Sandy Hook

by a3_nm on Wikipedia

When we first moved to the US, and I started blogging, I thought I would write about guns. I never did. I didn't want to talk about them. Not when I found bullets stacked like candy at a checkout; not when my kids came home from a play date talking about how their friend had showed them all his rifles; not even when the father of one of our friends was murdered whilst out jogging. Not after Fort Hood, or Tucson, or Aurora. I still don't want to write about guns now.

I took my kids to school yesterday morning, as usual with no other choice than to expect that they would still be alive when I came to collect them. My kids were calm and happy and so, it seemed, were all the other children. The parents and teachers, however, were not. I saw in their glassy, tired eyes what I felt in my stomach: a layer of grim resolve that had crusted over the mess of sickening horror and helplessness. We easily exchanged fake smiles and happy greetings, like toy money for wooden food. The other parents and I were all in the same boat, trying to carry on normally, not to show how scared we were. God knows how the teachers were coping, how they had got through the weekend. I wanted nothing more than to hug every one of them, but of course we were putting on a show of strength, denying our vulnerabilities for the sake of the children.

I'm sure a lot of children are upset, and I don't think that is a bad thing. Mine - and seemingly most kids at our school - are not and this isn't a bad thing either. They were fine all day, apparently. Fine whilst they wrote letters of condolence to an elementary school so like their own; fine whilst they conducted drills, working out how twenty-five kids could hide in a classroom should a man with an assault rifle ever prowl the hallways - all overseen, presumably, by wonderful teachers whose voices didn't crack, whose hands didn't shake.

These women are now front-line protection for our children, because we didn't want to talk about guns.

Although expressly designed to injure and kill, guns would still be awful even if one had never been fired at a human being. Guns are cheating. The destructive power of a speeding bullet has not been earned by the person pulling the trigger; they have not flexed superior muscles, demonstrated greater cleverness or exercised better judgement. Nobody needs such an unnatural advantage, unless they are living in the wilds and plagued by wolves or bears.

If you live in a city, you don't need a gun. They should be banned. It is not impossible - this is, after all, a country that made alcohol illegal if you can believe it, and if you can ban that, you can ban anything. Nobody needs a semi-automatic assault rifle. Walmart doesn't need to sell them. Arms manufacturers can make plenty of money hawking their wares to the armed forces of the world. It can be done, if only those people who are obstacles would stop thinking of themselves as victims, put the guns down and step away.

The Price of Failure

You might not have noticed, but I spent the last thirteen months watching and writing about all twenty-three James Bond films and now it is over. I've been left a little bereft and contemplating life without 007. For a bit. Until Skyfall is released on DVD anyway. But this made me think, what about a world without James Bond? What if he hadn't been there to foil those all those dastardly plans? What if his absurd luck had run out half-way through a movie? What would the consequences have been? Luckily, we are about to find out.


Dr No

Evil Scheme: The eponymous villain wants to disrupt US rocket launches. Why? I can't remember, it was fifty years ago!
You Only Live Once: The villainous Doctor's obstacle course housed in a ventilation shaft might have stopped our man in our tracks - but it could so easily have all gone wrong for Bond with that spider if he wasn't such a light sleeper.
The Price of Failure: Very little. We know that Felix Leiter's on the case and he even has a boat load of marines with him. Worst case scenario, the US invade Crab Key and the American space programme is delayed a month or two - nothing that an extra few billion dollars overtime wouldn't have soon put right.


From Russia With Love

Evil Scheme: To kill James Bond and discredit British Intelligence.
You Only Live Once: That fight on the Orient Express could have gone either way.
The Price of Failure: In the short term, not much. Would yet another sex scandal have changed British or international politics much at the time? In the longer term though the effects would have been MASSIVE, if only because killing Bond would have meant he definitely wasn't around to save the world thereafter. Without him, as we'll see, the human race would have barely survived the Sixties.


Goldfinger

Evil Scheme: To explode a dirty bomb inside Fort Knox.
You Only Live Once: Several chances here. Oddjob leaves Bond unconscious having lacquered Shirley Eaton and, famously, Goldfinger expects him to die but changes his mind.
The Price of Failure: It's at this point that we must consider the fact that, if Bond is killed on a mission, 009 will replace him, apparently. I think we can agree that this wouldn't make much difference. Firstly, we know he's rubbish and secondly, if he wasn't then he would have his own set of novels and blockbuster movie adventures, wouldn't he. Right, back to Operation Grand Slam. If it goes to plan we get either, a) a catastrophic economic collapse in the West, with Europe having to try and bail out the US; or b) a short-term wobble fixed by something like this, followed by a great big war as the undiminished manufacturing output of the USA was converted into weapons with which to bomb Goldfinger's sponsors (China, yes?) back into the Stone Age, facilitated by Soviet neutrality.


Thunderball

Evil Scheme: SPECTRE holds NATO to nuclear ransom.
You Only Live Once: Very lucky of Bond to make it out of Shrublands alive I reckon.
The Price of Failure: Tricky this one. I think we have to assume that the Blofeld of Thunderball is a gentleman terrorist and that he would not have used the nukes as long as he received his diamond pay-off. The British government are certainly resigned to handing over the ransom and that might have been the end of it (until someone else tried the same trick). Perhaps the crisis might even have led the West to think about disarmament? This might arguably have been a better outcome than the 'win' that Bond achieved - unless the USSR had tried to take advantage or SPECTRE had decided to keep asking for more money.


You Only Live Twice

Evil Scheme: SPECTRE wants to trigger WWIII on behalf of China(?).
You Only Live Once: Bond is half a sleepy roll away from poison on a rope here...
The Price of Failure: Towards the end of the film the USSR and USA are minutes away from open nuclear hostilities, from which we can project that North America and much of Eurasia would have been completely exploderised. Presumably China felt confident about profiting from such developments - but I worry that they didn't realise quite how cripplingly over-budget SPECTRE had gone, what with the volcano lair and the space programme and everything. Maybe, in the after-glow of nuclear armageddon, money might not matter too much in any case.


On Her Majesty's Secret Service

Evil Scheme: Blofeld plans to wangle a pardon and a title out of the UN by threatening to make strains of staple foods extinct.
You Only Live Once: I can all too easily imagine 007 getting his hands mashed up in the cable car gearings and falling to his death. Ew.
The Price of Failure: Two scenarios. One, the world refuses to pay, Blofeld eradicates rice and potatoes and mass starvation ensues. Two, the UN coughs up, the Comte de Bleuchamp swans off into retirement and Bond (assuming he survives) becomes happily married to Tracy. Which of these options you prefer largely defines where you sit on the Bond-fan spectrum.


Diamonds Are Forever

Evil Scheme: Blofeld demands nothing less than total global nuclear disarmament - enforced by his diamond-clad orbital space laser - so he can then auction nuclear supremacy to the highest bidder. Apparently.
You Only Live Once: Bond narrowly escapes being cremated alive.
The Price of Failure: The imminent threat (narrowly avoided by swinging a submarine against a wall) is to Washington DC. The destruction of the federal government of the United States would not have been without repercussions. The loss of data, infrastructure and personnel would have crippled America for generations; states would have been forced to take over federal responsibilities (and powers) for themselves, with many becoming semi-independent nations. In the short term Russian and Chinese cities would be Blofeld's next targets, but I assume someone would have agreed to pay up at this point, though whether any country would be prepared to admit Blofeld afterwards is an interesting question. But perhaps Ernst has thought of that and is planning to move to the Moon?


Live and Let Die

Evil Scheme: Kananga wants to destabilise the USA by getting it hooked on heroin.
You Only Live Once: Crocodiles, definitely.
The Price of Failure: A great big uptick in American drug-users in the early Seventies would have been unfortunate but would it have lasted? It's not as if little San Monique would have been able to resist a War on Drugs, so re-supplying his new punters would have been a nasty problem for Kananga - assuming he was still alive by then and that the existing organised criminal forces in America hadn't already dealt with their new competitor. The long term impact on the USA would have been bleak, with a whole generation blighted by addiction, and with the taxpayer lumbered with all the additional social costs of crime and so forth. With Kananga out of the way, no doubt the mafia would have sought to take advantage of the new commercial opportunities, putting further pressure on US law enforcement, further corruption of US government and institutions and prompting more farmers in developing countries to try and meet demand instead of growing food. On the plus side, little chance of World War III.


The Man With the Golden Gun

Evil Scheme: Hang on. Either Scaramanga wants to kill James Bond, or his mistress wants Bond to kill Scaramanga, or both, or China wants to harness a new form of solar power during an international energy crisis. It's not entirely clear.
You Only Live Once: Shot dead with a golden bullet, or stabbed in the goolies by Nik Nak.
The Price of Failure: I'm still unsure about this, if only because Bond's successful recovery of the Solex doesn't seem to dramatically improve life in the West that much (not much evidence of massive solar energy infrastructure in subsequent films). So maybe if Red China had got their hands on it, nothing much would have changed either? Who can say? What we do know is that if Scaramanga had killed 007, the man with the Golden Gun, China and the world as we know it would all have been utterly destroyed in the very next film.


