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Do you have sky q silver?
Interested to hear thoughts on Spectre UHD. Waiting for my package to be installed 5th September.
I downloaded an UHD version of SPECTRE a couple of months ago. Top notch quality. Then later I bought the BluRay (Full HD, not 4K Ultra-HD), and you can see the difference actually. It's slightly less grainy. But you have to look very well to see the differences.
Derivative but still better than what we got.
Off course not @RC7. I still love rewatching "SPECTRE". More and more "SPECTRE" to me feels like a very nuanced 'dance' between the seriousness and drama of "Casino Royale" and "Skyfall" and the lighthearted Guy Hamilton approach with his films.
Funny to see how much more positive you were after having watched the film the first time @Creasy47 ;-). And now....it all went down the Bottom 3 of your TOP 24 ranking hehe.
Never been through that honeymoon phase, where something is brand new and fresh and great to you, and after time, it lessens in quality for you?
I was quite comfortable with having my SP post from the other day be the last thing I say on the film for a while, but since you've brought this up out of the blue, I'll be glad to knock it down a few more pegs.
As for the title headline: definitely not. 'Rogue Nation' trumps SP for Best Spy Film of 2015 in almost every category for me.
I must admit that I found it quite decent on first watch, and even felt it was a return to form after the debacle known as TWINE (I still much prefer it to that film btw). As one can imagine, I'm not proud of this initial misconception. I'm actually ashamed of it, to be quite frank.
I would think that the later impressions are the more accurate ones.
In all honesty @Creasy47, I still think SF is superior to SP. It's a unique entry. It has the deeper emotional drama that CR, LTK and OHMSS had, but it still feels 'different'. Perhaps it's because of Bond's family background, which was mentioned only in the novel YOLT. Mendes knew he couldn't really bring back Bond's parents like Nolan did with "Batman Begins". But all the little suggestions...Andrew Bond's rifle gun, the Skyfall lodge from the Bond-De La Croix family, the tomb stone of Andrew Bond and Monique Bond-De La Croix..... It will always make "Skyfall" a more unique Bond film.
It's perhaps also the only Bond film in which the Bond villain for the very first time succeeds with his scheme. Bond is not able to save 'M', nor is MI6 able to prevent terrorist attacks on London. That too makes "Skyfall" a unique Bond film. I wonder how Ian Fleming would have felt about this film :-). Thanks for mentioning SF @Creasy47 ;-)
In QoS Bond isn't a big "winner" either, with Medrano and Greene dead for certain, but Quantum are still very much out there and the losses Bond experienced in the movie make it more pyrrhic than anything. While most Bond films skip Bond's grieving period, we get to see 007 dealing with Vesper's death and betrayal "live" for the first time in the series as Daniel's performance anchors the film and it's exploration of pyrrhic victory. When all is said and done, Mathis is lost to Bond, his own government wanted his head, nobody trusted him besides M, Fields died because of his meddling in Quantum's work, and despite his own burying of the hatchet between himself and the late Vesper at the end, he definitely comes away from it a much harder, but more professional man, forever changed.
SF continues the theme as well, with big personal and professional losses that put into question the nature of winning and losing when the true measure of victory in real life only comes down to which bastard loses and bleeds the least.
SP is the only film in the Craig era that dares to set Bond up for anything even slightly resembling a happy ending. SPECTRE's scheme is stopped, Bond and Madeleine are safe and sound, off to wherever with smiles on their faces. While I think we are all aware of the fleeting nature these kind of endings have for Bond, it's still a massive departure from the rest of the era in terms of how it concludes. Bond isn't callously walking away with darkness in his eyes. He's not pondering the memory of a recently departed loved one, trying to stuff his emotional response deep down inside his heart. This go around, he's focusing for the first time in his life on "something else." And hopefully for him, something more.
