It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!
^ Back to Top
The MI6 Community is unofficial and in no way associated or linked with EON Productions, MGM, Sony Pictures, Activision or Ian Fleming Publications. Any views expressed on this website are of the individual members and do not necessarily reflect those of the Community owners. Any video or images displayed in topics on MI6 Community are embedded by users from third party sites and as such MI6 Community and its owners take no responsibility for this material.
James Bond News • James Bond Articles • James Bond Magazine
Comments
I agree with this. I always appreciate when Bond feels more like an investigator doing proper spy work rather than just stumbling into leads the villain willingly presents for him or gets into a string of action sequences by chance.
Funnily enough I'd say that QoS is probably the strongest on that front of the recent movies. He really is piecing everything together as he goes, although because he keeps having to kill people M thinks he's gone rogue(!).
I must admit, I don't have a massive preference. Being thrown into an adventure can be as much fun as following a load of leads (in fact it sounds more fun like that!), it depends how it's handled.
I quite like how in one of them (DAD?) M practically admits that she uses 007 to shake things up a bit rather than perhaps as a subtle sleuth. Fleming's 'blunt instrument'.
You didn’t say that, @DEKE_RIVERS . You said the books will give enough.
But you know what you said, so let’s leave it at that.
I do love that Bond isn’t always one step ahead of everything as a character. He’ll do things which, on the surface, seem risky, but it’s usually for the purposes of plowing ahead with the mission or putting him and his opponents on a level playing field (ie. In CR he knows Le Chiffre is aware of him so simply blows his cover once he gets to the hotel, in SF instead of sneaking into Silva’s island he gets himself captured immediately, in TB he throws around the word ‘Spectre’ in front of Largo which obviously makes him known immediately to the enemy but ultimately confirms his suspicions). I guess the best way of putting it is where characters like Jack Reacher, Ethan Hunt or even, taking a traditional detective, Sherlock Holmes are chess players, planning ahead, anticipating their opponents’ moves, Bond is a gambler who operates better taking dangerous calculated risks and bluffing.
As long as that trait is applied to Bond doing detective work in a film, then it’s fine. Personally I’m a fan of Bond having to snoop around and uncover stuff.
I like this. Surely we must be long overdue for another FRWL/TLD, a contemporary spy thriller.
I dont think using more Fleming is fan service. The producers famously use Fleming as the guide whenever they are stuck. It is also been well documented that Puvis and Wade are big fans of Fleming and make every effort to include elements from the books in each of thier scripts. I would say that if we are looking for clues as to what is next for Bond it is looking at the Fleming novels and which parts have not been used.
Yes I like that as a fundamental difference between Ethan Hunt and James Bond: Hunt is a planner and always tries to go into a situation with a preset plan of how he's going to outfox the villain; Bond will throw himself headfirst into a situation and trusts his instincts and lateral thinking ability to get himself out of it with skill.
I don't think either is superior: I enjoy watching both.
I like a bit of a snoop and a spy, as long as there's a capture and escape not far away too! :D
I'm still a bit unsure what cinematic potential a garden has that folks think went untapped..(!)
Again, it sounds like Skyfall. He pops to Shanghai, then stays in the UK for the rest of it with little in the way of action. I thought SF was great so I'm not saying it would be terrible, but it's something they have looked at in the last few films.
Yes, but also yes. I've been wanting this for a long time.
After decades of Cold War the world is tired of this storyline.
There are familiar elements, yes, but the “enemy within” and Nazism features I feel like would resonate well in this particular moment in time. If it would be a faithful adaptation, it’d have to be set when the novel was to capture all the villain’s history, but I still feel like there are enough parallels to today that would compel modern audiences.
Lots of property destroyed during the Craig era. Collapsing house, desert retreat, Skyfall, MI6 building, Blofeld's desert HQ, Russian bunker. A film in which Bond doesn't need to blow up anything might would be a refreshing change. How many times has the Aston Martin has been blown up?