The Spy Who Loved Me

Evil Scheme: Sick of humanity, Carl Stromberg decides to trick the USA and USSR into nuking each other so that civilisation can be rebuilt below the waves.
You Only Live Once: I can't decide which is more implausible: that Bond can be expected to have known about the trick floor in the lift, or that Amasova should change her mind about shooting him. Sadly neither of these moments come early enough in the film for Bond's demise to allow Stromberg's plan to succeed. So we're left with Jaws or (most plausibly) the Lotus developing a catastrophic leak.
The Price of Failure: This is yer standard Bond Cold War apocalypse. Stromberg remains convinced that no human society will flourish on the surface so he obviously doesn't rate China's chances of survival. He does though have a plan for underwater cities, which might have been alright. But given Stromberg's crushing misanthropy (he won't even shake hands), does he really want to save anyone? Or does he just want to sit on the sea bed and sulk?


Moonraker

Evil Scheme: Sick of humanity, Hugo Drax plans to poison everyone with orchids. From space.
You Only Live Once: Given the sheer absurdity of his escape, I must proffer the Venetian hover-gondola chase. But then there's also the fight with Chang which 007 conducts with a fragile vial of killer poison in his shirt pocket.
The Price of Failure: Arguably, this would have been the most disruptive of all these foiled schemes. Killing literally all humans except for a very small and hand-picked sample would have irrevocably changed our species and its evolutionary path forever. On the plus side, its unlikely that climate change would have happened as we have experienced it over the last thirty years. On the other hand, the chances of humanity surviving into the 21st century must have been slim indeed. For one thing, Drax seems to have hand-picked a shuttle-load of beautiful chinless wonders to continue the human race and I can't help but wonder just how capable they would prove when it came to taming a wild and unpopulated world, or repairing a space station. For another thing, Drax is clearly off his rockers - what is to stop him having further culls until there is really nobody left?


For Your Eyes Only

Evil Scheme: Top secret Royal Navy technology is pilfered and offered to the USSR. Quite low key really.
You Only Live Once: Ersatz Blofeld should have killed Bond very quickly during the PCS if only he had stopped yapping on.
The Price of Failure: I can't see this being a big deal. Even if the Russians could command our submarines to attack our own cities, I'm sure they wouldn't have done. In the Bond universe of the Seventies, the USSR is much less of a threat than it was in real life. In fact, there seems to be quite a special relationship between London and Moscow, so I wouldn't be at all surprised if the KGB weren't after the ATAC just so they could politely hand it back to M over tea in Whitehall.


Octopussy

Evil Scheme: Let's cut to the chase and just say that frustrated bad Russian General Orlov wants to provoke NATO nuclear disarmament so that he can have a conventional war in Europe.
You Only Live Once: There is no doubt in my mind that the correct response of a tiger, having been told  to 'sit!', is to leap forwards and rip the throat out of any aging spies in the vicinity.
The Price of Failure: Let's assume, for now, that Orlov's plan works. The West panics, disarms and the USSR tanks start rolling towards the Atlantic. Remember that China in Bond's universe seems to be much more belligerent than the one we know, and they're unlikely to have disarmed themselves - so would they let Russia expand so aggressively? But I doubt it would even get that far. I don't think the USA would have abandoned a nuclear deterrent in 1983 under any circumstances, so the Praesidium would end up quietly murdering Orlov and then publicly wringing their hands over the terrible and unfortunate accident in Feldstat.


A View to a Kill

Evil Scheme: Psycho entrepreneur Max Zorin wants to monopolise the manufacturing of silicon chips by causing a catastrophic earthquake in California.
You Only Live Once: It might be unkindly suggested that spending a night with May Day is the thing would most easily have killed our now very elderly gentleman spy.
The Price of Failure: We know that the earthquake would have caused massive devastation and loss of life. But then what? Zorin would start to make a whole heap of money, but surely not for long. We know the British know of his involvement in Operation Main Strike and presumably they would mention this to the CIA fairly promptly? At which point Zorin would wake up with the muzzle of an M16 in his face, and General Electric would start manufacturing their own chips.


The Living Daylights

Evil Scheme: This is a complicated one. Corrupt Russian officer tries to trigger a spy-war between KGB and MI6, get very rich and rearm the Soviet army in Afghanistan. I think.
You Only Live Once: Good thing that cello case didn't fly straight off a cliff.
The Price of Failure: If Georgi's money-making scheme paid-off, well, there'd be one more rich idiot in the world. But everything else would have had greater consequences. Bond's death, especially if it was thought the KGB were responsible, would have dramatically soured the cozy relations between London and Moscow, possibly even leading to a Cold War. Meanwhile, the USSR might have been able to turn its new high-tech weaponry into a military advantage in Afghanistan, defeating the Mujahideen and securing the country as the southern border of the USSR. I doubt this would have prevented the collapse of the Soviet Union, but it might have been bolstered somewhat. It would have prevented the rise of the Taliban, and stopped Afghanistan becoming a centre of global Islamic extremism in the '90s. After the USSR disintegrates, Afghanistan instead experiences a civil war between secularists and fundamentalists, the former supported by Moscow and the latter weakened and lacking experience following the defeat of the Mujahideen in the late '80s. Let's say the secularists win. As a result there would have been much less radical Islamic terrorism than we experienced, and what there was would have been directed as much against Russia as against America. In short, much less chance of 9/11 and no Afghan War.


Licence to Kill

Evil Scheme: Sanchez' drugs cartel wants to become a global supplier by expanding into SE Asia. Eez bizness. James Bond wants to avenge himself on Sanchez for escaping from custody and maiming Felix Leiter. It's personal.
You Only Live Once: Perhaps Bond should have died when the house fell on him?
The Price of Failure: Not much of consequence here. The attack on the Leiters goes un-avenged, and organised crime gets very organised. Perhaps the opening-up of the Asian drug market would have lead to greater law-enforcement cooperation between China and the US? Frankly, it's difficult to care.


GoldenEye

Evil Scheme: To electronically steal money from the Bank of England and then destroy all the computers and electronic records in London with an EM pulse. From space.
You Only Live Once: Is it churlish to suggest diving after an aeroplane on a motorbike?
The Price of Failure: As this article points out, destroying London as a financial centre would have the immediate consequence of devaluing the pound, making Trevelyan's ill-gotten gains largely worthless. Which is a shame for him as he must have a hell of a mortgage on that secret rising-out-of-a-lake base in Cuba. Britain would be crippled, the world's financial centre would probably move to Amsterdam and the rest of the world would carry on pretty much as normal.


Tomorrow Never Dies

Evil Scheme: Media baron decides engineering a war between China and the UK is the perfect way to launch his new cable news channel.
You Only Live Once: I'm not sure there's any one moment of jeopardy that should have done for our James here, but it is a wonder that Q hasn't rigged one of these cars to blow up out of sheer irritation.
The Price of Failure: This is a no-brainer. The Royal Navy sails into Chinese waters and the People's Liberation Army Air Force bombs the crap out of it, humiliating Britain. China blossoms, full of confidence; the UK sinks into a pit of self-loathing, orchestrated, no doubt, by the headlines in Tomorrow. Carver's network is a massive success and he becomes one the most powerful men on the planet, boo, hiss.


The World is Not Enough

Evil Scheme: Elektra King nukes Istanbul so that her pipeline becomes the only way to supply oil to western Europe.
You Only Live Once: Luckily for Bond the O2 is dome-shaped or he would have gone splat, falling off that balloon.
The Price of Failure: So much for the Solex, eh? Like a neo-con's wet dream, it's all about the oil here - at least, it is once the vaporisation of nine million people and thousands of years of culture have been absorbed. As with the 2011 Japanese tsunami, the disaster in Turkey would have prompted a world-wide panic regarding nuclear technology, with many countries closing down power plants, as well as much hand-wringing over the availability of nuclear matter. So oil and gas prices would rise and there would be more pressure to drill in the Arctic, Antarctic and pretty much everywhere in between. We could expect to see Russia playing hardball with its European energy customers, America involving itself in foreign wars over oil and perhaps increased tensions over territorial disputes where energy reserves had been detected. So, yeah, pretty bad!


Die Another Day

Evil Scheme: Half-baked North Korean ex-pat plots to attack the South with an orbital solar powered space laser.
You Only Live Once: For sheer implausibility, it has to be the laser-escaping, collapsing glacier-dodging kite-surfing.
The Price of Failure: It seems clear that Grave's plan would quickly lead to total North Korean control of the peninsula, killing thousands and destroying towns and cities in the process. But what would be the international reaction? The USA (and other NATO countries) would immediately insist on North Korean withdrawal from the South, but they would be unable to enforce such a demand. China might exert pressure behind the scenes, but would feel obliged to support North Korea publicly, which would leave China and the US at a nuclear impasse. What would Russia do? Traditionally, in the real world at least, one might suspect them to attempt to block intervention in any rogue state but - faced with the power of the solar laser thingumy - they might relent in this instance and back the NATO position in a UN Security Council vote. Even then, without even an abstention from China, the US might feel it had no choice but to act. In which case a trigger-happy President might chance his arm with a nuclear strike in order to try and destroy Graves and the control mechanism. If that were unsuccessful, and it might well be, given that the laser could be used to swat missiles from the sky, then there might be no other course left than to accept the situation and to try and do a deal with North Korea on their terms.


