Spectre, the 24th James Bond movie, has had its first screening in London on Wednesday, to an impressed – if not wholly devastated – crowd. The initial consensus seemed to be that Sam Mendes’s movie is a highly professional and energetic successor to 2012’s Skyfall (still the top-grossing movie ever in the UK).
The film, which runs at two-and-a-half hours, mounts a rousing defence of boots-on-the-ground intelligence over information gathered through illicit hacking and high-tech surveillance.
Sam Mendes’s second film in the director’s seat has MI6 under threat from a new counter-terrorism wing, who want to abolish the long-running programme of which Bond is a part. Instead, they plan to rely on an international alliance of networks, each sharing data gathered online and from an extensive network of cameras and databases.
The system is intended to “shake up the intelligence service,” according to its creator, played by Andrew Scott – whose rapid rise to the top is credited to an old-boys network kinship with members of the cabinet – and to bring a “dark ages” system “into the light”.
Such measures are meanwhile resisted by the head of the secret service, M (Ralph Fiennes) who protests that they would turn the body into a “unelected global power”. In one of the film’s key speeches, he maintains that the most vital function of human agents is to make the kind of life-or-death call that a computer cannot.
The film sees Daniel Craig return as the athletic 007, on the trail of a mysterious assassin who is the tip of former boss (Judi Dench, who departed the franchise in Skyfall). His globe-trotting investigations result in the customary high body count and intense body ogling. But although Craig’s female co-stars (Monica Bellucci and Lea Seydoux) begin in need of his protection, their resourcefulness – and their levels of nudity – buck tradition.
Spectre, which also features Christoph Waltz as the head of the titular crime ring, is released in the UK on 26 October, in the US on 6 November and in Australia on 12 November.
