Skyfall thoughts: James Bond, a hero?

[boot_the_grime]

I watched Skyfall last night - I’m not a fan of the Bond franchise, but I did like Casino Royale, and this one got great reviews for some reason… Why, I really don’t know. The story is deeply unsatisfying and even more problematic than The Dark Knight Rises. What I get from this story is that Bond doesn’t care about saving people other than his

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[boot_the_grime]

I'm familiar with the Connery/Moore/Brosnan versions of Bond, though I haven't seen many of them. They are basically callous escapist male fantasies. But the new movies with Daniel Craig have been trying to be darker and "grittier" and more serious, and instead of having the perpetual nonchalant smirk, Craig's Bond is portrayed as a cold-blooded killer and rather messed-up guy. (Which, really, Bond obviously is if the movie is taking his character seriously at all.) Without going too much into spoilers, Casino Royale was a sort of origin story, showing Bond in the relatively early stages of his career, already fed up with the life he's leading and wanting to leave it all behind, but then what happens in that movie makes him even colder and more cynical and guarded and ties him even closer to his job and his boss. They're also bringing up his background more - that he's an orphan with no relatives, and stressing that he's got no meaningful human connections outside MI6.

Skyfall has been getting a lot of good reviews and it's been called "gritty" and dark. I think the movie would be better if it fully committed to a dark interpretation of Bond and MI6 - but they didn't dare do that, and tried to have it both ways instead. And that's a real problem here, because of the story itself: the movie brings up the idea that MI6 is a relic that isn't needed and shouldn't exist anymore, but they seem to think that they have debunked this idea in the second half of the movie - and they didn't. We're apparently supposed to root for MI6 to keep existing and Bond to keep doing his job just because... that's the premise of a James Bond movie.