
James Bond Movie Analysis - mindcrime
http://www.r-bloggers.com/james-bond-movies/
======
trevelyan
The latest Bond film is actually pretty interesting. And at risk of plugging
my own writing, anyone interested in actual film analysis could do worse than
check out this essay on the Skyfall, which nailed the major themes in Spectre
two years in advance:

"The hostility of authoritarian political systems to individual autonomy
(democratic government in aggregate) is thus one of the ongoing themes of the
film...."

[https://popupchinese.com/skyfall.html](https://popupchinese.com/skyfall.html)

The short version of Spectre is that Mendes is doing the same thing he did in
Skyfall, casting M16 as the villain of the film and using literary motifs and
allegorical doubling (i.e. villains reflecting aspects of Bond himself) to
suggest that it is the security state itself that the real villain in the
film. The interesting thing is the way he engineers a happy ending by
transforming the "license to kill" into a "licence not to kill", essentially
changing Bond from the agent of death he is shown to be at the beginning of
the film into a pro-democratic figure who abandons violence and in doing so
gets the girl and what she thematically represents.

~~~
spacecowboy_lon
So an Assasin that takes his own initiative on who to Kill is democratic :-)

~~~
trevelyan
Surprising and somewhat nonsensical, I agree, but that's what the film is
doing.

------
gloves
This is the original link: [http://opiateforthemass.es/articles/james-bond-
film-ratings/](http://opiateforthemass.es/articles/james-bond-film-ratings/)

The books were better than the films anyway!

------
Svip
That's not a lot of analysis. Why not ask:

Which Bond actor was the most profitable per film (i.e. the average box office
rating of an actor)?

Which actor was the most efficient (i.e. the average actor salary subtracted
from the average box office rating)[0]?

Which actor turned the best ratings? Can we predict whether the next Bond film
will be good or bad, based on data first from the Craig era films and then all
the films?

The article doesn't even mention what is the _best_ Bond film, i.e. the film
that performs best when _both_ rating and box office is taking into account. I
find the problem interesting of how you add a box office amount together with
a rating percentage to get a 'film score'.

This article seems to be more about the technical aspect and not such more
about the results.

[0] Yes, I know there are five Roger Moore films where the actor salary is
unknown, but then we could just skip Roger Moore or only calculate on the
films we _do_ know the salary.

~~~
kitwalker12
538 did such an analysis [here]([http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-
perfect-bond-movie-s...](http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-perfect-bond-
movie-sean-connery-judi-dench-and-a-watch-that-blows-stuff-up/))

------
hudibras
R-bloggers is an aggregator. Should link directly to the original.

~~~
mindcrime
_Should link directly to the original._

Why? Is it that hard to click through on a link? I stumbled across the article
on r-bloggers, found it interesting, and submitted the link. Why should I
worry about putting in the work to make sure people wind up on one site
instead of another?

~~~
hudibras
Just seeing your comment now, and I should have explained better. R-Bloggers
is a great aggregator for R-related topics and I look at it every day. But it
jams all the posts into its own text-heavy format, so you should click through
to the original to get the full post formatted as the author intended.

Again, R-Bloggers is great for finding blog posts of interest, but once you
find something interesting, then you should go to the original.

------
aluhut
Is there a reason why the pictures are so small?

~~~
sdrothrock
If you mean the graph images, they're slightly larger on the original post:
[http://opiateforthemass.es/articles/james-bond-film-
ratings/](http://opiateforthemass.es/articles/james-bond-film-ratings/)

The code is also much more readable there.

