet.

[MichaelB]

Lots of very positive reactions from my Facebook film critic friends too (mostly magazine journalists, so their reviews aren't out yet).

[ellipsis7]

Xan Brooks in The Guardian more equivocal...

[Finch]

Skyfall was really good though I think the finale would have been better still if

Spoiler

M had pulled the trigger

. Small niggles however, as Skyfall right now ties with From Russia With Love as my favourite Bond. Easily the best thing Sam Mendes has made yet. Deakins' cinematography was exquisite. The Shanghai scene is one of the best individual moments I've seen in this entire year. And is it just me who found Javier Bardem simultaneously hilarious and very unnerving? Definitely one of the better Bond villans.. Makes me feel even more sorry for Pierce Brosnan who was good as Bond but got some of the worst movies in the series (I nearly walked out of Die Another Day, it was so abysmal).

[oldsheperd]

I've tried really hard to like Bond films but they're always so pedestrian. I'm a Moore Bond fan myself if only for the fact that he was Bond when I was little. My first exposure was to Octopussy, Spy Who Loved Me and A View to a Kill.

[colinr0380]

Makes me feel even more sorry for Pierce Brosnan who was good as Bond but got some of the worst movies in the series (I nearly walked out of Die Another Day, it was so abysmal).

Not to mention some of the worst one liners ("You're a cunning linguist James", or "I thought Christmas only came once a year", which somehow seemed even worse than the campy, but relatively appropriate for the tone of the rest of the film, Moore codas!)

[cdnchris]

Die Another Day is easily the worst Bond film, which I think is saying something when there's shit like The Man With the Golden Gun. Going through the Bond set I got through Die Another Day again and was just groaning most of the way through it. The dialogue was nothing but innuendo or one-liners and the whole film felt like it was simply trying to out-do XXX for "extremeness".

I also feel bad for Pierce in closing out on that one because I did like him as Bond, even if 3/4 of his films are some of the worst in the series. I do like Tomorrow Never Dies if only because it at least went all out in its ridiculousness and was like some of the Moore films in spirit, plus I like Pryce as the heavy. But Goldeneye and The World is Not Enough are some of the blander Bond films. I'll never really get the love for Goldeneye that most seem to have. I remember coming out of the theater thinking "I waited six years... for that!?"

[hearthesilence]

The last two Brosnans started well, then went downhill fast.

Looking forward to Skyfall, it sounds like they sustain your interest through the whole film. The interrogation scene between Bardem and Craig sounds especially promising.

[cdnchris]

Other than the surfing bit at the beginning I actually thought the opening of Die Another Day was one of the better Bond openings with some nice stunt work and decent action. And I liked how the film had a political angle (a very loose one, though) similar to the Cold War Bond films, with the North Koreans in place of the Russians. But like you said, the film goes downhill quickly after the opening.

At any rate, I'm very excited by what I'm hearing about the new one. Sounds like this will be a little more fun and more like the classic films, with Bardem sounding like a strong villain. The better films always have a strong villain and the last two weren't terribly memorable.

Total Bond fanboy question, but does anyone know if they put the down-the-barrel opening back in? I liked how they incorporated it into the opening of Casino Royale but I admit it sort of irked me that it was missing from the beginning of the last one.

[oldsheperd]

Am I mistaken in thinking that the Craig Bond is a bit more serious than his predecessors?

[Mr Sausage]

Am I mistaken in thinking that the Craig Bond is a bit more serious than his predecessors?

For the most part. Not quite as serious as Dalton (he's allowed a certain wry humour), but a lot more serious than Moore or Brosnan.

I like it, personally. I think Craig is a great Bond. I also like that he's still allowed to act terribly without it being necessarily celebrated or condemned. His womanizing and cavalier attitude to life came off as kind of cold and self-destructive in Casino Royale without losing its entertaining aspects. Much preferable to to way it was celebrated in the later Brosnan Bond's only for M to be trotted out to give us all a lecture on modern social attitudes. God I hated those last two Brosnans.

[oldsheperd]

I'm hoping for extra cash this coming paycheck. Even though I'm not a huge Bond fan I'd like to get that blu ray set.

[Murdoch]

Craig's the only Bond I've been able to enjoy (mostly for Casino Royale), because his cavalier attitude toward women is given some depth, rather than having him flirt with whoever happens to be a woman in the movie and ending it with their inevitable sexual escapade and an awful one-liner. Personally, my disdain for the franchise has been because over the years pop culture has appropriated Bond as the ultimate male fantasy and I hated having to suffer through movie X or TV show Y showing the male lead going through the usual Bond tropes in his head.

Plus watching Craig break through a wall in CR is the coolest thing I've seen in any Bond movie, so there's that.