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While reading the Becoming Bond book it said that Bond 24 and Bond 25 were almost filmed back to back because of John Logan's story and script ideas. Thankfully, as clustered as the productions (and to a degree the finished films), were, I'm happy that they didn't do his idea. That being said, if EON is going to try a connected storyline this time, they will know to better plan it. I see them filming Bond 26 and 27 back to back, to avoid a possible sophomore slump. In particular, if Amazon is putting up the budget, and a lesser in creative control actor is headlining. Hopefully, no writers or actors strikes will happen! Thankfully, EON has a lot of Fleming (and continuation novels) to look at for guidance. If Spectre is a threat again, EON can build it up properly this time. It'll be tough to hide who's playing Blofeld though, in today's internet leaks! Just stop with the codenames and plot twists EON. Overall, James Bond will return, in good time, and with people who have never failed us.
I can hope that the next writer(s) take some inspiration from Fleming, while updating the novels/short stories as a modern-day adventure, something I thought NTTD (and SF, and CR) did rather well.
IMHO, QoS and SP were lesser films because they didn't build upon, or riff on, Fleming. Rather they attempted to copy the films that immediately preceded them.
Yes, the future movies (books and videogames as well) shouldn't target one film as an influence for themselves. Bond should always be modern, there's always material for Bond to have a new adventure!
I don't think Fleming is the only way to write a good Bond story. And there's still a chunk of Fleming in Spectre: Octopussy and Blofeld's MO, not to mention Fleming's own life.
Yeah, we hope for stellar after stellar and ultra-stellar Bond films from here on out. They've got Amazon now to boost things more.
It doesn't just apply to an interconnected era. I think there are pitfalls, for instance, in planning to use the same director for three films. There might be a need to 'course correct' which might mean that that director's style/approach is not needed (it certainly happens a lot in Bond). So I'm quite weary of too much pre-planning.
Which brings me back to Godzilla Minus One again. They found a way to make an exceptionally satisfying film that stands on it's own while including all the original Godzilla tropes. Right down to the roar and classic theme.
With the Moore era, we got stand-alone missions, but with recurring characters (ie. Jaws, Sheriff Pepper, and Gogol. Again, it's a case where if you haven't seen these characters' first appearances you 100% understand their dynamic with Bond, even if the films have their own stories). They may not be overlying plot/story threads as much as it is characters returning to Bond on separate missions/their relationships being expanded upon. But who knows.
Yeah, that was a bit of a disaster. As I always say though, Bond films have always been stand alone adventures with their own styles and stories, even if they have recurring characters/plot threads from the previous ones. A trilogy of Star Wars films is different and requires consistency in tone and story direction. Bond films can course correct or go in slightly different directions because each story is essentially its own.
Saying Spectre uses Octopussy is like saying Octopussy uses Octopussy... there's nothing there but names and a sentence long story to each of the names. If they had used more (Blofeld stealing gold or something) then there would have a more interesting start than "Bond got more attention so I'm mad at him."
Blofeld running an intelligence scheme here is also not that similar to Blofeld's intelligence schemes outlined in Thunderball. An apt comparison to me is like comparing Drax's plan in both version of Moonraker.
In Thunderball, the scheme is underground and much more cerebral (using his post in the mail service/radio station to send key traffic), with the clear purpose of money at the other end. Here, it's unclear what Blofeld gains by a mass surveillance program on mostly normal people, and it's also quite difficult to see how SPECTRE are positioned to deal with all this information, and why the issue is the Nine Eyes program itself, not C's defection.
That's interesting. You could map CR-QoS-SF-SP-NTTD onto DN-FRWL-GF-YOLT-OHMSS.
Not really, it uses it as the stepping off point for the whole personal storyline of the film and sets out what Bond is actually doing. The film of OP doesn't do that at all.
In TB Blofeld is established as having a career where he intercepted various important telecommunications in order to make money in various countries, upgrading that to an intelligence network which dealt in selling information etc. His plans in Spectre are probably the closest to that of the novels' version of Blofeld we've had onscreen.
I don't think it's very unclear that they have various high level illegal schemes running around the world and their control of intelligence networks affords them more freedoms- that's stately bluntly. It's also not hard to imagine countless ways of making money from unrestricted surveillance. I'm not sure why a relatively simple act of intercepting messages is more cerebral.
It does feel like an interesting time for EON, there really is no competitive pressure to push in any particular direction. I wonder if this will be a help or a hindrance?
CR wasn’t really starting with a blank sheet of paper, considering the Bourne influence. Even with GE, it felt like the only pressure EON was facing was to get the damn movie made - ‘reimagining Bond for the 90s’ doesn’t feel quite like the mountain it might have appeared at the time, in hindsight.
