THE GOOD DINOSAUR

The Good Dinosaur is not about prehistoric beasts in the modern world. It has the fateful asteroid miss Earth allowing dinosaurs to continue living at least long enough to coexist with cave people. What happens when Homo sapiens comes along is anyone’s guess. The real question though is, what’s the point? Beneath the gimmick of dinosaurs surviving in an evolved Earth along with other strange creatures (clawed chickens, fanged beavers, and the hairless two-legged kind) the alternate timeline matters little to the plot. It is a simply a story of an interspecies friendship between an orphaned cave boy and a kid dinosaur. But the boy could have been a modern day child lost in the forest paired with any other animal living today and virtually nothing would change. Don’t mention that the four-legged companion is an extinct reptile and this is a virtual remake of The Journey of Natty Gann.

            Making the star a dinosaur that can walk alongside a child is regrettably little more than a ploy disguising the lack of imagination throughout The Good Dinosaur. It’s an attention getter that soon gives way to a banal story of a mismatched pair’s journey home.

            Would The Good Dinosaur have been better, even with its limited creativity, had it been set when dinosaurs naturally ruled the earth, involving the friendship between two different kinds of dinosaurs, say, a carnivore and a herbivore? Probably, because, if nothing else, it would have been truly a movie about dinosaurs, rather than a movie about a boy and his pet which arbitrarily is a prehistoric beast.

            In its earliest incarnation The Good Dinosaur seemed to be shaping into such a film. But it became the longest postponed film in Pixar’s history after director Bob Peterson was yanked away from the project in late August of 2013. Peterson’s concept seemed more in line with what Pixar does best.

            “It's time to do a movie where you get to know the dinosaur, what it's really like to be a dinosaur and to be with a dinosaur,” he said.

            Ironically, this seemed troubling to Pixar President Ed Catmull. As producer Denise Ream explained, “Sadly, it happens more often than any of us would like. The previous director, Bob Peterson, just got stuck. It’s given a lot of thought and care. Bob still works at Pixar, he’s a beloved member of the studio. He helps out on a lot of the movies. We care about him, but he just needed help getting the movie done.”

            For over a year the film went into limbo until co-director Peter Sohn, a storyman behind Finding Nemo, Up, and others was nominated as replacement director. Sohn initially seemed to be on board with Peterson’s vision noting the kind of dinosaurs that would play in, but somewhere along the turbulent production something got lost. The wrong turn seemed to come when Sohn rerouted the direction into a buddy film. His new story proposal got him the job.

            “The heart of the story remains the same,” Sohn said. “It's always been about this young dinosaur growing up. But the world itself has changed a lot. Nature has become a character.”

            “We had three different storylines going on,” Sohn explained. “When I was asked to do this, it was to try and refocus it to one and honor Bob’s original intent of a dinosaur movie with a boy-and-dog concept. For me it was just like, ‘Boy, I love what Bob originally pitched, just that boy-and-dog story, the sincerity in that.”

            “A couple of things that did change were like that the siblings were a lot older, they became younger, it was a much more complicated story from the little that I know of the previous history,” recalls Ream. “And when we reset the movie a lot of it was about stripping away what had existed before or had gotten overly complicated and going back to the real true essence of the boy and dog story. So I came on and kind of shut the whole show down, which was very nerve-racking to a lot of people, but we shut the show down and literally Pete spent September, October, November and December solely working on the story and kind of iterating treatment forms, script forms, and then we started re-boarding toward the middle of December of ‘13.”

            There were drastic changes throughout, including an almost complete recasting of voice actors (John Lithgow, Judy Greer, Bill Hader, and Neal Patrick Harris were dropped for Jeffrey Wright, Steve Zahn, and Sam Elliott) and the planned release of November 2013 was pushed back. Pixar entered a turbulent period in which five percent of its staff was laid-off and Disney, with the success of Frozen, became less dependent on Pixar’s hits. In light of this, a problematic end result is not surprising. The film was postponed even further, leaving the studio without a 2014 release.

            “Nobody ever remembers the fact that you slipped a film, but they will remember a bad film,” Catmull said. “Our conclusion was that we were going to give the film some more time.”

