Spectre

The image everyone remembers, the Day of the Dead procession through Mexico City, was a negotiated one. Correspondence exposed in the Sony breach shows Mexico offering around fourteen million dollars in incentives for roughly four minutes of flattering screen time. In exchange, the assassination target shifted from a Mexican governor to an international figure, Mexican police became an unnamed special unit, and a cage fight in the draft became the Day of the Dead parade. No such parade existed in the city then. After the film, the authorities staged a real one, and two hundred and fifty thousand people attended it in 2016. The local colour you are watching is a fiction that turned into a tradition. The opening long take is editing rather than endurance: six separate shots joined without motion control cameras, blended afterwards through retiming and reprojection. That bravura does not carry across the remaining running time. The scale figures are real, though. Aston Martin built only ten DB10s, seven Astons were destroyed in the Rome chase, and the Morocco explosion took a world record with eight thousand one hundred and forty litres of kerosene. Not for: viewers who valued the cause and effect plotting of the earlier Craig films, since three films of villains are retrofitted into one organisation.