"Information is all, is it not?""
It's a huge thrill to see Bond, gone just rogue enough, chasing all the pre-existing clues to an organisation that was always going to be SPECTRE, and an end of level boss, played superbly as always by Christoph Waltz, who was always going to be Ernst Stavro Blofeld. The backstory is nice, though, with "Blofeld" being Bond;s childhood stepbrother who regards him as a "cuckoo". The fact that his mother's maiden name happens to be Blofeld does, admittedly, feel a little forced... but, dammit, rule of cool.
The set pieces are awesome, right from the start with the Day of the Dead in Mexico City, right through Bond's infiltration of the mysterious organisation's headquarters in Rome through to the final showdown with "Blofeld". Andrew Scott's secondary, bureaucratic baddie ("C"... yes, I get the allusion!) is fun. And there is, of course, a very real subtext to it all with us all merrily handing over our personal data to those evil, MAGA-loving tech bros. In the real world, sadly, there's no 007 to save us from our fate.
The ending is, with the very obvious difference that Madeleine gets to live, somewhat redolent of On Her Majesty's Secret Service, with Bond falling in love and choosing love over the job. But, of course, there's one more film of this era to go. If it's anywhere near as good as this, I can't wait.
Along with the silly brorhers plot twist, Silva should have been left unrelated to the origanuzation. Someone on Calvin Dyson’s review of this film said thry would hsve made Blofeld an agent of Quantum who takes over the organization and re-brands it. They would have also rewritten things to where Bond finds out from Mr. White that after the events of QOS, using the information Bond got out of Dominic Green, Quantum was largely dismantled by MI6. However Blofeld, along with Mr. White and the few surviving members of Quantum go off the grid and slowly rebuild the organization into Spectre in the 6 years in between QOS and this film. That would also play into the phrase "the dead are alive" at the beginning of the movie as well. This organization that was thought to be destroyed comes back to haunt the world as SPECTRE! The name would have made so much more sense as well.
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