Barry Norman could be right – Skyfall may just be the best Bond film ever

We had a little treat last night. I went out and got some fish and chips and then we fired up Skyfall on Sky’s On Demand service. As I’d missed the title sequence due to faffing around with the grub, I decided to watch the opening five minutes again this lunchtime – and ended up watching the whole damn thing once more from beginning to end, enjoying it even more the second time. What a great film!

Casino Royale was a commendable attempt to reinvent Bond for the Noughties. Quantum of Solace opted for ruthless violence and a plethora of breathlessly-edited action sequences, but somehow the essence of Bond – the Scottish directness, the ironic humour and casual cruelty of someone educated at an English boarding school – got lost along the way: to employ an analogy I once used to describe Bert Weedon’s attempts at rock ‘n’ roll, Daniel Craig’s second outing felt as if someone had described old Bond movies to everyone involved, but they hadn’t actually got round to watching any of them.

The makers of Quantum of Solace were evidently panicked by the frenzied pace of the Bourne films – but that only works if the central character is a cipher, a machine, as Bourne is meant to be. I also suspect the sheer glowering thuggishness of Daniel Craig’s face led them astray. Let’s face it, he looks more like a vertically-challenged Eastern European gangster than a former Royal Navy Commander – you can see him as a Russian oligarch dropping his son off by helicopter at Eton, but you can’t imagine him as one of Dave or Boris’s class-mates.

With Skyfall, we’re never in any doubt that the writers, actors, producers and, most of all, the director, have watched every second of every Bond film many times over – and absolutely adored them. Sam Mendes wasn’t looking over his shoulder at rival action movie franchises – he was looking at old Bond films. Realising there was no way his leading man was going to replicate Sean Connery’s charm or his elegant, panther-like menace (let alone his height), he decided to use the fact that Daniel Craig is a far better actor than anyone who has previously played Bond to the film’s advantage – after all, there’s no point in employing someone who can really act and then giving them a script more suited to Vin Diesel.

So Mendes slowed the pace down a few notches. There’s still tons of carefully choreographed violence, but the editing isn’t of the Tourette’s variety that causes epileptic seizures in audiences: the camera’s allowed to linger, scenes are allowed to develop, and accomplished actors like Judi Dench, Ralph Fiennes and Javier Bardem are actually allowed to do a bit of, you know… acting. Not too much, of course – this is, after all, an action movie. But enough for us to make some sort of emotional connection with their characters.

Apart from that, the secret to the resonance of this glorious film lies in the many unlaboured touches that put the whole thing in its historical context. We’re not just cheering this particular Bond or booing this specific baddie – we’re booing and cheering all of them, stretching back over fifty years. Mendes’s real genius here is they way he calls up all our memories of all the great Bond films – especially the first three, before Connery made the disastrous decision not to trim his exceedingly hairy eyebrows.

SPOILER ALERT: if you're one of the handful of people who haven't yet seen Skyfall, the rest of this post may jeopardise your enjoyment of the film when you finally make its acquaintance.

For instance, when Craig’s Bond “kidnaps” Judi Dench’s M and takes her to a secret lock-up in order to change cars, the light comes on to reveal that Aston Martin DB5. As they drive off in it, we hear the original Bond ur-theme, and the sound and the image together stir up our shared memories as effectively as a madeleine dipped in tea. I know how wet this is going to sound – but it actually brought a tear of delight to my eye:

Later, as the first wave of Javier Bardem’s army of henchmen appear at the Bond ancestral home with a view to killing our hero and his boss, Craig mows them down with the Aston’s built-in machine guns, first seen in Goldfinger.

Then, when Bond, inside the house, sees that Bardem has destroyed the Aston – the one thing (apart from his country) which Bond truly loves – rage crosses his face, another original Bond theme swells up, and we know his camp nemesis will soon be mincing off this mortal coil.

The title sequence is up there with Goldfinger’s – the song, “Skyfall”, could have been composed by John Barry, the Chinese dragons are wonderfully exotic and Bond shooting holes in his own multiple shadows is intriguing.

In his first Bond film, Daniel Craig, when asked whether he wants his vodka martini shaken or stirred, snarls, “Do I look like I give a damn?” In Skyfall, he watches a female bartender preparing his drink in the prescribed fashion in a Macau casino and rewards her with the purred response, “Perfect!”

Right at the end, when the latest Bond girl, who unfortunately shot him earlier in the film, and has decided to eschew field-work in favour of becoming M’s PA, finally gets round to telling Craig her name, it turns out to be Eve Moneypenny. Lovely touch.

One of the many things that felt so right about Skyfall was how much of the action takes place in Britain - in London and the Highlands, to be exact. In fact, I’m sure there are more references to Bond’s Britishness – of a serious rather than whince-inducing “Cool Britannia” nature – than in all the previous films put together. M even delivers a lengthy quote from Tennyson, which refers both to MI6, to herself, and to Britain:

Tho’ much is taken, much abides; and though
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

On a lighter note – and in keeping with the general sense of homecoming – when Javier Bardem arrives in the Highlands for the final showdown, his heavily-armed helicopter is blasting out the John Lee Hooker song, “Boom Boom”. But the version used is the one released by a British group, The Animals, in 1964, between From Russia With Love and Goldfinger: another nice touch. I’m surprised to find myself applying the words patriotic and nostalgic to Skyfall.

Bond’s meeting with the new Q not only provides an excellent example of the quality of the script, but also underline one of the central themes of the film (of course, it’s odd to speak of a Bond film actually having a theme) – the tension between the new world of technocratic ladyboys and the old world of violent, hard-drinking, hairy-arsed, sexist blokes with guns. (Interesting that the line Sometimes, the old ways are the best is repeated twice in the film, by different characters – if that doesn’t amount to a theme, I don’t know what would):

I’ll leave you with one of my favourite quotes from George Orwell:

People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf. 

Come to think of it, they should get that into the next Bond movie.