Naomie Harris and Daniel Craig in 007's Skyfall.

Agent 007 James Bond (Daniel Craig) returns to his roots in Skyfall, defending the MI6 agency to which he’s always had steadfast dedication, even while gallantly enjoying its bachelor benefits. On home turf, Bond restores all of us to our pop culture roots; Skyfall’s national security plot, combining an arch villain’s (Javier Bardem) threats to Q (Judi Dench), then breaching Bond’s ancestral residence, carries affectionate—even cultural—resonance. The sense of adventure is stabilizing and feels good.

Skyfall’s success isn’t a surprise. It should probably be the first Bond film to win a Best Picture Oscar—not because it’s the best (Goldfinger and On Her Majesty’s Secret Service are still the series’ high points)—but because Skyfall maintains quality popular filmmaking in an era that’s lost sight of what that means.

Exactly what it means can be seen in the fascinating promotional documentary Everything Or Nothing, which details the history of the James Bond franchise from its inception as a Cold War spy novel by British journalist Ian Fleming then adapted by Harry Saltzman and Albert Broccoli, intrepid American film producers who shared the dream of a popular entertainment featuring manly daring, sexual suavity and a subtle sense of political purpose. That this Anglo-American commercial enterprise would result in a 50-year globally admired venture that morphs yet without changing speaks to the marvel of the West’s pop culture dominance.

That dominance is at stake in Skyfall’s plot involving a Wikileaks-style enemy whose nefarious personal crusade and terrorist attack on MI6 heralds a new breed of international threat. (Javier Bardem is spectacular in this role; superior to his performance in No Country For Old Men.) Sizing up her enemies, Q says, “They’re not nations, they’re individuals”—which was also true for the old Bond villains but now takes on the modern sense of social chaos that was unconscionably exploited in Chris Nolan’s Batman movies. But Skyfall avoids nihilism by hewing to a code of valor that extends from Fleming to Saltzman and Broccoli.

That code never changes despite having six other faces on its brand. As Everything Or Nothing shows, each Bond actor lent his own personal integrity. Daniel Craig follows that tradition. His brutalized face and cold eyes personify our acceptance of killing more than Connery’s camp glamour and sophistication. Yet, after the spectacular opening stunt, Craig bounds into a moving train and snaps his tuxedo cuffs with terrific élan. Bond’s urbanity bests the Dark Knight’s affluent yet sophomoric pessimism; the world is in safe hands—as is the idea of entertainment.

Most movie chases are alike, and the Bond movies have set the standard for all action thrillers—Road Warrior, Indiana Jones and even the Transporter flicks are just a few that display the Bond influence. The level of stylistic commitment in the Bond films is reassuring. It takes an ace team (including producer Barbara Broccoli), because director Sam Mendes (American Beauty, Road to Perdition) knows nothing about this kind of cinema. Joe Wright’s Hanna showed genuine style, and Luc Besson and his cadre have revolutionized action tropes, quickening their purpose, while Skyfall clicks efficiently. The opening escapade introduces a Bond-girl sidekick (Naomie Harris), which enriches what would be routine; that humane flourish sets the tone for Mendes’ foray into genre.

It might have gone badly—imagine Mike Nichols pinch-hitting an Indiana Jones film. But Skyfall features more character nuances than Craig’s previous Bond movies: Harris’ role, along with vivid participation from Judi Dench, Ralph Fiennes, Albert Finney, Ben Wishaw and Bardem display Mendes’ striking  interest in actors.

Mendes is lucky. Skyfall is his first film on home turf, and he knows how these people talk and how they relate to the environs of metropolitan London (including a brief stint among the J.M.W. Turners at the Tate Museum) and the Scottish countryside. It adds to the story’s personal feel. These well-tailored Tories fighting an internal security breach and “a war we can’t understand and can’t possibly win” sounds sufficiently post-9/11, which makes Skyfall a modern version of the British WWII homefront movie Went the Day Well? as much as a Bond installment.

