Skyfall (2012) Review – Daniel Craig’s Billion-Dollar Bond at Its Most Human

★★★★★ Our Rating: 9/10

Fifty years after Dr. No, the James Bond series had a problem. Quantum of Solace had made money and few friends, the Bourne films had stolen Bond’s grit, and the character risked becoming a heritage act — beloved, profitable and faintly irrelevant. Skyfall, released in the United Kingdom on 26 October 2012 after a London premiere on 23 October, was Eon Productions’ answer, and it remains the high point of the Daniel Craig era.

Director Sam Mendes, a theatre and prestige-film name nobody associated with action, did something clever: he made a Bond film about Bond being old. About M being old. About whether either of them, or the service they serve, still has a place in a world of servers, leaks and enemies who do not represent any country. Then he wrapped those questions in the most beautiful-looking Bond film ever made. In this review we look at the story spoiler-free, the performances, Roger Deakins’ cinematography, the music, and the billion-dollar box office — along with the plot holes honesty demands we mention.

Quick Facts: Skyfall at a Glance

The Story: Bond, Shot and Left for Dead (Spoiler-Free)

The pre-title sequence sets the terms. In Istanbul, Bond and fellow agent Eve are chasing a mercenary who has stolen a hard drive listing NATO agents embedded inside terrorist organisations — a list that, published, means executions. The chase runs across rooftops and onto a train, and ends with M, listening from London, ordering Eve to take an impossible shot. She hits the wrong man.

Bond falls. The world assumes he is dead. He lets it.

Months later, drinking in obscurity and failing every test of the man he was, Bond watches television: MI6 headquarters in London has been bombed. Someone is attacking the service itself, taunting M personally, publishing the stolen names week by week. Bond drags himself back to a service that has been driven underground — literally, into wartime tunnels beneath the city — and is put through physical and psychological assessments he comprehensively fails. M passes him anyway. That decision, loyalty dressed as judgement, is the heart of the film.

The trail runs through Shanghai and Macau to a man named Raoul Silva, who is not a foreign mastermind but something worse: one of M’s own, from an earlier posting, with a brilliant hacker’s mind, a ruined body and soul, and a single fixed purpose. Bond, diminished, out-teched and protecting the woman Silva wants, eventually stops running the modern way and takes the fight somewhere the film’s title has been pointing all along.

No ending spoilers here. But be ready: Skyfall is willing to take things away from this franchise that Bond films usually protect, and its final act, set far from any casino or capital city, plays more like a western siege than a spy caper.

Performances: Craig, Dench and a Villain for the Ages

Daniel Craig as James Bond gives his finest performance in the role. The Craig of Casino Royale was a blunt instrument learning manners; the Craig here is a damaged professional discovering he may simply be past it. He plays Bond’s decline without self-pity — the shaking hand, the failed marksmanship, the drinking — and then, crucially, does not magically reverse it. This Bond wins on stubbornness and improvisation, not superiority. Craig also gets the driest comic timing of his tenure; Mendes, who directed him on stage and screen before, knows exactly how much wit to let through the granite.

Judi Dench as M is, in effect, the co-lead, and Skyfall is her film as much as Craig’s. After seven appearances mostly spent scolding Bond from behind a desk, Dench finally gets a full character: a spymaster whose past decisions have come home armed, who defends her record before a parliamentary hearing with a speech about fear and necessity, and whose bond with Bond — mother, boss, liability, cause — is the emotional engine of everything. Dench plays her without a drop of sentimentality, which is why the sentiment lands.

Javier Bardem as Raoul Silva walks in nearly an hour into the film, in one long unbroken shot, telling a story about rats, and steals the movie. Bardem plays Silva as theatre: flamboyant, funny, flirtatious and then, in an instant, corpse-cold. The performance risks camp and mostly converts it into menace — Silva performs because performance is his weapon, and because underneath it is a man destroyed by a betrayal he describes in the film’s most quietly horrifying scene. He remains the most memorable Bond villain of the modern era.

Around them, the film rebuilds the old furniture with new faces. Ralph Fiennes as Gareth Mallory brings patrician steel and keeps you guessing about his agenda. Naomie Harris as Eve is capable and sparky in the field rather than decorative, and the film’s handling of her arc is one of its slyest pleasures. Ben Whishaw as Q — young, cardiganed, sipping tea while out-hacking the villain — reinvents the quartermaster perfectly for the cyber age. Bérénice Marlohe as Sévérine is striking but, honestly, short-changed: the film introduces her with real promise and then uses her too briefly and too conventionally, its one clear failure of imagination. Albert Finney as Kincade arrives late and provides exactly the warmth the finale needs.

