Jake reviews the Skyfall Teaser Trailer

It's hard to read too much into a teaser trailer but our first look at Skyfall tends to indicate that it will business as usual for the James Bond reboot when Daniel Craig's third film arrives in cinemas later in the year. The rather pretentious (striving to be dramatic) music and opening scene of Bond (looking like he has just had an all night drinking session and has yet to have a shave) in a grim interrogation room undergoing some sort of evaluation via a word assocation game is very Barbara Broccoli Bond 2.1. "Frosties?" "Weetabix!" "Jim Bowen?" "Bullseye!" Craig is still mumbly here too. I couldn't understand some of his dialogue in the trailer at first. On the (admittedly inconclusive and skimpy) evidence of this trailer Skyfall is not going to be a change in direction or a laugh riot. If anything it looks as if EON and Daniel Craig are taking themselves even more seriously than ever his time around. Good news if you like Daniel Craig and the reboot I suppose but not so great for those of us who never liked Craig being Bond in the first place and are rather bored of the reboot already. It has to be said that Craig looks a bit rough here as if he's aged a lot since the last film and he seems to have given up on the bodybuilding too. The latter is not such a bad thing in my book as James Bond I think would have a plausible body rather than look like someone who subscribes to Men's Health and spends most of his spare time down a gym. One thing the trailer does do is highlight the cinematography with a couple of striking shots.

These neon images are sort of Blade Runner meets Die Another Day (no, honestly) and at least suggest this is going to be a more colourful film than the dreadful Quantum of Solace. It doesn't look terribly original though with a subway crash straight away of Die Hard With A Vengeance and that Jason Bourne aura still hovering the new series. One would imagine that they have a lot more up their sleeve to reveal (the villain is absent from the trailer) but it did seem rather generic and run of the mill rather than make you think of James Bond at any point. After I watched the trailer a few times it struck how you could have removed the Bond music at the end and easily imagined this as a new generic action film trailer for a Clive Owen or Jason Statham. The James Bond theme doesn't suit Daniel Craig at all. It's cheeky, upbeat, stylish, fun, old-fashioned. All the things Daniel Craig isn't. My main issue with these Craig films is they never really feel like James Bond films to me and Craig never feels or looks like Bond. It is far too early to come to any concrete conclusions about Skyfall yet but I suspect Barbara Broccoli is going to spend the rest of her life trying to make Casino Royale again. That's a sobering thought if like me you didn't even like Casino Royale in the first place.

I think the thing that struck me most about the trailer was that it was more or less what I expected. It's as if the Quantum of Solace reviews or the four year gap never happened. Just more of Daniel Craig walking around looking serious and miserable and doubtless killing a lot of people. It will be interesting to see if the next trailer is any different.

- Jake