Casino Royale

Evil Scheme: Terrorist banker plots first to make a load of money from a bombing, then to recoup his losses at a game of poker.
You Only Live Once: New Bond, new vulnerabilities. For the first time in ages there is the sense that Bond could die during any of the fights or stunts. Jumping off that crane perhaps? Or grappling with a war lord in the hotel stairwell? He comes closest to death after drinking a poisoned Martini and even needs to have his heart restarted.
The Price of Failure: <Click> goes the reset button and suddenly we are in a whole new timeline, seemingly, and all that stuff above us on the screen never happened. Hey ho. Two schemes here: if Bond had failed to thwart the Skybus attack then Le Chiffre would have made a whole ton of money and ruined an airline. If his poker gambit had worked, he would have also made a load of money for the bad guys. That's all by the by. For us what matters is that if either of these schemes had worked our jolly naive little Bondling would never have suffered, never have met and lost Vesper, never survived to learn the lessons and burst from his Brioni chrysalis as Bond, James Bond 007.


Quantum of Solace

Evil Scheme: Evil consortium Quantum plot to take control of Bolivia's water in order to.. I don't know, actually. Drink it? Put out a large fire?
You Only Live Once: The plummet from the DC3?
The Price of Failure: Quantum is a bunch of ultra-rich, mega-important guys who want to throw their weight around and do whatever they like. There are plenty of people like that in our world anyway and they rarely have anyone stand up to them, let alone defeat them. The best you can say about Bond's 'victory' here is that this time, at least, Quantum don't get away with it. Without his interference things would simply have carried on as normal.


Skyfall

Evil Scheme: Unhinged ex-spy is desperate to take revenge on his former employer, M.
You Only Live Once: Rather obviously perhaps, but [SPOILERS!] Bond appears to run into some insurmountable problems at the end of the pre-titles sequence.
The Price of Failure: Well, this is tricky isn't it. Because [MORE SPOILERS] Silva does manage to kill M and Bond does fail to save her. So perhaps we have to turn this around and say what would have happened if Bond had succeeded? M would presumably have carried on in her job and Bond would have undergone some emotional catharsis from having 'saved his parents'. Which would have been terrible of course because we need him emotionally damaged and orphaned, just as we needed Judi Dench to regenerate into Ralph Fiennes. Maybe M couldn't dodge the bullet, but we - and Bond - definitely have.

* * *

All fun and games, but there's a serious point to be taken from all this. In the old days, Bond was regularly required to thwart gargantuan schemes that would have devastated the world. Faced with the real and obvious threat of nuclear war (something we couldn't, ourselves, actually do anything about), society produced Bond and used him to make us feel better about our precarious existence. This trend continued right through to the end of the Cold War, after which the films had to cast about for other dangers: drugs, media and energy corporations, a smattering of light terrorism, and even rogue states; throughout the '90s Bond remained a triumphant heroic figure, able to deal with all of these worries.

But suddenly all that reassurance has gone: the Craig films have swapped grandiloquent but thwartable villainy for ambiguity and, arguably, futility. There's a tragic and wearying quality to these stories. Some of the threats are familiar (terrorism, corrupt cartels and corporations) but there's a sense in which such problems are just too big for Bond to deal with. It's all he can do just to survive, and there's no longer any expectation on our part that he will triumph. Worse, the forces of 'good' are often complicit, with government officials throwing up their hands or even joining in with the baddies. Does this reflect a tired resignation on our part? Is it that we see the problems we face as insurmountable? I'm worried that the answer is yes and I hope that Bond soon regains his cocksure swagger. And in the real world, without a 007 to save us, we have no choice but to deal with the great threats of our age, intangible and complex though they may be.

We can't afford not to.

Skyfall

There is a problem with watching a brand new Bond film. It's a slight one and, to be honest, it surely only affects people planning on writing up the final entry of a 23 film retrospective. But a problem, nonetheless: Skyfall is so shiny new, so fresh out of the box that, even having now seen it (twice), I haven't yet fully absorbed it. I grew up learning my 007 by rote, thanks mainly to endless TV repeats that forced fights and chases, quips and kisses inside my squashy formative brain. All those viewings accrete over the years; layer upon layer of familiarity and understanding build up and become a sturdy platform. I don't have that yet for Skyfall and the fact that it's not just sat on the shelf with the other DVDs rankles me. Suddenly, my many years experience are gone, my gun hand shakes; yet here I am pushed into the field, too soon.

To be honest after a single viewing, I was a little underwhelmed. Perhaps this was only to be expected. Hype and expectations were at an all time high and I was caught off guard I think by Skyfall's sombre tone. That's not to say I didn't enjoy it, because there is plenty to love. The photography is beautiful, the direction is thoughtful. Craig's Bond is a thing of wonder: vulnerable yet also granite hard, brutal yet charming. Great performances from Dench and Bardem and brilliantly likeable turns from Ralph Fiennes, Ben Whishaw and Naomie Harris to usher in the new regime. Poor Bérénice Marlohe doesn't get much screen time, but in her scene with Bond in the casino she is absolutely excellent - not many Bond women get such good treatment. 

The fight with Patrice is very good indeed, shot in profile, silhouetted against a mesmerising jellyfish light effect, it suddenly, breathtakingly, pivots as the hitman slips out of the window. Silva's introduction is possibly the greatest of any villain: an incredible single shot where the terrorist simply walks the length of the room, recounting his rat story. His 'lair', an abandoned city, is fantastic - surreal and dream-like whilst still utterly credible.

Best of all is the way Bond's character is explored. "Sometimes the old ways are the best," he says when Eve queries his use of the cut-throat razor - but it's only much later that Kincade says the same thing (about another blade) and we realise the old man is the source of Bond's sentiment. Similarly the riddle of Skyfall is dangled before us with the word-association game before being slyly answered by a tracking shot up the drive of a remote house in the Highlands. The retreat to Scotland reveals so much but without being obvious or crass. Unable to defeat Silva, Bond escapes into his own past to find what he needs, recovering his aim and - briefly - even the ghosts of his parents, recast as M and Kincade. The loss of her, his mother figure, leaves Bond renewed as an orphan, ready for adoption by MI6 once more. The final moments of the film are a delicious treat as the original tableau of M's office from DRNO is reconstructed before our eyes. But for all that, I was missing something as I left the cinema - it needed to enjoy itself a little more, needed (I thought) an injection of cock-sure swagger.

I had assumed that Skyfall would mean a return to business as usual for Bond. Casino Royale and QOS demolished the franchise and rebuilt it from scratch, eschewing familiar (and exhausted) elements whilst necessary repairs were performed. After DAD these two films almost had a self-punishing quality, as if the franchise were flagellating itself for past sins. I liked and admired that - it was cathartic; the Bond series was bravely taking its medicine and getting better. But the return of the gun-barrel sequence at the end of QOS seemed to signify that this process had been completed and penance served. Perhaps inspired by Bond's appearance at the London Olympics I fully expected Skyfall to throttle down on the self-doubt, both for the franchise and for Bond himself. Although the film is full of confidence, it is at pains to show in those last few moments that things are only now getting back to normal and a lot of effort is spent shuffling the new personnel into position.

So I went and I watched it again and I realised that the biggest problem was me. I had been too wound up to enjoy it properly, too eager to analyse it. I have enjoyed looking at these movies again, finding new things and having fresh thoughts, but along the way I had ruined myself for a new Bond film. I had trained myself to scrutinise instead of just enjoying it for what it is: a stylish couple of hours of fun and thrills.

I did better the second time, helped along by my fellow audience members. It was a daytime screening, and the theatre was maybe a third full: a mixture of retired people and students, roughly half men, half women, and each of them had paid just six bucks to get in. A casual audience it seemed to me, killing a few hours in a not very busy day; probably not obsessive fanboys who had agonised during the gap between UK and US release dates. It seemed a safe bet that these laid-back Texans weren't watching riddled with homesickness, desperately over-invested and hoping that they weren't about to be let down or shown up. I wanted to know what Bond meant to them, how much they thought he represented tiny distant rain-sodden Britain.

I got my answer watching Skyfall with them. They loved it. They laughed throughout, at almost everything, giggling like school girls in fact during Javier Bardem's first scene. They cheered when the DB5 turned up and whooped when it opened fire. It delighted me that people who were just passing by could enjoy Bond so much. I was swept along and it was wonderful; Skyfall was wonderful. The lights came up and they shuffled off, smiles on their faces. I didn't linger in the shadows. I went with them, out into the bright November sun.

*   *   *

Pre-Credits Sequence: Wonderful first shot of Bond, great bike chase, and a nifty train-top fight, complete with a YOLT style denouement - all rather wasted by making up most of the trailer.  