Some may argue that such changes are getting away from 'Bond.' But rebooting and reinventing is exactly that. Remaking Bond for a new generation means less fidelity to the original Bond of the novels and film. NTTD certainly did that. At no point during my early years watching the SC films could I have entertained the notion of Mathilde.
Yes I think it's a pretty slight story, it wouldn't hold up as a film now, even if done as period. I tend to think that adaptations have to be exactly that: taking the spirit of the thing and adapting it to a new medium and audience. And folks might spot it's pretty similar to Die Another Day too.
Yes, I did consider bringing up DAD. In many ways that was the attempt at adapting Moonraker, but having to flesh out a very simplistic story into a modern Bond film, they infamously went overboard with it (some would say nuts ;)) ). Of course i am not saying you couldn't make a better attempt at it than what they did then, but I still assume there should be better ideas out there.
I always think of that clever person's suggestion that Helen McCrory could have played C in Spectre and get a pang of what could have been.
Yes it would be fresher. And no plot twist this time, please. A LOT of Bond stories have a surprise twist female villain. A straightforward one would be truly fresh.
Funnily that’s what DAD was supposed to be. And then Lee Tamahori came on board and was like “we need an invisible car in this”.
I always thought the invisible Aston Martin was an idea suggested by P&W.
Yes, according to Some Kind of Hero, P&W suggested a stealth car for TWINE, but didn't want it to actually be invisible and were a bit annoyed to find out that it had become that. It sounds like they wanted it to be more down to Earth but Tamahori wanted it more comic book and took it in that direction. I'd like to read that script- I guess with stuff like the clinic and all of the Cuba stuff generally really, you can still see some of that.
It was. They read it on a popular science magazine, or something, as it is one of their methods to find an idea on which to base the entire villanous premise of the film… idiots (IMO, of course).
But I think what @MakeshiftPython was trying to say was that Tamahori, that hack, amped up the film’s ludicrous portrayal of tech and made a flamboyant film in place of a more restrained and intelligent one. Damn, I dislike DUD so much.
Does that really matter?
killing James Bond wasn't original and they did it anyway.
MR is my favourite Bond novel, and one of my favourite books of all time. And I agree with what you're saying. While it has a lot of great stuff in it, much of which has broadly been adapted into several Bond films, I don't think a modern but faithful adaptation would add anything.
I'm all for seeing something in a future Bond film like M giving him a seemingly mundane 'off the books' job, a chase where the henchman jumps on a truck and crushes Bond's car with something, Bond interacting with Moneypenny/Loelia about a fellow 00 who has been injured/died on an assignment, or any of the numerous untapped ideas that could conceivably be inspired by this novel. But ultimately I think it should be in an original story.
Agree, and the character of Hugo Drax has run out of potential options for hating Britain. The Nazis who fought in WWII are long gone, somebody who could have fought for the Soviets and switched would be 52 at youngest and faking your ID would be almost impossible in the 90s when the identity swap would happen.
Graves stole the idea of British hero gone wrong, and we've had oodles of rich, legal businessmen with vague intentions.
If Hugo Drax was adapted today, he'd probably be as effective as Sir Maxwell Tarn.
A 50's James Bond movie is fresh but...Indiana Jones killed that.
The movies are financially dependent on product placement, so a period piece is out.
Nazis are easy enemies to draw but not so much the Chinese, etc. Terrorists are not fun, and a lot of the world conflict involves people of different races and ethnicities, and I don't see Eon wading into that. (TLD was an exception.). Say you reimagined Drax as an Indian national who was secretly Pakistani...I just don't think Eon will go there anymore.
Bond has become too dependent on international box office to alienate potential audiences.
But I wouldn't be surprised to see a Russian as an enemy in Bond 26. Putin is as deplorable and megalomaniacal as Nazis these days, and you-know-who is basically the literary Krest.
I know. They need Aston Martin's money.