The latest Bond film is actually pretty interesting. And at risk of plugging my own writing, anyone interested in actual film analysis could do worse than check out this essay on the Skyfall, which nailed the major themes in Spectre two years in advance:<p>&quot;The hostility of authoritarian political systems to individual autonomy (democratic government in aggregate) is thus one of the ongoing themes of the film....&quot;<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;popupchinese.com&#x2F;skyfall.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;popupchinese.com&#x2F;skyfall.html</a><p>The short version of Spectre is that Mendes is doing the same thing he did in Skyfall, casting M16 as the villain of the film and using literary motifs and allegorical doubling (i.e. villains reflecting aspects of Bond himself) to suggest that it is the security state itself that the real villain in the film. The interesting thing is the way he engineers a happy ending by transforming the &quot;license to kill&quot; into a &quot;licence not to kill&quot;, essentially changing Bond from the agent of death he is shown to be at the beginning of the film into a pro-democratic figure who abandons violence and in doing so gets the girl and what she thematically represents.