Skyfall review

This latest Bond film truly breaks the mould, as a well paced, tightly layered surrealist epic, featuring Daniel Craig as an aging schizophrenic in the throes of a mid-life crisis.

The film opens in regular Bond movie style, with Bond doing Bondy stuff, like fighting henchmen atop a speeding train. However, the film gradually evolves into a delicious macabre about an elderly man, suffering from an ever-more pervasive psychosis, increasingly confused about his identity in a changing world.

 The film's director, Sam Mendes said, “We thought a good way to represent his building confusion was to have a sequence of progressively more irrational scenes. This culminates in the one where the villain inexplicably lets himself out of literally the most secure jail cell Great Britain can forge, and then explodes a tube train onto Bond using methods subject only to the wildest conjecture. We felt this was an apt metaphor for an old man failing to make sense of an information-driven, fast-moving world."

Mendes does well to establish the theme early on, without giving the twist away for free. Down and out after his final, failed mission, Bond is hurting; knowing that at his age he’s lying on the career scrap-heap. It’s at this point that – what with the head trauma suffered in the first scene, the cumulative effect of decades of hard-drinking, and unable to accept the loss of his identity as an invincible, sexually-smouldering young agent – Bond trips into a fantasy world, in which he is rejuvenated and assigned to the most important mission her Majesty’s government can offer.

Craig is exceptional in the role. Perfectly directed, he manages to convey the faltering nature of Bond’s mental self-subterfuge in a performance fraught with inconsistency. He lurches seamlessly from one extreme to the other; one minute a debonair superman, the next an ailing arthritic, painfully aware of his unsuitability for this young man’s game.

The final scene is Oscar-winningly well selected. “We wanted the penny to have dropped fully by this point” said Mendes. “The elderly – especially those suffering from Alzheimers - often find comfort and security in familiar features of their youth. That’s why we had Bond  (pursued by the villain) stupifyingly flee the safety of MI6, and - having thrown reason to the winds by this point – retreat to his remote childhood home in the highlands of Scotland."

Responding to reports that some audiences missed the tragic psychological subtext, Mendes said, “We were happy to leave it ambiguous whether Bond actually goes through this, or whether he’s in a care home imagining it. The key thing we wanted to drive home was the plot's total privation of ANY objective logic or realism. It's this that gives the film its poignant message about age-related psychosis and mental disease.