Theme: Adele's theme is what we might call 'retro' Bond now but that's not a problem. The Bondian chords are all present and correct and the lyric is well above average - but the song itself never takes off. Or rather, it circles round and round but never lands. Pick whichever plane metaphor you prefer, the fact is the song doesn't ever get where it seems to be heading: a roaring triumphant Barry/Bassey-esque crescendo. Having said that, it has an addictive quality: it crawls into your brain and lingers there. And once it has been paired with the opening titles it simply becomes marvellous. Klienmen returns to take charge of the visuals and the result is unusually macabre, with blood, skulls, grave stones and deer heads all featuring. It looks absolutely gorgeous and, although we don't get the pleasing linear narrative of Klienmen's earlier titles, there is something much more complex and ultimately satisfying. The hypnotic song shares a fevered dream-like quality with the images and the combined effect makes these the best Bond titles ever. Yielding new meanings with repeated viewings, they reach back into the past (showing Silva enduring his horrific injuries) and finally present us with looming portents of the future as the lyrics and images combine thunderously 'at Skyfall'.  

Deaths: Absolutely no idea. I wasn't even counting. Maybe when the blu-ray comes out I'll sit down and work it out, but I hope I don't. 

Licence to Kill: Okay, I can't actually resist. Just tallying it up in my head it might be around... loads. Twenty plus maybe. 

Helicopters: 1. So, there should be a direct correlation between the craziness of a Bond film and the number of exploding helicopters it features. But there isn't. Whacko Moonraker has none, whilst dour old-school FRWL does. But generally it holds. Brosnan racks up 7 in four films, whilst Lazenby, Dalton and Craig can only muster 1 between them. It's this one. 

Shags: Two. Neither of them, thankfully, Moneypenny or M. It is entirely possible that Bond and Eve did do some sex whilst in Macau, but it is explicitly not referenced at all, so we can decide for ourselves. A much cleverer 'have-you-cake-and-eat-it' solution than the one they thought up for DAD. 

Crimes Against Women: Poor old Séverine does not have a good time but, apart from her backstory, nothing happens to her just because she's a woman. Moneypenny is shown to be effective and resourceful, even if she does get teased for shooting Bond. Dench's M, possibly the greatest Bond woman of them all, gets a wonderful farewell.

Casual Racism: Insidiously, all the goodies are British and all the baddies are foreign, whilst ambiguously good/bad Severine is played by French/Chinese/Cambodian Bérénice Marlohe. 

Out of Time: Non-Brits might not be aware, but in 2012 the UK has been basically governed by public inquiries and committees like the one that grills M here. But 2012 is also the year we all stayed home and enjoyed/endured the Queen's Jubilee, the London Olympics, Andy Murray's Wimbledon final and so on - in short, for many Brits there was more than the usual amount of running around on the Underground or staycationing in Scotland. Throw in Silva's not so subtle nods to Wikileaks/Julian Assange and this couldn't be any more contemporary if it had this week's lottery numbers in it. 

Fashion Disasters: Silva's beige prison outfit is a crime in itself. Craig pulls of a beardy Bond (just about). But more often than not I found myself wowed by the outfits. Bond's suits match the immaculate levels of Goldfinger. The dresses, particularly the gold one Eve wears in the casino are beautiful. And say and what you like about IMAX but it really showed off the weave on some sumptuous knitted-silk ties.  

Most Shameless Advertising: There was a great deal fuss made about Bond drinking Heineken but for heaven's sake, beer is hardly the most unlikely product endorsement 007 could make is it? After all, it is alcoholic. And it is very a much a tiny beery drop in an ocean of booze, as this wonderfully comprehensive guide explains. The green bottles are blatantly brandished by Bond and Tanner, but there's something more shameless about an advert that masquerades as justifiable dialogue: chasing after the train in Turkey Eve swerves to avoid a sudden obstacle and M asks her what it was. "VW Beetles I think," she replies unnecessarily. 

Eh?: It hardly matters, but most of the story is nonsense. Why does Silva plan to get captured and escape? If he has the resources to blow up MI6 and everything else, surely he can fly to the UK himself and kill M with ease whenever he likes? We're told that Silva has planned his revenge so meticulously that he has anticipated his capture, but how can he organise things like tube trains turning up on schedule, or dictate the time and place that a Select Committee will meet? How on Earth does he get so far out of his cell that he can take out the guard before he's shot? Who are the men who assist him in London? How does he communicate with them or plan with them so efficiently that they are walking along carrying a police disguise at exactly the right moment? >> How does the Shanghai assassination work? Patrice shoots him dead from across the street, but nobody reacts when it happens. If they are all in on the hit then why pay Patrice millions of euros to do it?The target is already alone in a room with Séverine and her heavies - if she wants this guy dead she could do it herself. >> The committee that calls M before it would appear to be the Intelligence and Security Committee - but in real life this is a parliamentary body, i.e. all those involved are either MPs or Lords. Clair Dowar is definitely an MP, but what is Mallory? Surely no sitting member of either House could be made head of MI6?  >> Not really something that doesn't make sense, but the thought of Bond and M stopping off at a Little Chef on the A9 is as unavoidable as it is bizarre. 

Worst Line: "I always hated this place," says Bond aloud to nobody as his childhood home goes up in flames, as if he were a character in some cheesy action movie. Similarly, his, "It just occurs to me that we haven't been properly introduced," to Moneypenny at the end feels very leaden.

Best Line: Difficult to remember any stone cold one-liners despite lots of good dialogue. Kudos to Dame Judi for immaculately dropping the series' first F-bomb. 

Worst Bond Moment: The death of his parents - astonishing that we've only now stopped to consider it.  

Best Bond Moment: Adjusting his cuffs; kicking the gun off the floor and catching it; taking out Silva's goons on the island. Then we get wonderful images: Bond stood beside his DB5 with glinting musical sting or, even better, standing in the boat on his way to the casino. Craig's been working on the standing and has developed a signature pose that is repeated all through the film: legs planted firmly apart, shoulders back (of course), left hand thrust into his trouser pocket, the right arm loose but ready. Once you notice it though he seems to be doing it all the time. The dazzling, amazing quality of his Bond is how he comes alive when he speaks to women. Normally blunt, brusque and cold he transforms in to a creature of charm and twinkle. Remember the receptionists in Casino Royale and QOS? We get the same here when he talks to Séverine in the Casino and it's wonderful to watch. 

Overall: A very good Bond film that manages to be about the loss of his parents without hitting us over the head with it. My favourite moment is the shot of the house that finally reveals the significance of 'Skyfall' - understated but so important and everything clicks into place. Nods to the franchise's past are subtle and pleasing, and a lot of the story has an authentically Fleming-esque flavour. I suspect that, rather like the Macallan, Skyfall will get better and better with age.    

James Bond Will Return: with pleasure.

Whilst You Were Sleeping

Barack Obama has been re-elected as President of the United States. Oddly it seemed to happen rather suddenly, seemingly at the behest of the US networks. One moment, everything was up for grabs; the next, Ohio had been called and it was all irrevocably over.

A long pause was eventually followed by Romney's concession speech. It was a gracious and generous address, but badly gabbled as if the poor man couldn't wait to get off the stage. Understandable, but hardly presidential. It's a stunning victory for Obama: even with unemployment at 7.9% he might yet even win Florida and top 330 electoral college votes.

We still wait the President's victory address, but goodness, doesn't this country need to fix some serious issues? A house divided against itself can not stand. Will America ever come together over race, religion, and gender? If any consensus can be formed, I doubt it can be forged by a single President. It has to come from ordinary people, reaching out to each other. Americans are divided, segmented by states, by demographics, by this or that pigeon hole.

Washington warned against partisan politics. Lincoln demanded that government should be of the people, for the people. FDR told us the only thing we had to fear was fear itself.

When are we going to listen to them?

Election Day

America, this morning. (Not my flag).

It's Baked Alaska time here in Texas. Not a reference to our November weather, in which crisp chill Autumn mornings melt into warm Summer afternoons, but to the Presidential election and my relationship with it: simultaneously hot and cold, up and down, engaged and disengaged. At one and the same time I am both on the inside looking out and on the outside looking in, like the bluebottle that has inexplicably found its way between panes of double-glazing.

The weirdness is mainly to do with the fact that I can't vote but I am affected by the result. This is nothing new, of course, as non-US citizens around the world will attest. I grew up in Britain following American politics, becoming increasingly partisan and yet unable to voice my preference. I cheered on Clinton from the sidelines in '92 and '96. In 2000 I stayed up until Florida was called for Gore and I went to bed happy that Americans had saved themselves, and us, from an idiot.

But now there is at least strong meteorological evidence that I do live in the United States (I'm still sceptical). I am even more directly affected by the outcome of this election: the quality and affordability of healthcare for my family, to pick one example. And the irony is not lost upon me that I suffer taxation without representation. Of course I do get a vote, just not here. And I can't not vote in Britain - it's my country, it needs me, wherever I am in the world! America is just where I live (allegedly - remember there's no consensus on that).

There's another slice to this Baked Alaska. Even if I could vote here, it wouldn't count. This is not a battleground state: the real election is taking place many hundreds of miles away. Despite Houston's bluish-leanings, Texas is red like its steaks and its thirty-four electoral college votes are guaranteed for Mitt Romney. The fight is in Ohio and Florida (amongst other places) and I have seen no motorcades down here, nor heard any rallies.