Still, the solutions seemed simple enough.Even anachronism for the sake of anachronism would have worked better had The Good Dinosaur fixed on the core concept of overlapping humans (even cave people) with extinct creatures. That is, in part, what made The Flintstones a hit (along with the groundbreaking concept of an animated sitcom aimed at adults) and, for that matter, The First Bad Man, the 1955 Tex Avery cartoon that inspired the series. Hanna and Barbera had fun with the very concept of a cave men acting like modern humans coexisting with dinosaurs that acted like dinosaurs. Dino, the pet snorkasaurs, exemplifies what The Flintstones got right and The Good Dinosaur got wrong. There is nothing particularly funny about Dino’s doglike behavior-except that he has all the physical characteristics of a dinosaur. Arlo, the titular dinosaur voiced by Raymond Ochoa, is a dinosaur that becomes, in essence, a boy’s dog and no pun is made on the fact that he is a dinosaur.

            Of course the story is so generic it works for a dinosaur as it could for just about any animal. Arlo gets swept away from home in a raging river while pursuing a wild cave boy that had been raiding the family crops. On their journey back they bond and become boon companions. But shouldn’t a movie that goes out of its way to explain dinos and people coexisting make use of the traits specific to dinosaurs? The film’s treatment of its reptilian stars brings back to mind Stephen Hunter’s description of Disney’s Dinosaur for The Washington Post, “A Cretaceous Bambi”. 

            Humor may not be what The Good Dinosaur had in mind. Aside from some mildly amusing creature inventions caught in an evolutional warp, best of which is a triceratops-like dinosaur with camouflage ability, (and all surpass the stars, the dinosaur and the boy ranking as the studio’s least endearing creations) The Good Dinosaur is Pixar’s most humorless film. Still, The Good Dinosaur could have learned something from The Flintstones. As popular as it was, the sitcom lost ratings and was unceremoniously cancelled at the end of the sixth season when it stopped being primarily about modernized humans in the Stone Age and became instead about banished aliens on Earth, time travel, and goblins moving in next door, the town of Bedrock becoming a mere backdrop.

            The Good Dinosaur’s closest cousin is Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs, a similar anachronism stew in which Ice Age mammals end up in a world populated by dinosaurs. Let alone that it turned out to be an underground world in which, due to fringe logic, the reptiles managed to survive into the Ice Age. What matters is that the animators created a new world fit for the king lizards and its inhabitants were dinosaurs in every way movie dinosaurs should be dinosaurs. The result was the best entry in the series.

            In The Good Dinosaur the world looks very much like our own, the planet having changed very much since the asteroid missed. The dinos have become the dominant species, living an agrarian life much like early human civilizations. After the first ten minutes or so we forget that they are dinosaurs, though, since it matters little beyond the initial gimmick that they lived millions of years after they were supposed to be wiped out. By the time we get to know the central family they could easily be interchanged as bears, wolves, or even humans with virtually no change to the plot.

            In an interview, Sohn mentions what in retrospect became the film’s downfall. It stopped being about dinosaurs and became a boy’s own survival story, “If you put like a realistic dinosaur in the woods, eat some leaves, you’re fine,” he said. “You’re an animal. But we really wanted to play with that twist of this is a boy out there. A dinosaur boy for sure, but trying to infuse those qualities into him that caricaturing the eyes, caricaturing his look that for me as an artist, I love pushing those kind of universal looks because he speaks a language and the dog doesn’t, we would rely on those animation kind of moves and gestures that you would try to observe when you don’t speak a language. And also keeping him in a world that had an arc to itself. That it would start off being beautiful and then become dangerous. When we had these designs of the trees where they were a little bit more blocky and a little bit more graphic. We put Arlo in front of it, it’s like ooh that kind of is cool, but boy, it doesn’t feel like it’s that dangerous. Like when we get a rock stuck on him, it didn’t feel like anything ’cause when we went on our research trips, boy that idea of like you can get, you could die by a small thing like having a rock on your foot. Or you could die by a huge thing like an avalanche, which we tried to kind of explore in the film. So that was one of our main intents.”

            The scenery is often pleasant and is the only area in which this really looks like a Pixar film, but it never develops a style, shifting from a Midwestern homestead where Arlo and his family reside to Fordian country where Arlo and his pet boy help a family of T-Rexes round up their longhorns and battle cattle rustlers.

In fairness, Sohn detailed the great lengths the crew went through to create a vivid landscape. “We did a lot of research, going out to the northwest, Wyoming, Idaho and Oregon,” he said. “There’s nothing to photograph, there’s nothing to put into the computer. There are hundreds of artists that help make every blade of grass, every tree, every rock, every drop of water. It’s all meticulously done.”

