The sequence is built around octopus imagery, with goopy tentacles weaving and waving their way through scenes from the forthcoming movie. No and the gilded, surrealist innuendos of Goldfinger.īut Spectre’s credits are just weird. Bond movies have long been known for their innovative, avant-garde opening titles, dating back to the mod design work of Dr. The problem is that it handles most of them the wrong way. Directed by Sam Mendes (who also helmed Skyfall), it features all of the franchise’s familiar elements and characters. Spectre is the 24th film in the James Bond series, and the fourth to feature Daniel Craig as 007. Spectre handles familiar elements in all the wrong ways Indeed, while the stunning opening sequence offers a succinct demonstration of all the ways a Bond movie can go right, what follows mostly serves to illustrate all the ways Bond movies can - and do - go wrong. 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. Most extraordinarily, the Catedral is the single largest place of worship in all of Latin America.The jaw-dropping single shot is an incredible technical accomplishment. The Catedral took hundreds of years to build (1567 to 1788, to be exact), and it holds a motley blend of styles, including elements of the baroque, neoclassicism, and endemic churrigueresque architecture. You don’t really get a full frame of it during the increasing drama, but there are flickers of it as Bond pursues his villain-even in snapshots, it’s impressive. Directly to the north is the Catedral Metropolitana de la Ciudad de México. You feel, indeed, like you’re on a movie set.Įventually, Bond finds his way to the crux of the square, obviously hot on the trail of danger. With Art Nouveau stained glass vaulted ceilings and an ornamental splendor worthy of its moniker, it transports visitors to a lost era of detail and plushness. This is the Gran Hotel Ciudad de México, just to the southwest of the Zócalo. As Spectre kicks off, Bond-in a skeleton-painted suit, no less-follows a smoldering temptress (Stephanie Sigman of recent Narcos fame) into an ornate elevator and chamber.
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