When Bond escorts Q in the fabled Aston Martin, Skyfall also carries us back to the past—our pop culture past where entertainment wasn’t merely frivolous. Skyfall plays with heritage and personal homeland defense but those ideas are no richer than Mission: Impossible: Ghost Protocol. Fortunately, the movie looks terrific. Roger Deakins photographs a silhouetted assassin brawl in a skyscraper and a sequence of red-gold pagodas at night like Robert Burks did It Takes a Thief—for sheer splendor.

In Everything Or Nothing, Fleming’s first book is referred to as “the autobiography of a dream.” This speaks to how the Bond film series epitomized desire and satisfaction. As an expression of Western hegemony, the series isn’t just commercial; its good work translates to all territories. In the real world, espionage ain’t pretty, but when James Bond wins, it’s a global victory.

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Bond’s pursuit of nefarious industrialist Dominic Greene (Mathieu Almaric) uncovers the usual international

The bulging biceps of Daniel Craig in Quantum.

subterfuge—Greene’s plan for world domination involves an ecological crisis. But this topical angle is merely embellishment, like director Marc Forster’s studied attempt at thrill-ride filmmaking. He seems to have studied only the Bourne movies. Quantum’s action-scene overture is Bourne-blurry with none of the visual elegance and physical wit of the parkour fight sequence that opened Casino Royale.

No matter, the series’ growth happens more subtly. Toward the end of the globe-trotting escapades (each new locale is announced with distinctive eye-catching graphics), it’s possible to assess Bond’s personalized course of action. Paired with Camille (Olga Kurylenko), a questionable enemy/ally with her own motives for pursuing Greene, Bond’s vendetta comes into clearer focus. And here’s where Daniel Craig’s acting prowess makes a difference.

In movies, physiognomy is often character. Craig has a flat, round English face like Ringo Starr or Thom Yorke but with a fighter’s toughness. Even when he wears a tuxedo he doesn’t have Sean Connery’s elegance. Casino Royale may have made Craig an S&M pin-up of the new male-model era but Craig’s on-screen power is as working class as his strong performances in Infamous, Munich and Love is the Devil proved. Through old-school international film-industry apparatus Connery was groomed to cross British imperialism with Playboy magazine upward mobility, but Craig’s Bond represents the Empire’s undisguised crudeness. One minute into Quantum, behind the wheel of his Aston-Martin, he’s already scratched. When he’s shirtless, scars decorate his muscled torso like tattoos. It’s instructive to see this rough-trade Bond prioritize privilege, telling a budget-conscious M1 operative “I’d rather die” then hide in a flophouse—he registers at Bolivia’s Andean Grand Hotel instead. Killing has been the source of Bond’s class advancement and refined taste. Because he’s a soldier and not an etiolated British noble, his guttersnipe aspect gives the series a sociological back story. It’s now a socially and emotionally resonant myth.

When Bond fights a guy on a balcony and coldly watches him die—with his hands still on him—it’s imperative that Quantum take Bond absolutely seriously. Nodding toward environmentalism is less significant than this personalized study of vengeance. Quantum forces us to consider what revenge will do for Bond—and for us. In Dr. No Ursula Andress gasped at a man’s death as Connery looked the other way. The 1960s Bond didn’t need to ponder moral rectitude because his political battles were clear-cut—we knew what espionage meant. But when Quantum gets politically explicit it’s as morally confused as most contemporary political films. (Jeffrey Wright’s CIA agent asks “What would South America be like without coke or Communism?”—rather disingenuous for a global brand-name serial that trafficks in mayhem.)

These complications confound the series, which may explain why Quantum evokes the great Shirley Eaton icon from Goldfinger in a mortifying way. Reworking the Bond imagery keeps the franchise going, but it must be meaningful. Recent action pictures like Luc Besson’s Hitman have already stolen the series’ chic, just as the Indiana Jones films have usurped its fun. Craig takes Bond beyond fun. Quantum offers the in-process restructuring of a pop myth.
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Quantum of Solace
Directed by Marc Forster, Running Time: 106 min.
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