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viewing room druing the spectre meeting in Thunderball. :)
Is the chessboard really a nod to FRWL? Felt if anything more of a nod to the Seventh Seal - 'Death came wearing a familiar face' - the pilgrim plays chess with death in The Seventh Seal.
The first point I'd agree with.
The second, well, I'm not too sure, it might just be a similarity in the script as opposed to a real homage.
I wouldn't really call either of them homages - more parallels to Casino Royale.
Think that the series has run so long, that similarities are bound to happen.
Every car chase will be compared to all the previous ones. ;) same with
every fight, boat chase etc.
Yes, a lot of things can be put down to coincidence rather than active reference or homage.
Films that we fans have.
You mean casting Brosnan?
(The horror...the horror!)
Hilarious, no really.
I mean it.
You better believe it.
Well, you are right in that it is similar in idea and concept, but is it a homage? I'm not too sure. If there is a homage to the AVTAK car chase it is probably in the SP car chase where the cars drive down the steps I guess.
"Meet the Oberhausers"
Join in on the content galore and tongue in cheek on https://www.facebook.com/DieAnotherDayVodcast/
Some of these are brilliant catches, such as the little nods to prior character physical movement, such as the Q physical posturing.
Not all may be by design, but we don't really know.
The filmmakers do have access to the canon.
Babs and MGW at least, know these films as well as we do, and others would have selective reference.
The first is in the opening sequence when Bond goes to his hotel room in Mexico City and says 'won't be long' before exiting the room via the window and climbing upstairs - clear reference to Connery in the Vegas hotel room heading upstairs to visit Willard Whyte.
The second is Denbigh's death towards the end of the film - to me that bore similarities to Trevelyan's fall from the antennae in GE, especially when they look down on his body sprawled on the floor below.
Exactly.
Also agreed. It gets to the point where fans treat anything as a reference to something, to an embarrassing degree. Before we know it Bond films will be seen as ripping off past films when Bond climbs a stairwell a certain way. Not a reference, just how people climb stairs.
I'd say that's stretching it, judging from the tenuous connections I've read. The issue is that I could do this exercise with any Bond film, as it's very easy. The movies are their own sub-genre, so it becomes childishly simple to make broad strokes and comparisons to the other films in high numbers no matter what the movie is, especially since the early films set out particular expectations. It takes a precise mind to avoid appearing like you are grasping for straws making assumptions, leaps of fancy or other attempts at comparison. Some allusions will no doubt be intentional and more obvious, but when we refer to the sight of a chess board in a scene as a movie channeling FRWL, we've well and truly lost the plot. And I see far too much of the latter to take the process seriously.
There are plenty of leaps one could make. Bond taking on the role of a dangerous man for a job, like Bond does with Franks. Bond having the villain with a personal investment in his life introduced via a moment of revelation and high drama. Bond connecting a pipeline of agents to get to the main source behind it all, etc.
The problem being these are all broad strokes that fit many different Bond films, and don't make SP any more referential than others. More particular moments like Bond going out a window are more exact, but still not as right on the money as I feel people would like to think. More often than not things fall into expected and accepted tropes, where what Bond does has a rich catalogue of history with the films and the books. So it becomes less a case of something stealing an idea from somewhere, but more a movie tapping into that tradition and how Bond films are made/presented. Bond does things a certain way because that's how Bond is and all that.
The other connections you suggest are more tenuous and not ones I would make. Of course this is the first film which truly involves Blofeld and Spectre since DAF (if one ignores the FYEO PTS).
SP certainly felt very 'familiar' to me when I saw it for the first time in the theatre (I detected a lot but not all of the connections in that video post). That was perhaps because I did a very enjoyable Bondathon prior to my viewing which was a mistake in retrospect. It's not the only Bond film guilty of that certainly, & I may have noticed these things more (or even cared about them more) because I was not engaged in the narrative.
SF also has a lot of references (as an anniversary film) in it. Nearly every scene references a prior scene in another Bond film. I just felt they did it quite inventively, and I only noticed it after several viewings.
As I stated, there are more obvious ones, and ones that are leaps. Of the above the DN references don't really stick with me, nor do those for FRWL or TB. The train scene and FRWL only share the concept that Bond fights on a train, and that's not really a reference, just a choice for showing the action. Much like you wouldn't look at a film with a fight on a train and say, "That's riffing on FRWL," I wouldn't for a Bond film that sets a conflict on a train. Much like I wouldn't call the fight in TSWLM a reference either. All are too different and unique.
A SPECTRE meeting would have to be in SP, as it's the return of the organization and of course he'd be there to meet with his agents, so I don't see it as a riff on TB either. As with the FRWL example the scene is vastly different, with different content, mood and everything else. In TB we just see a man killed and Largo states his mission, whereas Bond is coming upon the organization in SP and we get a comprehensive idea of SPECTRE's hold on the world and the current scheme, in addition to how it moves the story along to Mr. White and introduces us to this Blofeld. It's also a creepy and unsettling scene, which TB's didn't play off half as strongly.
That's the steep hill of looking at concept and not content, where a scene on a train is seen as a reference to something no matter what the scene is like or how close it is in context to the film it's apparently referencing. There's also the simple tropes of Bond, and how these films work. We have expectations for villain lairs that all the films meet, because that's how Bond lairs look and feel.
The only time I have an issue with those pointing out references to things is when those apparent references or perceptions on the side of the viewer are seen as a film lazily ripping off what came before and being a piece of junk because of it. It's when really large leaps are made in those judgements that it's far worse, as the person commenting on a film's references aren't even suggesting strong references in the first place to base their opinion on.
SP, as with every Bond film I like, has the feeling of a Bond film, and it's that spirit of what a Bond film is that I take away from it instead of a running checklist of pseudo or quasi references it stacks up. I can see references here and there, but with its Bond tradition it also dares to do new things that are far more interesting to pay attention to. There's quiet scenes in that you'd never see in a vast majority of these films, and the script is flipped on many traditional scenes, where Bond's trusty gadgets fail, where a SPECTRE briefing is played quiet, where a villain actually sticks around to watch a hero die, etc.
You should know by now, there's no other kind of SP discussion.
The other film that gave me this immediate deja vu feeling in the theatre was TND.
The other films lift alright, but either the narrative masks it better or they are more inventive with it. I do remember putting out a groan when I saw the hidden Janus HQ in GE but I didn't mind it, because I was in the moment during the film. Certainly the opening bungee jump/plane catch recalled the parachute sequence from TSWLM and the Aston/Ferrari chase homaged GF/To Catch A Thief.
EDIT: Coming back to this, I think it worked in GE (for me) because of the long gap and the actor change. So the deliberate callbacks could be forgiven, especially when the Dalton era jettisoned some of the old style. I think they perhaps thought it was time to do that again given the Craig era had similarly and deliberately gone in another direction for three films. Perhaps the gap wasn't long enough though (again, for me), or perhaps my issue was they just shouldn't have done it with a recurring actor.