It’s like a circus act where two jugglers pass flaming wands across the face on an unwitting audience member who has to stand perfectly still. And yet their emotional synapses are so slow, they remain in place to bestow the big set piece its element of high danger. Buildings are levelled, the prospect of an extremely violent death hovers mere meters above their fragile heads. Yet instead of simply accepting that there are real human beings under those ornate masks, Mendes has these masses loiter in the streets and squares as mayhem erupts all around them. It’s perhaps no coincidence that the film opens on the Day of the Dead festival in Mexico City with throngs of revellers clad in skeleton/lady ghost garb, all having a gay old time. I realise I’m straying into fertile spoiler territory with this one, so I promise to tread carefully. And when we do see people, they act with a responsiveness that’s redolent of the living dead. James Bond goes about his standard man’s man travails in a world which is almost entirely depopulated. Whether these details are intentional is tough to discern. Glib, crackpot and unstable though the thought may sound, it derives from a set of subtle background details in the film, and is not a comment on the listlessness of the performances or the dynamism of the action. There was an aspect to the film which only struck me 24 hours after viewing – that with Spectre, British director Sam Mendes has in fact made a zombie movie.
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#Spectre film logo full#
I’ve been thinking a lot about Spectre since seeing it, even though – full disclosure – I must admit to not caring for it a great deal.