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I saw it last night. I'm a pretty harsh movie critic.
I give 4 out of 10 movies that I see a "eh, it was ok".
5 out of them I almost feel like demanding my money back.
1 out of 10 I really enjoy.
I'd put this one in the top category. And this isn't really my kind of genre of movie.
It certainly was very well cast. That bad guy from "No Country for Old Men" is great. He's one of the great bad guy characters of our time, and his performance in that plexiglass holding cell was awesome!
It also was very well made. Really great visuals throughout. (Lighting, scenery, camera work, etc.). It's a beautifully made movie.
It had a lot more below the surface stuff than a typical bond movie. Which IMO is good or bad, depending on what you like. Bond is shown with more foibles than normal. Red eyed, tired, stubble, etc. at the beginning.
M was shown as being far less than perfect, and the bad guy was shown as having, arguably, some good reasons for what he was doing. Or, at least, he wasn't simply evil for evil's sake.
They seemed to want to modernize the movie, so that it was very focused on computers and technology. But what they gave up was a lot of cool Bond "gadgets." He really had none (the gun that only he could fire was the only one, but that's not really a gadget or that interesting). I kind of missed that.
He also wasn't as suave with the ladies as in past films. Is this the older, slower Bond? (Maybe setting up a product placement for Viagra in later films?)
It's of course difficult to compare it to the great old ones (like The Spy Who Loved Me), because they are from such different eras. But overall this is clearly one of the top of the modern era Bond movies, and I think it holds up pretty well to any of the previous Bond movies.
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