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
This! I don’t understand this. Did all of these key players touch this one ring? Why does the MI6 database include the Spectre octopus tentacle motif?
Are there not her members of Spectre?
So lazy.
There we go,enough said.
It's in black and white.
There was book named " The battle for bond " i haven't read it myself but it tells a lot about what happened and how.
All good points!!!
It was utter bollocks and people try to make allowances for this film and say it's better than SF.
All the plot holes in SF don't even approach the stupidity of that ring scanning nonsense.
That is without getting into Brofelt or Blohauser situation.
Sorry nothing in this era touches the awfulness of this entry and anyone trying to argue it is on a hiding to nothing.
Exactly !
I'm no writer but I've been working on an alternative version of Bond 24 like yourself.
Nothing too drastic, taking the elements and still going with the tying things together using existing material that P&W established from CR onwards.
The material was there for them to do this much better rather than the half assed attempt we got.
Following their deaths, its presence identified during autopsy/forensics analysis showed up as a commonality between them. Clearly communicated in the film.
Vanity has its dangers.
That doesn't explain convenient SPECTRE graphic that Q has on his lap top though it's just silly.
It's just a rushed way to explain things like they really weren't that bothered how they put this across in order to link things together.
The convenient SPECTRE graphic was just a closeup of the metal formulation or whatever of the SPECTRE ring Bond had obtained.
Interesting thoughts. A good set up for a follow up movie if they had planned ahead
I'm afraid I take this with a bit of a pinch of salt.
The idea that EON would just leave a key piece of Bond intellectual property floating around until Mendes and Logan turned up and said they wanted to use it simply doesn't ring true.
Weren't the rights to SPECTRE wrapped up with McCrory's TB rights? Which EON had been in litigation over for decades. My understanding was that EON wanted those rights locked down regardless and it had very little to do with Sam Mendes.
This Gregg Wilson interview suggests it went down slightly differently from the way you're suggesting.
I think there's an element of good timing (or bad timing depending on how much you enjoyed SP) here. McCrory dies and his family show willing to finally sell the TB rights (including SPECTRE and Blofeld) to EON. Mendes is working on B24 using an idea totally unrelated to SPECTRE but knows EON are in negotiations with McCrory's executors. Ping - Mendes says "let's do it" and EON perhaps go the extra mile to close the deal in time for Sam to give us the marvel that is SP and Brofeld.
But the idea that EON weren't going to do this anyway is total nonsense.
I hate it and I was big fan of this era and DC till this, have faith that Bond 25 will restore that.
I agree with your post. MGW had been involved on the legal side of Eon for decades, and the opportunity to finally put the McClory controversy to bed had to have been immensely appealing (aside from Mendes' wishes to use Blofeld). It was a golden chance for MGW to bring all the Bond novels under one fold.
The legal maneuvers of MGW (and Babs) are underappreciated. Sony/Columbia had the CR novel rights, so they had Sony distribute CR.
There is reality, and there is spin. That book picture above is the latter. Eon is always protecting its intellectual property. Ask anyone who lived through the mid-'80s who was originally cast in TLD (hint: it was PB). But Eon, wanting to stand behind their ultimately chosen actor, spun it so that Dalton was "always the first choice."
And I'm someone who prefers Dalton to Brosnan. Spin is not personal. It's business.
I'll have to watch the scene again, but wasn't the news article of them lifting the car out of the water?
1) The set-pieces and the film overall feel oddly cocooned, with no sense of a broader world or community to speak of. This becomes quite literal when everyone disappears for the Rome chase, the snow chase, the London climax, etc. This is an important point because it makes the action feel fake, feel staged. Even in Mexico the extras are only cosmetic, there is no impact to speak of. Contrast this with the drama of the marketplace in Istanbul in Skyfall, or the chaos at the Dowar Inquiry, or the simple difficulty of finding Silva among a crowd in the Underground. This difference anchors what we are seeing in a kind of reality, instead of the eerie and empty chamber piece we get in the final film.
2) The replication of much of Skyfall's plot structure and presentation is a critical error. In Skyfall, it's important that we don't have the villain's perspective at all because he and his actions should remain a surprise. That generates suspense in this context because his objective is actually rather simple: destroy M at all costs. The dramatic power of that on a character level is great but there is nothing beyond that, excepting perhaps taking every chance to embarrass and prove his superiority over his replacement, 007.
With Spectre however, the "active" component of the villain's plot is abstract, or trivial as presented in the film. There are vague references to international attacks, but no active effort from MI6 to investigate or counter them for some reason - there is an absence of an actual mission for 007, which has only applied to LtK previously for good reason. With LtK we are already entrenched within the dramatic construct of Felix vs Sanchez so an actual mission doesn't matter. In Spectre we are hitting the marks of "classic Bond" but the immediate post-credits scene is actually setting up M's subplot rather than Bond's plot. This is not satisfying.
