He appears to respect women and the women he is entangled with are seldom helpless damsels. There is much that has changed about James Bond. The closest that a Bond has ever come to terrorists is when Timothy Dalton forms an alliance with Afghan Mujahideen in a naïve age when the Mujahideen were not called terrorists but allies. And what puts terrorists on top of the hierarchy is that they have a powerful reason to die, a reason that a mere criminal syndicate headed by an insane man with a trace of activist altruism does not possess. It is not that there is no other serious criminal syndicate in the world other than religious terrorists it is just that the hierarchy of brutality and villainy is now set in public perception. James Bond, on the other hand, is fighting a comic band of European men in fine suits, fantasy villains who are in the genre of zombies and Lord Voldemort. His suicide squads were insane men in modified SUVs who believed they were pursuing a moral goal, and they charged across a desert with nothing much to live for on Earth - they were the Islamic State (IS).įury Road does not devote much time to explain the history or the psychology of the desert kingdom because we know exactly what is going on - a handler who wishes to live well, women slaves who wish to escape, male suicide squads who wish to die, all entrapped in a delusion. The arch villain of the story was a brutal chieftain who could delude his men with drugs and faith to kill themselves for a chrome afterlife. That was the wisdom George Miller’s Mad Max: Fury Road possessed. A superhero might be a farce but a superhero who is not fighting Islamic terror is a parody of the farce. Spectre looks silly because it tries to escape the fact that the greatest terror of our times is terror in the name of Islam. Spectre, like many recent Hollywood movies, tries to achieve darkness of plot through dim-lighting, while darkness is often an effect of stark truth, as evident in, say, Body of Lies. (Such a lame scene compared to kissing, according Pahlaj Nihalani, that he has let kids watch it.) The boss of the syndicate sits in the shadows - he is in the shadows from every angle even though the room is lit. Members of the Spectre syndicate sit around a long table and discuss business, which includes a woman saying something to this effect - “We’re doing well, we’re winning”.Īt some point in the discussion a large man gouges out the eyes of a smaller man. As an acronym from the Bond lore, it is even less terrifying, in fact a bit amusing as though it is a real job description in some Indian television news channels - Special Executive for Counter-intelligence, Terrorism, Revenge and Extortion. Spectre is a beautiful and ancient word that could once frighten the discerning, but in these times, in the age of visuals, when the most gruesome reality is available for viewing any time, ‘spectre’ just means something low-res with a British spelling. As they are in the latest, Spectre, a film that wishes to terrify without offending anyone. At any rate, this one is coming on Novemcourtesy of Sony, so prepare for a Holiday night out at the movies when this one hits stateside.The evil that James Bond fights is always secular and that somehow means the Bond villains are usually Christian. Will there be more after this? Well, you’re guess is as good as mine, but considering how long and hard people have fought to keep this franchise alive, it seems only necessary as part of our global DNA in the history of film. Nonetheless, there’s no question here as to the amount of entertainment we will be in for with the scale of these movies only getting bigger and bigger with each film bringing us closer to knowing our hero just a little more before adding further layers of intrigue – This, all while keeping us at the edge of our brainseats with morsels of intrigue, espionage, beautiful femme fatales and thrilling, big scale action sequences that signify all that sustain the freshness of the Bond brand. Ultimately, we’re bound to find out just how returning director Sam Mendes‘s take on the pin-pointed rebooting of classic elements for the new Bond movies as of late will bode with audiences critical and fond of the franchise as a whole. While M battles political forces to keep the secret service alive, Bond peels back the layers of deceit to reveal the terrible truth behind SPECTRE. A cryptic message from Bond’s past sends him on a trail to uncover a sinister organisation.
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