Lawn signs for Romney popped up overnight across the neighbourhood about a month ago, put out by friends and neighbours who would never discuss politics openly but obviously felt passionate enough about the Republican candidate to pin his colours to their, er, grass. Rather oddly, the colour in question is predominately white. Not a comment on race, I hasten to add (heaven forfend!), but on design: there's so much blank space on these signs that I cynically wondered if it was so his supporters could fill in for themselves what they thought Romney might be standing for. For a fortnight they ran unopposed but eventually the Obama signs did appear - nowhere near so many of them, of course, and often in pairs, as if consecutive homeowners had felt the need to circle the wagons. But it is irrelevant which side put theirs up first: both Republicans and Democrats feel surrounded and threatened by the others; for right or left, it is almost an act of defiance to publicly declare oneself.

Such seemingly irreconcilable differences, such polarised debate, suggests that American democracy is in poor health. Are elections decided by big-money donors instead of individual voters? Do lawyers and judges get to say whose vote counts and whose doesn't? Sadly, these questions will be asked again today. At best, there certainly isn't enough transparency in the system. At worst, it might be that one side is hell-bent on actively disenfranchising its opposition's voters in key areas.

But an hour or so ago, as I dropped my kids off at school, I walked past a line of Americans, waiting patiently to cast their ballot. Anywhere in the world, it is an inspiring sight.

Tonight I will sit down in front of as many screens as I can find and I'll watch the results come in. I'll bite my nails and drink large amounts of alcohol. I'll swear, both vituperatively and with joy. I'll scour graphs and count votes and generally cling on for dear life, utterly powerless, swept towards the result like a man in a barrel towards Niagara.

I shall be in the hands of all the people queuing today across America.

Which is, of course, just as it should be.

A New Hope?

Well, who saw that coming? Earlier today the news broke that Disney is buying Lucasfilm for $4.05 billion, setting fire to Twitter, sending the forums into apoplexy and generally melting the internet. I know it's trivial and silly, but to people born after, say, 1965 this is staggering news. The original Star Wars trilogy is such a bedrock of our collective childhoods (not to mention adolescence and, hell let's face it, adult lives) that the sudden, unexpected prospect of a seventh episode (let alone an eighth or ninth!) quickly distracted minds that might have been preoccupied by post-tropical storm Sandy, the Presidential election or even the general shitty state of the world.

After the announcement, the immediate shock gave way to an air of suspicion and disquiet. Although the original films are still almost universally loved, successive 'special' editions, tweaked releases and prequels have left generations of fans largely dubious and predisposed to disappointment. The knee-jerk reaction was that Lucas was 'selling out' and that Disney could only make things worse: many people, it seemed, had a very bad feeling about this.

Well, phooey. This is surely the most exciting thing to happen to Star Wars since Lando flew the Millennium Falcon out of the Death Star. Everyone knows that the best Star Wars film is The Empire Strikes Back: the only one that Lucas neither scripted nor directed, just as everyone knows that it was Lucas's control-freakery that strangled the promise of the prequels. Why not let a new creative team get their hands on that galaxy far, far away - it's not as if they can ruin it, is it? That already happened and we're all completely over it and ready to move on, yes we are.

And if you're not, well, tough. I ran and found my kids and told them the news. Aged nine and seven, it blew their tiny minds, their delight and excitement only tempered slightly when I explained they would have to wait until 2015 to see it. But they wanted the chance, like the children of 1999 and 1984 before them to go and see their own Star Wars movie at the cinema. Above all, that's who this film is for: the next generation, both viewers and film-makers.

Nor does it bother me that Disney will be in charge. Yes, as corporations go, it's a little scary - show me one which isn't? But I think they can handle Star Wars. If nothing else, the Star Tours ride is fabulous proof that they know their Alderaan from their Endor and goodness knows how the amount of Star Wars wonderfulness at their theme parks is going to shoot up over the next ten years.

So, nerds of a certain age, be not afraid. And non-nerds needn't fret either. This is a sign of the times. Just this week, Random House and Penguin announced they are planning to merge to create the largest publisher in the world. Everywhere, matter is coalescing. Individuals like Mark Zuckerberg and Steve Jobs build tiny idiosyncratic companies that swell into world-conquering behemoths. Others create killer ideas that become franchises and are eventually swallowed up by the biggest of fish: the product of Ian Fleming's typewriter is now the juggernaut 23 movie property of MGM/Sony; Joanne Rowling's scribbling in an Edinburgh cafe became the Harry Potter movies that saved Warner Bros.; Disney already own Pixar, Marvel and even those lovable non-conformists the Muppets. And now young arthouse director George Lucas's unexpected movie smash of 1977 joins them.

All those different companies and creations started as insignificant little rebellions, given little hope of success against the dreadful galaxy-spanning status quo that they dared to question. But somehow they bulls-eyed their womp rats, navigated the asteroid fields and toppled the opposition. Now they are in charge.

The question we are all suddenly dying to have answered is - what will they do next?

Quantum of Solace

I really wanted to love Quantum of Solace. And, in fact, in 2008, I did love it and it felt like nobody else really got it. Having just watched it again I can see it is a fractured movie with a shifting, restless pulse. Whilst accelerated, whiplash-inducing edits prompted complaints from cinema-goers who weren't sure what was going on, at other times the film's rhythm is almost hypnotically slow, resulting in odd longueurs as the camera lingers on vanishing buses or dripping taps.

It's a little too short (thanks to the 2007/08 Writers' Strike that forced work on the script to shut down prematurely) and this, combined with the idiosyncrasies of auteur director Marc Forster, leaves QOS with an unusual atmosphere. It's more low-key, brittle in places and somehow lacking authenticity: lots of little things (like the freeze-frame, the unusually graphic captions, the ersatz opening titles, the grey, sodden London, the new MI6 staff and futuristic offices) all combine to leave a slightly odd taste in the mouth. Perhaps it is unsurprising that audiences didn't warm to it in the same way they had to Casino Royale. 

For all that though I still think it's brilliant: make no mistake, QOS is a good Bond film. Although the running time is shorter than usual, the plot is not fatally underdeveloped and the story we get is taut, and emotionally satisfying. It's full of sophisticated ideas (the murky, realpolitik of US/UK relations; CIA dealings with Greene; the intersection of corporate and governmental self-interest), great stunts (the Sienna chase and fight are excellent, tense and kinetically charged) and - hooray! - continued character development for Daniel Craig's wonderful portrayal of 007. 

There is a clear division in the film. Bond, Camille and Leiter (the latter played fantastically cool and wily by Jeffrey Wright) all possess a clear morality, a sense of 'good guys' and 'bad guys'. At the other extreme, both Medrano and Greene are unambiguously amoral. Other characters occupy the confused middle ground: some, like M, are conflicted; others, like the Chief of Police and the man who owns the plane Bond borrows, are venal; both Gregory Beam and the Foreign Secretary, representing American and British governments, claim that they can't chose with whom they do business. Mathis meanwhile is relativism made flesh - a traitor then, but a now loyal friend, offering his perspective-altering pills that make you 'taller' or 'forget, or anything else. He sides with Bond, but he certainly does not share 007's black and white morality:

"I guess when one's young, it seems very easy to distinguish between right and wrong. But as one gets older, it becomes more difficult. The villains and the heroes get all mixed up."

This Bond can't work like that. One film on from Casino Royale, he is still too young, it is still too early in his career, for him not to be susceptible to something approaching naivety. He has no interest in Special Advisors, politics, diplomacy - he sees only the target.

In 2008 I saw QOS very much as Casino Royale II, exploring the aftermath of Bond's relationship with Vesper. And whilst today it feels like more of a distinct installment in its own right, with a very different tone, and different concerns, the emotional core of the film is still the matter of the quantum of solace - the smallest crumb of comfort that would allow someone to move on with their life. For what it's worth I don't believe that Bond does actively search for such comfort - but I do think that he achieves catharsis by the end, even if it is not immediately clear to the audience what shape his solace takes.

The confusion stems, I think, from the audiences' natural assumption that Bond is intent on revenge for Vesper's death. He steals the Algerian boyfriend's photo from M early on and then proceeds to disobey orders, fight his colleagues and go on the run and so forth. When, during the course of the story, he doesn't seem to be getting any closer to the Algerian it seems as if the story must be confusing or badly constructed, and the final confrontation feels anti-climactic.

But this misses the point entirely: when Bond takes the photograph he might well be plotting a personal revenge - although he denies it ("I'm not going to go chasing him, he's not important.") and he doesn't lie to M anywhere else in the film - but just moments later any such plans are pushed from his mind by the attempt on M's life. The relationship between Bond and his boss is worth looking at in full another time, but for now we need only recognise that Craig's 007 is by far the most devoted and that M is, essentially, his mother. Just as in Fleming's Casino Royale, Bond's reaction to Vesper's love and betrayal is to retreat to the bolt-hole of his job. M, regal and motherly, is the physical embodiment of his duty, and Bond has personal loyalty to her as well as to Queen and country. Throughout the rest of the film, his single-minded obsession is to find the men who tried to kill her.

