IIRC, The final scene with Q has him cooking up some kind of magic computer thing to divert everyone other than Silva, IOW so the final confrontation can be between Bond and Silva with no interference. It's not mentioned again because it apparently worked.

It's not really clearly established how many men the guy has under his control or how many were on Bond's trail at the time, so I didn't really get that impression. I was under the assumption that all Q managed to do was slow them down, giving Bond and M time to prepare their defenses.

Huh. I thought they were pretty clear that Q's job was to make a trail for Silva leading to Scotland, subtle enough for Silva to get (and ONLY Silva), but not so subtle that he'd miss it completely. (I'm pretty sure that's exactly what Bond said he was doing in the movie proper.) How one would do such a thing is conveniently never brought up, but the movie still mentioned his purpose.

Sorry for harping on this one point. I agree with pretty much all the rest of your review. I was in a similar boat as you - this was the first Bond movie I've seen - and I still immensely enjoyed myself.

It is clear that Q was trying to send them somewhere, but the results of this weren't ever really explained unless he actually was trying to send them towards Scotland. If that's the case, I must have misheard them or something. Though if that is true, one has to ask why Bond would want Silva to come after him, and why Q would go through with that instead of sending Silva and his men towards a trap laid by a fully outfitted MI 6 team instead of one unstable agent and two people on the verge of retirement holed up in an old house with nothing more than a few shotguns, some explosives and a secret passage.

Basically, Bond wanted to draw Silva into an ambush, but he couldn't rely on a larger force, or indeed, anyone outside of the couple of MI 6 members who were already in on it. If a squad of SAS troops were deployed to Scotland, Silva would almost certainly find out about it, and avoided the trap altogether. Bond uses Silva's own brilliance as a hacker against him, getting Q to create "accidental", subtle tracks which lead all the way to the ambush site. Bond probably wasn't expecting Silva to materialize with an attack helicopter, however.

I like to ponder about that helicopter. Did Silva have to lead a huge attack against an air force base to get hold of one? Did he have to stop off at a Currys, so that he could deck it out with speakers?

Silva seems to be fantastically rich, perhaps through e-theft, so buying a helicopter isn't out of the question. As I saw it, it was basically a transport with a machine gunner in it. Getting the gun and getting it all into Scottish airspace would certainly present some difficulties. I wonder why he didn't lead with that, rather than just sending some random goons in to get slaughtered.

Sorting Algorithm Of Evil. Mooks always go first. Always.