Skyfall has the honor of being the first James Bond film I actually enjoyed. I’m fairly ashamed to admit that I haven’t seen any of the classic Bond films, but it was probably due to the fact that I wasn’t impressed with the modern ones. Casino Royale  was okay, and Quantum of Solace was forgettable, but Skyfall was different.  It felt as though it had a purpose rather than just being a neat action movie with a cool main character.

Skyfall is, in a lot of ways, about the failure of Bond, and as a result, whether or not the world actually needs intelligence agencies like MI6. The film begins with James Bond (played by Daniel Craig) being accidentally terminated, but not killed, after failing to retrieve a hard drive with the names of NATO secret agents from the wrong people.

Following Bond’s extended hiatus, he approaches M (played by Judi Dench) to be reinstated as 007, but before she can give him his title again, he must undergo the initiation tests. These set the stage for much of the film’s events; Bond took up heavy drinking and gave up field work when he was, in essence, dead. His test results are terrible, his aim awful, his attitude acerbic. He’s not as competent and, frankly, as badass as he used to be. He frequently allows mission assets to die, and he always makes it out of assignments by the skin of his teeth.

This, at least in my mind, makes for a more interesting movie. As things continued, I started to realize that I was assuming Bond and his cohorts would make it out of every encounter without breaking a sweat when I shouldn’t have.

Failure makes victory all the sweeter, but at times it seems as though 007 will not even complete his mission properly. He demonstrates that he’s incapable throughout. The reason there’s dramatic tension in every moment is not because the villain’s plan is so brilliant but because Bond is in such bad shape that you can’t possibly be confident in his abilities.

Speaking of the villain, Javier Bardem knocked it out of the park as Raul Silva. His backstory is a big part of the film’s twists, so no details will be divulged here, but he’s truly powerful.

He’s not the same breed of evil that we saw in No Country for Old Men, where Anton Chigurh is a remorseless force of nature. Silva has a very particular goal, for very particular reasons. He echoes Heath Ledger’s Joker in an excellent way without directly ripping any of his plans.

All of the other performances were solid, but his was the only truly exceptional one. I only wish that Silva was in more of the movie, as he only shows up a little before the halfway mark.

The thing that impressed me the most about Skyfall, however, was the gorgeous cinematography and direction. The use of light and shadow made for striking imagery in just about every other scene. Colors are varied and beautiful, the Shanghai and Macau segments are breathtaking, the choreography of each fight and chase is exhilarating, and the way it melds with the score (headlined by Adele’s main theme, which is excellent) is staggering. It all makes for a movie with clear style, which James Bond films have never necessarily lacked, but this was the first time I had really been so impressed by it all.

Skyfall does an incredible amount of things right. It’s a film that is lacking in neither style nor substance. It feels like, more than any other Bond movie I’ve seen, that it has something to say through the Bond universe and characters that hasn’t been said before. It may not make me interested in watching more James Bond films, but the series now has my full attention going forward.