“The area has a fantastic variety of landscapes, ranging from the Jackson Valley and the Tetons to the amazing geysers and waterfalls in Yellowstone,” production designer Harley Jessup said. “We studied the grasslands of Montana and the Red Desert, then incorporated all of it in Arlo’s journey.”

Ream described the process in detail, “From the get go Pete basically said, “I don’t want it to feel just like a walk in the park. I want it to feel really expansive, like it could go on and on forever.” And so that’s when Sanjay Bakshi, our supervising technical director, came up with the idea of using the USGS topological survey data, so we used that as sort of the starting point to get this really expansive feeling. And so of course that’s not hard but then getting to dress it all with trees or rocks, it looks photo-real but it is slightly stylized, so we still had to build and create everything. So how we had to dress and populate all of that terrain was complicated, and so that was a big challenge. This is also the first time that we’re using volumetric clouds in every single shot, usually a lot of them are map-painted or you pick moments when you’re gonna use the volumetric clouds, but in this movie, again, because we were outside we wanted it to feel immersive we made the choice to do all volumetric clouds. Even ILM said we were crazy to do it when we talked to them about it. And I was a little skeptical but it ended up being the right thing to do and we ended up kind of building this huge library of these 3D clouds and we kind of set-dressed them and they did a really amazing job; so that was a big challenge. The other thing, honestly, was I felt because there’s not much dialogue as we typically have in a Pixar film, I wanted to give an animation as much time as possible to create the performance, so carving out that time. We actually did something different how you sign the work so people could have continuous runs of footage rather than sort of piece meal, in order to create this consistent performance, which I think once you see the whole film you’ll really be able to recognize that.”

Even in its prettiest moments, however, there is something disconcerting about a world in which we don’t know quite when or where we are. It seems to be around the time Neanderthals walked the earth, though dinosaurs are the hut dwellers, but everything seems off. The mammals we see here aren’t mammals we recognize from our knowledge of the time. Instead of wooly mammoths and saber-toothed tigers we get strange creatures out of a mad scientist’s lab. If humans evolved at the same pace even with the extended survival of dinosaurs why not the other mammals? What are we looking at exactly? The movie is in a Land of the Lost type world but doesn’t know it.

            Box-office results are influenced by an array of factors and, for holiday releases, competition is always a challenge. Even so, the box-office results indicate a certain detachment audiences accustomed to the Pixar magic felt for The Good Dinosaur.

            Erik Handler, an MKM Partners analyst observed, “It’s not resonating like a typical Pixar film. It’s on a path where they’re going to need home entertainment to drive profitability. Usually with Pixar, by the time they’ve gone through the first window, they’re in the black.”

            Playing in front of The Good Dinosaur was a trailer for the following summer’s Finding Dory. One should always be cautious of sequels to masterpieces, but given how it promises a return to the Pixar form we love, the beauty, the imagination, the humor, one cannot be blamed for feeling a rush of excitement. 

THE FIGHTER

The Fighter wants to be an uplifting weepie and it almost is. It also doesn’t know what else it wants to be and so becomes a mess of many faces by turns comical, poignant, and inspirational. A movie can be all of those things and work, but David O. Russell never finds a balance and scatters the emotional ques so randomly that they all feel out of place.

The story is a text-book tale of triumph over adversity despite being based on the true story of Micky Ward, the welterweight boxer from the industrial city of Lowell, Massachusetts who went on to become world champion after defeating Shea Neary in London.

The themes that have become hallmarks of a Boston-area setting are evident as The Fighter is not so much about boxing as it is about loyalty to family during the darkest times, remembering your blue-collar upbringing, and tight urban communities. To Russell’s credit, he understands the mood of Boston well and brings it out of his cast. Of course, he couldn’t go wrong by casting Mark Whalberg as Micky Ward, who we first see making ends meet as a pavement worker motivated to bigger things not so much for love of the ring but the desire to do well by his daughter and his older brother Dick, under whose shadow he has lived since he saw Dick defeat Sugar Ray Leonard in 1978.

For Whalberg this project meant a lot, growing up near Ward and admiring him much like Ward admired his older brother.

“I want to do him proud,” Whalberg said. “The guy did everything I wish I could have done. He came from nothing, went on to win the world title with all the odds stacked against him. Did it with his mother and his brother. He’s still in the same town to this day. He’s got a regular job. He knows that I’m going to put it all on the line for him.”

