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SPECTRE was always refreshingly quirky and self-contained, for a terrorist group.
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SPECTRE lends itself to parody because it was already so wonderfully absurd. If we had to psychoanalyze people in the 60s, we'd probably say that SPECTRE was an exaggeration of what many feared about the Soviet Union—only it wasn't the Soviet Union, it was that third fish, so it was OK to be amused by it. And then you saw that the thing actually amusing you was your own fear of the Soviet Union, so that fear itself became ridiculous.Perhaps the most incredible thing about SPECTRE is that, for such a dumb idea, it and Blofeld have been hotly contested properties. Fleming and EON studios actually didn't own them because Fleming came up with them while working with another producer, which is why they stopped appearing in movies after For Your Eyes Only. In 2013 Sony and MGM announced that they'd acquired the rights to these ur-supervillains, which is why we're finally getting SPECTRE onscreen again.The new James Bond movies owe much to the Christopher Nolan Batman movies, which makes sense, since both have the same goals: making believable and human two heroes whose perceptions in the public mind have atrophied, through camp and studio mistakes.
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Without giving away too many spoilers, the new SPECTRE struggles to find its place in a world with way more than two Siamese fighting fish to pit against each other. And like the Nolan Batman films, Spectre really gets into trouble when it tries to make some kind of political statement. Because we don't want to be lectured about the evils of the 1 percent or government surveillance—those sins are obvious, and we read them in the newspaper every day. This isn't an opportunity to do that. This is an opportunity to reinvent the Joker by way of the Sex Pistols.Spectre also feels like the studio noted it to death, which we actually know from the Sony email hacks. "THERE NEEDS TO BE SOME KIND OF A TWIST RATHER THAN A SERIES OF WATERY CHASES WITH GUNS," one exec wrote. Regarding Bond villain Christoph Waltz, the exec continued, "WHAT [ELSE] DOES HE HAVE UP HIS SLEEVE?"—a simple bad guy wasn't enough. The result is an overly literal take on the "we're not so different, you and I" speech, which they make Waltz deliver about five different times, always very seriously. It's awkward.To be honest, chases with guns would have been fine with me—not everything needs the hoppy complexity of a barrel-aged double IPA. And part of what's great about the Craig movies is their emphasis on the fact that Bond is a hitman, rather than some actual intelligence agent. But in this new movie someone goes and ruins it all by comparing him to a drone. In On Her Majesty's Secret Service, we're shown the Bond family crest, which boasts three—three!—golden balls, and the phrase "Orbis non sufficit," the world is not enough. But sometimes the world can be just too much.Follow Dan on Twitter.Spectre opens in theaters today.On VICE Sports: How Daniel Craig Developed James Bond's Street-Fighting Skills