It would be much easier to overlook these logical holes if Waltz's Blofeld didn't land with such a thud. But it makes much less sense for a maniac like Skyfall's Raoul Silva, who was explicitly motivated by his personal desire for revenge against M. It's a simple enough retcon for villains like Casino Royale's Le Chiffre and Quantum of Solace's Dominic Greene since they already belonged to shadowy criminal organizations, they can be recast as agents of Spectre without it feeling too weird. You can feel the movie's four credited screenwriters struggling to squeeze this brand-new, all-powerful organization into the previous films' continuity.
That's right: Spectre recasts the entirety of Daniel Craig's run as 007 by insisting that all of Bond's hardships in Casino Royale, Quantum of Solace, and Skyfall were a direct result of Blofeld's careful machinations. In the decades since, he has somehow built a criminal empire so vast it can accurately be described as existing "everywhere." And what has Blofeld done with all that power? Obsessively orchestrated every single terrible thing that has happened to Daniel Craig's 007. In his childhood, Blofeld's father took the recently orphaned James Bond under his wing, and encouraged Blofeld to think of Bond as a "brother." (It should really be a red flag when your big twist unintentionally recalls the twist at the end of Austin Powers in Goldmember.) Blofeld, seething with jealousy, killed his father and faked his own death, receding into the shadows. Spectre does add one new wrinkle to Blofeld, and it's a big one: his motivations for going after 007 are personal, not political. Shortly after Skyfall was released, MGM finally acquired the rights to use Blofeld again, and Spectre doesn't waste any time building up the qualities that established the character as 007's Moriarty by the end of the movie, we've met his fluffy white cat and seen him acquire the facial scar worn by Donald Pleasence's Blofeld in You Only Live Twice. A legal dispute has kept Blofeld out of the 007 franchise since 1981's For Your Eyes Only, but he remains Bond's most iconic villain (even if modern audiences know him best through Austin Powers' only marginally exaggerated parody, Dr.
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He's Ernst Stavro Blofeld, 007's greatest and most fearsome enemy, as pretty much everybody guessed when they cast Christoph Waltz in a James Bond movie called Spectre. And here's where we get to the really spoiler-y material, so if you'd prefer not to know anything about Spectre's third-act reveals, you can stop reading now.Īll set? No, Christoph Waltz isn't merely Franz Oberhauser. Oberhauser is the shadowy leader of a shadowy group called Spectre - so shadowy, in fact, that he literally leads a meeting while sitting in the shadows. (To be fair to Waltz, Oberhauser's weird little asides about meteorites and cuckoos don't exactly stack up against Tarantino's punchy monologues. Spectre's primary villain is Franz Oberhauser, played by Christoph Waltz, a two-time Oscar winner who seems hopelessly miscast in everything that's not a Quentin Tarantino movie. And one "surprise" villain is so transparent that Spectre practically sneers at itself during the reveal.īut none of that compares to the void at the center of the film's overarching narrative. Monica Bellucci, the much-vaunted "Bond girl" that's actually in Bond's age range, gets little more than a cameo. Hinx (Dave Bautista), a new henchman that's clearly aiming for a slot in the Jaws/Oddjob pantheon, falls totally flat. Daniel Craig, who was so convincing in his grief and rage over Vesper Lynd in Casino Royale and Quantum of Solace, doesn't seem capable of playing anything but cool efficiency. That sense of cheerless duty - while appropriate for a spy who has devoted his life to Queen and Country - has somehow infected Spectre itself. Going back to the old ways doesn't necessarily mean going through the motions, but it seems like that's what happened in Spectre. But those throwback elements have devoured Spectre altogether, bringing it closer to the tropes that the Daniel Craig era was explicitly launched to upend. There were harbingers of returning director Sam Mendes' old-is-new approach to 007 in Skyfall, which reintroduced Q, Moneypenny, a male M, and even the Goldfinger Aston Martin DB5 by the time the credits rolled.
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