[Enterprise Captain]

I personally felt this was the weakest of the Craig era Bond films. I think if you go threw all the Bond films the smaller scale ones that tell the more intimate stories work better than the big elaborate ones. Casino Royale still holds for me as one of the best.

Plot Details

I've seen "Skyfall" twice now and this wasn't really a movie about Bond it was far more about M. In premise it wasn't a bad idea but I don't think it was executed very well. They set up this elaborate web at the beginning of the film and the payoff was far too simple for my liking. As one reviewer put it "A stiff drink with a weak chaser" I didn't feel emotionally invested in the film. The impact of M's death at the end didn't move me as it should have, which makes me sad because I loved Judi Dench's M. I just felt like the whole movie was missing that Bond feel, I can't put my finger on it exactly. Also you can totally fell the Nolan Batman influence in this film, trying to make things epic with some grandiose message that they fell the need to beat you over the head with. In "The Dark Knight Rises" it was "Rich vs. Poor" in "Skyfall" it's "The old ways vs. the new ways," just because you keep repeating a message doesn't give the film more meaning or emotional impact. I got the message early on and got annoyed after hearing it over and over again just as I did with TDKR. It's like they think the audience is too stupid to figure it out. You could make a drinking game out the amount of times they mention it and finish a bottle of vodka by the end. I would have enjoyed more focus on the Bond/M relationship and those characters than the message. I think Bond works far better when it's personal. One of the greatest scenes for me that sums up Criag's Bond is in Quantum of Solace. Bond gets in to a brawl with an assassin in a Haitian hotel and ends up stabbing the guy in the leg cutting the femoral artery. The look on Craig's face as he watches the guy bleed out slowly in front of him is fantastic. It's a horrible image but it makes you feel a little bit of what it must be like to be this guy. On the plus side of things, "Skyfall" was visually stunning. I thought despite not feeling the emotional impact both Dench's and Craig's performances were still very good. I even enjoyed Javier Bardem's performance as the villain. I did like the fact that they addressed Bond aging but I didn't like the lack of explanation for Bond's survival at the beginning. The fall alone should have killed him. I also thought that might have been a set up when I saw the trailers but it ended up being a sort of cheap why to get him out of the picture for awhile. I'm really hoping the next one will get things back on track but only time will tell.