Spectre opens with a single-take tracking shot through Mexico City's Day of the Dead celebrations that is among the most technically accomplished sequences the franchise has produced. Sam Mendes' 2015 film is undermined not by a failure of craft but by a narrative decision that no amount of visual accomplishment can support.
At a Glance
Director: Sam Mendes
Runtime: 148 minutes
Starring: Daniel Craig, Christoph Waltz, Léa Seydoux, Dave Bautista, Monica Bellucci
Release: 2015
Critics Rating: ★★★ (3/5 stars, visually ambitious but undermined by narrative contrivance)
Audience Rating: ★★★ (3/5 stars, entertaining despite its limitations)
Plot
Bond follows a posthumous message from the previous M to Rome, where he infiltrates a SPECTRE meeting and discovers that the organisation behind every threat he has faced is led by Franz Oberhauser, a man from his own past. The Mexico City pre-title sequence is the film's most technically accomplished passage: the crowd choreography and the sustained tracking shot through the hotel give the sequence a physical scale and a formal precision that no subsequent Bond film has matched. The plot's retroactive connection of Blofeld to every significant Craig-era event is the film's central weakness, a contrivance that gives the antagonist dynamic a personal dimension at the cost of credibility. The Austrian and Moroccan sequences that follow are more conventionally structured, and the final act in London, while visually polished, struggles to recover the momentum the Blofeld revelation has spent.
Characters
Craig's Bond is given workable material, a character whose personal connection to Blofeld is the film's most forced dimension. His performance in the film's more emotionally serious sequences is the most restrained of his Craig-era career, reflecting a character who has reached a degree of emotional equilibrium the earlier entries did not always allow. Léa Seydoux's Madeleine Swann is the franchise's most romantically developed Craig-era Bond girl after Vesper, a psychologist of personal complexity whose relationship with Bond is the film's most satisfying character development and whose eventual significance to the Craig era's conclusion gives her introduction a retrospective weight. Christoph Waltz's Blofeld is a character of theatrical menace whose revelation as Bond's foster brother is the film's most implausible moment; the character's potential is gestured at rather than demonstrated, and the film never gives Waltz the material to make the threat feel genuinely earned. Dave Bautista's Mr. Hinx is the franchise's most physically imposing henchman since Jaws, whose train compartment fight with Bond is the film's most purely entertaining action sequence, a piece of old-fashioned physical cinema that recalls the franchise's most direct confrontations.
Meaning / Themes
The film's central concern is the relationship between surveillance and security: the Nine Eyes intelligence programme and the individual freedom it threatens is handled with adequate intelligence but insufficient conviction to give the theme the resonance it warrants. The surveillance subplot, which positions C as an antagonist within MI6 itself, gestures toward a timely critique of institutional overreach without developing it with the depth the premise deserves. The retroactive framing of Blofeld as the architect of Bond's personal history gives the antagonist dynamic a dimension that the more credible Craig-era entries achieved through less contrived narrative means.
Direction
Mendes' direction is controlled and visually purposeful, with a command of the film's more spectacular ambitions that gives the Mexico City and Austrian sequences a cinematic intelligence the franchise's more routine entries rarely achieve. The pre-title sequence is the film's directorial centrepiece, its single-take precision and physical scale placing it among the most formally ambitious sequences in Bond history. Hoyte van Hoytema's cinematography, while less distinctive than Roger Deakins' work on Skyfall, gives the film a visual consistency that suits its more expansive locations and keeps the film looking authoritative even when the narrative is not. Mendes pitches the film at a register of visual confidence and functional intelligence, with an entertainment assurance the more tightly focused franchise entries seldom matched. The film's most rewarding sequences are those in which the visual ambition and the craft are most directly combined, and the film is least convincing when the Blofeld connection is most directly foregrounded. There is a tonal unevenness to the second half that the first act's bravura cannot entirely compensate for. Sam Smith's Writing's on the Wall is the franchise's most vocally polished Craig-era title song after Adele, and Thomas Newman's score gives the film a weight that suits its more expansive passages.
Final Verdict: A film of visual ambition and real craft, ultimately undone by the decision to make Blofeld the architect of Bond's entire Craig-era history. The Mexico City pre-title sequence is one of the most formally ambitious passages in Bond history, Bautista's Hinx is the Craig era's most physically formidable henchman, and Mendes' direction gives the film a visual authority that makes Spectre a more watchable entry than its central contrivance might suggest. Its reputation has settled into a consensus that regards it as the Craig era's most compromised entry, most useful as context for No Time to Die, which inherits its character relationships and attempts to resolve what Spectre left unfinished.