Skyfall Trailer 2: 007 vs. Wikileaks; Javier Bardem as Julian Assange

By Todd Allen

The latest Skyfall trailer trailer has dropped.  Have a quick view and let’s discuss:

Well, now… that’s 007 vs. Wikileaks isn’t it?  Not literally, but Wikileaks adapted into an active espionage threat.  The time honored tradition of adapting/address a current trend in literature.

Wikileaks raised a few eyebrows when it’s public display of classified documents effectively outed a few people having otherwise confidential conversations with the U.S. State Department (whether this was actually exposing agents is more a matter of opinion at this point), it also has done some work on exposing spying activity in the private sector.  Shifting that to grabbing a list of active operatives is a pretty easy literary leap.  Wikileaks is the face of espionage hacking to large portions of the global public, after all.  (This may not be an entirely accurate perception since a lot of _leaks_ were involved, but perception and reality differ at times.)

Then you’ve got the language around M in the trailer: “They weren’t targeting her, they wanted her to see it.”

And that would be close enough to the public shaming / exposing motif of Wikileaks.

At this point, it could all have been independently developed.  Hacking has been part of the 007 franchise before, notably in Goldeneye’s satellite hacking.  And then you see Javier Bardem, a bad ass’s bad ass, with that dye job.

This is what Wikileaks grand poo-bah Julian Assange looks like.  When Javier Bardem is a pale shade of blonde and the hackers have leaked all the agents names, all I can think of is: “They made Julian Assange into a Bond villain.”

I like it.

We’ll see if there’s more to the plot than that, but that’s sure what I got out of this trailer.

Past that, these trailers continue to look gorgeous, but with Sam Mendes directing, gorgeous film is a reasonable expectation.

The film debuts in the U.S. in November.