To be sure that took a little acting, but Whalberg’s shared roots with Ward made him a natural fit.

“I changed my voice a little,’’ he said. “Micky has such a distinctive voice and not a lot of people outside of that area or the boxing world know Micky Ward, so I didn’t want to lay it on too heavy after doing The Departed and The Perfect Storm. When people come into that world and do an accent, it always drives me crazy.’’

“When I met him he was a 26-year-old mumbling kid from Dorchester who was coming right off of Boogie Nights and he was slouching down on the couch,’’ Russell said of his star. “Now I call him Godfather because he’s literally got a boardwalk empire and a television empire. On this project, he sacrificed his body and he sacrificed his time and he sacrificed his money. He paid for all the training on his nickel because we had no money. He carried the film on his back.’’

Christian Bale, who replaced both Matt Damon and Brad Pitt, delivers the most impressive performance of all as Dick Eklund, once “the pride of Lowell” but now destroyed by drug addiction and living a life torn by love for his brother and love for crack houses. Bale lost a lot of weight for the role and learned the exciteable mannerisms of an egotist consumed by addiction. And yet, Dick may be the most genuine person in the movie in regard to his love for Micky. Both their mother, Alice (Melissa Leo in an Oscar winning performance as a hot-headed untactful matriarch) and Micky’s father (Jack McGee), seem to be at least equally interested in continuing the family legacy as they are for Micky’s success.

A girl named Charlene comes along offering an alternative voice of hope, though Micky’s family greets her with all the hostility reserved for an intruder. Like most women who work at a bar, Charlene puts up a wall to block lecherous creeps, but softens up for Micky and encourages him to follow his own path. At least superficially (because Charlene is a softy at heart), this is a departure for Amy Adams, though by now it shouldn’t be surprising that she can pull off just about anything.

The Fighter plays things safe, though, and one can’t help feel slightly cheated. For instance, after the heated cat-fights between Alice and Charlene, the two are seen casually discussing the prognosis of Micky’s climactic fight as if they had been a family all along, a gradual reconciliation never even hinted up until then. It’s a mutual acceptance arrived at without an explanation of what dissolved the bitterness between the two most important women in the boxer’s life.

That is the fundamental shortcoming of The Fighter, becoming especially obvious in the end. There is little, if any, build up to each emotional benchmark. We are supposed to cheer Micky’s victory and yet the road to such a response was faulty at best.

Part of it, undoubtedly is due to the erratic editing, costing in style from documentary to Hollywood saga. Indeed, the framework is a documentary within the drama being filmed by HBO. Dick, in his delusional gaze believes it to be about his return, but in reality is about crack addiction, the movie’s sad joke. But the cinéma vérité nature of the cutting extends past its point killing the emotive impact in a way Russell likely did not intend.

Until the last one, the fights lack punch, though this may be because boxing may be only the venue for larger statements; statements undermined by the willy-nilly shifting of gears. Juxtaposition in moods can be done well and is often in itself the statement. But Russell doesn’t control the way he jumps from humor to melodrama. Take, for instance, the scene in which Alice and the band of sisters storm over to Charlene’s house, overloading the car, arriving at her doorstep where a brawl breaks out, catching the attention of a nosy neighbor.

It’s hard to read the scene. It seems played for laughs with the overfilled cars driving haywire, knocking down trash cans as it zigzags down the street and the stunned look at the neighbor is supposed to be our que to join him in voyeuristic amusement, but Russell then asks us to take the lead up and resolutions (Charlene finally sucker punches one of the loud-mouth sisters) seriously.  While Russell’s music is generally good in this movie, it dresses up the scene in unwarranted exhilaration that only mutes the significance of what transpires.

The Fighter has all the right parts; a story that, however familiar, is proven to work, great performances, and wit. Whalberg, who produced the movie, certainly had big aspirations for it.

“If it ain’t gonna be like Raging Bull, then it ain’t worth doing,” he told the press. “These guys, they have the story. Their lives are incredible. The things that they went through, and the things that they overcame and endured. It’s one of those amazing stories that I hope I get an opportunity to tell in my career. It’s going to be one of them gems.”

 But it was assembled with little thought or care. For a movie that was meant to be, and could have been, stirring, The Fighter is notably hard to respond to.

