License to Chill (your enthusiasm (since this is stupid))

Millions, billions, nay zillions of words have been written about the James Bond franchise. Anything that I have to say on the subject is simply parroting everything that has been said before about it, but goddamnit you're here and you're going to hear about it since if I had to sit through goddamn Spectre the way I did so will you.

Ch 1: The Expositioning

 When I went to the academy today I was rip-rarin' ready to go to post on a google hangout through the entirety of the movie about what was going on, and my reactions to the way the plot was playing itself out interspersed with a lot of cursing and bad joke. I didn't necessarily expect to HATE the movie, I might very well have wound up enjoying it (like with Lucy and The Last Witch Hunter) which has happened before, and will happen again.

It's perfectly fine to like a movie that other people don't like. Opinions are tolerable, within reason, and are a great resource for lively debate and argumentation on a subject. Tell me how much Wing Commander sucks and I'll agree with you wholeheartedly but still point out things I liked about it.

What is not acceptable is when a movie has promise (and a budget that could resuscitate the population of the critically endangered Bengal Tiger), and proceeds to absolutely waste all the goodwill i afforded it based off a positive relationship with other parts of it that made me happy.

I am so fucking pissed at what Spectre did to me that the little boy running through the aisles behind me, eating popcorn with an open mouth and loudly commenting on things did not even reach the level of ire that was directed at the screen. What follows is a post-mortem dissection of the rotten pustulent corpse that Eon Productions and MGM slammed down into theaters and bullied us into accepting since we weren't going to get anything else.

I love the Daniel Craig series. He's the first James Bond I was ever really interested in the whole way though a movie, and for goddamn sure the first one that I was excited to see again in a new adventure when the line "James Bond Will Return" came up at the end of the credits. Casino Royale revived the entire fuckin premise for a character like James Bond existing, updated for a new radically different world from which he was conceived, and jettisoned the ridiculous shit that had been tacked onto the series after multiple generations of writers had obv. run out of ideas. Also goddamn does that opening credits sequence get your foot tapping.

Quantum of Solace is the middle child of the series, and almost universally disliked by the popular culture, although I fully enjoy it. Even though the supervillain premise was a little esoteric, the characters kept it moving and watchable all the way to the credits. You have conversations that go places and aren't boring, action scenes that even though they defy the laws of physics are easy to follow and engaging, and music that doesn't sound like someone pulled a cassette tape out of a medical waste dumpster.

Everyone loves Skyfall. Not much more to say. Best opening song, period. Bond's relationship with M is probably the deepest we'll ever get into the character, period. Yeah it runs a little long, but Javier Bardem's white-hot rage and sadness carries the ending through and at the end when you find out Naomi Banks was Moneypenny and Ralph Fiennes is sitting in his office as the new M, you're all "huh, what a good movie that also happened to have a scene where a man is eaten alive by monstrous komodo dragons. I wonder what the next one will be about."

"What is Spectre really about?" you mockingly ask your 2012 self -- beaten down and bound to a post -- as you light a cigarette and spin the cylinder of the revolver containing a single bullet, "it's about nothing. you know nothing. looking for reason Spectre... is like looking for an actual specter."

Then you take a deep draw on the hand-rolled tobacco, pull back the hammer and point it at your own past head.

"But what's it's score on rotten toma-" you screamed.

You pull the trigger.

Darkness.

It's better this way.

Ch 2: You Can't Walk Out and Let It Beat You

It's hard to describe what Spectre wanted to do, since doing so is like trying to grasp onto light. It's all plot particles, careening away from the source in a wave-like motion in every direction at incomprehensible speeds.

However, through some miracle, there were parts of Spectre I actually enjoyed, even chuckled at:

Ex: The opening scene is probably one of the best action setpieces thought up for a Bond movie. A long single-shot scene through a Dia De Muertos parade in Mexico City leading up to an assassination gone wrong and Jamed Bond fistfighting an old man in a helicopter that's doing barrel rolls above a crowded city square before kicking both the pilot and passenger out hundreds of feet up, and he just flies off into the sunset.