I always see myself giving the edge to SP over SF in these debates. Craig is reminiscent of Connery in SP to the best degree, giving his own take on scenes that I could see Sean playing the exact same way, which is a kick for such a big 60s fan as myself. Dan is focused, confident and unflappable, perfect in every scene. A perfect tribute to the best of Bond and a credible portrayal of a character he was able to develop from a rookie to a professional over the past three films, with SP being the film where we see his Bond unhampered and fully formed to the eye. Bond's burnt out nature in SF doesn't cancel out Dan's great performance there in this argument, but in that film there's times where he is given lines that are reminiscent of something Roger would do that just don't work, and come off as cringe-worthy, where that is nowhere to be seen in SP. His deliveries feel honest and when he's given a throwaway line to say the tone feels more "smartass" than "clown."
On the whole, the story of SP is better for me, the themes more interesting (family, home, second chances, past coming back to your doorstep, eyes/surveillance, etc.), the relationships with Bond and his MI6 family more developed with the great but not overused M, MP and Q, a more interesting exploration of who Bond is as he questions his life choices and future away from the bullets and blood, and a better set of truly cinematic scenes that evoke amazing use of visuals, tension and sound that represent a high filmmaking standard (PTS, Rome meeting, Hinx fight, Bond and Madeleine in the hotel, Blofeld's HQ, the run down MI6 maze, etc.).
The PTS features the visual and auditory life of Mexico City during one of their most special days of celebration for life, as Bond goes out to end some, perfectly contrasting his view of life and death and that of the Mexican citizenry. The SPECTRE Rome meeting echoes with whispers and heavy breathing as the score goes quiet and allows the uneasy interactions to play out as millions of tiny pins drop in the silence. The fight with Hinx is stripped of music, the only sound being the monolithic pounding of Bautista stomping through the carriage to smash Daniel this way and that, in a moment where my heart was nearly tricked into thinking Bond was a dead man. The hotel scene between Bond and Madeline is a beautiful break from "the chase" as Mendes and Hoyte frame an interaction between two troubled characters who are attempting to maneuver their own demons to work and mesh together. Bond learns of Madeleine's hard outer shell, not unlike his own, and how she's not a woman to mess with, as she shoots him with a finger gun from beyond the bed's veil, a fabric barrier between them that's destined to break to their will later on. A very human set of scenes carry into Bond's discovery of White's hidden room and of Vesper's interrogation tape in the same breath that Madeleine comes upon her father's collection of photos, the only things he had left of her to hold on to as she broke away from him. In this moment Daniel and Léa are pitch-perfect in their performances, embodying two characters whose pasts have each come out of nowhere to barrel them over. In seconds Bond and Madeleine each fight internal battles to keep their emotions and responses in check, before they both overcome their bad memories and join each other in the center of the room, with neither aware of the inner bouts the other was facing only moments before. Bond represents successful grieving here, as he mourned Vesper long ago and buried that part of his life like a casket full of skeletons, but where Madeleine is concerned, her father has only just died and she has a long way to go towards truly dealing with that loss as Bond has, as complex as their relationship was.
I could go on, but we'd be here all day. SP represents to me a beautiful series of truly human character moments surrounded by blockbuster appeal. In this film you get your action and chases, shootouts, fistfights and explosions, Bond villain and lair, and that's great, but what surrounds it all is truly fantastic and worthy of praise. The film focuses on character and character interaction, credibly developing their big players through their time spent with each other.
Bond and Q have a beautiful moment of levity at the start, developing their more sour dynamic from SF into something with a greater foundation on trust and playful ball-busting.
Bond and Mallory are by no means sunny co-workers post-PTS as the former is stringing his boss along and being duplicitous as he has been trained about what his motives were in Mexico City. They aren't on great terms, but we see Mallory's belief in Bond come through during the film as he trusts the man to do his job without MI6's help, much like Dench's M herself, cementing the fact that Mallory was her true and worthy successor.
In one of the great surprises of the movie, Bond and Mr. White are reunited with both years and agony separating them. 007 comes upon the Pale King in much the same state as he left him in Siena in QoS, strapped to an IV and reeling from recent pains taken. In this scene White represents to Bond's eyes exactly what he might become in the future if he keeps on the same path: a dead man with nothing and nobody around him, sucking on his last breaths of air alone. This perfectly sets up Bond's later choice of leaving MI6 behind at the end, wanting something more with his life beyond the death and the destruction, the duplicity and the danger.
