5. Exotic, But Murderous, Creatures
This one's a minor note, but one that I enjoyed nonetheless. As we follow Bond back into action, fit to unburden yet another casino of an exorbitant amount of money with a disarming wink and smile, but he encounters complications four complications, in the form of brutish henchmen, nothing too complicated. Oh, also a den of Komodo dragons. This trope hearkens back to a meaty chunk of the Bond films. 'Dr. No;' 'You Only Live Twice;' 'The Spy Who Loved Me;' 'Thunderball;' 'Live and Let Die' (twice); 'License to Kill;' 'Octopussy' (twice, again) and 'For Your Eyes Only' all feature one form or another of psychotic beasties. In the new films, however, we've seen neither hide nor hair, nor scale, nor fang, nor beak (as in the case of the face-sucking octopus in 'Octopussy') of any creatures yet. It seemed to be part of a larger effort to modernize Bond and rid his exploits of such a ridiculous plot device and the subsequent pun that follows each grizzly death. But in 'Skyfall' director Sam Mendes embraced it. Not only did he embrace it, he executed it well. That seemingly trite element of the Bond franchise hadn't been addressed on film in the films released during my lifetime I was born just after the July 1989 release of 'Licence to Kill.' So, for me it was a treat to see Bond calmly, casually navigate the situation, escaping by (unnecessarily) leap-frogging off of a Komodo dragon out of the precarious shrugging off the henchman's grizzly death with the pun, "That's the circle of life."