Spectre: 5 Awesome Things (And 8 That Sucked) In The New James Bond

3. The 'Snowden Plot' Is Weak

Minor spoilers: if you don't want the ideas behind the villain's plot to be revealed move onto the next slide. It turns out that the Oberhauser's scheme is to, in a quite vaguely-defined way, control all the information in the world via computers. First of all, that was sort of Silva's whole MO wasn't it: controlling the information superhighway, all that inherently undramatic stuff that involves actors looking at bits of code on the screen while pounding music plays. Secondly, it's been two years since the Snowden leak about the NSA and the 'surveillance is bad' drum has been beaten so loudly and so constantly that any satiric parallels or attempts at 'relevancy' all feel a bit old hat by now. Also, it's a bit hypocritical that MI6 is against the concept of drone surveillance when all the human surveillance done by Bond ends with him killing people, murdering hundreds of people in explosions and crashing planes into houses. Thirdly, a large portion of act three ends with plucky heroes trying to break into a glass building to stop a computer system from coming online as a countdown plays. Considering that Terminator Genisys just came out, featured the exact same set-piece, and was awful, that really doesn't make this film feel cutting edge and vibrant. Finally, because of the Snowden parallels, it's incredibly obvious that both the monitoring system and the character who introduces it are going to be evil, to the extent that the audience spends the entire film just waiting for them to turn. "Just reveal you're evil. Come on, we know you are. Hurry up, I'm getting bored!"