Javier Bardem torments James Bond in a new ‘Skyfall’ clip

I’m going to have to stop watching clips and trailers at this point, I think.

Then again, this latest clip is so much fun that I’m not sure I’m going to be able to stop myself.

I know very little about Silva, the mysterious bad guy that Javier Bardem is playing in the film, but one of the keys to making a Bond film work is pitting him against someone who is a worthy adversary.  So far, the early reviews that I’ve glanced at seem to really like Bardem’s work, and this new clip is one of the best glimpses we’ve had so far of Silva and Bond together.

What I like about this is the way it feels like Silva is engaged in the game here.  It feels like he’s enjoying the cat-and-mouse with Bond, and the move he pulls to get away is pretty great.  It’s also pretty clear that this is another film where Javier Bardem is visually disturbing, adding to the menace.  Nobody makes wigs more upsetting than Bardem, and his “blonde policeman” thing he’s got going on here is really freaky.

I’m curious to see how the film explores Bond’s history.  In a series that has run 50 years where the main character has always been within about a fifteen-year age range, continuity gets weird, and Bond in particular has had so many different incarnations that it feels like you have to treat each of the Bonds as a separate thing.  Daniel Craig’s films were the most radical reboot in the series history, even though they carried over some of the cast members from the Pierce Brosnan movies, and it feels like they’re trying to ground him in a greater sense of personal history than most of the Bond films.  Obviously, the death of Teresa Bond has been a thread they’ve included in the series several times, but more than almost any other character who has been around this long, Bond remains a blank on a personal level.

Our own Greg Ellwood was on the set for this scene, and you can read about that here:


That’s a fun tease, and November 8th cannot get here fast enough.  God, I hope “Skyfall” is as good as it looks.

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