Ex: Q, who I hope remains played by Ben Whishaw for a long time to come.

Ex: the one creative and hilarious death in the movie when Bond brutally murders the big henchman that has nails for thumbs.

Ex: Oh also Bautista who plays the aforementioned henchman perfectly, he's like the It Follows, tracking bond down wherever he goes

Ex: ... uhhh.... one or two of the jokes, maybe?

Everything else: just SHIT. (also spoilers but they should have no effect on watching the movie and if it does you're a loser)

Spectre's premise is a continuation and rehash of Skyfall's. Bond is aging, it's not his world anymore, everyone he loves dies, he's on his own, blah blah horseshit you find in 1st year screenwriting school.

This is particularly telling by the opening credits sequence, which contains, hands down, the. absolute. WORST. imagery and music that has ever been associated with the franchise.

Sam Smith's song is awful. Listen to it. It's all over the place, i can't even place what it's trying to sound like, he goes back and forth between an annoying falsetto and his regular voice as a piano taps its keys seemingly at random. And it's BORING. It's so slow and jarring, even if you don't care for QoS's "Another Way to Die" unless you are a soulless monster you have to admit it has more energy and drive in one guitar chord than this shit has in its entire length.

The video accompanying the music... there isn't an emojii that i can use to describe how alarmed I was watching it. It's basically tentacle porn, this terribly CGI designed octopus sliding its suckers all over the standard nude dancer in shadow, then everything lights on fire for some reason.

Also, why an Octopus? Specter barely had anything to do with octopuses, they did shit-all at explaining the origin of the group.

Following the uniquely terrible opening credits you have 2 1/2 hours to extract about 15 minutes of fun out of what you're sitting through.

Spoilers: The antagonist of the movie is James Bond's older adoptive brother, who murdered his own dad and faked his death in an avalanche and rose to become the head of a criminal organization that has infiltrated every level of every government in the world, but seeks only to torture Bond because he's upset that when his parents took Bond in after Bond's parents died they were nice to him.

That's his motivation. I'm not even making anything up or being hyperbolic here, Christoph Waltz tells us exactly why he's doing what he's doing and that he was the one pulling the strings behind the other 3 movies, being Bond's Phantom Menace.

That's supposed to be the secret real motivations behind the antagonists, which also involves the absolute stupidest macguffin that has existed in a movie since... think of something funny. The guy that plays Moriarty in Sherlock comes into Ralph Fiennes office at the beginning and is introduced as "C". We're informed that MI5 and MI6 are being merged for some reason, and the 00-program is on the verge of being cancelled... somehow.

Moriarty/C, who IS TOTALLY NOT A BAD GUY DON'T WORRY EVERYBODY tells M and Bond that he's the new head of the merged organizations, and is developing a program called "Nine Eyes" that involves 9 countries sharing their intelligence agencies to create a "New World Order" and prevent terrorist attacks on their home soil (also moriarty is a bad guy and spectre created the program to spy on literally the entire planet).

For reference those nine countries are: 1: The UK. 2: The US. 3: France. 4: China. 5: Japan. 6: South Africa 7: New Zealand 8: Canada 9: Australia.

I want you to read that list again and see which things are not like the other. If you already noticed it, i'm sorry you probably crashed your car from laughing too hard.

Not just at the whole goddamn premise behind multiple countries sharing all of their intelligence with each other (particulary china and the US ever partnering together and the weird inclusion of South Africa) but that the movie completely ignores the fact that Nine Eyes is designed to spy on the ENTIRE PLANET. Every single CCTV camera can be used by the program. Any possibly type of electronic communication can be spied upon by Nine Eyes and can take action on what they please.

The movie is a hairsbreadth away from creating the actual New World Order all of those conspiracy theorists talk about on their podcasts, and it's all undone because Moriarty cannot help giving away the fact that he is a bad guy since he's Moriarty, and that Christoph Waltz has a grudge against his little brother that he's jealous of.

