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I like to think that Bond learnt from Bouvar's mistake and did not, in fact, decide to turn up to his 'funeral' in YOLT as his own widow.
Especially in YOLT! It's almost like Dahl dared us not to bring our brains with us into the theater. Soooo much of it makes NO sense at all!
They even left the Japanese disguise which was something that clearly should be removed in an adaptation.
Most of the elements from the original story are not in the film:
Bond is not burnt out through grief;
Bond is not sent on a purely diplomatic assignment which snowballs into something more dangerous;
Bond isn’t consumed with revenge for Blofeld;
The Japanese secret service don’t ask him to assassinate someone who turns out to be his hated enemy in disguise;
There is no castle with a ‘garden of death’;
Blofeld doesn’t wander around in a suit of armour;
Bond doesn’t kill Blofeld after a sword-against-staff duel;
Bond isn’t interrogated by being trapped in a room with a vent for lava or superheated mud or whatever it was;
Bond isn’t left amnesiac at the end.
I think the film bears little resemblance to the book, only taking a few elements and discarding the rest.
In any case, the novel is still a travel book with very little plot.
Ah, thank you, I didn't quite get what Makeshift meant by 'elements' as opposed to story.
This. Besides, the movie is so dull that the stakes feel low. Yes, humanity is at risk and whatnot, but Bond avenging Tracy is personal, and for a Bond fan that raises the stakes much more than the usual world domination plans. In fact, it is a much more engaging tale exactly because you can relate to a man mourning the loss of his wife, whereas controlling satellites from a volcano lair is much more fantastical.
Pretty much. You still get a ton of things from the book, but the story/plot being radically different just changes the context of those elements. Bond and Tanaka still bond together in a bathhouse with beautiful women, with Bond learning about Japanese culture. How the book and novel present them are very different of course. YOLT is still an adaptation, it’s just extremely loose compared to what came before.
Like you said. Contrast that with TSWLM, where the only real thing the film and novel have in common is the steel toothed villain.
You’re right. It isn’t subtle. But you are wrong about it being ignored, and didn’t grasp the plot events that discount your last sentence there.
Primarily, Anya and Bond are in the same business. Her boyfriend tried to kill Bond. Bond killed him instead. Much like her promise of delayed vengeance, it is the business. Her *decision* to not kill Bond is based on her experiences in the film, including seeing precisely *how* Bond has a different, possibly better, approach to the morals and ethics of that business. Bond risked his life to save hers, which had no effect on the mission outcome. He did it to save *her*. In addition to whatever else they had got up to prior to her realising it was Bond that had killed her boyfriend, she changes her opinions and intent regarding Bond. She *also* is fully aware that he is someone who lost his significant other to ‘the business’ and that that is why he accepts the threat of her vengeance calmly — it’s what he would have done, and did do, in her position. Her opinion over that also changes, because that was a circle of vengeance and tit-for-tat, which the whole *point* of this story is about. That’s how the world would be destroyed. Avoiding that attitude is why XXX and OO7 are working together. Why Soviet and Western crews ally up throughout the finale.
It’s the whole point of the film.
The obvious fact it isn’t being ignored, is that she pulls the gun on him in the luxury escape pod, and Bond himself shows that he considers it possible that she will kill him.
Then it’s champagne corks popping and keeping the British end up, because the delayed vengeance plot has been resolved by events in the story.
That and he’s James Bond.
As you can see, TSWLM is as deep as anything mustered in the modern era, it just had more fun doing it. The same is true of the quasi-retread that is TND.
I agree with that, the problem is many fans seem to want that more detached approach (despite the ones where the story is more personal like OHMSS or CR always topping the polls), whereas I agree that involving Bond emotionally in a story makes it more compelling. Fleming knew that.
I think that's a bit of a stretch. I love your analysis of it, but most of that isn't in the film, much though I'd have liked it to have been.
Sure, OHMSS worked because it was different. But if it is no longer different, then it loses all its appeal.
It really *is* in the film though. All of it. We don’t always think that ‘old’ films wee doing this kind of thing, but some of them definitely were.
In fact, the same stuff is basically a running theme through the rest of the Moore era and even TLD.
It’s a known choice by the production team vis-a-vis the East/West Cold War dichotomy going back to why SPECTRE replaced SMERSH in Flemings books as well.
It’s also about the fact that TSWLM is really the first film where Moore’s Bond is being Moore’s Bond rather than having some elements hang over from Connery. His is the gentleman spy, not Connery’s rougher set-up.
As to the thematic elements, as was said in FYEO — ‘that’s detente’.
No, because we want Bond to be a cool guy.
If he's like that in all of his movies it loses his appeal according to your logic though.
I can do one line contradictions just as well as you can! :D
I'd love it to be, but it's not. Where does she realise that "Bond risked his life to save hers, which had no effect on the mission outcome. He did it to save *her*"? The champagne pop? Another reading of that is he makes a joke with the cork and she finds him very charming and funny in that moment and forgives him (because she's the spy who loves him), because the film isn't much deeper than that.
Don't get me wrong, I'd love all that stuff to be in there, but it's interpretation and projection to some extent rather than actual substance in there, and it can be interpreted in different ways.
As for the stuff about Russians and the west, yes of course Bond films were never looking to exacerbate that stuff because it's not their place as entertainment: the same reason as Craig's Bond never going after Al Qaeda or whatever- it would just be distasteful. You can take it as a message if you want, and it is one to some extent, but I'd also suggest it was more of a policy on taste grounds, and even on not wanting to alienate some potential markets, even.
Nobody wants a crybaby Bond. That's all.
Look at the craig era. The formula dried quickly.
Everybody went to see them and they made hundreds of millions, right to the end. Everybody loved it, that's all.
And they killed his Bond. There are no more stories to tell.
Except with the next Bond, who everybody will go to see as well.
Man, this pointless contradiction is easy.
They will go see the cool Bond because they can't kill him twice.
I would call this circular logic but it's more like a wiggly line.
If they had done it, the series would not have lasted 60 years! ;)
See most people reading would have assumed it had something to do with the conversation you were having.