Skyfall is the newest James Bond movie, a classic adventure film, with no shortage of theatrics. Daniel Craig does a great job portraying the legendary 007, who is on a mission in the Middle East this time.
Bond gets killed in the beginning of the movie, without completing the mission, during a battle following a classic chase. This doesn’t seem very Bond-like, so you don’t quite know what to expect at this point. It all seems very real, though hard to believe.
In London, Mom is in trouble for sending him on a mission that was too dangerous and ended up costing him his life. When a signal from the hard drive is detected, it’s too late to find it before it cyber attacks the MI6 headquarters and blows it up. Movie should be over at this point, though it hardly began.
Far away on the Turkish coast, Bond is still alive though, living a carefree life. When he learns of the MI6 attack, he returns to London, surprising M in her private apartment. A recurring question throughout the movie from this point on is “why didn’t you stay dead?”, and avoid the stresses of being an agent. 007 has a very strong feeling of duty, and he knows that he is needed. When he is finally allowed back on the field, he needs to find the man who still has the hard drive, the man who had shot him.
This movie introduces a new quartermaster, Q, who, although very young, is a technological genius. He gives Bond a gun with a grip that reads body temperature, so only 007 can fire it, as well as a tiny radio transmitter.
Next stop for Bond is Shanghai. The Chinese city at night was an impressive backdrop to his mission, as he follows the enemy from the airport to a skyscraper. His stealth is almost compromised when he has to jump and hang on to the elevator that goes up to dizzying heights. He clearly is not in his prime and struggles to perform. There is a close fight between him and the enemy agent, who falls to his death without giving Bond the desired information. When Bond investigates the case of his enemy’s gun he finds an intricate dragon engraved on a poker chip.
The chip leads him to a casino in Macau, where another adventure occur, this time adding the obligatory romance into the mix.
When Bond meets the head of the cyber attacks, he learns that he is an ex-agent of M, and has a grudge over when she sent him into the field on a suicide mission. Silva, the villain, operates on an abandoned island, where he has servers set up that can hack into any system in the world, and where he is attempting to publish the hard drive with the names of every NATO agent. The obligatory fights between Bond and the main enemy follow, with the final one taking place at Bond’s manor. After the culminating battle, Silva ends up getting killed, but later even M dies.
The last scenes are of the regrouping of Bond and MI6, where Mallory is now the head of, and he asks Bond if he’s ready to return to the field. Bond of course says yes, and the credits roll.
