This is my Skyfall. I have to defend it!

Hat-tip to my friend Michael Brown for the title of this post. And I got the above image from here.

I made a quick weekend trip to New York last month, and while there I saw the new James Bond movie, Skyfall. It might seem strange to devote a few hours of a short getaway to watching a movie, but when you're on vacation, you do things you normally don't do. And I almost never see movies in the theater at home.

Shortly after leaving the theater, I posted on Facebook that Skyfall was a blatant ripoff of Home Alone. I might not have been the first to publicly express that notion, but I had to have been one of the first, since I saw it in the afternoon of its opening day. I'm also quite confident that there aren't many who have explored the two movies' similarities as thoroughly as I have.

I've waited until now to write in detail on the subject, out of deference to those who haven't seen the new Bond flick yet. But it's been out about six weeks now, so I'm not too worried about posting spoilers at this point. And I wanted to get this up before Christmas passes, and we forget about the masterpiece that is Home Alone for another 11 months. So here we go.

There's an obvious setpiece at the end that is the main tipoff to the connection between the two films. In it, James Bond returns to his childhood home, and with the help of M and the caretaker of the old house, uses everyday objects to prepare various booby traps and defenses to fend off an invasion from a more powerful intruder. Pretty much everyone who's seen both flicks has made this comparison at this point.

But there are so, so many more plot points from Skyfall that seem to have been lifted directly from the Home Alone screenplay. Here are the ones I've identified thus far, listed in order from "could just be a coincidence" to "Ian Fleming's estate owes John Hughes' estate some serious royalties."

1) Both heroes are of Scottish descent. Bond literally returns to his Scottish roots, and McCallister is a great Scottish name.
2) The protagonists each employ a creative method of descending stairs quickly--007 sliding down the escalator while chasing Silva, 00-Kevin using his sled.
3) Both movies have a bearded old man with a mysterious backstory who helps save the day.
4) In both films, the hero was abandoned at the beginning by "Mom."
5) The Home Alone tarantula was replaced by either the scorpion or the monitor lizard, depending on how you want to look at it.

Do you guys give up, or are you thirsty for more? Good.

6) In both movies a second building across the way is used as part of the escape, but the bad guy catches up to them there anyway.
7) Silva wasn't the first villain with fake teeth to pretend to be a cop.
8) Each movie features unnecessary shaving--00-Kevin (I like that nickname) is too young, and 007 shaves in the middle of the night--what?! Why?!
9) The bad guys in both shows easily bypass shoddy attempts at security (Silva blowing up MI6/escaping from his cell/etc.; the Wet Bandits figuring out the automatic lights of every house in the neighborhood).

Obviously, this not only proves that Skyfall is little more than a remake of Home Alone, it shows that somebody needs to get on the "grown-up-Kevin-McCallister-as-a-super-spy" movie. I would totally watch that. If you can think of any similarities between the two movies, mention them in the comments. In the meantime, I've got one more for you:

10) Both movies include blatant beverage product placement early on (Heineken for Bond, and "Fuller, easy on the Pepsi!"), but later the hero gets their favorite, classic treat (a shaken-not-stirred martini and a lovely cheese pizza ("just for me"), respectively.

Keep the change, ya filthy animals.