I”m an admitted total and utter sucker for Guillermo del Toro’s monsters, so I’m intrigued by what little we see of the beast in Pacific Rim in this teaser:

The thing I’m hoping for the movie, though, is that it’s at least in part about how you go from having military jets shoot rockets at monsters to a point where a multi-national fighting force is going mano-a-mano with the damn things in battle robots. The viral content for the movie seems promising—it’s got things like emergency tests and troop transfer orders that demonstrate a society adapting itself to a new and unnerving reality. If I can have bureaucracy and monsters and Idris Elba, I will be a very happy woman.

It says a lot about the penetration of mandatory minimum sentences for drug-related crimes into public consciousness that the folks who cut the trailer for Dwayne Johnson’s new action movie, Snitch, use scenes where characters talk about sentencing guidelines twice in the first minute:

Were this a different movie, I’d take a look at the cliche cartel villains (though I do love me some Benjamin Bratt) and the chase sequences, and I’d probably write it off. But the decision to portray mandatory minimums as both cruel in and of themselves—which,in addition to being applied in racially disparate ways, they are—and to demonstrate the ways in which they can be used to push people in vulnerable circumstances into becoming confidential informants, is astute, and different. Both the New York Times and the New Yorker published blockbuster pieces on the use and misuse of confidential informants earlier this year. The former, by Ted Conover, followed the experiences of one such informant, Alex White, while the latter, by Sarah Stillman, took a more systematic approach. But they both make the point the drug war in particular is increasingly reliant on a system that puts people who have committed small crimes in great danger for very chancy results.

Most of our crime movies operate by showing us the flaws in the law-enforcement system and using the victories and examples of noble exceptions to those flaws to reaffirm our faith in the police and in the courts to keep us safe, combat evil, and act with mercy. Snitch could be that rare crime film that works in a different direction, arguing that systems meant to produce consistency in inconsistent circumstances inject further instability into our government’s efforts to control the flow of narcotics. Even if it’s not willing to indict the war on drugs—and it’s true that there are cartels, and they can be brutally violent—or the law enforcement system as a whole, I’m glad to see movies like Snitch that are more closely rooted in the ambiguities and real impact of our criminal justice system even if they devolve into by-the-numbers shoot-’em-ups. There’s drama to be drawn from the experiences of people whose lives are ruined by an inflexible system, and by the bad deals that prosecutors offer up to them, and stories worth telling about those failures. The setups to our action movies matter, even if a lot of them end the same way.

This post, obviously, discusses plot points from Skyfall.

I. The Bulldog

Skyfall is supremely British movie. M writes Bond’s obituary with a bottle of whiskey and a china bulldog painted to look like the Union Jack as company at her desk. After the bombing of MI6 headquarters, Bond grouses “The whole office goes up in smoke and that bloody thing survives?” “Your interior decorating tips are always appreciated,” M tells him tartly. When MI6 relocates, it’s to Winston Churchill’s old bunker: “Quite fascinating, if it wasn’t for the rats,” M’s aide Tanner (Rory Kinnear) says. During a free-associative exercise as part of his field assessment, Bond’s asked to respond to the world “Country.” His immediate response, of course, is “England.” When he and M return to Skyfall, the family estate Bond hasn’t visited since he left for school, they’re met by a fabulous old-school retainer, Kincade. “Some men are coming to kill us. We’re going to kill them first,” Bond informs him. “Then we’d better get ready,” Kincade replies stoutly. When the first henchman meets Kincade’s shotgun, he dispatches the man with a hearty “Welcome to Scotland.” Even the language of daily conversation feels more staunchly English than usual, whether it’s Bond telling M “Just changing carriages,” as the back half of a train is violently torn away behind him, or M sourly suggesting, on Bond’s return from a long absence that “I suppose they ran out of drink where you were.”

That vigorous emphasis on cultural signifiers of British national character makes sense. Skyfall is a film that’s explicitly concerned with the blowback to British imperialism, and implicitly structured to bridge the gap between the UK’s two great contributions to spy culture: the bureaucratic knife-fight and the secret agent with the Walther PPK.

