
Spectre movie review: Bond goes backward
After a truly spectacular and fresh opening sequence, everyone might as well be enacting a Bond puppet show, which is sometimes unpleasantly retro-icky.

After a truly spectacular and fresh opening sequence, everyone might as well be enacting a Bond puppet show, which is sometimes unpleasantly retro-icky.

What we witness here is the destruction of the old Bond mystique, and the creation of a new one. This is the sneaky cleverness of the film: it is, at last, going to tell us why Bond still matters.
We can only blame *Casino Royale.* The 2006 reboot of James Bond was so brilliant, so satisfying, so organically of the moment that it could only prove hard to top, and even hard to equal.