(Mathijs, you warned me!)
SPECTRE.
I had high hopes for SPECTRE. I mean, they capitalized the 24th Bond movie’s name and everything! That could only mean it would be awesome, right?
I mean, come on. Just read that out loud.
SPECTRE.
Rawr.
Only the thing is: SPECTRE is a disgrace – a low-effort Bond movie created by a director whose default mode of filmmaking is the shrug and an actor so cocky the interviews make it sound like he made this display of blandness entirely by himself.
Capitalization tricked me. In what follows, SPECTRE will be refered to in a more fitting typesetting, spectre.
Here’s a trailer because you might not know what a Bond movie is.
spectre starts out incredible – an unbelievable long take featuring an elevator, a hotel room, a rooftop and, oh, just about a hundred extras dancing around a plaza in Mexico City. This sequence is amazing: Action! Humor! Sexy times! It’s all there.
Then Sam Smith’s horrible falsetto theme song starts.
After that, it’s about ninety minutes of typical cock-tease bond: spectre introduces Ralph Fiennes, the new M, but doesn’t do anything interesting with him. spectre introduces Andrew Scott, who plays C and previously played Moriarti on Sherlock, and doesn’t let him do anything interesting, either. Then finally, spectre introduces Christoph Waltz, the villain, and doesn’t let him do anything interesting, either. Monica Bellucci shows up, doesn’t do anything interesting other than sit on a bed in underwear, and to add insult to injury spectre‘s inane plot quickly throws her in the garbage for the much younger Lea Seydoux, who does super interesting things!! — but only when there’s no bad guys around. Cars are raced, but not very fast, Bond’s head gets drilled into, but not very deep, and big explosions follow small explosions for no reason because, shrug, spectre.
Then, the credits roll, and lo and behold, no actor has done anything remotely interesting, safe for the overly cocky and at times scarily unlikable Craig and Ben Wishaw (Q), who’s transformed from sexy geek-chic to MI6’s closeted nerd who does all his top-secret development in an Austrian ski lift on a laptop that’s at least ten years old.
Everything in this movie screams of low-effort. Interesting callbacks happen, but that’s all they are: Callbacks. Nothing interesting is done with the ominous white cat, with the mysterious organization that ties everything together – not even with the Bond girl, who can’t show her amazing qualities or ditto sideboob and is thus reduced to an insultingly bland blank slate. Sure, Bond objectifies women, and it’s kind of disgusting – but in spectre, the Bond girl ceases to be a woman in favor of a plot device whose only defining factor is that she, surprise, needs saving!
Craig, Mendes, come see me after class, because I’m seriously disappointed in you.
SERIOUSLY DISAPPOINTED.
(And that’s how you use capitalization, hah!)
