The villain
keeps dropping cryptic messages on M's laptop: "Think on your sins.' M realizes it is an agent that she, the Mom,
had "abandoned' in a prison "to die like a rat'. Bardem is convincing as an evil villain, with
bleach blond hair and shades of Anthony Hopkins from "Silence of the Lambs', especially
when he speaks with a Spanish accent and wishes to destroy a revered British
institution.
M and MI6
come under scrutiny and governmental review.
Unable to keep up with the new cyberthreats, her boss Mallory (Ralph
Feinnes) tries to push M out, while urging Bond to remain dead. M vows to hang in there with her favorite
agent. When she is in the process of
explaining the nature of the new threat as dangerous and opaque at a public
hearing, the British parliament itself comes under attack. Both M and Bond find themselves scurrying for
Winston Churchill's hidden bunker, with the help of a hi-tech Q (Ben Wishaw), in
London's subterranean tunnel system.
Mendes
wanted to make a Bond film at the edge of the contemporary reality, thrusting Bond
into the age of terrorism and cyber warfare, while revealing his true character.
" In this movie Bond is pushed to the limit, it kills him
in a sense, brings him back and he's a shadow of his former self," Mendes said.
This is why, perhaps, the British critics have almost unanimously found this
Bond more real and appealing.
When Bond
suddenly turns up at his estate in Scotland, his housekeeper Kincaid (Albert
Finny) who has not seen him in many years asks, "What are you doing here?"
"Some people are trying to kill us. We will kill them first," replies Bond.
Adelle (Grammy-winning
Bond aficionado) lends her silky voice to an ode to the end of the world as we
know it:
This is the end
Hold your breath and count to ten
Feel the earth move".
Let the Skyfall, when it crumbles
We will stand tall, and face it all together
At the Skyfall
Dinesh Sharma is the author of
"Barack Obama in Hawaii and Indonesia: The Making of a Global President", which
was rated as the Top 10 Black history books for 2012. His next book on
President Obama, "Crossroads of Leadership: Globalization and American Exceptionalism
in the Obama Presidency", is due to be published with Routledge Press.
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