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Glad to see another on the Turner train!
Casino Royale: Fleming title and Fleming's Bod
Quantum of Solace :Fleming title Fleming's bond
Skyfall: not a Fleming title and a weird mixture of Fleming and movie bond
Spectre: Fleming title (see Quantum wasn't the last one) but basically Craig doing an impression of Brosnan's bond
No time to die: not a Fleming title but a return of Fleming Bond
Honestly I would like more consistency with Fleming titles and fleming tone... there is no reason Bond 23 couldnt of been called The Property of a lady and Bond 25 should of been The Garden of Death
as for tone yeah Craig does dark bond well.. pulling out jokes just doesn't work.
Casino Royale is note for not From fleming if there is a movie that is pure James bond this is it.. I am curious to hear What makes Spectre more James Bond in your mind
Well, like being ballsy enough to have the ejector seat and Spectre meeting, for example. And a crater base and so on.
Casino Royale is Fleming in the sense that there's a card game and torture scene between Bond and Le Chiffre in the second act, but the characterization of Bond has nothing to do with Fleming--blowing up an embassy, breaking into M's house, being a loose cannon disrespectful of institutions. The type of guy he is in the movie, especially the first third, is practically contra-Fleming, and his reaction to Vesper's death is likewise alien to what happened in the book.
I was referring to Bond movies, and not Fleming, anyway, so none of that is a criticism of Casino Royale or the Craig era. Some of these films are among my absolute favorites.
"He saw her now only as a spy. Their love and his grief
were relegated to the boxroom of his mind. Later,
perhaps they would be dragged out, dispassionately
examined, and then bitterly thrust back with other sen-
timental baggage he would rather forget. Now he could
only think of her treachery to the Service and to her
country, and of the damage it had done. His
professional mind was completely absorbed with the
consequences — the covers which must have been blown
over the years, the codes which the enemy must have
broken, the secrets which must have leaked from the
centre of the very section devoted to penetrating the
Soviet Union."
Quite different.
But even if the James Bond of the Casino Royale film were remotely similar to Ian Fleming's creation, I'm really talking about the EON film franchise. I'd like to see future installments be a bit more like those.
🙄
I really could not stand spectre and the attempt to mix a campy, tongue-in-cheek style bond with the craig era-rough, story driven drama bond. I truly thought this was one of the most forgettable films in the series. Whichever route they decide to go I hope it is tonally even and consistent throughout. I myself am a huge fan of the story driven, stripped down version of bond that we have seen a lot of through the craig years and hope they find a plan to keep that tone going forward.
I think this is a fairly safe bet. The most successful 2 films in recent times, both financially and critically, are CR and SF, which incidentally try to go for Fleming in tone, or directly adapt straight from the books.
I don't expect they will stray too far from this long proven winning formula any time soon, which is what the franchise was firmly built on. It looks like even NTTD is going to serve up some long overdue, and previously overlooked Fleming scenes from the novels.
The films which tie in closer to the source material are usually deemed by most fans and critics alike to be the best films in the series (OHMSS, FRWL, GF, CR etc). If it ain't broke, there is nothing to fix.... ;)
The film series became really successful when it moved away from the books and became its own thing, bigger and crazier.
Good point. I somehow feel had GF not been the hit it was, the series would have remained small and ended either with Connery or when the Fleming novels ran out.
Yes indeed, and I actually think that Thunderball was a bit of a misstep: although it was on a grand scale they took a bit of a backwards step from the glitzy campy madness of Goldfinger. There's no laser beam or guy throwing a steel hat: it's just fairly dull villains dressed in black doing quite ordinary things, stealing bombs. YOLT is the one that actually feels like it got the message from GF.
I really love TB, though. It is considerably slower paced and lacks the supervillain henchman and over the top sets. Still it feels very Fleming like (by way of Kevin McClory).
YOLT takes things to the next level of fun. Same with DAF, really, which was specifically intended to capture the flavor of GF. A massive hit, though many fans today dismiss it as a sub par follow up to OHMSS.
I think the book feels fairly Fleming, almost transitional before we get into TSWLM, OHMSS and YOLT, all which really take risks.
But CR-MR are very solid, as are FRWL-DN.
He had a lot more hits than misses of the 14.
Yet the film that followed YOLT is the one that is now deemed the more superior classic, even with a one-hit wonder in the role. DAF also followed the GF trend yet I doubt that is deemed as high in the popular rankings as FRWL, for example. If anything DAF usually ranks towards the bottom.
SF still feels like its trying to tap into Fleming though, even with the occasional cheesy nods to the film series.
And yes, the film series hit its stride when it adapted GF as the Bond template - bigger and crazier, but this is still Fleming. The formula for success was written back then - a PTS at the beginning of the book (of sorts), larger-than-life-villains, bowler hat henchmen, fast car with gadgets (limited to a few in the book), outrageous criminal plan, Pussy Galore, 2 murdered Bond girls nearer the beginning, game of wits (in this case golf), etc.
Its all there in GF. This was the template the series was built on, which is undeniably Fleming. The 2 films before this also followed Fleming, but they didn't hit the right notes for a successful template like GF did.
I think so. I would say GF is as accurate an adaptation of Fleming as say, FRWL or OHMSS.
I've always felt TB was the weakest novel, even though it does give us SPECTRE and Blofeld (another template that movie Bond success was built on). Probably more down to Fleming being constrained to adapting a screenplay into a novel that had already been loosely penned out, and contributed by KM and JW.
Audiences didn’t really go for it though. It’s only seen as a favourite in retrospect.
Yeah, agreed; but a lot of the time it’s more of a balance with a trad Bond film than CR was.
The film adds a lot of flavour to the adaptation, it’s adding a feel that its two predecessors didn’t quite. People responded to that bigger, bolder feel.
Yeah exactly. There’s not much in the way of the twisted, uniquely Fleming ideas in there. Maybe the health farm, but otherwise any Man From Uncle villain could steal some bombs.
Again, this movie performed extremely well in the foreign markets, but less so in the US. And again, like OHMSS, TLD has been reevaluated by US fans retrospectively that didn't get it the first time round. Simple summation, it's only now seen as a favourite in retrospect by our American cousins across the Pond.
I hadn't thought about it like that. That's a really interesting point mate