| “ | They kept me for five months, in a room with no air. They tortured me, and I protected your secrets, I protected you, but they made suffer, and suffer... and suffer. And then I realized, it was you, who betrayed me. You betrayed me, so I only have one thing left; my cyanide capsule. | „ |
| ~ Raoul Silva's tragic backstory to M. |
| “ | Think of your sins. | „ |
| ~ Silva's message to M. |
Tiago Rodriguez, or better known as Raoul Silva, is the main antagonist of the 2012 action-thriller film Skyfall, the third installment of the rebooted James Bond series.
He was a disgraced and renegade MI6 agent who became a cyber-terrorist following his escapement from the Chinese after his torture. Silva used this opportunity to seek his revenge on M for selling him out to the Chinese in the first place, and humiliate her as the part of his vindictive upbringing against his arch-enemy James Bond.
He was portrayed by Javier Bardem.
His Evil Ranking[]
His Villainous Deeds[]
- Prior to becoming a cyber-terrorist who later worked for Spectre, he hacked the Chinese while stationed in Hong Kong without M's prior acknowledgement and permission, which he later got captured by the Chinese as a result of breaking protocol. This made M betray him with six new agents and a peaceful transition in return.
- Instead of re-applying in the MI6 as usual or happily retire, since it didn't help that James Bond did either both, he took the situation very personally and went out his way to humiliate and take revenge upon M, who was only doing her job. He forged a cyber-terrorist empire after escaping the Chinese with the master plan to do so.
- He hired an assassin, Patrice, to kill Ronson for his hard-drive that contained the identities of disguised NATO agents worldwide. He would then publicize five of those he already decrypted from M's computer every week, resulting in indirect deaths of several of them.
- He created a deliberate gas explosion in her stationary office of MI6 headquarters, while she was outside the building for her to see. This action caused the deaths of eight MI6 agents who had nothing to do with his suffering.
- He kidnapped both Bond and Severine to his radioactive island lair, where the latter was brought into a seperate room to be tortured by Silva's men while the former was brought into another for Silva himself to introduce to.
- He challenged Bond to a marksmanship game called William Tell, where he allowed Bond to give his shot for marksman redemption. Seeing it has an honorable factor, he subverted this by murdering Severine after Bond's turn (who Bond deliberately missed to save her fate) instead of the butterscotch, dishonoring both Bond and the rules of William Tell.
- He deceived MI6's intelligent Q by setting a virus to be accessed whenever Q would mistakenly plug Silva's computer to the MI6 network and allowing his own escape moments after, opening several doors, including his jail cell. And on his way out, he murdered a few guards off-screen who were watching him before escaping through the bottom hatch of the same room.
- He planned her assassination from MI6 to Westminster, just so he would publicly execute her in front of the inquiry. This ultimately failed, since most of her associates stood up and blocked his view, unintentionally killing or wounding said people and then killing the policemen. This endangered the public, including MI6 officials, inquiry members, parliamentary ministers and journalists, with one minister he fatally shot just before heading out of the court room in disgust of his foiled plans.
- And right before his fiasco, he had his henchmen kill three Metropolitan police officers who were guarding the front of the courthouse.
- He raided Bond's ancestral home that contained him, M, and Kincade after following both Bond and M there with the first wave of his henchmen. During this, he showed no genuine care for any of his henchmen, and was only using them at his disposal to achieve his ultimate goal of killing M, to which he indirectly succeeded with one of his henchmen wounding her. He only seemed surprised during the helicopter crash as his loss of resources, rather than out of genuine care as first stated.
- Within the belief that M is still alive and was heading towards Bond's chapel, he followed them there to attempt a murder-suicide by having M pull the trigger, which would kill both himself and M at the same time. He would've done so had it not been for Bond to eventually intervene and fatally stab him with a throwing knife.
- Despite his death, his indirect kill of M is what made him The Heavy of the franchise, as he's the second person who managed to kill one of the people Bond genuinely loved, with the first being Le Chiffre's torture towards Bond that indirectly caused the death of Bond's first lover, Vesper Lynd, who had to spare Bond's life in exchange for the tournament money she owed to Mr. White.
- Out of all the villains in the rebooted James Bond franchise, he's the first to have achieved his primary goals, besides the goal of killing Bond unlike Lyutsifer Safin, who ultimately did the latter.
- The film's sequel later reveals that he was involved with the criminal organization known as Spectre, notorious for its organized attacks on humanity, and even with his superior Ernst Stavro Blofeld.
Why He Doesn't Stand Out?[]
- Despite having a tremendous effect on James Bond with M's death, he mostly suffered from off-screen villainy, such as his own "secret missions" of rigging an Ugandan election and destabilizing economies, including the fridge-horror of sex trafficking when Severine revealed herself as one of his sex slaves to Bond. Although his crime of blowing up the MI6 headquarters with a gas explosion is shown, the same treatment has never applied to many of his other off-screen crimes, nor do they really make him heinous to stand out from other notable Bond villains in the rebooted franchise who did or may have done worse than him, such as:
- Le Chiffre, financing terrorist attacks (resulting in thousands of deaths) using his client's money as shown with Steven Obanno and the prototype Skyfleet SS70,
- Dominic Greene and General Medrano, with the former attempting to drown Bolivia for profit and the latter who's shown to be a rapist towards Camille and a hotel waitress,
- Ernst Stavro Blofeld, who orchestrated many terrorist attacks just so he could publish his worldwide surveillance program affiliated with his organization.
- and Lyutsifer Safin, who attempted to infect the entire world via nano-bots.
- Not to mention, he had a lower (even attempted) kill count than all of those villains, and some of their most heinous crimes are truly shown while Silva's crimes don't. So technically, he fails the heinous standards to Blofeld, all of his other agents, and Safin.
- He had a genuinely tragic backstory of being betrayed by MI6, which ultimately served this as a motivating factor for taking revenge against M in the first place, and this story also became occasionally relevant throughout the film, and is never shrugged off at the end. His torture from the Chinese got him to the point of attempting suicide via a hydrogen cyanide capsule which permanently disfigured his face.
- On a side note, he also hesitated to kill his former boss at gun-point in the court room, showing the gravity of the situation all coming into fruition before deciding to open fire and wound Mallory instead. Since he decided to fire, it's still a minor prevention that's in notable detail.
External Links[]
- Raoul Silva on the Villains Wiki
- Raoul Silva on the James Bond Wiki
- Raoul Silva on the Magnificent Baddie Wiki
- Raoul Silva on Wikipedia
[]
 Villainous Benchmarks
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