I appreciate the conclusion more each time I see this film, allowing its metaphoric and cinematic import to outweigh criticisms about its logic (e.g. why do trained mercenaries walk as open targets through a valley?!) This film reveals something on each repeated viewing.
I don't think this scene defies logic at all:
I think the mercs were sent in for the same reason a hunter/gameskeeper sends in the dogs - to bring the 'game' out of their hiding place.
Thanks to this first shootout Silva was able to assertion what was waiting for him at Skyfall - for all he knew there could've been a squad of marines with ground-to-air missiles waiting for him. So by sacrificing the initial strike force he ascertained his own military superiority from the comfort of the heavily armed helicopter.
If the mercs hadn't approached so openly, but stealthily instead and gained entry to the building before the ensuing fire fight began it would've been obscured and Silva may not have been any the wiser about his opponents strength had his team been killed inside.
3. It doesn't matter what anyone thinks about the use of a torch in Skyfall. It is in the movie so it is so. At this point put the blame of torch use on the character and not the creators. People do a lot of unbelievably stupid stupid every day. Is it so farfetched that a character made a choice that you wouldn't have?
That's just not good enough for a movie at this level (or any level if you care about your movie being a good one). In a good movie character drives the action and thus the plot. Character and plot are inseparable and just like the plot needs a reason for happening, so to do characters need a reason for doing everything they do. This is called character motivation and is vital to every good movie and performance down to the smallest detail (hence the greatest compliment you can pay an actor is to tell them their work is very detailed).
Above all, these motivations and thus their actions must be reasonable or at least plausible in the established logic of each character. You can't simply say that whatever a character does, however implausible or inexplicable in terms of what we the audience have been told about that character is simply up to them - that they 'made a choice that i wouldn't have...'
It's not about choices that I would make - i'm not in the movie ! It's about choices the characters make actually making sense in their own minds and this being clear to the audience. What we have here is a character doing an implausible thing because it allows the story to move on (and makes for a pretty shot). That is poor, very lazy script writing. If you don't believe me, then try writing a feature script in which the characters just do whatever you need them to do in order to push your story along, regardless of whether in seems plausible.... And then try selling that scrip.....
Defy logic at your peril - a script is a house of cards and playing loose with the logic you establish for your characters is like playing loose with the laws of physics for your deck of cards. Go too far and it all comes crashing down. I don't think that 'torch-gate' has brought Skyfall crashing down, indeed, apart from a few small hiccups it's a good script and the dialogue is among the best in the franchise. But it would be a better film had Britain's head of intelligence and an experienced gameskeeper not inexplicably been throwing a torch beam around the moors like a bat signal desperately looking for Christian Bale to save them.
Edited by Odd Jobbies, 25 February 2013 - 10:08 AM.