SPECTRE

If the four movies starring Daniel Craig as James Bond were to be ranked, Spectre, should sit at number three, just above Quantum Solace and below Casino Royale and Skyfall, the best of all. This sounds dire, but it’s not; not really anyway. Craig, especially after joining forces with director Sam Mendes, revitalized the franchise in the way it had been crying to be for decades. He brought it up to date with the realer, uglier, and scarier threats of the modern world without ever losing sight of the charms and appeal of James Bond, in this way bring to shame the embarrassingly misguided attempt of Rob Cohen’s XXX to do the same in 2002 as Pierce Brosnan was wrapping up his tenure as 007. There is, in fact, a getaway scene in Spectre after Bond has been identified at a villain conference that puts a similar motorcycle chase out of a castle in XXX to shame, both ending with a vehicle engulfing into flames. Not surprisingly, Craig’s cynical, grittier interpretation made for the best Bond since Sean Connery. Practically on his work alone, the last four Bond films transcend their genre.

Craig brought the edge, but it was Sam Mendes who brought a thematic core. Though a humanist director, Mendes would likely balk at the thought of a 007 movie being anything other than thinking man’s adrenaline rush. As producer Barbara Broccoli said of the director, “I think that's where Sam Mendes has really excelled. He's a great director of drama and actors and suspenseful storytelling. But also, he's a 12-year-old Bond fan in the middle of all that. He's a 12-year-old boy at times in terms of wanting to bring the kind of action and excitement that he enjoyed when he first saw these movies -- and he has a young son. So I think he gets the balance right, because he does the drama and the action. Like Skyfall, I think he's got it right with this one.”

Ultimately, it’s the exhilaration that makes a Bond film.In this respect, Spectre succeeds as well as any in the series. There is a car chase destined to be the best remembered piece in the movie, skillfully blending laughs and thrills, most of the gags being self-referential to the franchise. None of the action sequences are really subpar but there is little invention to them. Bond’s climactic race against time in an industrial building rigged with explosive to rescue the trapped Bond girl (Léa Seydoux) or save his own skin is more than just a subtle tribute to The Dark Knight (which also challenged the hero’s conscience). It’s a well-built essay on claustrophobic tension, but the ensuing helicopter hayride that concludes with a crash on Westminster Bridge is such a factory-made lollapalooza it plays like a collage of action clips assembled from any number of hair-brained blockbusters.

Two other pieces are ruined by plot holes so glaring they are impossible to watch without imagining the lazy editing and writing involved. The first is an intense struggle in a helicopter soaring over Mexico City while crowds celebrate the Day of the Dead below. Staking out terrorists (who will later be revealed to be a part of a larger ring) on a rooftop, Bond overhears them in the neighboring building plotting their attack. The bad guys realize they are being watched and an exchange of gunfire erupts, culminating in the toppling of the two buildings. Bond survives this in a way that only a Hollywood hero can, but his escape is edited with such fluidity it earns its applause and its laughs for the punctuating gag (think of it as a clever Simpsons couch gag).

Heather Callaw, the unit publicist, described the opening with great gusto, “It starts with Bond and Estrella, who are walking down this Day of the Dead parade. Estrella is played by Stephanie Sigman, who is a Mexican actress. They’re kind of weaving their way through this Day of the Dead parade, they make their way into a hotel—we’ve also shot here once before in The Living Daylights.

They’re going up to Estrella’s room, Estrella thinks she might be bringing Bond to bed but instead he’s looking out the view of her window. He sees two baddies across the way having a conversation, and he stops something really bad from happening, kills one of the guys, the other guy goes running, Bond jumps out of the window and there’s a bit of a chase, he causes a building to explode and they both end up—boom—on the ground, and the foot chase starts.

The baddie’s character is called Skiara, who’s played by Alessandro Cremona, he’s an Italian actor. What we’ve been shooting over the past couple of days is Bond chasing Skiara slowly making their way through the Day of the Dead parade. As the running Skiara is on his mobile phone he’s calling for backup, cue the helicopter coming down the street. Helicopter lands, it’s full of a couple of other baddies. Skiara jumps on, Bond follows, pulls off one of the baddies, Bond jumps on the helicopter, helicopter goes up, and they start to have this fight in the helicopter.

The helicopter is piloted by a guy called Chuck Aaron, who is a stunt pilot. He’s the only person who’s insured to do 360 flips in this helicopter in the world, so we’re doing a bit of the stunts here but kind of the bigger helicopter stuff is happening 10 hours outside the city at a lower altitude.

