Skyfall

Last night I went to see Skyfall with my family. As this night out was funded by my parents I decided to come along, but I wouldn’t have seen this film on my own initiative. I’m tired of Hollywood’s constant sequels, especially they’ve been exploiting the James Bond franchise for fifty years now.

The trailers before the start of the film reinforced my belief, Iron Man 3 and Taken 2 are upcoming films. To be totally honest Taken 2 actually sounds interesting because Taken was cool, and if they keep limited to only one sequel I won’t complain. But as said before, generally I’m more interested in films which are not made by Hollywood.

The film delivered what I expected it to deliver: reasonable film, but not worth my time either. However, the excessive appeal to suspension of disbelief seriously annoyed me. While that is acceptable to some degree, it was so bad it made the film incredulous. Some examples:

  • The fight on top of the train was filmed at the Varda Viaduct. It is 98 meters high. Bond is fighting Patrice who had just shot him, gets shot by Eve accidentally and falls of the train into the canyon. For comparison, the deck of the Golden Gate bridge is 75 meters above the water and approximately 98% people who jump from there don’t survive, mostly because they don’t survive the impact they make on the water. While almost all of these people want to commit suicide, we don’t see Bond attempting to minimize the force of the impact he will make on the water either. Shot twice and falling from over 100 meters (if we add the height of the train), we are to believe he still survived?
  • After accidentally shooting Bond, you’d say Eve starts shooting at the Patrice as there is plenty of time to do so. Instead she starts agonizing over the mistake, allowing the train to reach a tunnel. She was using what looked like an M4, an automatic rifle which usually has a magazine with 30 rounds, so there was plenty of opportunity to shoot more.
  • Later in the film we learn that Patrice shot Bond with a depleted uranium bullet (strangely, getting shot by Eve apparently caused no injury). But why would you use depleted uranium in handguns? Wikipedia tells us that depleted uranium is only used in high caliber anti armor rounds. Much later after getting back to MI6 Bond cuts open his chest to extract the bullet fragments. If he doesn’t let a surgeon do it anyway, why did he not do it as soon as possible after surviving the fall? Depleted uranium is not exactly a safe substance to have embedded in your chest, you know. And of course only three bad guys in the world use depleted uranium rounds for small arms so they can be easily discovered by MI6.
  • Silva blows up a part of the MI6 building by turning on the gas after breaching their network. Such a building would have been constructed with no security protocols to prevent gas explosions? How could the gas leak, and how was it ignited at the right time, exactly?
  • When Silva escapes to the metro it doesn’t cross their minds to simply stop the train he is hiding in. When Silva is climbing a ladder in London’s metro system he is caught by Bond who aims his handgun at him. Bond simply allows Silva to press a button to detonate a bomb in the subway, which sends a train on a collision course with Bond. This provides enough distraction for Silva to escape. Bond could have shot him easily but does nothing.
  • And the most annoying of all, the Hollywood operating systems and the absence of computer security at MI6. More films are guilty of this, but Skyfall crosses the line. Q searches through Silva’s laptop which somehow allows Silva to crack the MI6 systems. That would have been impossible if he didn’t connect Silva’s laptop to the MI6 network with the UTP cables.

It appears I’m not the only one who is annoyed by the sequence of implausibilities. The script writers were obviously lazy as the script could have been written without all the unlikely events and assault on logic. No matter how good reviewers think the next installment in the James Bond franchise will be, I promise myself I won’t see it under any circumstance. I won’t pay for any more sequels, let them think of something new.

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