007: Skyfall. Starring Dame Judy Dench, Craig Ferguson Daniel Craig, Heineken, Sony Viao, and Audi.
Short review: lots of Bond tropes, tongue-in-cheek references to many previous films, actual character development that isn’t as heavy-handed as in the previous two Daniel Craig 007’s, and this film didn’t drag on for 45 minutes too long (unlike the previous two…). Overall my opinion is go watch it if you’ve ever enjoyed a Bond or other spy film.
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SPOILER TIME!
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Not giving a synopsis, but there are various bits I want to discuss…
Wolf Blitzer of CNN makes a cameo.
It feels like the writers got together and looked up a list of amazing Bond moments, then shoved them all together. Yet somehow it worked.
How they fit two train sequences is beyond me. They did it well too! Spaced out and not redundant.
How they had komodo dragons in the film is amazing (all CGI, and on a factual note these reptiles aren’t social yet are depicted as living in a cage-pit together. Good for the scene, annoying for my inner herpetologist).
How they made a contemporary Bond arch-villain who has a physical deformity actually work… Just well done.
Aging the characters, making them fallible, transitioning and reintroducing characters… All well done.
My big nerd gripe is that when they are in the server lair on the abandoned island… Some of the electronics don’t make sense. For instance, that room wasn’t clean enough to host that many servers.
The worst offense was in at least one of the suitcase computers there was random parts pieced together. I saw what I think is a RAM expansion daughter board just tacked in there. It wasn’t slotted and the DDR3 206-pin caddies were empty.