The reviews are essentially right. Skyfall is a positive restart for Bond. Gone are the sillier gadgets and the incessant womanising, though these are not lost completely, this is still Bond after all.
Similarly a lot of the action takes place in the UK rather than gratuitous foreign beauty spots, not that they are completely absent either. There is a believable baddie and a coming-of-age plot that kills off a few current themes and sets up some new ones.
It is all rather neat and tidy and sets Bond up nicely for the next fifty years.
All that is very good but there is one serious drawback. This is Bond as Batman. To be specific this is Bond as Batman in The Dark Knight. If you do not want to know why then stop reading!
Raoul Silva is the Joker. He thinks and moves like the Joker and, more importantly, he makes the "two rats" analogy just like the Joker claims that he and Batman are like each other and so are natural opponents. Bond's mother, M, is killed. Bond's ancestral home is destroyed.
The deliberate copying, and it is hard to believe that it could be anything else, is a negative that the film struggles to overcome. It does that well enough for the copying to be forgiven if not forgotten. It is still a very good film and I will be buying the DVD.
I saw this yesterday afternoon and absolutely and unequivocally loved it. I've enjoyed Bond movies before but wouldn't have called myself a fan until seeing Skyfall (and it's def. the best of Craig's Bond outings). I can see your point about the parallels with the Batman movie but this didn't ruin it at all for me and I'm really looking forward to seeing what this new modern Bond and world of MI6 bring to the party in the future.
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