Perhaps it's a form of self-punishment, but Bond seems to be denying himself the satisfaction, the solace, that vengeance would provide him. One could argue that Bond is merely channeling his personal grief and anger through his work, transferring his emotional pain over Vesper to his concern for M, but either way it makes little difference: for Bond there is now nothing left except the job.

Is there then a quantum of solace for Bond by the end of the film? I think so. Camille certainly finds her own, but she is not exactly the 'mirror' to Bond as some have claimed. Unlike Bond, she is on a personal revenge mission. In fact she has done something which, for this 007 at least, at this time, would be unthinkable: shorn her ties with the Bolivian secret service to pursue Medrano. She shows us, perhaps, what Bond should be doing, what he might secretly want to be doing, but for whatever reason can't or wont. Although there is no physical connection between them, they do share an intimacy of experience and Bond is happy to help her achieve her revenge. Surely he takes vicarious comfort, even pleasure, when she is able to complete her mission? At the same time he takes care of Greene, fulfilling his own self-stated objective to find the man who tried to kill M, and this does seem to be enough. By the time he catches up with the Algerian, Bond appears to have shaken off the demons that were hovering on his shoulder on the flight to Bolivia; although we don't see what happens, Bond doesn't need to kill him, just as he no longer needs to carry Vesper's necklace. He is already in possession, it seems, of that smallest crumb of comfort.

"It'd be a pretty cold bastard who didn't want revenge for the death of someone he loved," said M at the beginning, and it's almost as if she was giving Bond permission to feel. She underestimates him throughout QOS, misinterpreting his motives, questioning his judgement. By the end though he has proved himself to her. "He's my agent and I trust him," she says. And then, of course, at the end, she calls after him: "Bond, I need you back."

"I never left," he replies, and the implication is that he never intended to go after his personal revenge. Duty, to her, to the mission, was all he needed.

There is one final quantum of solace - for the audience. The film ends with the traditional, familiar gunbarrel sequence, bold and vital, red on white on black. It is there to reassure those that might have been alienated by the experiment of the reboot, but it is also there to excite us all about what is to come next. Switched to the end of the movie, it still feels like a beginning and becomes the most glorious piece of cinematic punctuation - not a full stop, but a colon:

James Bond will return.

*   *   *

Pre-Credits Sequence: This exciting car chase is a brilliant opener - once you've seen it two or three times and have worked out what's happening. But on a first viewing it seemed designed to perplex a casual audience, so savagely is it edited. And then it suddenly stops dead on that irritating freeze-frame, which is rather like someone knocking over your pint and then shouting "Ta-da!".

Theme: 'Another Way to Die' by Jack White and Alicia Keys is certainly not a bad theme song. But it's not a great one either. The single version is better than the edit used in the titles here, but somehow manages to end up both shouty and a tiny bit bland. Forster, apparently, wanted design studio MK12 (who had worked on previous films of his) to produce the titles, so Danny Kleinman stepped aside. The result is rather odd. Despite the inclusion of many familiar elements (bullets, Bond, dots, women) it doesn't feel like the genuine article and I can't put my finger on what went wrong. All I can say is that, if Never Say Never Again had been made in 2008, this is what its titles would have looked like. Luckily Kleinman is back for Skyfall.  

Deaths: 24, possibly. Unfortunately, because of the editing, it's impossible to tell - often we see bullets fired without being shown where they land, whilst the inter-cutting of the Bregenz fight with the on-stage violence of Tosca is as close to a piece of deliberate obfuscation as we ever see in a Bond film. We never find out if that women at the Palio was killed or not either. Tsk!

Memorable Deaths: Fields' oily send off is obviously designed to be memorable but is a little too desperate for our attention. Mathis' death veers towards bathos.   

Licence to Kill: 11 - again it's impossible to be certain. Bond certainly gets credited with a lot of murders but even we can't be sure sometimes. Take those two Bolivian coppers - Bond certainly takes them out, and there's even a gunshot, but (and God help me I did watch this several times on slow-mo) I can't see him do anything that would kill them instantly. It seems to me that he merely knocks them out and that they are later killed to frame him, but that's pure supposition. It doesn't seem like he is responsible for Greene's death either, despite leaving him in the desert: I don't think Quantum are the sort to waste bullets on corpses.  

Exploding Helicopters: 0. A plane does blow up, but that DOESN'T COUNT.

Shags: Again, just one, except that it's not even Camille but sub-plot filler [Strawberry!] Fields. She seems resigned to it beforehand and regretful afterwards, bringing a much needed dose of realism to Bond's sexual antics.  

Crimes Against Women: Times have changed since Goldfinger and the rapists are now very much the baddies. Camille is probably the most progressive Bond woman we've ever had, despite being a victim. Crucially, her attractiveness is entirely disconnected from her abilities, and her relationship with Bond is based on mutal professional respect and shared experiences.

Casual Racism: Latin America is wall-to-wall corruption. 

Out of Time: Bond's trip to already troubled Haiti appears to take place just before Tropical Storm Fay and Hurricanes Gustav, Hanna and Ike smashed the place to bits during the summer and early autumn of 2008 (but see Eh?). A devastating earthquake followed in 2010, killing over 300,000 people. Meanwhile, water shortages were already happening across South America as this 2008 article shows. 

Fashion Disasters: Anatole Taubman's hair. Fields' raincoat, which seems to unecessarily suggest she is not wearing anything underneath. Craig's Bond seems to be able to wear anything and make it look good, but time will tell.

Most Shameless Advertising: Boringly, we have the same lot as last time: another Sony Ericsson phone, another Aston Martin and another high-profile Ford (an electric Ka!). Most desperate for our attention again is Virgin Airways, who make the bald claim that you can get six super-strong Vesper Martinis (upwards of 25 units of alcohol by my count) on any of their (non-existent) flights. Go on, try it: you will end up in jail.

Eh?: Ah yes, those flights. I apologise in advance for some hardcore pedantry. Whilst global travel has long been part of the Bond franchise, he really does flit about in this one. Annoyingly, his journeys as depicted here are flagrantly at odds with reality. Firstly though, what's going on in the PCS? It seems as though QOS picks up almost exactly where Casino Royale left off, but if so why has Bond changed his clothes? Furthermore, the journey from the Veneto (if that's where White's house is) to Sienna is around three hours (probably much shorter given the way Bond drives) but M has found the time to drop everything and fly to Italy. And the Palio di Sienna happens in both July and August - pushing Bond's Haiti trip unpleasantly into the 2008 hurricane season. >> Let's get this one out of the way: you can't fly Virgin to La Paz, Bolivia. Nor can you fly  with them from Italy. They'll happily book you on another carrier and make you change in Madrid, and Lima. But I doubt you get to knock back Martinis at the bar en route. And surely, any kind of connection or stop over would mean an MI6 or CIA agent meeting Bond and trying to arrest him. >> This one really irritates me. Greene has an appointment at the opera in Bregenz, Austria. He is in Haiti. He takes off no earlier than late morning and arrives in plenty of time. Total rubbish. Next season, the opera on the lake production at Bregenz starts at 9:15 in the evening. It's nearly an eleven hour flight from Port-au-Prince to Austria and, even assuming Greene can land closer than Vienna, he presumably has to leave an hour for delays, to do the passport thing and drive to the opera - it is an important meeting after all. All this means that Greene should be taking off around nine in the morning Austrian time which makes it 3:00 AM in Haiti. To make it all the more ludicrous Bond has to make the same journey and arrive at the same time, even though he hasn't yet chartered a plane when Greene takes off. And on top of all that Tosca is much longer than The Magic Flute (next years show), so the performance would start probably as much as two hours earlier. >> Speaking of opera, surely the great and the good of Quantum know that nothing is more likely to attract attention than to ostentatiously leave in the middle of the act? Sneaking out at the interval is obvious enough, but if a Guy Haines equivalent (say Peter Mandelson or Steve Hilton?) got up and walked out mid-aria, it'd be on the front page of the Telegraph the next day. Possibly even more astonishingly, Mr White comments on the walk-out to the stranger next to him. Goodness me! Leave if you must, but talking is verboten! (She, quite rightly, ignores him.) >> One more operatic observation, which is that various bits of Tosca are mixed together during the already confusing chase/fight through the opera house. We have the music from the end of Act I played over staging from all three acts, resulting in the disorientating notion that Bond's set-to with Quantum's thugs might be happening over several hours. >> Then there are people dining in the restaurant during the gun-fight. I've not been to Bregenz, but I'd be surprised if opera-goers decide to have dinner during the show? Never mind the fact that presumably the performance would be cancelled if people started shooting at each other in the foyer? >> Why doesn't Haines' bodyguard tell Bond he's Special Branch? Is it a secret? >> And how do the Quantum earpieces work? Where are the microphones? Do they cancel out the BLARING music? Hmmm... >> How does Greene get all that oil into the hotel room? Do they take a barrel up in the lift? >> And I would ask what the existing Bolivian water utility company has been playing at, not noticing that water has been squirreled away - but of course they are already real shortages, because of inadequate infrastructure and not, presumably, because of a shadowy international criminal conspiracy.  

