Related How to fix the James Bond franchise: make it more like Mission Impossible It's just too bad the rest of Spectre is such a disappointment - relative not just to its opening scene, but to other recent Bond films, which scrambled the Bond formula in ways that produced two of the series’ best entries: the taut, brutal Casino Royale (2006) and the breathtakingly beautiful Skyfall (2012). It’s everything you want from a modern 007 film. It’s a perfect Bond sequence: sexy, thrilling, stylish, extravagantly elaborate, and marvelously over the top. It’s the single greatest shot in Bond film history, and it sets incredibly high expectations for the duration of the two-hour, 30-minute runtime. The film's brief glimpses of Mexico City suggest a dusky, haunted urban landscape full of mystery and death.īut the investment certainly paid off for moviegoers. I’m not entirely sure that city officials got what they paid for. It's a scene that pulls double duty as a high-octane opener and a backdoor fundraiser for this $300 million spy extravaganza: It was reportedly reworked in order to qualify for as much as $20 million in tax credits from the Mexican government, which wanted Spectre’s producers to feature the city in a positive light. Set during Mexico City’s Day of the Dead festival, the sequence introduces a longer pre-credits action set piece, complete with crashing buildings and a vertiginous hand-to-hand encounter in an out-of-control helicopter. It makes for a gorgeous, foreboding, and incredibly tense sequence, staged and paced with Hitchcockian wit and precision - and that’s before stuff starts blowing up. The jaw-dropping single shot is an incredible technical accomplishment.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |