I told my two daughters this was part of our cultural heritage and they had to go with my wife and I to see it. They are both teenagers, US born and bred, with British parent inflicted quirks but normal American girls with nice teeth and lightning fast text thumbs. We are definitely becoming less relevant to their lives as parents, there is much more hiding in their room, pop culture on the Internet and going to movies only with their dates. So to some extent I was just being difficult when I gave them a talk about how when I was a kid the only time my parents ever went to the movies and took the whole family too was to see a Bond film or a Carry On.
They have never seen any Bond, from Connery through Brosnan, I could do nothing to persuade them to watch one. I had a plan, I would expose them to Connery's You Only Live Twice, Lazenby's OHMSS, Moore's For Your Eyes only or Brosnan's Die Another Day. I just couldn't get them to try one.
Luckily, they both had parties they wanted to go to so I had enough leverage to make them come to the see Skyfall with us. Despite the eye rolling all the way there, they totally enjoyed them. Because the film manages to reference so much of the 007 back story, I had the pleasure of explaining why his vintage car had machine guns, the cold war and that the MI6 building is a real thing which we will try to go see over Christmas this year. We always do a couple of days decompressing in London after the annual pilgrimage to our ancestral home and spending too much time with relatives. They tweeted how much fun they had to their friends!
I am going to quit while I am ahead now. If this is the only Bond they ever see I am ok with that. I have learned that my enjoyment of the earlier films is heavily colored by nostalgia and it just doesn't translate to them.
I thought it was a great Bond movie because it's more about Bond, who he is and why.