Bond and Madeline's dynamic represents the heart and soul of the film, and we watch as they develop beautifully (as described above) while they travel together, unwrapping each other's pasts and what each of their futures may be. In the end their connection and choice to face that future together is less a sloppy development in the script and more an inevitable resolution where two people who understand each other are drawn to each other to see what's there between them, as they both have experiences only the other can truly understand. It may be love, it might not, but they're going to give it a go and explore their relationship to preserve the both of themselves.
And again, I could go on and on and on (I haven't even gotten into all the things the film does with Blofeld and his interactions with Bond, or detailed why the other scenes of the film feel special to me.) I think SF is a great film too, as I love all the Craig era movies for daring to give us a truly layered Bond as opposed to an untouchable superman, but I do feel it's largely overrated, I view Silva as a more lower rung villain, lament the lack of on location shooting, and much prefer the more nuanced and interesting use of themes in SP, how the MI6 crew are used, how Bond is used and much, much more. The themes of SF are very rooted in the plot, with how spying is being curbed by the British government and people like Bond are put into question, but in SP the film's themes are explored through character and rooted in character interaction on a grand scale, which give them so much more weight than those placed in SF, and they succeed at being less overt as well, which makes further analysis of SP very fruitful because so much is there to discover. One thing SF will always have in its favor, however, is that Tennyson scene. Iconic.
I actually think that by treating SF and SP as sister films featuring a development of the same core characters and themes (questioning surveillance, spies and espionage in the modern age, amongst others) as opposed to a battle of which did what better, we can get more mileage out of enjoying what they both do well together as two halves of the same whole, which is quite a lot. To me they represent some of the greatest work that have been done with Bond since the glory days of the 60s, and are the perfect two follow-ups to the equally special two-parter films CR and QoS before them.
All this represents to me why the Craig era is so special. There's so much beauty and depth to explore in these films and how they use Bond as a flawed character (as Fleming intended) to tell stories that are as heart-warming as they can be tragic. And there's so much to learn from just these four movies. In this era as in real life, winning and losing don't exist as both the "heroes" and "villains" experience equal loss. The past doesn't succumb to your attempts to bury it, and is liable to push up dirt the moment you least expect or want it. Trust isn't a commodity sold between people, but something valuable beyond measure that is earned between those who share the same heart. Giving up is never a viable excuse, as the true sign of strength is getting up every time you're kicked back down.
No other Bond films like these ones paint these pictures for me, and that's why the day that Dan hangs up his holster, whether it's in a month, a year or several, will be met with a heavy heart in celebration for all that he and EON have been able to give us. This decade spanning era has made it such a great time to be a Bond fan for me and countless others, and I hope we get a final Craig film that explores theme and character with as much sophistication as his other films have managed to give us a truly impactful conclusion to the era of the only Bond actor who has yet to be worthy of standing next to Connery.
This is the best assessment I have read about SF/SP/Craig-era yet. True, every single word.
And yes, epic, Brady, epic!
And after all is said & done, I still love SPECTRE as much now as the first couple of times I saw it.
Many thanks, gents. I'm glad we agree on aspects of this film and the era as a whole, as well as what makes it unique and special amongst the Bond canon.
@chrisisall, I agree that SP is the gift that keeps giving. As with QoS before it, it took me time to see all it had to offer in theme and character, but now it's a delight to return to and it's truly ripe for analysis long after the credits roll.
What I love about the Craig films is exactly that. They're "thinkers" that stay with you long after you see them. While films like DAF and those found in the Moore era that gave us adventures that were more lax on depth and far more focused on fun are certainly welcome amongst the Bond canon, films like them only marvel me for so long despite any enjoyment I may get at watching them. Every time I finish a Craig film, however, I stall in my seat, thinking about how and why Bond developed the way he did, what his motives were in a particular scene, and what Dan was trying to convey about his character when he froze his features after speaking to an ally, gave a ponderous look out towards nowhere following a revelation, or gave a quick Batman-like glare after beating somebody into submission. Dan has created an "inner life" with Bond that makes his movies such a kick to watch. I laugh with glee as his Bond dryly navigates the world, and marvel at the slight expressions he gives in each scene that detail what he may or may not be thinking about what is occurring to him.