Not that it felt retrofitted.............. it was retrofitted and that is why they were not firing on all cylinders. I'd rather have a one off than a continuing story arch.
Yeah, they're very similar. It shows carrying over story elements isn't anything new with Bond either.
Like I said, Bond isn't really like the Avengers movies or a trilogy of Star Wars films with one big sweeping story that needs to be maintained. Fundamentally they've always been stand-alone adventures (in the sense that Bond's mission/the adventure is different every time - different villains, different threats, even vastly different tones/styles). That's the way these films are designed, to be Bond 'adventures'. That doesn't mean they can't carry over plot threads, characters, character ideas etc. from one film to the other. That's always been the case, even with Fleming's novels.
As for where they could go creatively, I think there are indications. The trends with recent, rebooted franchise characters seem to eschew going through their origin stories. Ie. the new Batman film is a 'year two' concept, and the new Superman film seems to be similar, with younger versions of these characters, but ones who are ultimately established, at least in a broad sense. Both films seem to involve said characters at a pivotal/'crossroads' point in their careers though, and the films are about them reconciling something (ie. The Batman shows us a Batman driven by revenge, even inadvertently influencing the villains/frightening ordinary citizens, and throughout the film he learns to instead become the symbol of hope we associate the character as embodying. The longline for the new Superman film states it's about him 'reconciling his Kryptonian heritage with his human upbringing').
I can imagine that being the broad outline for the next Bond movie. A younger, but established Bond being sent on a mission that by the end has a lasting impact on him. I think we'll get a good dose of Fleming in there for whatever that specific character idea is.
Yep, it's funny how often we hear 'go back to Fleming', but when the films use his method of a continuing arc through the stories, suddenly it's 'not that bit'! :)
I think a good example of how to do it right is the Mission Impossible films. There's been a load of continuing threads through those since 2006 you could probably say, and it's worked well. What they do crucially though is not assume any prior knowledge of the films from the viewer- every continuity point is also re-established in the film you're watching, because they're popcorn movies and it's silly to assume that someone in the cinema on a Saturday night is fan enough to remember or even have seen the previous film.
So if you watch Fallout, the story of Ethan's wife from the previous few films is concluded. But the film doesn't assume you know who she is, so it opens with a dream sequence of Ethan marrying her and a nuclear explosion going off: so immediately you're either reminded that she exists, or told that she exists. New viewers can join the dots because it's not a very complex story. It'll be interesting to see how they do it with the next film as it's consciously a 'part two' - I think they'll still make it accessible.
That's where something like QoS fails I think, because it launches into a car chase seconds after the end of the previous movie (from two years ago!) and anyone who isn't fully up on CR isn't even given a prompt to remember the end of it. You're even supposed to remember that Bond has a massive machine gun!
Also of course, the MI films are making up the storyline as they go. It hasn't been pre-planned, and that's absolutely fine, no-one's complaining that they didn't have it all planned out from 1996. And Fleming didn't plan his story arcs out either.
The films go in a different direction, and then about six others after that as well.
To be honest it's also worth saying that even when Fleming wrote YOLT amnesia wasn't an uncommon plot device at all. The idea of someone getting hit on the head or having a traumatic experience and suffering from memory loss was always there in film and literature. It even spans different genres (ie. It's there in comedy certainly - I'm sure there's countless cartoon or Laurel and Hardy type examples of characters getting hit on the head, getting amnesia, and believing they're someone else. There's a thriller from the 1940s called Somewhere in The Night which, on paper, has more or less the same plot set up as Bourne with a Marine waking up with no memory of who he is. Hitchcock dabbled into amnesia as well with Spellbound). I suspect it was even something of a cliche when Fleming wrote it (albeit in a very unique novel). So I wouldn't say Bourne was necessarily influenced by Bond directly. Like YOLT it just uses the old plot device of amnesia in a certain way.
1. The remains of the Oberhauser storyline are twisted so far that the Fleming almost remains no longer. Oberhauser taught Bond to ski, became a father figure, and died mysteriously. That's all the Spectre and Octopussy share. The meat of the story (the gold, the doublecross, etc.) is jettisoned for a weak excuse of conflict in young Franz.
2. The closest, but not a particularly good or accurate job at all. Again, only surface level is kept: Blofeld gains control of intelligence (the use/methods/motivations aren't even really the same)
3. The cerebral is not just intercepting messages: it's the framing of the messages as "defections" from junior officers, and creating an army of people in an intelligence agency when it was just himself, and reconstructing the same racket (by himself again) in peacetime (when before he was in the chaos of war) and again with little help.