Direction and Technical Brilliance

The single biggest upgrade Mendes brought was Roger Deakins. Skyfall is, shot for shot, the most gorgeous Bond film ever made, and it is not close. Deakins lights the Shanghai fight as silhouettes against a wall of shifting neon jellyfish. He turns a Macau casino into a floating world of lanterns, gold and dragon shadows. He shoots London in steely greys and then, for the finale, gives Scotland a painterly bleakness of mist, fire and dawn light. Several sequences — a fight in a glass tower, a train disaster in the Underground, a house burning against the night — are instantly among the most beautiful action images of the decade.

Mendes’ own contribution is structure and tone. He holds Silva’s entrance back for an hour and builds the film around two-handers — Bond and M, Bond and Silva, M and Mallory — so that the action, when it comes, is carrying emotional weight. The action itself is cleanly staged and geographically clear, a deliberate correction to the shaky, over-cut style of the previous film. The Istanbul chase, the Shanghai assassination sequence and the Tube pursuit are all models of legible direction.

The honest caveats: Silva’s master plan depends, in classic Bond fashion, on coincidences and on him being captured at exactly the right moment in exactly the right way — a scheme that frays if you think about it afterwards. And at 143 minutes, the film’s middle section between Macau and the return to London sags very slightly. Neither flaw sinks it, but both keep it just short of perfection.

Music and Background Score

Thomas Newman took over scoring duties from David Arnold and brought a cooler, more modern sound — propulsive percussion, electronics woven through the orchestra, and motifs that nod to the classic Bond sound without pastiching it. His music for the Scotland finale, blending folk-tinged strings with the Bond brass, is a career highlight.

Over it all stands Adele’s title song, “Skyfall”, written with Paul Epworth. It was the first Bond theme in years to feel like an event in itself — piano-led, smoky, built around a chorus that seems to fall and rise at once — and it won the Academy Award for Best Original Song. Heard over Daniel Kleinman’s credit sequence of graves, water and blood-red skies, it announces the film’s themes before a word of the plot is spoken: this is a Bond film about endings.

What Works and What Doesn’t

What we loved:

• Roger Deakins’ cinematography — the best-looking Bond film ever made
• Judi Dench finally given a full, central role, and playing it superbly
• Javier Bardem’s Silva: theatrical, disturbing and unforgettable
• A third act that strips Bond of gadgets and turns the film into a siege western
• Adele’s Oscar-winning theme and Thomas Newman’s propulsive score

What could be better:

• Silva’s plan relies on implausible coincidences and a conveniently timed capture
• Sévérine is introduced with promise and then wasted — the film’s weakest writing choice
• At 143 minutes, the middle stretch loses a little momentum

Box Office: Bond’s First Billion

Made for a reported $150–200 million, Skyfall became a commercial landmark. It grossed $1.109 billion worldwide — the first Bond film to pass a billion dollars, the highest-grossing film in the franchise’s history at the time, and for a period the highest-grossing film ever released in the United Kingdom. It did this in the franchise’s fiftieth-anniversary year, with a film aimed as much at older audiences and Bond nostalgists as at teenagers, proving the character’s ceiling was far higher than the industry had assumed. It also collected five Oscar nominations, winning two — for Adele’s song and for sound editing — a level of Academy recognition no Bond film had approached before.

Verdict: Should You Watch It?

If you watch one Daniel Craig Bond film, make it this one — and if you have written Bond off entirely, Skyfall is the film most likely to change your mind. It is not flawless: the villain’s scheme is smoke and mirrors, and Sévérine deserved better. But as a piece of popular filmmaking — performance, photography, music and myth-making all pulling in the same direction — it is close to the best the series has ever produced.

Our rating: 9/10 — a beautiful, emotional, thrilling high point for 007.

Frequently Asked Questions

Do I need to watch the other Daniel Craig films before Skyfall?
No. Skyfall is largely standalone. Knowing that Bond and M have history helps, but the film explains everything it needs. It works as an entry point to the whole series.

Is Skyfall suitable for children?
It is a tougher film than the older Bonds — there is sustained violence, some disturbing villain scenes and a sombre tone. It suits teenagers and adults best; younger children may find parts of it intense.

Who sings the Skyfall theme song?
Adele performs “Skyfall”, which she co-wrote with Paul Epworth. It won the Academy Award and the Golden Globe for Best Original Song.

What does “Skyfall” mean in the film?
It is a place name with deep personal significance for Bond, revealed in the final act. Saying more would spoil one of the film’s best-kept secrets — the title is a destination, not just a code word.

Is Skyfall the best James Bond film?
That argument will never be settled — From Russia with Love, Goldfinger and Casino Royale all have their champions. But Skyfall is the most commercially successful of the Craig era and the most acclaimed by critics overall, and for many viewers it now tops the list.