“England. The Empire. MI6. You’re living in a ruin,” Skyfall’s antagonist, Silva (Javier Bardem) tells Bond when he finally arrives on-screen. Much more so than a traditional Bond film villain, Silva is a photo-negative of Bond, a man whose faith in MI6 has been shattered, who abandoned British soil to live on a Japanese island that looks like a dreamscape in Inception, complete with a tumbled Ozymandian statue, who wears white and cream to Bond’s black, who fights his battles with server farms instead of his fists, and whose sexual ominvorousness extends even beyond Bond’s own. It’s possible he’s meant as an allusion to Julian Assange, who recently caused the UK some measure of annoyance, in both physical presentation and weapon of choice. But Skyfall makes the interesting choice to give Silva grievances against his government more legitimate than any Assange suffered personally. When M ran him as an agent in Hong Kong during the transition of control from the British to China, she handed him over to the Chinese government after he was discovered doing offensive hacking outside his brief. “I got six agents in return, and a peaceful transition,” M explains to Bond without sentiment. Silva was tortured, and when he tried to take his cyanide capsule, it failed to kill him. “Life clung to me like a disease,” Silva tells her, revealing the destruction of his dental plate, the ruined face he conceals with prosthetics. “Do you know what hydrogen cyanide does to you? Look upon your work.” Hong Kong isn’t the only element of British foreign policy history that Skyfall alludes to: as Silva stalks M through London, the movie brings up the dreadful specter of that city’s subway bombings. Who needs doomsday devices when you have reality?

The chase ends, where it has to, in a Parliamentary hearing room at Westminster. John Le Carre, the creator of some of the greatest heroes of bureaucratic British spydom, has explained that he dislikes James Bond because “It seems to me he’s more some kind of international gangster with, as it is said, a license to kill… he’s a man entirely out of the political context.” Much of the best of British spy fiction has responded to Bond in the same way, from George Smiley’s disinfection of the Circus, to the men and women working inside the Grid in Spooks. And among the other work of the Daniel Craig era in the Bond franchise has been the reconciliation of that “international gangster” with British politics and bureaucracy. In Casino Royale, M is disgusted at being called in to testify as to Bond’s conduct after he shoots up an embassy in Africa, both because she has to deal with the oversight, and because Bond’s given Parliament reason to demand it:

Who the hell do they think they are? I report to the Prime Minister and even he’s smart enough not to ask me what we do. Have you ever seen such a bunch of self-righteous, ass-covering prigs? They don’t care what we do; they care what we get photographed doing. And how the hell could Bond be so stupid? I give him double-O status and he celebrates by shooting up an embassy. Is the man deranged? And where the hell is he? In the old days if an agent did something that embarrassing he’d have a good sense to defect. Christ, I miss the Cold War.

In Skyfall, she’s back at it again, this time on even more serious grounds. After Bond fails to stop Patrice, a terrorist who managed to steal the encrypted identities of NATO agents embedded in terrorist organizations, M finds herself called to heel by Mallory (Ralph Feinnes), a former soldier-turned bureaucrat. “Are we to call this civilian oversight?” M asks him. “We call it retirement planning,” he tells her. “I’m here to oversee the transition period leading to your voluntary retirement in two months’ time.” After those agents are unmasked and begin to be killed, M is called before an inquiry to explain herself, an act that both makes Bond and his colleagues answerable to a political context and gives M an opportunity to explain why the kind of political context Le Carre called for is less clear-cut in a post-Cold War era. “Our enemies are no longer known to us,” she tells the minister. “They don’t exist on a map. our world is not more transparent, now. It’s more opaque. That’s where we have to fight. In the shadows.” As Silva makes his murderous way towards her, she quotes Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s “Ulysses”:

Tho’ much is taken, much abides; and though
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
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The 2009 action movie G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra was so spectacularly awful, so gleefully, intently dumb that it overdid it and shot past so bad it’s good to so bad it’s bad, that I kind of can’t believe this but…I’m sort of looking forward to G.I. Joe: Retaliation. And I kind of can’t believe that, in between jokes about Channing Tatum babysitting the Rock’s kids, and Bruce Willis talking about his cholesterol, there’s a line about drone strikes, or at least terrifying strikes from the skies, so blunt it could have been spoken on Homeland. “There’s only one man who could authorize a strike like that, and I voted for him,” the Rock says grimly:

