An Evening with James Bond and Bruce Wayne

Over the weekend, I had the pleasure of watching the movie Skyfall again, which I had seen previously in theaters over the summer. Afterwards, I made a fairly obvious but for some reason untold observation: Skyfall and The Dark Knight are the same movie.

Before I continue, let me make it clear that I think both movies are fantastic, and they are among my favorite films. I am not attacking either of them, or in any way accusing one of plagiarizing the other. But the fact is, the characters, themes, imagery, and even dialogue, is so similar that it is hard to ignore.

Now, maybe I am just having a false revelation here. Maybe all movies in this genre have the same general structure and I just never noticed. But that can't be, because for one thing, both of these movies are instant classics; they seemingly take what we already know and do something different and awesome with it.

James Bond/007 is obviously Bruce Wayne/Batman. Both are orphans who come from money, but are set on their life course by the tragic events surrounding their parents' deaths. They run off at an early age and are taken in and trained to be deadly weapons (in Skyfall, M hints at this during a conversation with Bond. In The Dark Knight, it is expounded in the prequel, Batman Begins). In a way, both of them develop dual identities from their experiences in order to hide the pain of their childhood. Bruce Wayne turns his inner fears into his outward strength, by creating the Batman. While there is an external struggle of Batman trying to be the hero, Bruce Wayne is in fact, the man bogged down by his demons. He is human, and even though he believes the Batman is a necessity, he yearns to take off the mask, and pursue a life with Rachel.  Likewise, 007 is a role James Bond must play in order to be the hero, but over the course of the movie we see that his status as the poster child for MI6 is taking a significant mental and physical toll on him.

Silva, Skyfall's villain is pretty much the Joker, with less makeup. Both of them are bad guys the likes of which no one has really seen before. Gotham, a city constantly dealing with mobsters and internal corruption, is caught off guard by the lunatic Joker, only interested in chaos and misery. MI6 is unprepared for the high-tech assault by Silva. Both villains represent the antithesis to the hero. Silva was, like Bond, an agent at MI6. He points out that he and Bond are victims of M's mother-like control over them, but that they are survivors—the two remaining rats in the barrel, as he puts it. He also warns that eventually M will turn against Bond, just as she did with him. In The Dark Knight, the Joker gives Batman a similar piece of advice: "To them you're just a freak, like me. They need you right now, but when they don't, they'll cast you out. Like a leper." He insists that Batman's talents are wasted on his commitment to justice and his inability to take a life. The Joker targets Harvey Dent, in the hopes of turning 'Gotham's white knight' in a villain. Silva wants to destroy M's reputation and villainize her before the rest of England's government. Both of them are successful. Even their methods are sort of equal and opposite. The Joker believes in low-tech terrorism; he repeats how much damage one can do with dynamite, gasoline and bullets. He threatens to kill more Gothamites each day until Batman reveals his true identity. Silva, on the other hand, uses technology to terrorize England. He hacks MI6, and then uses YouTube to release the identities of their undercover operatives each week. Furthermore, Silva and Joker both come off as being overly theatrical weirdos with mysterious aliases, and then turn out to be ten steps ahead of the good guys for 90% of the movie. Interestingly, both have somewhat startling facial deformities as a result of their past transgressions, and both give disturbing accounts of how they got those deformities. 

M is equivalent to Harvey Dent. Both of them represent the public face of the hero's questionable methods of justice. M at first makes the mistake of thinking 007 is expendable, and allows him to be shot. This, combined with Silva's actions, call into question the effectiveness of the '00' program, which M has to defend in court. Over the course of the film, she realizes that Bond is necessary for the security of Great Britain (and the world). Harvey Dent wants to have the Batman arrested and is suspicious of his intentions, but then realizes the value of an incorruptible symbol of justice working behind the scenes. Eventually, both become the target of the respective villains, and have to be protected by the hero throughout the movie. And (spoiler alert) both of them eventually meet their demise in the arms of the hero, but only after the villain is apprehended/killed. 

Q and Lucius Fox are identical in that they are technological geniuses with humorous dispositions. They have access to, for all intents and purposes, unlimited resources. They do not work directly for the hero, and they outfit the hero with exciting gadgetry. Lucius Fox even creates a sonar-based map of the entire city, much like the subterranean map of London that Q comes up with while searching through Silva's encrypted software.

One could also argue that Mallory and Commissioner Gordon are analogous. Gordon and Dent have different methods and goals for cleaning up Gotham, and they argue over what the role of the Batman should be. When Dent eventually dies, Gordon becomes Batman's closest ally. Likewise, Mallory at first butts heads with M about the necessity of the '00' program and the usefulness of Bond. But over the course of the film, he comes to respect M and Bond, and when M is killed, he takes over M's job as the director of MI6. There is even the courtroom in which Silva attacks M, but is protected by Mallory until Bond can come to the rescue, which is fairly similar to when the Joker attacked Dent's convoy, and Gordon had to keep him safe until Batman neutralized the threat.

The supporting cast also seems to fill the same the roles in either film. For example, Severine and Rachel are love interests who represent a way out for the hero. But in both cases, the villain gives the hero an ultimatum that results in the woman's death, reinforcing the hero's rage and desire for revenge. Kincade (the man at the Skyfall estate) and Alfred, are both caretakers that have known the hero since they were children and understand the events that created the hero's inner struggles.

The settings in both movies are like characters as well. Batman's mansion and access to his bat-cave were destroyed in Batman Begins. So in The Dark Knight he is using an underground facility somewhere in Gotham. In Skyfall, MI6 is compromised, so Bond has to report to the new headquarters in a WWII bunker. In both cases, the setting represents how the hero has been stripped of what he is used to, and must retool with what is available to him. (Interesting sidebar about settings: both heroes fight and capture a minor villain in a poorly-lit -- but also kind of blue-tinted -- skyscraper in China.)

Even the themes in each movie are the same. Much like Dent's two-headed coin, Dent and Batman are opposite faces of justice in Gotham, but both of them are essential. A great line from The Dark Knight, by Dent is: "You either die the hero, or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain." In a way, he is talking about himself and Bruce Wayne alike. If he had died in the explosion that the Joker orchestrated, he would have died the white knight of Gotham. Instead, he lived, and the Joker warped him into Two-Face. Batman survived to take down the Joker and-Two Face, but was then accused of murdering Dent and became public enemy number one. The same quote applies to Skyfall. Silva is like an earlier version of Bond; he was favored by M and a hero to his country. But he became too ambitious and rebellious, and M turned him over to the enemies of MI6. After being tortured and attempting suicide, and surviving, he turned his anger and frustration against his former masters.

There are a number of more specific plot and dialogue connections that I just don't see the point of going into. But the fact is, these movies match up astonishingly well. In a way, one could argue that they deserve to be the same. Both have similar histories. Batman has been around on the big screen since the sixties, and has undergone a number of renovations and reinterpretations. He started out as a goofy hero with absurd gadgets, and peculiar villains. But has since been reborn into a much more vivid and believable world. All of this describes the history of James Bond as well. And for both franchises, these two movies in particular represent benchmarks in the story. They take the classic ideas of the franchise and reinterpret it for a modern, more realistic world.