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Timothy put a lot of effort and professional pride into the role. His character prep spent reading and understanding Fleming's source material is beautifully obvious in TLD.
Bratislava defection scene and @peter 's mention, Confronting Pushkin, are two perfect examples of how Dalton nailed the character better than anyone else, really.
I too can only wish... Dalton could have sparred beautifully with Sean Bean. What a thespian face off that would have been :((
I concur! Dalton nailed the novel-ian Bond better than anyone!
Agreed. Stated with the utmost love and respect, the Moore era had lost track of Fleming. (Not saying that Fleming is the only way to go!) Dalton, a "serious" actor, wanted to go back to Fleming. And he did. I love how he explains it in the "Everything Or Nothing" documentary; about how re-inventing Bond was necessary lest the series end up in self-parody; and also about how this was never meant for little children. I regret, to this day, that we got only two Dalton films. He was such a good Bond, such a good actor in the role. Alas, he didn't get the love and praise he deserved. In an alternate universe, he made his third film in '91 and his fourth in '93. This Daltonite keeps dreaming about that reality...
Very well said by all. I too loved Dalton from the beginning. The first glimpse I got was of him on the tram trailing Kara and it was like looking at the guy I'd been reading about in the Fleming books. Although I was thrilled Bond was back in the mid '90s, that was also balanced out by feeling of loss, of an era that was robbed of reaching its full stride, replaced by something more generic and crowd-pleasing.
TWINE was like watching a Lifetime Network version of Bond with his tracing the tears on the computer screen and being duped by Elektra. While TND is my favorite of the Brosnan era and a lot of fun, it too smacked of many other action films of the time. Sorry, I never want that feeling again and will take the path the Craig films have taken any time over repeating what those films offered.
While the Brosnan era started Bond using machine guns more extensively than usual, Craig's films have been just as bad. One of my bigger problems with NTTD is how often the action just goes for video game-like running around with a machine gun, in Cuba and then especially at the climax. He also used one during his escape from Blofeld's base in SP.
And it's hardly the only instances of Bond with a machine gun as Lazenby's did during the invasion of Piz Gloria in OHMSS, Moore in the tanker battle in TSWLM and Dalton at the air strip in TLD.
I used to think this, but interestingly, no longer.
Have you seen TND or TWINE?
I am guessing probably not, as he did state that Bond meeting Carver and Paris at the Hamburg party was one of the best scenes in the entire series... 8-}
Yes, same here: they don't feel like the same guy to me.
TLD is one of my favourite Bond films and I wouldn't change any of it, but do I think it may have been better for the series if Brosnan had been Bond from this one? Probably yeah- he would have been very good in it (even if he would have been very thin with massive hair! :D ) and I feel it would have been a bigger hit. I guess the hiatus would still have happened, but I feel like they would have got him back for B17.
Interesting point, I see where you are coming from.
For the 'stability' and continuity of the franchise it would have indeed been more optimal.
But we would have been deprived of Dalton's 007, and that for me is unthinkable.
Yeah I certainly personally prefer having both, but I can well imagine that Eon might look back on that period and think the films would have been in a stronger position with him there from the late 80s. I used to think that he needed that time to mature a bit, but I rewatched Fourth Protocol again recently and he holds the screen very effectively- that guy could have Bond right there and then.
I actually prefer Brosnan in The 4th Protocol, Thomas Crown, The Matador... :-?
I think a lot of the criticisms that get leveled at him are valid (he feels more corporate, a little less of a spy, a little more of a brand).
On the other hand, I think a lot of the things leveled at him are pretty unfair and also true of the rest of the series (generic, stupid, loud, silly, whatever).
That said, he clearly cared about the role, wanted to explore the character more, and EON didn't have the stones to really go through with it at that time (you can see hints of it all throughout his tenure, most obviously in TWINE, and it is also in that film in which they fail to commit most egregiously and that's why the result is such a head scratching combination of box-ticking and gestures toward something more substantive).
If you really want hard, gritty, and realistic, watch Zero Dark Thirty (great film). That's probably the closest the general public is ever going to get to what espionage and special operations are really like, and it's pretty fucking grim.
Lastly, I don't get the reflex that says if you like Craig, you have to disown Brosnan. Both are just about tied as my favorite Bond, with one inching out the other, from time to time. I liked Craig in CR when I first saw it, but not enough to replace the image of PB as Bond in my head. Craig didn't really own the character, for me, until that moment in SF in the PTS, after he tears off the back of that train car with a backhoe, scrambles up the arm of that machine, jumps and lands inside the severed car, just inches from the edge, sticks the landing without breaking a sweat, then shooting his cuffs, calm and as cool as can be, he swaggers off. At that moment, he replaced PB as Bond in my head and became my favorite. Until recently, since I've been rewatching some Brozz, and I forgot just how much he LOOKS the part, and just lives in that calm, cool, unflappable demeanor that defines the character for me. But I still think DC in SF is the single best performance of any Bond actor in a single film.
I think my favorite character beat in the entire series is that moment in TWINE, at the casino, when Bond stabs the guy's tie into the bar, steals his gun, and downs his martini in one gulp. That's all Brozz.
Myself, I regret Brosnan didn't get the gig in 86. If he had done TLD and LTK, then the come back, that would have made his stint at 6 films over a 17 years period. That would have been a huge body of work and just bloody awesome.
It’s the Brosnan of ‘95 and onwards I’m not so keen on.
Yeah I think that's bang on- the cold Protocol Brosnan would have worked very well in this. I think we'd also have got the comedy squinty Pierce of Remington Steel and the Diet Coke ads as well, but I don't think that's a bad thing as people loved all that and the audience would have most probably connected with him better. And in Daylights he would have landed a few of the gags better than Tim did- I think even his greatest fans acknowledge that he wasn't at his most comfortable with the laughs.
Nope. If Broz got it instead of Dalton, they'd have tailored it to his Remington Steele persona to capitalize on its appeal. No, things definitely worked out as best they could have....
If we got the Brozz from The Fourth Protocol, mixed with the one liners, he’d have hit it out of the park because he was more comfortable killing a one liner (whereas Dalton, and Craig (the deep water bit from SF) were not so cozy in this environment). And, as you have stated @mtm , with a population behind the Brozz casting, I think TLD would have been a financial juggernaut (and LTK would not have been in cannon; something that hurts me, 😂)
Well Daylights would have been the same movie- Dalton was cast so late in the game they didn't even have time to make suits for him and he had to bring his own along. So I don't think they would have tailored that movie to him particularly.
LTK wouldn't have happened, no.
"That goirl didn't know one end of a raifle from the other"
How do you mean? Was that changed?
I regret both facts, to be honest, the same way I regret a cool and suave Connery not staying on until, say, 1987, on the best of terms with the producers, while I also regret that Lazenby didn't fulfil that seven-picture deal. And that comes from someone who really loves Moore. :-D So I guess the issue for me is that several (hypothetical) "careers" really sound good.
Take Brosnan. In hindsight, we could have gotten a fifth Brosnan in 2004 and still have CR in 2006 with Craig. Too much of a good thing for general audiences? Possibly. But I'm sure many of us would have been okay with that. Brosnan opened strong with GE. He himself agrees that things went down fast after that. DAD is a joke to him--or at least that's what he pretends in the EON documentary. I just wish that he could have ended his career on the level of another GoldenEye as it were.