And I think, despite his facility with technology, what I liked best is that his ‘bad guys’ were well rendered.
Fiction works best when you can at least understand why the baddies feel and act the way they do and he had few equals at that. Even the bastards you wanted to see die, you saw how they came to believe and behave as they did.
That very succinctly describes why very few new movies are any good. The bad guys are usually just two dimensional monsters.