Quite the oddest sensation last night at the first public screening at the Odeon, Leicester Square, of the new James Bond movie, Spectre, was being at the heart of a really big gathering where no one had a mobile phone. All the smartphones were confiscated at the door for fear of piracy and the spectacle of London’s finest not knowing what to do with their hands was quite something; some people positively talked to each other. The downside was the scrum at the end to retrieve them.
The other odd thing was the feeling of being a bit out of sync with the rest of the gathering. At the same press event for Skyfall, the atmosphere at the end was exhilarated because the audience had had a good time together. This time it was more subdued; there had been only one occasion when we’d all had a good laugh and there wasn’t applause when Bond’s old Aston Martin was hauled out at the end of the film – nothing like the gales of laughter that greeted it at Skyfall.
The trouble was the film. People were determinedly upbeat, bent on liking it. Self-excepted: it was less coherent, less fun, than I’d expected. And when I read the rave reviews in the papers this morning the feeling of being out of step with the parade was even more disconcerting. But all was well; it turned out this morning that my Evening Standard colleague David Sexton had felt the same, so that’s fine.
You’ll be bombarded by reviews so let me just ventilate about a couple of things. One is the complete swiz of the Bond girl. We were fed a great spiel before the launch about Monica Bellucci being the oldest ever, at 51: Bond pairs off with a woman his own age! … women of the same vintage cheered up enormously. Well, she appeared for the shortest ever interlude as the widow in a Mafia style funeral at the start, and was perfunctorily seduced, before disappearing from the scene. The actual Bond girl, Lea Seydoux, was blonde and 30 and gorgeous, though obviously feisty in an unthreateningly feminist way. So, not quite so groundbreaking.
Another problem was the hitman, Mr Hinx, played by Dave Bautista without a shred of redemptive humour. Bond’s hitmen can be fun qua characters – previous ones included Jaws, but also a horrid dwarf and the Chinese bloke with a metal-rimmed bowler. Well, Mr Hinx has nothing going for him except bulk and strength. And mere muscle doesn’t really do it.
And then there was the curious absence of a sense of place, which was odd, given how many of them there were: Mexico City (fabulous, but just for the prelude, with the Day of the Dead parade); Rome (good car chase); Austria and Tunisia, where there was a Dr No style hideout in the middle of the desert; London, or at least the Thames. Except the film engaged with none of them. In From Russia With Love (a proper, Spectre film) the thing kicked off in Istanbul, and you felt the atmosphere of the place, obviously in an overblown orientalist way, but that was half the fun. In You Only Live Twice (another proper Spectre movie) it was set firmly in Japan…hackneyed maybe, but you were jolly well embedded in it. This Spectre calls in on countries only onto to move on from them. And unlike those other Spectre movies which were given an intelligible context of the standoff between the US and the USSR it’s hard to work out what this Spectre is up to. The one contemporary reference is to people trafficking, and that goes nowhere. All very odd.
But there are some jokes, which is nice… and then there’s Q: Ben Wishaw as the fabulous, nerdy geek, who can hack into any computer, including Spectre’s in a minute flat. He’s a different vintage, different age, different genre from Desmond Llewelyn, but he’s good for a comic touch and he’s genuinely distinctive as a personality. Which, given the rest of this movie, is quite something.
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