We’ve got 1,500 extras here today. They all kind of file in at 4:30 in the morning to this big convention center. They have their hair and makeup done which takes anywhere from one and a half hours to two and a half hours.”

Even Christoph Waltz, who does not appear until later in the film (even then with his face initially obscured in darkness) was delighted with the opening. “The action sequences in Mexico are extravagant to say the least,” he said. “The scenes in Austria are traditional Bond action in the snow. These films with Daniel Craig have shifted the tone. They don't depend on a set formula that forces actors simply to go through the motions.”

Things soon go south, though. A chase ensues between Bond and the surviving villain which brings them both to the getaway helicopter (Bond leaping on just as it takes off the ground). Bond, his quarry, and the pilot get into a tussle, sending the flying machine into a dangerously turbulent ride above the festive crowds below. But wait? Why are there still crowds celebrating in the streets? Are they not aware that two buildings just came tumbling down? It’s a hard booboo to overlook, harder still to understand how it made the cut considering the expert editing the surrounds it.

Indeed, up until this bizarre oversight the scene is handled commendably, relying on audience recognition of hero and villain based on cues. We see the villain first, but he is wearing a skeletal mask, hiding all of his lifelike features so that all we see is a soulless fiend. But there is another figure following the demon. His face is also disguised but he is with a girl and moves elegantly, leaving us with no doubt that we are looking at our hero chasing a villain who, for all we can see, is nothing but a monster.

Less clever is the knockabout in the train pitting Bond against a hulking brute working for the criminal enterprise (Dave Bautista). Kinetically, it’s a sound sequence and even worthy of laughs, though the brawl goes unnoticed even by porters as the two crash their way through various carts is left unanswered.

Elsewhere, the narrative construction is the chief driving force of Spectre, build-ups and all. The screenplay by John Logan, Neal Purvis, Robert Wade, and Jez Butterworth is original, though the titular criminal gang and its leader Franz Oberhauser (Christoph Waltz) began life in the writings of Ian Fleming, where Oberhauser went by the name of Hannes. Origin points can be found in the novels Thunderball (and its film adaptation), as well as the story “Octopussy” and the 1971 film Diamonds are Forever.

The roots of Spectre can be traced back to a long standing legal dispute between Ian Fleming and Kevin McClory dating back to 1959 before James Bond came to the movies. McClory (a fan of Felming’s Bond books) had the idea of making a Bond film set in the Bahamas, a suggestion that ultimately developed into both the novel and movie Thunderball, co-scripted by Jack Whittingham. In between, McClory sued, claiming Fleming had taken elements from another script of his and incorporated them into Thunderball. The fallout was likely caused by a sudden lack of faith on Fleming’s part, especially when McClory’s productin (which McClory also directed) The Boy and The Bridge tanked at the box-office and consequently failed to generate enough income to finance the film production of Thunderball.  Fleming now found himself with the pressures of working alone with a series he was running out of ideas for. He did what came easiest and basically touched up the old script written in collaboration with McClory and Whittingham, now in the novel form given the title Thunderball, and took sole credit.  The two settled the case out of court in 1963, MClory walking away with the film rights to the eventual Thunderball movie, which he produced, and its later incarnation, 1983’s Never Say Never Again (the black sheep of the series). As late as the 1990s, McClory was still trying to rework the story with a script titled Warhead 2000 A.D.  (when Timothy Dalton was still Bond) but the project never came to fruition. McClory died in 2006 and in 2013 his estate granted M.G.M full rights to the plot elements first found in Thunderball.

These old elements were taken and made into a story for the age of drones and terrorism, but the true evil is the abuse of power in the name of security.

Broccoli described the approach as, “It's always a challenge. We try to get the right blend of classic Bond and a contemporary twist, and come up with new storylines. I think we've really done a good job on this one.”

Spectre manufactures weapons for defense and then sells them to governments. Nations that a little persuasion soon find themselves victims of terrorism. Conspiracy theorists like to let their imaginations run free after tragedies, but don’t the coincidences in Spectre (Johannesburg is bombed after South Africa is one of the few nations to reject a proposal to implement Spectre’s security system) give anyone pause?

Well, M (Ralph Fiennes) does and finds himself torn between his appreciation for his maverick agent and the imposing pull of C (Andrew Scott), who is Spectre’s biggest shill in the British government. Bond, of course, takes matters into his own hands in a hunt that leads him from Rome to Austria to Tangier and finally back to London for a showdown.

