SKYFALL (2012)

SKYFALL. Sam Mendes, dir. Neal Purvis et al. script. UK/USA: MGM, Danjaq, Eon Productions (prod.) / Columbia Pictures et al. (dist.), 2012. See IMDb for complexities of distribution.

James Bond action-adventure movie, with, as usual with Bond films, interesting technology (often lethal). However, if we "gender" technologies, we also associate them with different age groups and generations, and although the point is far from central to SKYFALL, this rather elegiac film is of interest for a nuanced subtext on technology, chronological age, and, let us say, cohort of spies, heroes, and villains. In this Bond venture a very young Q can be a computer wizard and produce a mission-appropriate radio transmitter; a middle-age Bondian villain is visually associated with the most cutting-edge of computer technology that is itself imaged like something out of a documentary on the early computers produced by British and US WWII and Cold War research. And the car with the gadgets is the classic Bondian Aston Martin DB5.The brief USA Today review notes that SKYFALL is a movie that "focuses not only [on] Bond's beginnings, but also" on "dealing in a world gone mad with modern technology"; they overstate the point, but the theme is there as a "but also."

5. DRAMA, RDE, 11/XI/12