• Skyfall as a film about British national identity and the empire. (The bulldog.)
• Skyfall as a frank assumption of the implications of the Daniel Craig reboot of the Bondverse: the acceptance of something like third-order simulacra: the Bondverse rejecting the burden of representation of the ‘real’ world for representation of the Bondverse.
• The Aston Martin as the symbol of this assumption.
• M as the main character.
• The ‘Skyfall’ manor as James Bond’s ‘unresolved childhood trauma’ (he “always hated this place”); the ‘Skyfall’ manor as Balmoral; the ‘Skyfall’ manor as imperial guilt. (Silva was handed over, or betrayed, with Hong Kong.)
• Scotland (but only here, for its other symbolic richness) as Bondverse, as “back in time”.
• Skyfall as a defense of Baddies. Baddies as a legitimate mythologising of terror in the post-9/11 world. Skyfall as a rejection of complex fears. Skyfall as an admission that in the ‘real’ world the threat is too much (fight it in Scotland instead).
• M as the Queen; Skyfall as a rehearsal for her death.
• The Olympics Opening Ceremony is important for a lot of this. (i.e., parachuting Queen and UK’s ‘post-imperial’ acceptance.)
• China as a rehabilitated location: China as more modern than the west, blue lighting, the “brave new world”, as Bond says before it cuts to Shanghai. (The security guard confronts the assassin, rather than confronting Bond.)

Also, what is this trope of the captured nemesis who, we later discover, wanted to be captured.