This all comes, of course, wrapped in a package that includes an In Like Flint-like president-swapping scheme (sadly, the ladies of America are not also getting brainwashed through salon hairdryers), sexy ninjas, and motorcycles that turn into explosives. I’d expect nothing less. But it’s interesting to me that even pop culture artifacts that are otherwise quite comfortable with projections of American military power are getting increasingly uncomfortable with our capacity to deal death from above and without warning. Homeland’s concerned with the possibility of blowback, while the much showier G.I. Joe makes horrifying spectacle of the prospect of getting blown of out of existence from a higher level of the atmosphere. But they share that anxiety. And it’s telling that the Rock’s character believes that even a legitimate president might have grossly abused the power drones or satellites give him.

I promise this will be the last exercise in Star Wars nerdery for…a little bit, at least. But Jamelle Bouie, who is one of my favorite people to geek out with, and I sat down yesterday to record a Bloggingheads episode about our hopes and fears for the new movie coming down the pike. In it, Jamelle makes what I think is a good point: that Disney’s profit incentives could actually be good for fans if they did things like release remastered box sets of the original cuts of the movies.

Another part of the conversation we had was how to design villains for the new movie better. In the absence of Vader , as a Big Bad for most of the prequels, the villain design was either haphazard or racist. One thing Jamelle and I discussed was whether the new movies could introduce the shape of familiar conflicts but with different participants. The remnants of the Empire could function like an insurgency, but one run by white, British-coded members of the Imperial Navy. If you want to do a trade wars story, bring in Thyferra, the planet that produces Bacta, and where a white minority forces labor out of an alien majority, a la South Africa. If you want to force an existential crisis with the Jedi, bring in the Yuuzhan Vong, who have an apocalyptic worldview, and are very effective at implementing it, to be al Qaeda. In a way, I’m excited to see how this goes less for Episode VII itself and more for a chance to think about what our action movies should be.

You guys, I’m pretty sure we don’t need John McClane to beat the Russians because we already won the goddamn Cold War:

I get the nostalgia factor on this. But I’m increasingly exhausted by the fact that our inability to get over the idea of Russia as the Evil Empire and our rush to obtain Chinese and Middle Eastern co-production means that our action movies are totally stagnant and unable to think creatively about current geopolitical tensions, and as a result, to come up with new formulas for our movie conflicts. There are times it feels like that old chestnut James Bond is the only franchise that’s been able to think about non-state actors with any amount of creativity, whether in Tomorrow Never Dies or Casino Royale. Even the X-Men stuck with discrimination metaphors rather than bring in the geopolitics of Genosha or Wakanda via Storm. I love Saint Basil’s Cathedral. But I sort of wish that one of these days the movies would decide to leave it exploded for a while and move on to some other landscapes, and some other fears.

As I was reading through the coverage of the announcement that Star Wars Episode VII will be arriving in movie theaters in 2015, I clicked on over to my friend Alex Knapp’s post on the subject on Forbes. And then I lowered my head slowly and repeatedly to my desk. It’s not that I think Alex’s ideas for storylines for a new trilogy are bad ones—they definitely aren’t. But it was that the post fell prey to a symptom I’m finding more and more deadly in criticism these days: the idea that we should just hand the keys to all pop culture over to Joss Whedon and sit back and enjoy the ride.

It’s not that I dislike Whedon, or many of the products he’s given us over the years. But I think there’s something disturbing about the idea that Joss Whedon is good at everything, or that the things that Joss Whedon is excellent at are necessarily the best things that our mass culture can do. It’s a homogenizing impulse—I shudder to think of a world with one dominant action movie sensibility, especially one that particular. And it ignores the fact that for all of Whedon’s strengths, he has weaknesses, a number of which would be particularly tricky for a revitalized Star Wars franchise.

