Obiter Dicta Issue 7 - November 24, 2015 | Seite 15

ARTS & CULTURE

Tuesday, November 24, 2015   15

Spectre
The Old Bond Is Back For Better Or Worse

ê Photo credit: Comingsoon.com
Final Rating:
anthony choi › staff writer

A

fter the immense success and critical
acclaim of Skyfall, it was almost inevitable that the subsequent Bond movie would
fall short of many a moviegoer’s heightened
expectations. Unfortunately, Spectre would not only
do just that, but fall even further thanks to a combination of questionable writing and an incredibly farfetched plot.
Spectre starts off with great promise with an
attention-grabbing, visually impressive fight scene
that has become so characteristic of the franchise. However, the bad news is that the film
would only go downhill from there, as the
entire plot left something to be desired. One
of the prime reasons is the writers’ strained
attempt to tie together all of Daniel Craig’s
past Bond films in a narrative web that was
unconvincing to say the least: all the villains from
all the prior movies actually turned out to be mere
pawns of this greater super-evil organization, which
has somehow acquired enormous resources and
power, and yet nobody has even heard of. Ironically,
this lack of believability actually made Quantum of
Solace, with its plausible real-world manipulations,
feel like more of an actual threat and Spectre more
like Dr. Evil’s Virtucon in comparison.

The second strike against Spectre is that the storyline began to feel drearily repetitive. Bond once
again has to go pseudo-rogue for the second time
in four films to uncover a secret. This secret, as it
turns out, has astonishingly personal ties, and the
movie becomes yet another revenge story about a
jealous individual who shares a background history
with the main character, and has turned evil—a formula that has been beaten into the ground lately by
Hollywood (see Batman, Superman, Star Trek).

The most glaring issue about this new Bond

“. . .the storyline began to feel
drearily repetitive.”
instalment, however, is that the franchise, after
using the reboot to bring 007 into the modern era
with a darker, realistic, and grittier Bond, and dropping the mounting absurdity that was slowly but
surely making the series a joke (see Die Another
Day), all of a sudden returns in essence to the latter.
This is not to say that a less-grounded, somewhat
over-the-top Bond is necessarily a bad thing—I will
admit that I personally enjoyed a number of the

campy Roger Moore films (even Moonraker), but
probably because I saw it more as a product of its
time and, as such, had much different expectations
than a movie made today. However, after establishing this new Bond with Daniel Craig, returning to a Roger Moore-esque Bond not only feels like
a shot out of left field, but campy 007 and realistic
and gritty 007 mix about as well as oil and water.
In fact, the entire film was punctuated with strained
homages to previous Bo