4. OK: so the whole goal of the Nine Eyes program was to get control of the world's intelligence agencies so that they could do their crimes without scrutiny. Surely however, the crux of the issue is not the actual program but then the defection intelligence operatives. So Nine Eyes isn't the problem and doesn't require the big build up that it gets. Because what I picked from the movie was that Nine Eyes is simply the mass increase of surveillance of normal citizens to prevent terrorism and such.
4b. The only way Nine Eyes itself would be the problem would be if SPECTRE had control and was running the actual servers and systems. I don't see how SPECTRE would be prepared for that sort of workload and if they were, they would have been needed to be introduced as an data company or something like that to nail it in. Even if Nine Eyes was a network where important intelligence is shared, then the framing is all wrong: the system shouldn't be framed as bad, the actual potential leaks in the data company would be bad. So basically the program would not be destoryed but reprogrammed.
5. You claim that there's a lot of ways to make money from unrestricted surveillance: and that's true of a real world data company with loads of data analysts. SPECTRE is poorly positioned to capitalise on what would be hours and hours of street footage and massive amounts of internet traffic. At best, most of this stuff would be low level and sold off to advertisers, maybe to a foreign government who has the ability to trudge through all of the mud. But quite the opposite to Blofeld's "MOST IMMEDIATE" stealing scheme and the sale of high class intelligence in the novels
He's killed by the story's protagonist, who Bond goes after. Hence: it's an extension of the same story. It's not twisted, just extrapolated and extended.
The motivations are the same, Blofeld's motivations stay pretty constant. But if it's the closest it's not a bad job.
It's a lovely bit of backstory. But the language here: 'cerebral', 'twisted', 'weak' etc. is unnecessary. The book is just a thriller with a fairly plodding plot, the film is a fun diversion. Let's keep some perspective.
Nine Eyes going online will give Blofeld full access: it's all in the film.
You're making problems where they aren't any. Spectre is big and has been introduced into the system: the film shows us this. Saying it can't be either without any reason to is just inventing issues. You may as well ask how Blofeld built the crater base in YOLT: he did.
Says who?
I'm not going to get into a back and forth about this: my point was only that Spectre contains elements of Fleming's ideas and I've shown that, you've decided that the film should be subject to much greater inspection than the book and is inferior and nothing will change that, so enjoy your day.
I agree with you. OP is my favorite of the short stories and I would have liked to have seen a closer adaptation, somehow. Craig would have been suited for it. (And come to think of it, there are echoes of Oberhauser's suicide in White's death scene.)
I can see how Logan and Mendes thought that delving into Bond's past in SF worked well, so why not double-down in SP? OP is the logical starting point there. They even had the snowy setting in Austria--infuriating!
Where SP went astray is, IMHO, that they unsatisfyingly combined Blofeld and Oberhauser into one character. It would have been better if they kept Oberhauser as a Largo-type, let him have all of his personal motivations against Bond--I even like the "cuckoo." Keep Hinx as Oberhauser's Vargas.
Give Blofeld all of his tics, the cat, the eye, whatever.
And have Blofeld manipulating both Oberhauser and Bond. "I'm the author of all your pain...I even know about your childhood." I think it would have worked.
1. Fine, this is a point that I have missed. However, I would say that the main story of Octopussy is the bit about the gold, not necessarily the bit about Oberhauser's murder. Bond in Octopussy does not go on a hunt down for Oberhauser's killer, and that change in a lot of dynamics in the story means that it's almost impossible to say that Spectre takes from Octopussy in a way that one could say is "adapting Fleming," when the previous comment was mentioning films like CR, Skyfall and NTTD. Spectre "adapts Fleming" the same way the Moore films "adapt Fleming." That is, mostly at a base level and changing loads about the motivations, plans and goals. Even FYEO, the most Fleming based Moore film, takes so many liberties in adapting (and mixing) it that some things are unrecognisable. This is same sort of thing that I'm trying to point at Spectre.
2. I got the impression that there was also revenge in Blofeld's motivations in Spectre, not just money.
3. There might be the slightest bit of drama tinged within the words, but I feel as if my point is quite clear: being the closest adaptation at the moment doesn't make it a good one. One could argue that either LTK or TMWTGG are the closest adaptions of TMWTGG novel at the moment. Doesn't mean that either are good adaptions of the novel.
4. Full access to what? Intelligence sharing between these 9 allies, or to all of the surveillance that the program would create? My point is that if it is the first, then the issue is not actually the program, but its compromise. The film frames Nine Eyes as if it is a bad thing in of itself, so that suggests the second one. My point here then boils down to the fact that it this also doesn't really adapt Blofeld that well either. Taking in mass information for low risk and little reward (from at least what I see) is close to the opposite of what Blofeld does. (Taking in low amounts but high quality information at high risk with high reward). This kind of changes the characterisation of Blofeld in my eyes as well. The fact the film doesn't really give us a clear point to what the reward is also is to its detriment, and it instead decides to focus on the relationship between Bond and Blofeld at the end.
