Skippy, you're completely, utterly wrong. This was about a million times better than Skyfall.
It wasn't perfect - my main qualms were with
"smartblood" and them telling us where every scene was set at the bottom of the screen in text - great for some locales, but totally uneccessary when it's London and we're watching a James Bond movie.Also, every single Craig Bond film
seems to feature absolutely zero infiltration; rather, James just wanders into villains' lairs, invited, and then fights his way out again.I thought it was great, and it just beats Casino Royale for me as the best Daniel Craig Bond movie.
I had heard before the movie that the product placement in this was to be worse than that in Skyfall but it was nowhere near as prevalent. I thought the Blofeld reveal, although inevitable, was done as well as could be expected. The nods to the terrorist activities forcing the vote to pass and Oberhauser and Bond having history were subtle enough to not hammer the viewer over the head with plotpoints while obvious enough to suggest that most people would have seen them clearly.
Much like Skyfall, the cinematography was superb throughout, but unlike Skyfall, there was an overarching plot connecting all these cool-looking scenes together, rather than just unbelievable cooked-up scenarios to string together a bunch of exercises in film-making ("let's do a night scene in Shanghai" "let's have him go to an abandoned island" "let's have a tube train crash through the wall" "let's have a shootout in Scotland" ). I liked the attempts to tie together the plots from the previous movies - although did anyone else notice, when Bond is moving through the old MI5 building, that they've basically forgotten QoS ever happened?
Glad they've left it open for Blofeld to return, would have been pointless to include him otherwise. Mr White was excellent I thought - never expected his inclusion to draw together the films in any way and I thought the whole thing was pretty good. Not sure the female roles were particularly well thought-out though. The action scenes were superb.
I spent a lot of time thinking "wouldn't this make a great videogame?" Anyway, I really liked it overall. Glad I saw it at the cinema - after Skyfall I wasn't that bothered tbh, but this is so, so much better.
EDIT: forgot a couple of points. I still really dislike Sam Smith but I've warmed to his Bond theme, I thought it suited the film and the intro very well.
I liked the nods to old, non-Daniel Craig Bond movies. Unlike Skyfall, where they were about as subtle as being hit in the face with a hammer, here they were excellent nods. The sequence on the wooden train The references to skiing and the downhill mountain snow scenes. The white cat and Blofeld's burnt eye. The little nods to Skyfall were great too - the dog on the desk, Bond talking about being shot by mistake.