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10 Reasons Why Spectre Doesn’t Top Skyfall

Sam Mendes' Spectre, the 24th entry in the James Bond franchise, is not a bad film. Critical consensus indicates it's flawed, but still basically enjoyable and artfully made by a director who's proven surprisingly adept at blockbuster filmmaking. Nevertheless, Spectre has the misfortune of following one of the greatest Bond movies of all-time: Mendes' own Skyfall. A Bond film made to simultaneously bring 007 up-to-date and celebrate 50 years of the character, Skyfall is comfortably the best of the Daniel Craig Bonds. Spectre comes in at a respectable third.

4) Interesting Concepts Are Raised But Never Fully Realized

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Spectre

“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.