Another entertaining Bond series entry that gets up close and personal with M and 007 himself. The opening sequence with Bond in hot pursuit of a thief with an important hard drive is great. The rooftop chase on motorcycles followed by a fight on top of a moving train, it's almost action movie overload. When Bond fires up the crane, it's a supremely cool start. There's a whole lot of Judi Dench in this movie and the relationship with Bond reaches a new level. Bad guy Silva is played by Javier Bardem. He's sufficiently evil and his motive is based on revenge. The computer hacking accomplished by Silva is ridiculous. Technology is so abused (or dumbed down) in movies, it's most often distracting. A rooftop motorcycle chase is far easier to believe than some of the network packet busting on display by a new Q (with Bond's help, no less). And some how Bond manages to find a clue buried within a hexadecimal block of characters. Problem is, some of those characters are not hexadecimal. Silly and stupid. It took me out of the movie almost permanently. And I'll leave the asinine graphic displays, IP address troubleshooting stupidity and unfathomable user interfaces alone. "Skyfall" fails as soon as Bond takes M to his boyhood home. Getting this personal with Bond was a mistake. It's like two different movies. The first half is excellent and the last half is pretty dumb. Daniel Craig continues to be a top notch Bond, though, and is my favorite after the great Connery. I'm pleading with the creators to stop softening him up.

79% Approval Rating. Truthfully I expected more and I wasn't the only one in the group I went and saw it with. I felt as if the pace was just wrong and that there wasn't really the type of climax that 2012 movie fans were seeking. I was hoping for a TDKR like redemption movie and what I got was a drawn out sequel setup with a bad guy who's physically and mentally capable of so much more than we get to see and too much character development from characters that we didn't need to see. The reason I like casino royal so much was that they abandoned the cliche, stale bond movie format and started fresh with a new story line. This movie just brought back that old story line format which i've had plenty of….

After the convoluted, stylized mess of Quantum of Solange, this feels like a soft reboot. I can see why some people rate it as the best of the Craig era.

`Review Categories:` `10 Year Rewatch` `"First Scene Was So Dumb I Stopped Watching The Film` `Shitpost to amuse myself, TBH` I'm just going to give a review of the opening action scene, or the first part of it, because it was so unbelievable/impossible that I just stopped watching 9 minutes into the film on my first *attempted rewatch. I remember feeling something was off years ago, but this is just ridiculous, and not in a fun, silly way like some of the Connery or Roger Moore films. I remember some nice shots later in the film, but this opening scene is just unforgivably stupid. At the same time that they're presumably going for some meager nod to realism by having Moneypenny crash into things (or maybe it's ironically sexist by calling her an incompetent field agent/woman driver?) I honestly don't think they knew what they were going for... wait, why the heck is Moneypenny a field agent? Oh yeah, I forgot, this was about the start of the multi-franchise retcon theme where no one-- especially women-- could have any worth as a knowledge worker or academic alone (unless their name is Q and they're _geek chic_) so they had to start making everyone under the age of sixty a fucking superhero. Assistants and secretaries are hella vital. Case in point: I need a personal assistant because I'm a disorganized mess, and that's the only reason I'm not James Bond, you see. Anyway... the dude that stole the laptop hard drive **so hard** that he ripped out some of the metal (despite the fact that one just can just rip out one or two tiny screws and pull it out) has a double-drum magazine on his machine pistol... which he ditches after maybe 60 shots, for some reason, before hopping on the bike (too heavy?/"_realism_"?) he then proceeds to fire a couple of extended regular mags worth before getting onto the train, and then proceeds to fire like 200 fucking rounds while on the train, while Bond runs out after his tiny PPK mag is expended, just so he can crawl into the excavator and get shot, and then this idiot fires like a hundred rounds, seemingly from nowhere, at the excavator bucket just for shits and giggles I guess. Oh, and then he shoots apart (with a 9mm, mind you) the latching mechanism of the train cars. And then Bond hops through the top of the passenger car that he just can-openered open, into the midst of the passengers who are just, fine I guess, and straitens his suit like a cool tailored suit guy... who's just been shot in the arm from a magical infinite bullet gun. It's like a Naked Gun film, but without any attempts at humor. Also, Moneypenny stops in the middle of her pursuit to do a cheeky bit of product placement where I was expecting her to wink at the screen and spout a brand mantra, which, honestly, would have been funny, instead of just really awkward. _Stansfield voice_: >That's why I stopped! Holy Shit, _American Beauty_ is a "Great American Film" masterpiece (from a British man), but theater directors should not be let near an action movie set. Ten(+) years later _Skyfall_ ..s on a re-watch, whereas _Quantum of Solace_ showed its genius and relevance after I grew the fuck up and actually learned enough about the world to appreciate it. I think I'm gonna go watch that again instead. ps. It's also pretty funny that a Tony winning director dyed Javier Bardem's hair white and essentially made him the "evil gay", white-haired anime villain. LOL!