Nor is the villain's plot at large. Having access to surveillance internationally simply isn't a visceral, dramatic threat, not when the villain's organisation has previously been shown to be omnipotent anyway, and again in this film before the plan goes through. There is a "so what?" to the villain's gambit. I would change this to something more tactile, for instance: the Nine Eyes system allows C to impersonate directives from all intelligence chiefs internationally. And then we can have some kind of actual danger from C, and we can actually begin to fix the third act by having something as simple as the other 00s turned on Bond let's say. You could have this happen earlier on in the film and actually double-down on something suggested in QoS, and instead of Hinx Bond is beset by his opposite numbers from other countries, let's say. This could provide much-needed shape to the set pieces and link the threats to Bond to the actual plot.
3) To return to an earlier point, you do need the villain's perspective, or a villain's perspective. If you're bringing back SPECTRE, use it. We don't need Bond at the SPECTRE meeting at all - this is a stupid scene and a stupid reveal for Waltz that doesn't inform or advance the plot at all beyond Bond discovering the Oberhauser thing. But even that doesn't propel anything in the plot! We discover the nature of the organisation when Bond gives the ring to Q - could have happened in London. We discover that the organisation want to kill someone called The Pale King... but we knew this in Mexico! Cut Rome entirely and you have a better film right off the bat. Have Bond extract the location of The Pale King from Sciarra during their confrontation before killing him. Then when he returns to London to check in, as in the finished film, have the Judi video reveal that The Pale King is Mr. White, and that she has continued investigating Quantum for four years or whatever. Maybe we can find out he has a daughter here too, anything to get Madeleine into the plot earlier. But critically we can have an obscured Blofeld talking with SPECTRE henchmen, including Denbigh if needs be. We don't need to withhold this for Bond's perspective because the villain isn't going to function in a way that requires that.
4) If you're going to take the effort to establish Madeleine as her father's daughter, maybe put that into play for something more than a brief moment of pointing a gun at Bautista. In the finished film there is a hackneyed attempt to tap into a theme of Bond finding a life beyond being a spy, but Madeleine for some reason takes the symbolic role of that normal life despite... not being that at all and being "the only person who could understand him". Shades of QoS I know, but maybe have Madeleine prove to be combat ally, maybe have them actually try to attack the crater base. Instead of the QoS nonsense of backing a car into the villain's base to blow it up, have Bond plan an infiltration like the GE PTS, and he and Madeleine get partway through it but are suddenly thwarted at every turn because unbeknownst to Bond at this point, the villain knows him like a brother. And so Bond's efficacy as a secret agent is suddenly completely useless against this opponent who is supremely intelligent and knows exactly how Bond personally thinks. He's the anti-Bond, the antithesis rather than the fractured mirror image of Silva. Suddenly you have some grounding and function at least for the Brofeld bullshit. But Madeleine doesn't get captured, and she saves him let's say. A strong, competent female character like Pam Bouvier, who can be more effective than Bond in this context because maybe Mr. White has secretly trained her to be Blofeld's kryptonite, I dunno. But I think that would be more engaging than what we wind up with.
Nine Eyes as written does nothing for this film, and the idea of Blofeld forcing 00 agents turning on Bond is ingenious. (And really, White could have been revealed as Blofeld. Keep Oberhauser out of it entirely--too confusing in comparison to the larger Bond/Swann story.)
It boggles my mind why they wouldn't reintroduce Spectre in the way of a FRWL, or TB. Audiences would have loved seeing shadowy Blofeld dispatch his latest failed operative. That's classic Bond. You still could have him emerge from the shadows later in the film.
Since they copied the OHMSS father-daughter template of Tracy and Draco, they needed to go back and study the structure of OHMSS. And like you said, introduce Swann a lot earlier. She should have been in the PTS or in the film shortly thereafter.
Again, my problem with SP is one of potential: unlimited budget, unprecedented talent, and maybe unmatchable good will on the heels of the olympics and SF. SP had a lot of things in place to be great, and it was just OK.
One thing many of us seem to agree on is simply cutting out some of the plotting - there's just so much crammed in here - and letting things breathe a bit. Show us the beautiful locations, show us the interesting characters, let some of these relationships unfold. For my part, I'd cut out the 9-Eyes subplot altogether.
I agree. On one hand too much plotting and on the other not enough plot. There's certainly a lot going on but ultimately does anyone actually care? The central premise is so wafer thin and unengaging that it doesn't matter how twisty they make it - the whole thing is basically just dull.