Rewatchables Reference

• Silva and Bond meet for the first time – the sustained one-take rat speech. 'He completely fucks this movie up so hard.' Mendes and Deakins shoot it perfectly, starting from behind Bond's shoulder as Silva comes down an elevator from 40 feet away. They knew what they had and just let us have it.
• The Shanghai skyscraper shadow fight – jellyfish projections in the background, silhouettes fighting. 'That should be in the National Gallery.' Some of the most beautiful fighting ever filmed.
• The tube chase through London – grounded action where you understand the stakes and motivations. The subway train crash is a genuine surprise.
• Q and Bond meeting at the National Gallery – 'Age is no guarantee of efficiency, and youth is no guarantee of innovation.' Well-written cross-purposes dialogue while looking at a Turner painting.
• M reading Tennyson before Parliament intercut with Craig sprinting through London – 'We are not now that strength which in old days moved earth and heaven... strong in will, to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield'.
• The 'Skyfall' estate preparations – Bond, M, and Kincaid planning. 'Some men are coming to kill us. We're going to kill them first.' 'Then we'd better get ready.' Pure Eastwood energy.

• Judi Dench at 77 – 'just does just enough to give it a little bit of extra meaning and depth and emotion. But never takes the scene over.' Her standing over six coffins is one of the most iconic trailer shots.
• The Adele song – 'feels like it's 100 years old and also incredibly modern.' Wins the category unanimously. Oscar-winning all-timer.
• The locations – Istanbul, London, Scotland. Very sensible compared to Bond movies set inside volcanoes. This is a 'Board of Tourism' Bond and it works because the locations are central to the theme of Englishness.
• Roger Deakins' cinematography – 'if this movie came out today, I'd be like this is cutting-edge shit.' Hasn't aged a day.
• The cast from top to bottom – 'not a single error made.' Everyone is overqualified: Dench, Fiennes, Whishaw, Bardem. Most of the MI6 actors have played Hamlet.
• The idea of casting a prestige director for a franchise movie – led to Ryan Coogler doing 'Creed' and Black Panther instead of pursuing indie prestige projects.
• Albert Finney's last film performance – 'the perfect kind of role for a guy at his age and his career'.
• Daniel Craig's wardrobe – the Tom Ford suits, the training tracksuit ('this is how Rod Laver trained'), the Scotland Barbour jackets and boots. Ben Whishaw's sweater and parka also noteworthy.

• The hacking plot – M clicking suspicious links, Ben Whishaw having to explain hacking on a giant screen, the stylized Pac-Man ghost animation. 'There's nothing interesting about watching somebody watch a screen'.
• The Sévérine plotline – she reveals she's a survivor of sex trafficking, and Bond's response is to sneak up on her in the shower. 'It's not a good look.' Especially problematic because the movie is otherwise so purposeful about raising emotional stakes.
• Naomi Harris as Moneypenny – feels like she's in a different, lighter movie. 'She's a little jaunty' while everyone else is really depressed. Her arc from field agent to desk secretary is supposed to feel cool but is also 'totally weird'.
• Imperialism – the movie is explicitly about the British Empire and its sins, which hits different post-Brexit.

• Sean Connery was in discussions to play Kincaid – they wisely decided the stunt casting would be too distracting. Nobody wants to see old feeble Sean Connery, plus it would turn Bond into an MCU-style interconnected universe.
• Kevin Spacey was originally approached for Mallory, thanks to his American Beauty connection with Mendes. That would have been a very different movie (and aged even worse).

Ben Whishaw as Q – a great reinvention of the character, making him younger than Bond for the first time. He's bringing a lot to every scene, especially the National Gallery meeting. Was right when he was starring on the BBC show The Hour.

Javier Bardem – Amanda argues his performance is 'the performance of the decade' and calling it overacting is wrong. Sean says everyone in the movie is so muted that Bardem seems more outsized by comparison. But he's 'making the movie' – it's not overacting, it's the point. They reluctantly give it to the boat captain who sticks his head in to suggest pushing off, just before Bond sneaks into the shower.

• Helen McCrory (Polly from Peaky Blinders) as the minister questioning Dench – wins the award. Renamed the 'Denholm Elliott Award' for this episode.
• Rory Kinnear as Tanner – 'in pretty much every good television show to come out of England.' To most people he's 'the guy who fucked the pig on Black Mirror'.
• Ola Rapace (Noomi Rapace's ex-husband) as Patrice – a well-known actor in Sweden who gets tossed off a building.

• Yale professor Stephen Carter's theory that Silva is M's adopted son: 'Raoul Silva' is an anagram for 'arrival soul,' and 'think on your sins' is an anagram for 'your son isn't in HK (Hong Kong)'.
• The 'code name theory' – that James Bond is a code name used by different individuals, not one continuous person. The hosts are skeptical but acknowledge 'Skyfall' plays with this idea.
• Before 'Skyfall', Peter Morgan wrote a darker rejected script where M had an actual biological son who rose against her – the adopted-son theme survived into the final version.
• Alternative titles considered: Silver Bullet, A Killing Moon, Once Upon a Star, Once Upon a Spy.
• The Macau casino interiors were actually Pinewood Studios. Production visited China, Turkey, and locations all over England and Scotland (Glencoe).
• Silva's island is based on Hashima, an abandoned mining town off the coast of Nagasaki – a real place you can visit (with questionable 3G).

• Daniel Craig – opened the London Olympics as Bond, starred in a $1.1 billion movie considered the best Bond ever. 'Has he done enough with it?' Knives Out is great but 'objectively not the same amount of power'.
• Sam Mendes – probably earlier (right after American Beauty), but 'Skyfall' completely reset his career after Away We Go flopped.
• Javier Bardem – after his Oscar for No Country, this felt more like 'I can still do this if I want to' than a new peak.

• Bond wearing khakis in bed after sex in Turkey – 'who has ever put on khakis after sex and gotten back in bed?' No underwear khakis is especially impractical.
• If you're pretending to be dead, you probably shouldn't entertain an entire bar doing scorpion tricks.
• They sold his apartment while he was 'dead' – 'I'd be really fucking mad'.
• The agents list is on one hard drive – even in 2012 that seems wrong. And hackers revealing agents via YouTube is questionable.
• Q and Tanner laying a 'top secret' breadcrumb trail on the giant screen of the computer that just got hacked, with the lights on, in the middle of headquarters.
• Can you strangle a guy with your knee underwater? Daniel Craig is not the tallest guy – 'from a lever situation, I don't know'.
• James Bond tells everyone his name constantly while being an international secret operative. Just walk up and shoot him in the face – 'I feel like I'm Scott Evil right now'.

What was Silva's full relationship with M? She gives one perfunctory line about cutting him loose in Hong Kong for six agents. But what really transpired? The cyanide pill, the torture – is it just about being an expendable agent, or something deeper?

The James Bond franchise / Barbara Broccoli – the film rejuvenated the franchise and made people excited about Bond again despite being the 23rd movie. Sean says Mendes, Amanda says the franchise. The Bond character wins by proving he can sustain prestige-level filmmaking while remaining entertaining.