Most Rewatchable Scene
Silva's entrance: the rats-on-the-island speech to Bond
In the discussion (11)
Approx. transcript time · 00:18:50Read transcript
- Five candidates are laid out, with an effort to keep scene distinct from sequence: the Shanghai skyscraper shootout, the new MI6 introduction in Churchill's tunnels with word association and sit-ups while Rory Kinnear briefs him on the state of the world, Silva and Bond's first meeting with the William Tell scene, the tube chase, and the church scene at the end; a Shanghai versus Macau mix-up is corrected along the way.
- Smaller stuff is what connects one host to the movie: the first meeting with Q in front of the Turner painting, talking in metaphor and at cross purposes in really well-written dialogue, with Wishaw great as Q; it is not a sequence where a train bursts through the ground.
- M reading Tennyson at the inquiry, cut against Daniel Craig sprinting through London with Big Ben behind him, lays it on thick but is moving every time; Craig is called a fantastic movie runner, maybe number two behind Cruise, and the film came out months after the London Olympics, which Bond kicked off in the Danny Boyle opening with the queen.
- Mallory and M's philosophical conversation about whether the enemy is in the shadows is a favorite dialogue scene, read as metaphor about waging a war on terror and the rights of a government to exceed its power, reflected later in the court scene; nothing in Quantum of Solace, written during the writer's strike, has that crispness.
- Two more suggestions: the planning conversation at Skyfall with Albert Finney's Kincaid, including the line about men coming to kill us and killing them first, which is right out of Eastwood, and the fight on top of the train with the excavator and the sleeve adjustment; the Istanbul opening with Moneypenny feels like typical Bond until M orders her to take the shot, and the motorcycle chase on the narrow walkway is illogical but shot beautifully.
- The pick is called a category of one: the Silva intro, shot by Mendes and Deakins from right behind Bond's shoulder as the villain comes down in an elevator and starts talking from forty feet away, his face withheld until the rats story nears its conclusion; the filmmakers knew what they had and let it play, and the episode plays the rat speech from the film.
- The scene inverts the Bond convention of saving the villain's big speech for the end, as parodied by Austin Powers, by putting it at the close of the first act; it is playwriting, one long metaphor monologue, spiced with the question of whether Silva is sexually attracted to Bond or something fraternal, and the hosts wonder whether the unbuttoning was in the script.
- Bardem is called the greatest Bond girl, lighting Craig up more than anyone since Eva Green; the villain tilts the movie on its axis, funny and destabilizing and more unsettling than other Bond villains, while the backstory with M is brushed aside in one line about Hong Kong.
- Silva hacking Bond and MI6 in 2012 is seen as prescient, a technocracy story rather than the money-and-power plots of villains like Mads Mikkelsen's; the abandoned island, shot off Macau but based on one off Nagasaki, is a faded ghost town that parallels Bond's own enjoying-death stretch.
- The scorpion scene is loved, with a nitpick that a British guy doing scorpion tricks in a Turkish bar while keeping a low profile would go viral; Silva mirrors Bond as a lone wolf with mommy issues operating to his own ends.
- After the action discussion, the answer is the rats speech, the Silva intro.