That is essentially, if SPECTRE use 9 eyes steal the joint intelligence, then the issue is them, not the program, and if they steal the surveillance, there's barely any gain for them at the cost of handling loads of data. I don't think that's "creating issues." If it isn't clear what the data will be used for and what will be to come, I think that also goes against Blofeld's straightforward and planning (but also risktaking) nature. (And by the way, YOLT gets away with the volcano by being thoroughly unserious about the plausibility of the film (but it doesn't work at all for me). Spectre tries to be more plausible and serious about its contents, so even the slightest flaw in plausibility means that it loses ground)
5. This is just assumptions from all because of the unclear nature of how Spectre benefit. Its' unclear and marginal gains at best are what we see.
Anyway your point about Spectre having Fleming material was in response to a claim that it didn't in comparison to films like CR, SF and NTTD. Obviously every film has some Fleming material, but Spectre doesn't have enough (or doesn't use it well enough) to warrant that sort of comparison. This was all to say, Fleming material should not be adapted the way it was in Spectre, because of its dilution and loss of context in many situation. My opinion of the film is poor yes, but that doesn't matter either. I wouldn't want to see Bond 26 adapt Fleming like Goldeneye did, even though I love Goldeneye.
Also, when comparing an adaption to its original (in terms of quality of adaptation), the adaption is always the one that gets scrutinised: because it is supposed to retell the original. My goal in this discussion was to say that Spectre should not be the type of Fleming use that should be continued. So I don't know what sort of scrutiny I need to be putting on Thunderball and Octopussy for this discussion.
Yeah I can see all of the steps in their thinking: like you say, after the personal, childhood-based plot of SF it's kind of amazing to find one in Fleming which it almost feels like no-one had really spotted before. It's quite bizarre in a way that the film of Octopussy actually trims out the personal attachment to Bond- they had the opportunity to do something a bit more interesting and went with a personal attachment to the leading lady instead.
So as the baddie has to be younger than Smythe to be an effective villain, that means he could have been a child at the time, so in comes the foster brother stuff (which in turns links up with a biographical detail of Fleming's- when he lived in Austria as an adolescent he stayed with a couple of doctors of psychology who specialised in unhealthy sibling relationships) - it all makes sense and seems meaty on the page. And why not make that person Blofeld? It's just a name, why not? But then if you step back that asks a bit too much of the audience.
I know what you mean about Blofeld and Oberhauser being two people: I think it would be easier to swallow if Oberhauser were someone Blofeld had found to try and pick away at Bond perhaps and get revenge on him for the events of the previous films, you're right. But then I could also imagine looking at that story and thinking 'what's the point of having these two as separate characters - we may as well combine them so Bond and Blofeld have more reason to hate each other'- it does streamline it. I kind of don't blame them for a lot of the story decisions because it does fit together pretty well, it just doesn't work in the film- I'm not even really sure why.
I think the problem might just lie mostly in that he's called Blofeld. If he had stayed Oberhauser we'd all be a lot more forgiving of it, I think. Kind of mad that it could just come down to a name, really.
You're right about the Mr White suicide, yeah; with all of the other Octopussy themes it would be an odd coincidence if that weren't intended. He's even got a sexy daughter, like the movie version of Smythe!
He absolutely does: the case comes across his desk and he takes it up because of his attachment to the 'wonderful man' Oberhauser. It's not 'Death Wish' or anything, with a bloodied Bond seeking revenge, but neither is Spectre; but he does take the case because he wants justice for his mentor's killer (bizarrely Spectre actually has him show less emotion about Hannes, which I think is a misstep). At the end of both he doesn't kill the guilty man.
I could see a "cuckoo" Blofeld working, but that's the later YOLT-novel Blofeld. It's like they skipped a step, or movie or two, with the character. I could even see him going cuckoo in SP after Bond scarred him.
Or as others have suggested, they could have just made White into Blofeld after SF, after they got the rights. The scaffolding was there. ("White" is probably a code-name, like all the names in CR and QoS.)
That might have taken us on a journey to Bond falling in love with Blofeld's daughter, which would have made NTTD very different.
I always thought White was Blofeld in the first two films of the Craig Era, so when Spectre was announced I was hoping that this would be developed.
I was butt-hurt when I heard the casting of “Oberhauser” went to Waltz (knowing, like we all did, where this character was going).
That might have worked, and would have been a good twist in that everyone was expecting Waltz to be the ubervillain.
Christensen was one of the casting highlights of the Craig era for me. He easily could have been Blofeld in NTTD.