Yesterday I saw Skyfall, the third in the rebooted 007 franchise. I think my Five Word Review reflects how I feel about it.
Coincidentally, I also saw The Amazing Spider-Man on half term release at my local indie theatre (my Five Word Review for that one also self-explanatory).
After the disappointment that was Quantum of Solace (I still don't know what that even means!) and doubt about rebooting a franchise barely a decade after it began I was not expecting to enjoy either of these movies.
As it is I enjoyed both of them. Both had something new to bring to their universes, with Skyfall really feeling like Bond's apotheosis after 50 years of films.
So are Hollywood execs really being greedy money-grabbers, or are writers and directors getting to build on their predecessors' work for the first time?
Since Amazing Spider-Man was released first and I saw it first, it only seems fair to discuss the Wall Crawler first.
After various animated series and a hokey live-action series, Spider-Man hit the big screen in 2002 with Sam Raimi's Spider-Man starring Tobey Maguire as the web-slinger. The film was generally well received and took an impressive $821m at the box office. A sequel, unsurprisingly called Spider-Man 2, came out two years later and was, in my opinion the best of Raimi's Spidey films, before it all went horribly, horribly wrong in the laughable Spider-Man 3.
That Raimi, and possibly Maguire, had run his course on the Spider-Man franchise seemed to be the consensus. Spider-Man 4 entered production in 2008 but was scrapped in early 2010 and a reboot announced with Raimi's departure. Gavin Webb came on board as the new director almost immediately.
I for one was sceptical about announcing a reboot fewer than eight years after the first film was released. Positive noises from the casting helped, but I was intrigued when the budget announced was "only" $80m. Expecting not to enjoy the movie, I held off seeing it in its original theatrical run but, not wanting to pay for a DVD of a movie I didn't think I was going to like, elected to pay the £6.50 to see it at my local theatre.
Skip ahead a couple of hours, and I came out feeling it was a worthwhile experience. The meek Tobey Maguire was replaced with competent, but withdrawn Andrew Garfield, while way-out-of-his-league Mary Jane Watson became pretty-but-achievable Gwen Stacey (personally I think Emma Stone is more attractive than Kirsten Dunst, but that is what we are told).
Right away, I preferred the look of The Amazing Spider-Man. The world, stunts, locations and costumes felt far more grounded than Raimi's films, and gangly Andrew Garfield looked more like an acrobat in the home-made spidey suit. Elements brought to the fore in the Raimi films were dropped or not dwelt on in Webb's movie.
Rather than being the bullies' target, Garfield's Parker is not picked on, only coming to Flash's attention when Peter tries to stop him bullying another kid. That Flash gave Peter the opportunity to become one of them by inviting him to photography him tormenting the geek, and Peter's refusal to do so, made his character fundamentally different from Maguire's. Flash himself demonstrated a softer side in a surprisingly touching scene after Uncle Ben is killed. The more delinquent aspects of Peter's nature were brought to the fore, too. We can see his anger, fear and sense of abandonment by the disappearance of his parents. Uncle Ben and Aunt May (Martin Sheen and Sally Field) have to give him several stern talkings to about his behaviour. He can be selfish, forgetful and rude, not the perfect nephew shown in Spider-Man.
Similarly, Skyfall exceeded my expectations. Having heard the many good reviews of it, I dared to get my hopes up, but I have been tricked before.
It is fair to say I think this was the best Bond film by far. It hit all the notes just right, managing to be just ridiculous enough in places to stop it feeling as much like the Bourne films as Casino Royale did. A careful ratcheting of believability let the film take bold choices in some of the action scenes without bursting the sense of reality. It had the fun of the old Bond.
Bond himself really stood out for me, though. In the second half of the film, I started to feel he was being set up almost as London's Dark Knight. A late shot in the film of Bond looking over London's rooftops like a "watchful guardian, a silent protector" confirmed this for me. The sequence of Bond sprinting through London's streets while Dame Judi recites Tennyson's Ulysses gave me genuine chills. That it should have come out in London's Olympic year felt more than fitting.
I almost feel like Casino Royale, Quantum of Solace and Skyfall were setting up all the films that cam before them. Like this prequel trilogy was the origin story that brought Bond to where he was at the start of Dr No. It was only through the trial of fire in the previous films that he was now fit to become the world's greatest secret agent.
