Dark Liquid

Before reading further, there may be very, very mild spoilers, but I wouldn’t worry unless you’ve never seen or heard anything about the movie. A trailer probably gives more away than I do here.

I saw Casino Royale last night with Dru in a rare occurrence of a thing called a date.

We arrived a little late for the 15:30 showing, so we instead went to Borders where they were giving out free chocolate! Woohoo! We browsed around the books and DVDs for a bit then realised we only had 30 minutes till the 16:30 showing so quickly went and grabbed me a burger (Dru wasn’t hungry) and then headed off to the 16:30 showing.

While we were waiting for the film to start they were playing Bond theme songs, which was cool, we kept trying to guess which films they were from, but failed miserably. The film started off quite well, I enjoyed the intro sequence, I thought it very well done and quite creative. I also quite like this new Bond theme song, I’ve not really enjoyed many of the others (though Duran Duran’s A View To A Kill is awesome), but this was pretty cool, I shall probably we getting the soundtrack to the film at some point.

I think Daniel Craig pulls of Bond very well. He has more of the grittiness I remember from reading the books (damn that was a long time ago, I need to get them again). Also, it’s refreshing to see a departure from the standard Bond look, Bond in blonde works quite well.

I liked the prequel style of the film, which is unusual as prequels don’t often impress me. Also, the sheer lack of over-the-top, in-your-face action with all the associated glitz and glamour was a breath of fresh air. It was great to see Bond getting back to basics and doing what he is meant to do, be a spy, a killer and a charismatic gentleman. In the recent films, he has been nothing but a vehicle for flashy gadgets and effects, much like the villains. That was also nice, the villain. Simple, not some ridiculous world dominating orbiting super laser, shark attacking psycho, but a cold and calculating villain whose character flaws didn’t make him seem like a retard. Of course, they couldn’t throw away every cliché, he had to have the ol’ scar over the eye, but that was okay.

I really liked the new Bond girl. She was a really good character and was also quite beautiful in a non-glossy, plastic way that a lot of other Bond girls have seemed to be. Also, she couldn’t really have been any worse as Halle Berry anyway, even if it had turned out she was rubbish. But thats not an issue since she pulled of the part very well and looked good while doing it.

There was a cliff-hanger ending, which was nice for a change, as usually there is a cheesy line, some kind of sex and the other MI6 characters doing the ‘oh Bond, you crazy character you’ style routine which undermines the entire film and makes it seems like a bad comedy sketch. It worked for the other films, because they had a certain fun quality that alluded to that kind of silliness, but it would have ruined this film’s, in my opinion, vastly superior feel.

Not that they didn’t have their fun in the film. There were lots of well placed puns about various Bond clichés in there which were funny and well placed. They weren’t exactly subtle, but they blended I well enough with the other dialogue to not linger and ruin the joke.

All in all, very enjoyable and one of the best films, and Bonds, I’ve seen for a while.