Last Christmas, Prairie got me the 50th anniversary James Bond collection, and over the year, we worked our way through the entire canon, all the way through Skyfall. On the whole, Bond movies are a lot of mindless fun (some more mindless than others, to be sure), but boy does the quality vary. At the end, we were glad that we undertook this project after Skyfall was released, because it ended up meaning we went out on a high note.
We hadn’t been terribly impressed with the first two Daniel Craig films — Casino Royale took Bond too far to the modern, gritty style, and devolved into a nonsensical mess by the end; Quantum of Solace…well, I barely even remember what that one was even about — but we both felt that Skyfall was easily the best Bond film since Goldfinger (or, arguably, The Thomas Crown Affair). It was the first one in years that felt actually felt like a “real” Bond movie (that is, the Connery era) in the modern era: exciting action pieces, neat spy games, and an undercurrent of humor. Realistic without having to be ultra-violent or ultra-serious, and recognizing the inherent silliness of the spy genre without playing so far to that side that it devolves into farce (the Moore era).
So finding this quote from a two-year-old interview with Craig impressed me. It sounds to me like he and the team behind Skyfall had some of the same thoughts…
I think we set a good tone [in Skyfall], I think we set a real tone, but I am happy for fucking exploding volcano lairs. Obviously I am joking but what I love and what I really wanted to achieve with Skyfall was a level of fantasy, it’s one of the less violent ones, there’s less blood, and people aren’t dying in a horrible way, and it feels like much more of a family movie, and they should be family movies. I don’t want to go ludicrous and we’ve got to keep them in reality, but Christ almighty, the world’s fucking weird and there’s plenty we can start mining and taking out. If Blofeld turned up again, it wouldn’t be a bad thing.
Given the recent announcement that the next film is titled SPECTRE, this does sound promising indeed.
(via iO9)