Tuesday, January 12, 2016

007: Spectre's redundant last act.

A couple of weeks ago I managed to see 'Spectre', the latest outing in the James Bond franchise. It took me quite a while before I saw the movie, because I was so disappointed in Daniel Craig's previous Bond film 'Skyfall'.

Having now finally seen the film, I have to say that I enjoyed watching 'Spectre' a bit more than I enjoyed watching 'Skyfall'. At least this film had quite a few enjoyable moments that even managed to make some sense.

There are good things that can be said about 'Spectre' and also not that good things that need to be said too. The writers of the film should have been able to figure out at least some of these obvious problems that I managed to notice.

In any case, one of the things that I liked about the film is that it was pretty down to earth this time. Craig's 007 in my opinion works best when the plots aren't too far fetched and that you can actually spend time with the character.

I liked how the filmmakers tried to reveal something about the character's past that we didn't know that much about. I especially liked how Bond tried to figure out what 'Spectre' meant and who are the people behind it.

I liked the 'bond'-girl in the movie, which is something that unfortunately doesn't happen that often.  I also liked 'Q':s character a lot and didn't really have anything against Blofeld's character or his WWE henchman Batista.

Also I liked how the action scenes weren't mostly about silly cgi-effects that some of the worst Bond movies have been about. I liked how these scenes - especially in the middle of the film - kept pushing the story forward.

There were however a lot of things that I didn't like about the movie at all. These problems with the film helped me to understand why many of the critics didn't rate Spectre' that high either (64% fresh at rottentomatoes).

The biggest problem with the movie is that it was too long and it didn't know when to stop. By that I mean that after Bond destroys Spectre's lab in the middle of the desert, the film had structurally reached its climax.

Unfortunately 'Spectre' didn't end there, since the film kept going on for another 25-30 minutes and had another act that was completely unnecessary. We didn't need the stuff that happened after its 'real' climax.

It wasn't necessary to see 'Q' hacking into the 'new' Mi6 and it wasn't needed that 'C' turned out to be a villain too. The kidnapping of the Bond girl was a horrendous a plot twist and Blofeldt resufarcing didn't get my approval either. 

The film just went on and on way past its time which made me pretty frustrated and angry. The fact that the writers didn't see this obvious problem with the movie's script is something that I'll probably never understand.

All in all, Spectre could have been a really solid movie had the writers understood how the structure works. Instead, what we got was a disappointing Bond film where the writers - as unfortunate as it is - didn't believe in their story enough.

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