Connery and Dalton also did this very well, and I think that's why they collectively make up my top three best 007s. They made Bond feel human in the same breath that they made him seem extraordinary and better than all the rest. I think Bond should always toe that very fine line between the fantastic and the human, because somewhere in there is a sweet spot that makes him both relatable yet unreachable like the modern myth he has become in our collective culture. Because while we might not have the necessary coldness to do what Bond does and we may lack his coordination and knack for resourcefulness that allows him to survive every brush with death he faces with a certain roguish irreverence for Death's plans, we can learn from his example and adopt his own outlook on life into our own in a greater sense.
We can carry his loyalty and duty to his work into our own pursuits, just as we can share his love for women, fine food and drink, and revel in the same thrill for adventure and travel he himself exudes as he explores areas outside his own culture with great enthusiasm. Bond at his very best is a student of the world, opening his heart to cultures and traditions all over the world while also protecting that same heart from those who may wish to do him harm. Somewhere in there is where the true magic of Bond lies, and why he has and always will be an icon to the masses. He's cool and fun to watch, sure, but his layers exceed those surface features that make us "ooh" and "ahhh" tp give way to a greater majesty. The depth he can convey is like that of an ocean's waters, pronounced and dark to the eye, masking leagues of hidden pains and pleasures that are a sum total of the man he's been carefully carved into becoming by a storied life not lacking in both danger and tragedy.
Daniel, Sean and Tim convey this sense of greatness and depth to me like no other actors, and because of them I'll always keep coming back to Bond to learn a little and live a little through his exploits, acting as his greatest audience member and support system from beyond the screen. Because whenever I think of Bond and exactly how I feel he should be portrayed skillfully by an actor, certain scenes always come to my mind that feel "just right." Scenes I play in my head whenever someone asks, "Who is James Bond to you?"
I picture Dan's Bond in Casino Royale, staring into the hotel mirror with exhaustion and annoyance as blood from a wound around his temple runs down his face, a moment after he thought he'd gotten the bleeding to finally stop. I picture Dalton's Bond in Licence to Kill and study the mix of jittery anxiety and fear radiating from his eyes as he finds Della dead and Felix close to joining her in a mess of blood and torn cloth, then revel in his determination later on as he faces Sanchez in a battle to the death, his eyes now displaying white hot fury and purpose as he gives the villain one last light with his best man's gift. I picture Sean's Bond in From Russia with Love, the sweat and blood mixing on his wet forehead as he chokes the life out of Red Grant with a garrote wire, his eyes predatory and bestial as he becomes something more than a man to avenge the late Kerim until the blonde's last choking breaths give way to the peaceful shuffling of the train carriages on the railway.
That is James Bond to me, and that's why he's so special in my heart of hearts, easily one of my most well-loved characters. This all gives me an idea for a new thread I may start to carry this kind of discussion elsewhere and to give it its own space to develop naturally.
Can you also explain this:
and then you said:
I also found this:
I thought you hated the F&F films now?
I think you are bullying me now. You put a few sentences out of the context of some larger posts I must have written somewhere. I didn't do that with Brett. People know me very well that I am not a fan of QOS, that I think "M:I - Ghost Protocol" is better than QOS, but that I assumed that "Bond will be BETTER" with regard to "SPECTRE".
I also liked "FF 6" a lot, much more than the way worse DAD-esque and over the top "FF 7".
Lastly, when I referred to @Creasy47, I referred to an entire post. And I still find it a bit weird that one film can go down in a ranking so much. What you are doing though is the modern version of bullying, of putting me on a public scaffold. What else do you want from me? My scull? As a trophy?
http://picosong.com/zdWa/
Not to step on toes here, but I think you are both misreading each other.
