2) When James enters the tunnel at SkyFall, the first thought in my mind (and my wife's as she later told me) is, why did he not close the door behind him? He just set up a huge bomb behind himself.
Hmm. I'd assumed that he had, but that the force of the explosion blew through it.
4) I was also bugged by how incompetent they made Bond appear to be in his testing. He went from being the cream of the crop to not even capable. That was too much of a stretch IMO.
I didn't think this was unreasonable. He'd been shot and seriously injured, near-drowned, then spent months out of action. Plus, since then he'd been engaged in all manner of self-destructive behaviours and appeared to be held together with too much alcohol and pain killers.
I actually really liked this aspect of the film, and the way it highlighted that the life of a secret agent is extremely destructive. Plus, it tied in to "Casino Royale", where after the fight in the stairwell Bond is only able to pull himself together by consuming a near-lethal amount of alcohol.
6) The villain was just willing to blow M away in the courtroom, but was then suddenly suicidal at the end? What was up with that? I prefer villains that are consistent in their behaviors.
Again, I didn't have a problem with this. He basically had mommy issues, and desperately wanted to kill her (and, indeed, himself). And as long as he kept moving, it was easy to continue in his hate. Even the courtroom was fine, because the heat of the moment stopped him from thinking about it too much.
But at the end, once everything was stripped away, and it came down to cold-blooded murder, he suddenly found that he couldn't pull the trigger.
He also could have blown James away on the ice, but instead stands there talking? Just a few minutes earlier, he was throwing firebombs into the building, but now, it's time to talk?
Yeah, that was problematic.
This villain wasn't a world class Bond villain. His biggest threat was to kill a few agents and cause some harm to the reputation of MI6. Where was the threat to the well being or the economy of the world, or at least the destruction of a major city?
I actually like that the new Bond films tend to have a much smaller scope - Casino Royale was about turning a single agent, Quantum of Solace chipped away at the edges of a conspiracy, and now Skyfall is about a single rogue agent with a personal agenda. That seems much more in keeping with the books, where most often the villains weren't about world domination (or at least weren't in a position to achieve it). Besides, once you've saved the world a couple of times, it becomes increasingly difficult to come up with a credible threat for next time.
8) No cool gadgets. The homing radio hardly counts as cool and the earpiece/headsets are items that regular people sometimes use. The souped up DB5 shouldn't have even existed (due to the Craig reboot). The best they could do was the gun that only works for him.
Actually, all the gadgets are rather problematic.
The gun really doesn't make sense. Bond is a secret agent whose duties occasionally include outright execution (see "Casino Royale"). That being the case, what he wants is an anonymous, easily disposed weapon. With this gun, a simple ballistics check that identifies his weapon also definitively ties the shot fired back to him. Additionally, because he can't even wear gloves while firing it, if he has to dispose of the weapon in a hurry (or otherwise loses it) it is guaranteed to bear his identfying marks.
The radio likewise didn't make too much sense. In most of the world, it achieves nothing that a mobile phone doesn't. If its benefit is better range, then it probably makes more sense to instead give Bond a better mobile phone. The radio is only really of much use if Bond has had his phone taken from him... but if that's the case then it's probably better to give him a radio that
doesn't look like a radio. Plus, this radio is quite amusing, given the subdermal tracker Bond gets in CR, and the lengths he goes to to remove it.
You're right that the DB5 didn't fit, but it's just
cool. If you need to explain it in-universe: the car obviously belonged to some other agent in the past. MI6 had scheduled it for destruction as a relic, but Bond saw it, thought "cool!", rescued it from the scrap heap and has spent the last several years lovingly restoring it. Or something.
(Of course, there's also Q's reference to the exploding pen of Goldeneye days. Basically, the universes seem to be colliding.
)
Again, I quite like that the gadgets have been few and far between recently. They just weren't a big feature of the books, and had both become part of the comic relief element of the Bond films and a part of them become rather formulaic. Plus, our technology has now reached a point that much of what they might give him has either already been done or would seem very sci-fi in nature.
All in all, it was an ok film, maybe even a good film. Better than some Bond films, especially several of the Roger Moore ones. It just wasn't a great film or really a Bond film. And most of it was because they are trying to do a James Bond reboot of some sort. Take away his gadgets. Take away his motivations. Take away the threat of the villain. Meh.
I dunno. As I said, I liked that they've toned down the gadgets. But Bond's motivations seemed quite solid - he's an agent for Queen and country, with a very strong personal loyalty to 'M'. Just like in the books, in fact. What will be interesting to see will be whether he transfers his loyalty to the new M, or if they'll be shown to have issues, at least in the next film.
And the villain seemed nasty enough - his initial threat was really quite nasty (expose the agents), and his later personal obsession with M also seemed vicious enough to be a credible (albeit small-scale) threat. I didn't really have an issue with any of that.
The opening action scene, the Komodo dragons, the casino (sort of, but no gambling), the yacht, and the DB5 felt like a Bond film. Little else did. He didn't save the day, he killed the (fairly lame with respect to goals) villain.
IIRC it wasn't explicitly stated, but my understanding was that he
did save the day - when he captured Silva (and his laptop), he also recovered the list. It's just that after that point Silva's plan moved on from "cause trouble for MI6" to his real goal of "kill M". At that point, Silva no longer needed the list (and the plot can move forward), but in the bigger picture it was actually that, rather than the threat to M, that MI6 were most concerned about.
(Of course, if Silva's real goal wasn't "kill M", and the capture/escape wasn't part of his original plan, then it really doesn't make sense that the list would be on the laptop. A villain capable of putting together an elaborate contingency plan to escape capture would also not put his only copy of the list on a laptop that he might well have to abandon as part of his escape.)
Get rid of the insecure semi-normal Human Bond and bring back James Bond.
The good news is that I think they have here. The Bond we see in the last scene is very far from the Bond we see in M's house. He's regained his edge and exorcised his demons. Bond is back.
(Yes, despite my major issue with the whole capture/escape thing, I
really enjoyed this film.)
Oh, I did have one other nitpick, though. "Country? England." WTF? Firstly, Bond is
Scottish, or at the very least spent his early years in Scotland. And he works for the government of the
United Kingdom. England, indeed! Bah!