It’s worth remembering, for example, that Whedon’s main accomplishment is revitalizing and critiquing the horror genre, and that he’s actually weak when it comes to one of the most important components of truly transcendent action filmmaking. He often seems relatively indifferent to actual action sequences. The fights in Buffy and Angel (which I’m working my way through now) are almost deliberately indifferent and schlocky in a way that robs tension from them. Matchups may be exciting because of their outcomes, like Buffy sending Angel to Hell, but not because of any clash of styles, or often, any real sense that the outcome itself is at stake. Dollhouse was more attuned to standard-issue training montages than any particular difference in style. Like Buffy, River Tam’s fight scenes in Firefly and Serenity are plausible because of things we’ve told that have been done to her, and she wins because that’s integral to the story’s needs. We don’t see the decisions or things other than the generic martial arts skills she has, that give her an advantage and let her think her way out of corners, because she’s never really in any. If anything, I’d say Whedon has an interest in the artificiality of action sequences, which lends itself to valid critiques of genre conventions, but not always to fight choreography that stands on its own.

The action sequences in The Avengers are somewhat more distinctive than his previous batting average, are mostly better because they involve the Hulk, a fighter who can be used with particular wit and violence, or amusing team-ups of fighters, rather than because Whedon got much better at choreographing actual duels. I shudder to think what Whedon would do with a lightsaber duel—why not at least call in a wuxia action choreographer, given the potential of the Force to shape duels, like Yuen Woo-ping, who did the amazing fights in Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon?

Then, there’s Whedon’s witty banter addiction and his approach to sexuality, both of which I think are strengths for him almost all the time, in part because he has a smart sense of scenarios where they fit, among them group dynamics or emotional situations that need to be deescalated. Whedon’s characters often use references or wit to defuse situations or to distance themselves from difficult emotions. I love Buffy telling Angel “I’m cookie dough. I’m not done baking. I’m not finished becoming who ever the hell it is I’m gonna turn out to be. I make it through this, and the next thing, and the next thing, and maybe one day, I turn around and realize I’m ready. I’m cookies. And then, you know, if I want someone to eat m- or enjoy warm, delicious, cookie me, then that’s fine. That’ll be then. When I’m done.” But that’s not remotely the same thing as Han Solo leaning in to tell Princess Leia “I’m nice men.” The line is an abstraction, but to totally different effect. The menu of movies available to us needs both cuteness and sensuality, lines that deflect and others than pull characters closer to greater intimacy.
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The rumors that Idris Elba will follow Daniel Craig as the next James Bond come and go, but they’re back again. I’m obviously in favor of this potential development on the grounds that Idris Elba is awesome (though I also think you could make great cases for David Oyelowo or Chiwetel Ejiofor) and it would give me an excuse to make a lot of “Able was I, ere I saw Elba” jokes. But there are a lot of reasons that it would be great to have a black Bond, and Elba in particular, beyond his simple excellence as an actor:

1. It would clarify that Bond is a rotating identity: James Bond is sort of like that other venerable British pop cultural institution, the Doctor. He’s been around for decades, he’s played by a rotating cast of actors, and there’s not the most rigorous continuity between incarnations, particularly between the old-school ones and the re-imagined version. But unlike the Doctor, Bond doesn’t have a clear means of passing the torch. A black Bond would be a clear break with tradition. The franchise could either nod at what this means for James Bond as an identity unmoored from a single man’s identity (it would explain why M likes Daniel Craig’s Bond more than Pierce Brosnan’s), or come up with a mythology for passing it on to the next man. Either way, this would permanently open up the franchise to different kinds of men, allowing for some experimentation in styles within the basic elements of Bond-dom.

2. It would be a nice reminder white guys aren’t the only people who can be hypercompetent national icons: It’s not as if Will Smith hasn’t been saving American bacon for a long time. But it’s one thing for a black man to be the unexpected savior of the world and for him to be anointed as the best a nation has to offer. It’s past time.

3. It would give Elba a chance to play a lover, as well as a fighter: I’ve written about this before in the context of Luther, but given how good Elba is at playing sensual, passionate, or nailing the contours of a difficult marriage, it’s too bad that so many of his roles have steered him away from being romantic or sexual and strictly towards the commission of a great deal of very stylish violence. Bond girls (or in Eva Green’s case, Bond Women) are an inherent part of the package. It would be lovely to have Elba in particular and a prominent black actor in general get a chance to play one of the world’s most famous seducers in a context where it’s evidence of his awesomeness, rather than a showcase for suspect stereotypes about black men and sexuality.

