4) Interesting Concepts Are Raised But Never Fully Realized
“The dead…are alive.” Spectre chooses to open with those words written across the screen, and then never clarifies exactly what it means. That the film raises intriguing ideas relating to death and rebirth but then never capitalizes upon them is one of the main signs that the script was a rush-job. It’s a film where the writers clearly had something to say about family, legacy and mortality at the planning stages, but there just wasn’t enough time to sufficiently articulate it all.
Where Skyfall addressed its own concerns clearly even amidst all the booming action, in Spectre, any good ideas just get lost in the noise. For example, Andrew Scott’s nefarious Denbigh and his Nine Eyes spy program is presumably Spectre making a comment on surveillance and decreasing privacy, but the argument is never crystallized.
It all leaves the film feeling just a tad insubstantial.