Part of me wishes this was the last Bond film. It just felt so narratively and structurally perfect that it seems like the high it should end on. Kind of like his riding off into the sunset like Indiana Jones at the end of The Last Crusade.
Something that worked particularly well for me was the way the film tried to distance itself from the Bonds of the past in the early stages. Whishaw's Q is derisory of the idea of an exploding pen, the hopelessly ineffective nature of on-the-ground agents in the information age is discussed and so on.
So (SPOILERS) when the Bond theme kicks in and the doors swing open to reveal the old Astin Martin (complete with ejector seat button), I couldn't help feel a rush of nostalgia an good will towards the film. The reveal that the car had twin machine guns behind the headlights took me by wonderful surprise. I actually laughed out loud in the theatre, and I swear there were cheers from the audience! Yet it never served to break the reality that the film had set up. I was still emotionally invested in the characters.
SPOILERS END.
The, for the first time, exploration of James' backstory and childhood also helped give me the feeling that the series had come full circle.
Although Bond has faced other 00s in the past (such as Sean Bean's 006 in GoldenEye) Javier Bardem fabulously outrageous Silva really felt like Bond's dark opposite. Like Bane in The Dark Knight Rises, Silva is what Bond could become if he made the wrong choices. As a result, he was the first genuinely interesting Bond villain. His personal motives stopped him feeling like a cartoon villain, and actually made him pitiable.
Spider-Man's villain also managed to stay the right side of stock villain. Like Doc Ock in Spider-Man 2, he wasn't evil, but had had something happen to him that made him dangerous.
On a side note, both these movies are pure fantasy. There is no attempt at gritty realism here, but both also manage to infuse their worlds with enough character and pathos that I care about what happens to all the characters, good and bad alike. It is interesting that Webb's previous film was a character-drive romance, while Mendes' history has been in character-driven films.
While The Amazing Spider-Man is called a reboot, I would personally be inclined to call it a remake - a word studiously avoided by those in charge - because, while it is drawing from source material created decades ago (so could be called another adapation of that original story as in Total Recall), it effectively tells the same story as Raimi's Spider-Man. Casino Royale and Batman Begins, however, were genuine reboots - they are telling stories never before committed to screen and wiping away decades of continuity with it.
So do these movies simply cannibalise what has come before, or do they represent a genuine addition to the story's respective universes? And are the studios that create them driven by art or profit?
Of course, the answer is profit. Somewhere along the line, The Amazing Spider-Man's budget nearly tripled to $230m, while Skyfall had a healthy $150m to play with. The fact is, at these costs, the studios can't afford to simply make a "worthwhile" picture - it has to be commercially viable, too. With the Bond franchise the highest grossing in history until Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, and Spider-Man in the Top 10 both are properties their respective studios (who incidentally swapped the rights to their respective characters) would want to keep in active service.
These movies would have been made whether or not they were any good - as long as they were profitable, they would be released. A franchise only really dies when the cost of creating sequels, prequels, off-shoots, reboots and remakes exceeds the amount of money they bring in.
However, I like to think the writers, directors, cast and crew involved still strive to create something worthwhile, and this is where the reboot/remake phenomenon can actually help a franchise creatively.
Everyone knows the origin story of Spider-Man, we saw it just a decade ago. Bond has at least 22 films to his name. Where can you go with a character like that?
That pressure to come up with new and interesting takes on the characters has forced the creators to break new ground with them. It is not simply enough to tell an origin story any more - it has to be expanded on.
With visual effects no longer a draw in and of themselves (we've seen it all by now), creators seem to be looking inward for their stories, exploring character, motivation and decisions. Whether by design or as a result of the pressure of trying to mine something different enough from the source material to make a movie people will still pay their hard-earned cash to see, it has the happy by-product of giving us more emotionally enriching experiences.
Where these movies can go once that process it complete and it has to regenerate again (2020, anyone?) remains to be seen, but or the time being producers seem to be able to build higher on the foundations of the movies that have come before. And go to interesting places maybe they would not have had the incentive to do first time around.
They may never recapture the glamour, and thrill of their first screen outings, but they can still be worthwhile additions. All of which makes Tennyson's words feel remarkably apt:
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
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