by Brritski

2007 A Spy Odyssey - the review

Following the acclaimed success of her national tour with The Singing OrisTAea, we extend a very special welcome to our guest reviewer.

Ai was very disappointed with this film. It seemed to run out of ideas very quickly and ended up as series of disconnected scenes. This post-modernist structure is so old millennium and not at all suited to the revolutionary realism of New Hagueland. A director with wider experience such as oneself would have made a much better job of things Ai'm quaite sure.   Some of the things we are expected to swallow would defeat a starving python. The ski sequences on Lakey Hill defy belief even though they did install a cable-car there when global warming was found to be a temporary blip. And as for the car chases at more than 20 mph, well, where did they find those empty roads ? Did they tarmac over some disused railway lines ?

Less obviously, the symbolism was rather forced. The black police van in the opening scene was followed by the second 007, Black Maria, although the nostalgia of her birth scenes on a steam railway brought a Proustian tear to the eye.  Linking these two symbols to a patio made from a single slab of black Welsh slate was quite ridiculous. The aspect of that garden and the existing colours would have forced the National Feng Shui Trust to act to prevent this desecration at the planning stage.   In the light of the tofu dwarf scandal of 2005, one is quite prepared to believe that Black Maria should reach maturity at the age of six following her combined GM-modified MMR-HIV-Hepatitis-Alphabet vaccination. It is also possible that she would take her revenge on her mother and her new tribe at Glastonbury together with the staff of the Ambridge Organics stall, but is it likely that she should have been able to find so many Hippopotami in remote Somerset ?   Some cameo roles deserve mention - the deaf-mute chauffeur was a welcome gesture to the disabled community, but the significance of his name, Boson, escapes me. The village busybody on the bike was also very well observed, but where did she get that quaite ridiculous accent ?   The final scenes of destruction were in the best Broccolian tradition, with the rescue of Bond by Bones (would she really be interested in a rich old man ?) and the death of the arch-villain Woolfeld in the piranha-infested Health Club pool, while Black Maria rescued her sadly-deluded father from the ruins of the Grey Gabluyanka and delivered him into the arms of his true love, Highly Revered.
But overall unsatisfying and unconvincing, faults which I will be sure are absent from my new production, Of Micey Men, starring my own dear husband Robert.

L. Snell, Borchester Echo 1/4/2007