The way I see it, Gustav, while I also find this sort of thing strange, people are perfectly welcome to state their change of heart about a film, as Creasy did with SP. It's only natural after seeing a film to look for other people's opinions on it, and over time thinking on it on your own and then in packs with others may clue you into things about it you end up not liking. In much the same way that people can join in the craze surrounding a Bond film up to its release, but afterwards mellow on their love for it as that enthusiasm and celebration dies down and they realized their expectations of the film weren't met when they examine it with more critical eyes not blinded by the Bond hysteria. @Creasy47 isn't the type to just change his mind out of nowhere to suit an agenda, and I know you know that. What he says he feels is really what he feels, no question about it.
@DaltonCraig007, I see the posts of Gustav you included as nothing resembling a dramatic change of opinion, or a change in anything for that matter. In the first post, Gustav says he liked Ghost Protocol more than QoS, and then said he was looking forward to what I assume was Rogue Nation, stating that he still hoped EON and the next Bond movie would exceed the great efforts displayed by the makers of the MI franchise.
The espionage film market is certainly about competition, and it's perfectly natural to see MI and Bourne going up against Bond, and comparing and contrasting each after release. What Gustav's comment says to me is this: He likes the MI films and enjoys them greatly, but Bond is what really makes him passionate and so he's always hoping that Bond will come out on top in the end critically and financially as it means better things for EON and the future of the franchise. And I agree, as I feel more for Bond as a character or icon than for the likes of Bourne or Hunt, despite my enjoyment and appreciation of those films as well. In conclusion: Nobody does it better than Bond on the whole, and that's what Gustav's words detail to me.
As for the F&F comments, Gustav liked FF6, but not FF7, and that's it. That's not a change in opinion, that's a gradual assessment of a franchise over the course of some new additions to the line-up. Gustav enjoyed FF6 greatly, but was underwhelmed by a more over the top and cheesy Fast 7, but he may still like the series as a whole, much like he can dislike QoS but love SP and the Bond franchise or Daniel Craig era overall as well. Not liking one film out of a group doesn't mean you hate the entire group, it just means that for you, it's clear which movies are weakest and which aren't amongst the pack. FF6 is the benchmark for him, and in his opinion FF7 failed to meet that, nothing more, nothing less. I too find 6 superior in every way to 7, despite really enjoying all the movies in the franchise, though I'm not a fan of all of them. How many series of films can you name where you love all the movies in that series to a high degree and don't point out one or two as the weaker ones of the bunch? We all have our favorites and least favorites while still loving the whole of whatever that series is, and that's okay.
A change of opinion of the kind Gustav is pointing out that would be strange is if I told you one week, "Man, Furious 6 was out of this world; the action, the characters, the stunts, there's nothing like it," then "FF6 was a drag; the stunts were subpar and the characters don't do it for me anymore" a while after. That would be a drastic change of opinion, but not an unwarranted one even in this case, because as I said above, we can change our perceptions of how good we think a film is, no matter the genre.
I would ask the both of you not to take all this so seriously.
Make no mistake, I loved the stairwell fight from "Casino Royale", but I always wanted to see Bond almost losing. On top of that, the sound editors did some marvellous job here. No wonder they won an Oscar for similar work in "Skyfall". And as opposed to David Arnold's music in "Casino Royale", I do think that Thomas Newman's track builds better in this fight sequence.
The "SPECTRE"-fight sequence is now really among my favourites.
And yes, the kicker was seeing Bond really get messed up in this fight. He's gotten cut up before, but here we saw him getting absolutely pulverized at times which was shocking as we hadn't ever seen Craig's Bond this outmatched before. Bautista owns the scene and he's intimidating without doing anything at all. The elephant-like pounding of his heavy feet as he approaches Bond for the kill is immaculate, as is the shattering and crunch of the glass he and Bond smash into, the clinking pots and pans, the sound of the flame that starts on Hinx's arm, and more. Perfection.
Bond is a franchise that has train bouts as a staple at this point, and this scene here is right up there with the Bond and Grant fight in FRWL, and succeeds for much the same reason: the score is largely cut out, and we see Bond really fighting to stay alive as he gets bloodier and sweater as the deadly confrontation with his animalistic opponent goes on.
This is a main highlight of SP for me, and one of my all time favorite Bond moments, closed off with Madeleine's amusingly awkward yet human statement of, "What do we do now?"