Michael G. Wilson, the other producer, promised surprises, “Bond has such a long history and the novels, and it's fun to play around with those ideas. But we always try to make the pictures surprising -- surprise the audience but also, there have to be elements in it that are Bond-ian in the sense that the people won't be disappointed in the picture when they go see it. So that's the fine line we've got to tread.”

Indeed, there are quite a few surprises along the way, particularly about Bond’s past but the best one of all is how Spectre lays itself into the Bond timeline. The events beginning with Casino Royale to Spectre are revealed to be connected in one swooping story arc, orchestrated by Oberhauser who has a secret connection to Bond. With this sweep, the four Bond movies starring Craig exist in a confined sphere from the others in the franchise, but they are not exactly a reboot either. Skyfall strongly implied Agent 007 was a single person and Bond was his family, instead of code, name, contradicting Lee Tamahori’s take on the character in Die Another Day as well as the obvious passage of decades since Dr. No and the physical and personal differences in all the James Bonds. However, this movie reconsiders slightly and closes Craig’s turn as the agent in such a way it acknowledges the coming of a new Bond (as there certainly will be).

Much like Christopher Nolan did when his take on Batman came to a close, Mendes bowed out with Spectre, leaving Bond to a new filmmaker. Explaining his graceful exit he said, “The reasons I’m doing the second Bond movie are the reasons I would do any movie, really, which is all to do with the story. And in this movie, Spectre, what you have is a movie entirely driven by Bond. He is on a mission from the very beginning,” he says. “It’s about whether or not to pursue the life he’s always pursued, whether he matters and is he going to continue or not.”

The story arc comes to a conclusion here and so Mendes sees himself ready to let go, if only temporarily. “I feel very honored to have been part of the Bond family, and very much hope I have a chance to work with them again,” he said. “Directing Skyfall was one of the best experiences of my professional life. I felt like everything I wanted to do with a Bond movie, I put into this film.”

Where Spectre lacks is in a sense of locale. Far too much of it is shot in dark cabins, crumbling houses, and stark industrial buildings. We may be spoiled, but by now we’ve come to expect the exotic from a Bond film.

It may have been a case of good ambitions steering into overkill. As production designer Dennis Gassner recalls, “When Sam and I talked about filming, a year ago in January, I asked him what he wanted. He said, ‘Can you find me something hot and cold?’ I went, ‘This is a great start!’ I said, ‘Okay, let’s go to Morocco and let’s go to Switzerland! …I want to make something better than ever. It has to be better than Skyfall. I did Skyfall, too, so I’m pressuring myself. I want to top myself and so does Sam and Daniel and Barbara and Michael. There’s such a great family that’s bringing this to you and giving you the best experience when you sit in a movie theater.”

This is compensated for, however, from some interesting performances. Fiennes plays against type for a characteristically stiff but complicated M. Christoph Waltz is always at his best as someone who could be a golden boy were he not a monster, capable of unspeakable evil and yet never stops fascinating us with erudition, class, and manner. His screen time in Spectre is less than expected, but he is used to the best advantage every moment he is on screen. He makes Oberhauser the only criminal we still can’t take our eyes off of even as he straps Bond to a chair while preparing to drill through his face.

“In Spectre, the two women who Bond hooks up with, both have great mystery, they both have depths and for that you need fantastic actresses,” Mendes said. Léa Seydoux’s Dr. Swann is connected to the criminal ring in an intricate way, but she is the girl who ultimately grounds 007. It’s not hard to understand why. She resists him and so becomes his biggest challenge yet. Monica Bellucci teases with her presence early on, hinting to be the latest squeeze, but is forgotten as soon as Bond as chased out of Rome.

Mendes was well satisfied with both female leads. “I just thought well Monica Bellucci makes sense for the story, the age of the character we're dealing, and she has an incredibly seductive presence in life and in the movie. I'm thrilled she's in it,” he said. “Madeleine needed to be soulful, feisty and complicated. She couldn't have been a total newcomer. We needed someone with a certain amount of life experience and maturity. And Léa has the whole package.”

Spectre is neither the best nor the worst Bond movie, but it does a lot of fascinating things with the franchise canon. Fans will like it and should see it if only for the talking points it raises. For the most part, it’s also a good time and boasts at least two moments of pure cinematic energy of the sort only 007 can deliver.