It's so fucking stupid that THAT is the throughline of the movie.We're supposed to base a plot off that, the foundations of this piece of shit are built of styrofoam.

Ch 3: Guess Who's Wrong (hint it's tumblr)

So, a lot (a LOT) of attention was paid to the interpersonal relationships in this movie, since it came out in 2015 and we can't not dissect everything under a microscope.

If you're mad at the relationship that Daniel Craig and Lea Seydoux have in the movie, you're wrong. You're not only wrong, you didn't watch it apparently. Out of all the shit that this movie throws at you, their stupid relationship was the only thing that was at least halfway believable.

The complaints about hos "oh she said she wasnt going to sleep with him then 10 minutes later they fuck and then she's in love with him", did you even watch the movie?

Lea Seydoux plays Madeline, whose father is Mr. White, the guy that led to Vesper dying in Casino Royale and escaped MI6 custody in QoS. Christoph Waltz decided to poison him even though they were founding memebers of Spectre, and Bond tracks him down to try to beat information out of him before he dies. Bond and Mr White talk and then Mr White blows his own head off, and then Bond goes to try to find out what Madeline knows about Spectre.

She hates her father at first, since she knows he was an international terrorist, but when Bond saves her from being murdered by Bautista she has nowhere else to go but with Bond, and when they track down a hidden safe house Mr. White had she finds pictures he had of her as a baby to a young adult, even though she cut him out of her life he still cared for her and watched over her until he died. It's an actually nice scene, there's emotion there, for fuck's sakes.

THEN (here's where the complaints start piling in) Bond and Madeline take the world's fanciest train ride to the middle of the Moroccan desert. While on the train they have one of the most boring conversations on earth, and right as they toast their martinis, Bautista walks up and kicks the table they're sitting at into the ceiling. It's one of the funniest parts of the movie, this gigantic slab of a human kicking a table covered in glasses and cutlery into the roof of the train car, then grabbing Bond by the collar and throwing him through walls.

The following fight is one of the most interesting parts of the movie, since Bond gets the SHIT beat out of him, just constantly, but then right when Bautista is about to chuck Bond off the train (he never uses his metal thumbnails to try to scoop out Bond's eyes, which disappointed me since he does it to another guy at the beginning of the movie), Madeline shoots him in the shoulder and he turns around and DECKS her. Then Bond leaps up, loops a rope connected to a bunch of kegs around his neck, and kicks the kegs off the train. The rope runs out of coil and Bautista grabs the rope and says his first and only line "Shit." then gets pulled off the train and dies.

Madeline helps Bond up and they're both bruised and tired and look into each others eyes, and then they kiss. Two people, charged with adrenaline, experience a connection after a traumatic experience and are naturally aroused by each other since they're both beautiful and agree on a lot of things. HOW DARE THESE PEOPLE ACT LIKE ACTUAL HUMAN BEINGS RATHER THAN THE BLACK & WHITE RULES I HAVE FOR HOW TO COMMUNICATE WITH EACH OTHER THAT RESEMBLES TWO COMPUTERS EXCHANGING INFORMATION MORE THAN ANYTHING ELSE.

Ch 4: It Just Sucks

Spectre is garbage. There's so much fucking camp, like Bond flies a plane along a forested road and has both wings sheared off but WHOOPS the plane is still flying on the road and hits the jeeps he was trying to disable isn't that wacky?

No one aside from Bond and Madeline have anything to do. Moneypenny googles some shit for Bond and then leaves, Ralph Fiennes has the stupidest line of the movie while talking to Moriarty:

~"A license to kill also means... you have a license not to kill."~

Yeah ok Ralph i'll see you at the Oscars.

I really hope that this is the last Daniel Craig movie. Which sucks to say but unless they change directors and writers and producers it's true, and we're going to the Pierce Brosnan Bond movies that aren't Goldeneye all over again.

Everything is terrible, Bowie and Rickman are dead.

Vote Sanders.