Non-spoiler conclusion: This is a terrible, terrible movie. If it kills the Bond franchise for a while, it will be too late. I hope if they do continue, it’s at least with a different writer and actor, because after a strong first movie, the Daniel Craig Bond era is pure shitacularity.

Giving away everything right up through the ending

So the whole big thing in this movie is that Parliament is all “oh, M is incompetent and out-of-it and should retire because she’s making bad decisions,” and throughout the ENTIRE MOVIE all we see is M being incompetent and out-of-it and making bad decisions, from telling one agent to shoot James Bond (because why not) to taking a laptop from a master hacker and plugging it into an Ethernet jack inside your own “secure” network. SURE THAT COULDN’T GO BADLY.

Because she’s charismatic and a named actor, I think we’re supposed to be rooting for her to keep her job, but oh my god, she should have retired right away at the very beginning of the movie.

Anyway, even though that was the whole point of the movie, it doesn’t matter because she dies, which makes a climactic scene utterly pointless, in that the villain’s plan is to kill himself and M, and then Bond comes in at the last second and kills the villain and M dies anyway. GOOD SAVE, BRO. He could have just sat there and checked his email and it would have worked out fine.

Just comprehensively dumb from start to finish, I have to wonder if this movie was actually done as anti-intelligence-agency propaganda, because seriously, if MI6 was really like this, they should be defunded.