Worst Line: Bond somehow finds time to say "You and I had a mutual friend!" to the Chief of Police before he shoots him. It feels rather forced and Brosnanish.   

Best Line: Quite a few. M moans that the CIA only got Le Chiffre's body. "If they'd wanted his soul, they should have made a deal with a priest," Bond replies. M on Quantum: "When someone says we got people everywhere, you expect it to be hyperbole. Lots of people say that. Florists use that expression!" Greene gets a few. "Don't talk to me like I'm stupid!" he shouts. "It's unattractive." Then: "There's nothing that makes me more uncomfortable than friends talking behind my back. It feels like ants under my skin."

Worst Bond Moment: Nothing horrible from our point of view. Bond's personal nadir is obviously being stuck on the flight to Bolivia, where he tries to drown his sorrows. Don't give the man time to think!     

Best Bond Moment: One of the great things about Craig's Bond is the way he moves: a purposeful, fluid stride, full of a strength that is being held in reserve. The moment when he eludes his MI6 guards in the lift and then prowls back to M, like a cat, is superb. There's some good vaulting too: he hurdles the bar after meeting Leiter and he also impressively jumps across the bonnet of a car under La Perlas de las Dunas. One tiny thing, but it's a favourite of mine: on entering the suite at the posh hotel in La Paz, Bond flings the keys across the room, utterly careless. The grand moment however is a tableau: Bond stands, indomitable, and stares down Greene at Bregenz whilst Puccini's Act I finale to Tosca lets rip underneath. Marvellous.     

Overall: Massively underrated, with fantastic performances by Craig, Dench and Mathieu Amalric. It is hampered though by some odd choices, often coming across as oblique and distant. Just as Bond doesn't go out of his way to explain his intentions, perhaps it is no coincidence that QOS itself is a film that knows what is doing, but makes surprisingly little effort to explain itself.    

James Bond Will Return: on the 26th of October! Or if, like me, you are in the US, November 9th. So that won't be an excruciating two weeks at all, oh no. Anyway, roll on Skyfall.

Casino Royale

James Bond, with two double bourbons inside him, sat in the final departure lounge of Miami Airport and thought about life and death.

It was part of his profession to kill people. He had never liked doing it and when he had to kill he did it as well as he knew how and forgot about it. As a secret agent who held the rare double-O prefix - the licence to kill in the Secret Service - it was his duty to be as cool about death as a surgeon. If it happened, it happened. Regret was unprofessional - worse, it was death watch beetle in the soul. 

And yet there had been something curiously impressive about the death of the Mexican. It wasn't that he hadn't deserved to die. He was an evil man, a man they call in Mexico a capungo. A capungo is a bandit who will kill for as little as forty pesos, which is about twenty-five shillings - though probably he had been paid more to attempt the killing of Bond - and, from the look of him, he had been an instrument of pain and misery all his life. Yes, it had certainly been time for him to die; but when Bond had killed him, less than twenty-four hours before, life had gone out of the body so quickly, so utterly, that Bond had almost seen it come out of his mouth as it does, in the shape of a bird, in Haitian primitives. 

What an extraordinary difference there was between a body full of person and a body that was empty! Now there is someone, now there is no one. This had been a Mexican with a name and an address, an employment card and perhaps a driving licence. Then something had gone out of him, out of the envelope of flesh and cheap clothes, and had left him an empty paper bag waiting for the dustcart. And the difference, the thing that had gone out of the stinking Mexican bandit, was greater than all of Mexico.

That's the opening from Goldfinger (1959, hence the stuff about 'primitives'). Apologies for quoting it at length but it's important. This stinking bandit is important. And here's why:

Run through the intricate sausage-machine of film-adaptation, Fleming's reflective passage ended up on screen as that clip. Whilst the literary Bond Pooh-ishly ponders the capungo's death and sees something astonishing, Connery simply struts out the door, amused with himself. It is the moment ink and screen versions of 007 diverge.

I know, I like that bit in Goldfinger too. I certainly enjoyed it almost a year ago when I watched it for this blog; I called this the 'first and superlative quip' and lauded the PCS to the rafters. But then I spent the rest of the last year watching all the other Bond films and something happened: I saw where this would lead, twenty years later.

Mainly I got sick of the quips. Pretty quickly. Probably by the middle of Thunderball, in fact. Of course, if you only watch a Bond film every now and again it's not too annoying. But if you're watching them in order, regularly - like, say, society does - the quips get worse and increasingly callous. The ghastly nadir comes in TND where, having just casually pulverised a random security guard by throwing him into the threshing mechanism of an industrial printing press, Brosnan's 007 breezes "They'll print anything these days!". Lines like that work to deliberately dehumanise the victim, to mock them and dismiss them. The cumulative result, after so many films, is to render such deaths dramatically and emotionally meaningless. To kill that man costs Bond nothing. It costs the audience even less to watch him do it. 

If both your leading man and your audience are so desensitised as to be almost incapable of feeling then there are limits to the sort of stories you can tell. How can you make a film where Bond must fall in love? How can you show him to be affected by death? In short, how can you make Casino Royale?

The answer is that they ripped everything out (apart from Judi Dench) and they started again. Along the way they managed to recombine Fleming's Bond of the books with the on-screen 007. The result is the best film so far in the series.

There is so little wrong with it. It can be difficult, when something works so satisfyingly, to identify all the bits that make it so good. It's brilliantly written, well acted and the music is superb (David Arnold's best score). The action looks terrific and feels exciting. Everything we have grown to love and associate with Bond - the martinis, the women, the car chases, the casinos, the fighting - is there. But everything is there for a reason. Best of all the ingredients are mercilessly stitched together to form a convincing and realistic world.

Two things make this the best Bond film. Two little, inconsequential things, that this film absolutely gets right: Love, and Death.

The relationship between Bond and Vesper is excellently portrayed. In the book it is nearly all squeezed in the last few chapters, but here it is cleverly pushed into the the very centre of the story. As soon as Bond and Vesper meet on the train, the air between them is fizzing with wit and chemistry, and throughout the hotel and poker scenes they continue to dance about each other in a way that lifts everything else. That their affair is convincing as well as entrancing is due to wonderful writing and to great performances from Craig and Green.

Daniel Craig is stunning as Bond, turning a flat cartoon into a living man. He has the unique advantage (well, apart from Lazenby) of being the only actor asked to develop the character over the course of a film; he does it beautifully. For the first time since the books themselves we get a real sense of Bond as a broken, damaged man: an orphan, and then a killer, who has had to construct an invulnerable exterior around his frailties. What was, for most Bonds, smug sang-froid, is with Craig clearly a coping mechanism - a mask that tries to disguise his real emotions.

Over the course of Casino Royale we see him change. The parkour chase at the beginning shows Bond to be, literally, a 'blunt instrument' as he runs in straight, relentless lines, bulldozing fences and crashing through walls, utterly direct and lacking in much guile or sophistication. He is also reckless and impulsive, a natural gambler who can't stop himself throwing away his cover at the hotel, and who desperately decides to go after Le Chiffre with a knife when he runs out of money. Slowly, the Bond we know emerges. He performs real detective work to track down Dimitrios and brilliantly improvises to gain access to him in the Bahamas. He even gets to follow someone, like an actual spy. We see him acquire the icons of his own identity: the tuxedo, the vodka martini, the Aston Martin DB5. Tempered by the advice of friends and allies, tested by the cruelty of his enemies, he grows stronger and cooler. This development continues into the very final seconds of the film and crucially allows both him and the audience a cathartic climax that transcends the sadness of Vesper's death.

Craig sells the idea of Bond completely, convincingly wrapping all the brutality, charm, coldness, humour, passion, savagery and wit around a fearsome engine. We know, we see, that this is a Bond that won't stop. Nevertheless Vesper is capable of driving thought of duty from his mind.

Eva Green's Vesper is beguiling, waspish, strong yet vulnerable, completely fascinating and utterly real. She's unlike any other female character in the series and, of course, this has to be the case in order for the audience to fall for her as well. She is the Best Bond Woman. I know I said that about Fiona Volpe (who is still sexier, more flamboyant and more dangerous) but Vesper is a complex, three-dimensional character, capable of transfixing and ruining Bond in a way that no other could.

At the centre of their badinage is a telling little exchange where Bond announces that he will call his new vodka martini recipe 'Vesper' after her.

"Why, because of the bitter aftertaste?" she snaps back, disbelievingly.

"No," replies Bond, surprisingly earnest. "Because once you've tasted it, it's all you want to drink."

Vesper laughs and they agree to dismiss the moment as 'a good line', but we, with twenty films of retconned hindsight, know Bond meant it. We know that he didn't, won't, drink anything else ever again.

The new approach to death is signaled in the first few minutes.

"How did he die?" Dryden asks.

"Your contact?" replies Bond. "Not well."

