SPECTRE

SPECTRE. UK/USA: Columbia and MGM, et al. (prod.) Columbia & Sony for UK and US dist., respectively, 2015. See IMDb for details of and distribution. 148 minutes. Estimated production budget, US$245-300M, opening week grosses UK, US$80M.

We don't usually list running times for films unless the films are available in alternate versions or the running time is otherwise significant; and we don't usually get into matters of budget and grosses. The point here is that SPECTRE is a big film, with record-setting ticket sales in the UK and impressive projections for the US and elsewhere.[1] Given the film's sheer heft, so to speak, if not exactly gravitas, it is significant that the "Spectre haunting Europe" and the rest of the world in this movie is surveillance explicitly identified as Orwellian. The lair of operations for this Panopticon — a word not used — is a high-tech, computerized operation both above ground and somewhat below, set in a crater that is the result of a hit by an asteroid in the Tunisian desert. We do not have an Underworld mechanized here, as in "The Machine Stops" onward, but we do have a cybernetically-saturated depression.

Surveillance as such is accepted as inevitable — the point of view is, of course, that of Bond-inflected British intelligence — but presented as dangerous when free of democratic restraints, expanded to include the major governments of the planet, concentrated in streamlined spy operations such as a conflated MI5 and MI6, and (no spoiler here) ultimately caught in the tentacles of the villainous terrorist organization, SPECTRE.[2] As the "Special Executive for Counter-intelligence, Terrorism, Revenge and Extortion," and not the movie itself, SPECTRE is seen in a board meeting that could be out of C. S. Lewis's comments in his 1961 Preface to The Screwtape Letters that "in the Managerial Age, in a world of 'Admin.,' [t]he greatest evil is not" done in Dickensian dens of iniquity or "even in concentration camps and labour camps. In those we see its final result. But it is conceived and ordered (moved, seconded, carried, and minuted) in clean, carpeted, warmed, and well-lighted offices, by quiet men" and one woman, with SPECTRE, "with white collars and cut fingernails […]." In the film SPECTRE, as in Lewis, one "symbol for Hell is something like the bureaucracy of a police state or the offices of a thoroughly nasty business concern," with governmental and (crime)-business bureaucracies conflated. Although this meeting is not so polite as to preclude an on-screen murder as part of the personnel process.

Of less significance, but interesting: in "the classic sequence of the hero threateningly contained for technological torture"[3] — obligatory in Bond movies — the implements are handled by Christoph Waltz's very clean-cut villain Oberhauser by telemanipulation, with Oberhauser at a nearby computer console with no socks and possibly wearing loafers, looking like a Silicon-Valley middle-manager while, in Bondian-villain fashion yet again using some highly-elegant but over-engineered, overly ingenious, and, ultimately, incredibly inefficient and stupid way to try to destroy Bond.

{RDE 06/X/15}