Brief notes on Skyfall

[firecat]

I really enjoyed Skyfall. It's very cool that they made a Bond film where...


...Bond and almost everyone else fail at almost everything they set out to do, and I'm still cheering and thinking Bond is the greatest agent ever. Also where M dies but I'm not pissed off because Judi got a co-starring role.

I liked how they played with the various Bond tropes. Also it passes the Bechdel test handily.

Comments

[firecat]

That post has some excellent points. I didn't read the sex scene in question as coercive in the same way that he did (see this comment if you want to know how I read it), and I also didn't read the other relationship as "chaste" (see this comment). And yeah, there were certainly exploitative elements in the death scene he discusses; it further developed that Bond is unfit for duty, but that could have been developed another way.

It's weird. Normally that stuff bugs me. But in this movie it didn't bug me as much. I think the reasons are these: except for the sex worker character, all the women in the movie are powerful in the same way the men are (they fight and kill, they are in danger and they rescue people from danger, they have sexual agency, they give orders, they have public roles). Another reason is that almost all the characters, male and female, are incompetent at times in ways that have big plot consequences. And almost all of them act like assholes in ways that have plot consequences. So there isn't for me a sense that the movie is about men being agents while women are primarily there to be sources of manpain and/or to be baby vessels and/or to help/hinder in little ways behind the scenes, which is what bugs me about many movies.

[jiawen]

Thank you! That's all very helpful, especially about them all being powerful in the same ways -- I may have to see it in the theater after all.