DVD movie commentary/review

In a day and age of security uneasiness, what or who will save the day? Fight fire with fire or with subtlety? 

James Bond is based on the Ian Fleming novels, but the issues the novels, and movies, present are as relevant today as they were yesterday, perhaps more so.

The character James Bond is a spy with a mission, to save the world and keep it safe.

But the crop of James Bond films since 2006, apart from Spectre (2015, USA), are notable for Bond becoming more complicated. Spectre harks back to the Bond films I watched in the 1970s. It is about saving the world, but without much development of character.

At a very surface level, Spectre is about security and being safe in the West, in the vein of the simplistic thrills of the earlier Bond films. What are really serious, complex situations are sown up with a blast or two.

Previous Bond film Skyfall (2012, USA) was as up to date on the terrorist crisis as it could have been. It had a sweeping sense of modern insecurity in the West that convinced of its authenticity.

Spectre does not come up to the cinematic polish of Skyfall.

For most of Spectre, James Bond (Daniel Craig) snoops around. Bond is on a spying mission, attempting to find out more about the organizations causing panic in the supposedly secure world.

The latest bulwark against the underground is trying to unite the spy organizations to make security in the West stronger.

However, the organizations’ information on their spies may be accessed. This fear causes Bond’s boss to question who will have access to the information, especially as it may get into the wrong hands.

It is a scary thought if there is an inside job done by someone from the underground, which would put information about spies into the underground’s hands and then they would effectively eliminate the defenders of the ‘free world’.

In this day and age, security concerns are becoming a headache so saving the world in the latest James Bond movie is back to basics. Either the issues are too difficult to write better or they opted for a slam-bang approach. They go for the latter.

Someone’s got to save the day.