Nobody is easily disposed of in this film. The refreshing authenticity of Casino Royale lies in the fact that all the violence and killing is conducted by people who are fighting for their lives. The struggle with the bomber in Miami matters. When Bond tussles with Dimitrios, the men lock eyes, knife clenched in their grappling hands, each willing the other to submit. Le Chiffre's torturing of Bond is driven by the very real fear that people are coming to kill him. The fight with Obanno, the African war lord, in the stairwell of the hotel is the most savage and unrelenting we have seen in a Bond film since the one on the Orient Express. Protracted and exhausting, the audience is given nowhere to hide from the violence, forced to watch a man die in tight close up. There is no quip to let us laugh it away and we are made to feel complicit as Bond hides the body and washes the blood from his hands, like a murderer. When he reappears moments later, immaculate, we understand that his suave exterior has been reassembled - but we have seen the wild look in his eyes in the mirror, the large glass of scotch he had to throw down his throat. We know what it cost him.

This James Bond will remember the Ugandan he killed in the stairwell of the Hotel Splendide. He certainly won't be able to forget the wide-eyed silent screaming of Vesper as she gulped down lagoon water into her lungs. He'll pretend to others, to himself, that he is detached, unaffected, cold. He will even take satisfaction in the deaths of cruel or evil men. But then, stuck in an airport, or on an overnight flight to Bolivia, with too much time on his hands, he will sit and knock back the drink he named after Her and see in his mind the invisible bird that flew from their mouths, greater than all the world.

*   *   *

Pre-Credits Sequence: Shot in black and white with some Dutch angles, this little scene seems to hark back to Bond's cinematic Sixties roots, but really it's more evocative of something like The Ipcress File. It's a clever and careful introduction to Craig's Bond. He's at his most suave and polished here - the killer line 'Considerably!' is clipped so hard that he could pass for Trevor Howard - whilst the lighting makes Craig's controversially blond hair look very dark indeed. It's a very managed, traditional version of Bond and it is violently juxtaposed with the flashback to the ragged fight in the bathroom. With economy and style it establishes that these are Bond's first kills, cleverly underlining all this by showing us Craig through the gunbarrel, as if for the first time. The message is clear: this is where it all started.

Theme: I didn't warm to it initially, but the more I watch this film the more I like it, to the point that I would now rate it as one of the very best. Unusually muscular, it suits the new Bond very well and (most rarely for a Bond tune) has some good lyrics. I particularly like 'Arm yourself because no one else here will save you' - it perfectly captures the grim self-reliance of a lone agent like Bond. Meanwhile Kleinman turns in his best ever work on the visuals: clever story-telling with imagery ripped from the film's plot and setting. It's so good, you should go and have another look at it here, okay?  

Deaths: 21. But they all matter. For the record that's very low - only DRNO, LALD and TMWTGG can beat it. 

Memorable Deaths: Just about all of them. Even Solange, who dies off screen, gets a vivid corpse scene. But the murder of Obanno in the stairwell is especially visceral. Vesper's horrifically realised death is specifically designed to be unforgettable.  

Licence to Kill: 10. Not so very low, given the film's overall body count. The most important thing here is that all of these deaths become personally significant struggles. Some are mental contests, like the one in the PCS, others are tests of strength, like the stairwell battle. But always the sense is that Bond is pitting his whole self, his wits and his will into the fight. 

Exploding Helicopters: 0. I'm developing a theory about these you know.   

Shags: Just the one - except, of course, that it's not a shag, but a love affair. Bond and Solange remain conspicuously dressed for the duration of their unconsummated assignation.  

Crimes Against Women: For the first time in ages it feels like it is just the characters in the film who are sexist, rather than the film itself. And even then this is the least sexist Bond film I can think of. Solange and Valenka both seem to be trophy girlfriends but they prove themselves to be more than that. Solange is happy to get back at Dimitrios by shagging Bond, having observed the latter emerging from the sea. And Valenka shows tremendous strength of character, not to mention loyalty to Le Chiffre, when Obanno threatens to chop off her arm. For once there's no Moneypenny to file a harassment claim against 007 so Bond has to make do with teasing Vesper. It's mild stuff, although sexually charged, and she's more than a match for him.   

Casual Racism: Very little. Small town policemen in Montenegro are corrupt. Mendel, the Swiss banker, is the campest German speaker in fiction since Lieutenant Gruber. Actual Germans, like the gentlemen at the club in the Bahamas, are oafish and fat. Otherwise we're back to the most casual of Bond stereotypes: all the baddies are foreign (and even Vesper, thanks to the casting of Eva Green, has the odd tell-tale non-English inflection).    

Out of Time: Ubiquitous CCTV combines with the internet to splash Bond's embassy raid across the online headlines and show that the franchise has moved into the 21st century. Airport security concerns haven't gone away since 2001, whilst Le Chiffre's plan of using the stock market to profit from terrorism is directly connected on screen to 9/11. 

Fashion Disasters: Time will tell, but I couldn't see any. This Bond seems to be able to wear anything and make it look good. 

Most Shameless Advertising: Sony is heavily involved. The Vaio laptop is everywhere, as is Bond's Sony Ericsson phone. Aston Martin is very visible too, Bond driving the DB5 and (ostensibly) the DBS v12. Our winner would be the Ford Motor Company (who managed to get a scene included where Bond drives a Mondeo) if it weren't for Richard Branson popping up at Miami Airport. 

Eh?: Goodness this film hangs together well. I suppose it's the benefit of sticking so closely to the novel. There is a slight oddness though. When does Vesper turn traitor? And how involved is Mathis? M says that Vesper had obviously made a deal to hand over the money to Le Chiffre in order to save Bond. That sort of implies that this happened during her kidnap, but we know that she was compromised already, because of her Algerian 'boyfriend'. That would suggest that Vesper is a 'back-up plan' of Le Chiffre's, just in case Bond won the game. But the earlier in the plot that Vesper is leaned on, the less likely it is that she gives up the money for Bond's sake, rather than to save her boyfriend. Perhaps it isn't Le Chiffre she deals with at all, but Mr White, in which case that would have to happen after Bond's torture. Most probably, she deals with Le Chiffre and then Mr White - she has to have contact with the latter or else she would not have his mobile number, or recognise Gettler in Venice. >> But hang on. In the dinner scene directly before the kidnap Vesper appears to be unsettled, suggesting perhaps that she has made contact with Le Chiffre and is complicit in the kidnapping (as she is in the book). If this is the case then she uses Mathis' name as an excuse to leave. What if she doesn't know about the kidnapping? (Remember the villains leave her lying in the road for Bond to run over - yes, I know it's to try and force him off the road, but then why take the risk with her life unless they don't mind killing her? They also place her behind a blind summit to maximise the danger of her being hit.) That means either the villains are using Mathis as a lure, or that Mathis himself is involved. Bond certainly thinks so (he mutters "Mathis!" before he jumps up, as if he has just realised something important - we never find out what exactly) and later has the man tasered away as a traitor. Le Chiffre implicates Mathis too: "I'm afraid your friend Mathis, is really my friend Mathis," he tells Bond. What reason does he have to lie? Having just dumped Vesper in the road and seeing that he is about to torture Bond to death, he can't be too bothered with protecting Vesper's cover? It's all very murky and never really explained. By QOS Mathis has been declared innocent of all charges, but who knows? >> The sudden introduction of Gettler, the man in Venice with tape across half his glasses, feels last minute and false. But it's taken precisely from Fleming's novel: the same character (same name, with an eye patch instead) stalks Vesper in the last few chapters for similar reasons. >> One other tiny thing. When Vesper enters her account number into the banker's magic suitcase, we only hear three button beeps. I'm guessing the Treasury are a bit grown up for three digit account numbers.  

Worst Line: Hardly any. There are no cringe-worthy quips and the exposition is neatly and naturally woven through the film. The only line that sticks out a little is Bond's "The bitch is dead", which is taken straight from the novel.  

Best Line: Over dinner Vesper asks, "It doesn't bother you? Killing all those people?" Bond raises his Martini. "Well I wouldn't be very good at my job if it did." Bond sullenly orders a drink and the barman asks him if he'd prefer it shaken or stirred. "Do I look like I give a damn?" It's the best script probably ever and certainly the funniest since, oh, Thunderball? Lots of brilliant lines and every single conversation between Bond and Vesper crackles superbly. The exchange on the Pendolino is perhaps the very best. 

Worst Bond Moment: Bond flouts diplomatic neutrality to murder Mollaka the bomb-maker. Bond drives a Mondeo. Take your pick.    

Best Bond Moment: Let's just pick a few of the best ones, shall we? Bond crashing through walls, chasing Mollaka, getting up and carrying on. Bond pranging the oaf's Range Rover in the club car park. Bond turning on the charm to melt the club's receptionist. Bond's DB5 seduction of Solange. "I love you too, M." Bond examining himself in the mirror in his new dinner jacket. Bond haring after the kidnapped Vesper in his DBS. Bond's composure when M calls him to ask where the money is. The best bit, of course, is Bond stepping forward over the fallen Mr White and answering his question.    

Overall: After a twenty film franchise in which everything had become locked down with suffocating familiarity, EON throw off the shackles and give us the original James Bond story. Despite being skilfully updated for post-9/11 sensibilities Casino Royale is a remarkably faithful adaptation that restores Fleming's credible, thinking, wounded 007 to the screen. This is as good as it gets.    

James Bond Will Return: to wrap up some enticing loose ends in Quantum of Solace.