4. It might encourage the franchise to think more creatively about other elements of the Bond formula: Casino Royale worked so well because it upended almost every element of the excess that marked the Brosnan years: the villain was pegged to actual geopolitical realities, the decisive action sequences went down in a polite casino private room rather than on a grand tableaux, the violence was personal and painful rather than flashy and fake, the woman in question’s brain mattered as much as her breasts. Craig’s helped bring the franchise part of the way into the future. Maybe a black Bond would augur even further exploration of the limits of the formula.

5. It would be interesting to see a slightly older Bond: Daniel Craig remains under contract as Bond for a while, and I’ve seen some suggestions that Elba couldn’t take the role until he turns 46. Part of what was fun about Craig in Casino Royale was that the movie was an origin story about how a callow, confident young spy lost something and gained mastery as a result. It would be fascinating to see a movie that’s self-consciously about a great fighter and great lover entering the period of his decline, sort of a Casanova In Bolzano for the action world.

I literally could not care less whether Jack Reacher turns into a new action franchise for Tom Cruise (though if it got him out of the way of Jeremy Renner in the Mission Impossible movies I would not cry salty tears). But I am very glad to see that David Oyelowo, who was awesome on Spooks, and underrated as a corporate corner-cutter in Rise of the Planet of the Apes is getting slipped into yet another movie so American audiences will get used to seeing him around:

We talk a lot about black men who should be giant stars in various tranches of Hollywood: Idris Elba, who should be a middle-aged superhero somewhere, Romany Malco, who would be a regular romantic comedy leading man if anyone had any sense, Michael B. Jordan, who is a ridiculously multi-threat talent. I think Oyelowo should play a larger part in that conversation: he’s a handsome, talented 36-year-old who is older than Jordan, who at 25 is still on the upswing towards leading man-dom, and younger than Malco and Elba, who are both in their forties. He’s right in the sweet spot, and if he keeps showing up in proximity to big stars, maybe some of the recognition will start to rub off. It would be lovely if someone in Hollywood had plans to do something with those opportunities, build them towards something, rather than permanently siloing him as a white hero’s enabler or obstacle.

As excited as I am about the prospect of Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy movie actually being a way to introduce Carol Danvers to The Avengers franchise as Captain Marvel, I’m starting to have concerns about some of the casting rumors swirling the movie. None of this is for certain, of course, but the latest buzz has Emily Blunt in talks to play the fighter-jock-turned-superheroine. I dearly love Ms. Blunt, who can do everything from sexy to hilariously, neurotically competitive. But the fact that she’s in the conversation at all raises an issue that I’ve noticed in the conversation about a female version of The Expendables, too: even as we improve the action roles available for women, Hollywood stays rather inflexible when it comes to what kind of female bodies are desirable and viable.

When word came the ensemble project was in production, the director of The Expendables 2 came up with his dream cast list, which included only one woman who is primarily an action actress. I made the point at the time that it would be nice if the movie went after actresses who specialized in action films, and had the fighting styles and physiques to match. And that’s what’s happened, starting with the additions of Gina Carano and Katee Sackhoff.

I don’t want to say that there should be strict body-type requirements for certain kinds of roles. But it’s striking that the kinds of shoulders and muscle development that are a prerequisite for male action stars don’t help women land the same kinds of roles. Good fight choreography can help suspend disbelief, which is why it was exciting and upsetting to see Scarlett Johansson face off against a ripped and sleeveless Jeremy Renner in The Avengers. But if the casting in that franchise and Angelina Jolie’s career or any indication, the ability to look great in an evening gown and to miraculously avoid sweating off your lipstick even in tense circumstances is at least as important as the ability to look physically intimidating or land a plausible punch. Blunt can do both of those things. But I’d rather see Sackhoff, who has played a tough fighter pilot before, as Carol Danvers, and to see Hollywood value a woman’s physical strength as much as her face and dress size.