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Comments
Are you high?
:))
I think you have excellent taste in most of the 007 adventures... so... what makes CR and QOS so vapid?
Lol you like skyfall but not qos and casino
How and why
For example, I like Casino Royale. Very great spy thriller. And in a way, does manage to adapt Fleming's storyline in fair content to the spirit of the 21st century post-9/11 setting. But, I will also say it that it does not have the escapism of the more fun-oriented Bond films where our hero himself was that know-it-all colourful super-spy rather than the realistically grounded down-to-earth MI-6 operative. Craig's Bond was very different from the previous incarnations of the character in his first two, as was his tenure.
Casino Royale borrows the concept and the characters from Fleming's novel, but otherwise disowns everything the previous films have come to set... Maybe other than the existence of The James Bond Theme and the main title sequence, but that's a different thing. Quantum of Solace follows the same path as its predecessor, but the main issue the majority of the audience have with it is the editing as well as the irritating shaky cam aspect derived from The Bourne Supremacy and its following volumes. That's the problem with the second, which otherwise I think is a brilliant spy thriller, and for me, certainly more watchable than the one that came before.
One way of putting it. That's why myself and the others alike don't fancy them as James Bond films. But, I do love them as magnificent spy thrillers.
When I saw CR, I thought it was the most Fleming, and the most film-Bond I had seen since the Connery era.
And although QoS was different in tone (as was FRWL, YOLT, OHMSS, LALD, MR), I knew it was Mr. Bond on screen, and no other.
And I'd still like to hear @MrKissKissBangBang on why he deems Craig's first two films vacuous. Seems like a very sweeping statement.
In his first two, Craig was utmost different from the film Bonds. Perhaps closer to the Fleming Bond since Lazenby had some of the bearing of his literary counterpart. He didn't quite become the Bond we've known (the cinematic Bond of the first 40 years) until Skyfall to a small extent, and a full transformation to that Classic Bond template some members address to here in Spectre, using the quips, one-liners and witticism that was lacking when he first started nine years prior.
Craig's Bond in CR seemed straight out of a Chris Ryan book, a former SAS/SBS recruited by the MI-6 who was just introduced to tailored suits. The previous Bonds were those suits if I make sense. His behavioral methods also showed that he didn't employ over the top delivery of vocabulary and decided to stick with a more normal average joe way of talking/interacting rather than being a know-it-all scoundrel that the cinematic Bond is known for.
Mind you, I'm not bashing Craig's Bond here in any way, but he was more of an "inspired-by" conceptual character rather than a faithful adaptation of the Fleming character. Of course, the outline remains the same. Two kills to earn the 00-status and whatnot... But, his outline isn't the same as the template of the film-Bond. Just because his physicality is of brilliance doesn't make him similar to Connery or the superior Bond in terms of fisticuffs that is Lazenby. Those two shared common things in personality like taking almost nothing seriously unless they were at the brink of survival (A few instances would be the sewers scene in Dr. No, the laser beam in Goldfinger, the shark evasion in Thunderball, the alpine escape in OHMSS in which Bond was clearly frightened, etc). They even went to mock the villains in an Etonian/Oxford-graduate clever sophisticate type of a way rather than having a more grounded talk like Craig did. The latter didn't have any formality. Just a muscle in a suit.
However, by the time we had Skyfall, there was a transition that I noticed in Craig become very much like the generally known cinematic Bond. By no means I'm a fan of the film but it didn't just jettison the formula of the first 20 films the way CR and QoS did. It tried to win them back. Even Craig admitted it while comparing the product to the likes of The Spy Who Loved Me and if I remember correctly, the general depiction of Roger Moore's Bond. The "put it all on red, it's a circle of life" line was pure movie Bond whereas the previous two entries didn't have any kind of formally clever lines as such. But, there was something about the train scene in Royale that I loved, where Bond and Vesper were tying to outwit one another. That scene felt like Bond to me whereas the rest of the escapade did not.
While Spectre fails to hold relevance to what it tried to represent, as I've always been repeating it before, Craig was totally Bond there. The cinematic Bond. Not the Fleming Bond.
Nevertheless, I prefer CR and QoS over SF and SP as films.
So do I @ClarkDevlin .
I have CR at #3 at the moment (always fighting with OHMSS and FRWL for top spot,always rotating !) ,QoS at #4 ,SF at #7 , and SP at #13.
I find your post very reasonable and I actually have to agree. While thinking that CR is a great film on its own, I never felt it to be very Bondian, which is strange since it is based on Felmming's first novel. Maybe back in 2006 it was the concept that irritated me (someone becomming Bond whom we had already known for 44 years). And it felt as if they even wanted to create a new Bond instead of showing us the back story of the cinematic Bond I used to know.
And even though I wasn't a big Brosnan fan, I also had difficulties in accepting Craig as the new Bond and thought that too much weight was put on physical strength. I also thought that some sort of irony and self awareness was missing. It felt as if the producers felt ashamed of what they had done before and now tried to get away from some of its traditions.
That is the reason why I actually prefer how Bond is shown in Skyfall and Spectre, even though I think that CR is by far the better film.