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Agreed.Wasn’t a fan of his Phantom Of The Opera appearance and thought he was quite laughable really.
He’s a loser that has power via his technology and therefore has a false sense of power.
He’s a very subtle and powerful villain
I like this reading and agree he's a really good villain. I feel like not near enough is said about his freakish attraction to Madeleine which is done subtly in the film but a creep factor that hadn't been done with another Bond villain.
I concur, I think they should've leaned into this even more. Have another seen with him and Madeleine, make him go all Dracula. Maybe have him try to get kind of handsy with her.
The scene where he is holding Mathilde in the garden is the creepiest in any Bond movie.
The scene with Mathilde in the garden is a strange mix between creepy and even a bit funny ("do you like it?", "No"). It's a good scene (altough the garden is lacking the wow-factor of the novel), something completely fresh for a Bond movie. And his eyes, especially his look during the last minute of his life stick in my mind.
Fair point. It is defintely the best explanation/excuse for his unclear plans.
However, it remains a main problem of the movie. It isn't satisfying for the (most) viewer(s) if the main plot of the Bond villain is unclear.
To sum up my feelings about Safin: he is a solid villain overall but the longer talk between him and Bond raises more questions than it answers and is my least favourite scene of the whole movie.
It's a fairy tale motif where the villain falls in love with the princess and tries to possess her. A lot of monster movies do this as well — Dracula, King Kong immediately come to mind.
Yeah it seems like classic stories are retold all the time.
Bingo. We've been telling the same stories for thousands and thousands of years, just changing up the coat of paint. But the walls and concrete are all the same.
It left a lot of that backstory purposely ambiguous, but that didn't help later on when we need to buy into Safin's motivation and he and Madeline's shared past
I love the vast majority of NTTD but I stand firm on my dislike of Valdo Obruchev, tonally he just doesn't belong in the film in the context of the scenes built around him. He undermines the stakes and overall quality of every scene he's in. A heavily misguided character and I can't comprehend why the writers thought it would be appropriate to include him in a film where Bond dies.
If they simply had Dencik play a more grounded character the film would be so much stronger.
Valdo is introduced as comic relief and he's that to the end. At the same time he's an example of a soulless, despicable human example of a unfeeling, cold instrument that can destroy others without a thought.
That really registered with me as a chilling element to the character. And very relevant in our times.
Exactly! I never understood the need for excessive comedy in a film where Bond is a tragic Greek hero, it's almost disrespectful adding comedy. That's why Bond's death felt like a sucker punch, because after all the jokes, he still dies. Another very misleading part is, Dencik was marketed as a very serious character in the character posters, plus he wasn't shown in the trailers....which give the film a serious look, especially the Cuba scenes. I'm not a fan of Bond dying, but if you must do it for the first time ever, give the film an eerie feel throughout, so we can see his death coming before it happens, as this will make his death worth it.
And I'm glad they put in some humour. Or shouldn't Lazenby be allowed to talk about his stiffness because Tracy finally dies? However I could also live with a bit less Obruchev in the last scenes...
Oh, I mean the tone of the film should have been consistent to fit the ending, not that we necessarily needed to see his death coming. I'm sure a lot of people easily accepted Maximus' death in Gladiator, because the tone of the film was even and they weren't exactly sad when he died, because the film maintained a serious and heroic tone throughout.
When the Bond's daughter came into it, my friend thought 'Bond with a daughter? how will they make that work in future films?'
Then, Bond get infected with anti-Maddy/Matilde nanobots, and my friend thought 'ah, that's clever, because he's infected, that means he'll not be able to see his daughter and be the family man after all, and he'll go back to being the same old James Bond'.
So she was prepared for a bittersweet ending where Maddy and Matilde move away, and Bond is back in the secret service doing his duty.
So when they blew him up, it was very much a surprise for her. She said when the credits rolled she was going 'is that it?', and I can understand that. As James Bond's post-death epilogue was what, four or five minutes?
It was like, sixty years of movies, then BOOOM!, "he used his time", chink, vroom vroom, cue Satchmo.
+1
One of the big problems I had with NTTD, was the deaths were brushed off too quickly. If we had seen how Felix or Blofeld's death had affected Bond a bit more, maybe it would have foreshadowed time is running out.
A few seconds looking at cigar didn't feel enough for someone who Bond saw him as a brother
Maybe it would have dragged down the pace of the film too much, the pace of NTTD was great.
That's where the lack of long-term planning comes in again. NTTD is a long film and still feels rushed in places (or on the positive side: it really moves) because they had to do shorthand like f.e. him looking at the cigar for a few seconds to convey loads of emotions because there was no time to dwell on it. You could even argue that they manage to set-up that moment very well with a handful of very short moments of the cigar being connected to Felix, but when you look at Marvel, who are the masters of this kind of stuff, they peppered in the set-ups through 6 movies, then re-inforced or re-contextualized them in 12 (!) more movies and then have a payoff-bonanza were they can fire off loads of emotional callbacks ("on your left" "I am Iron Man", the Hammer, just to name a few) one after the other. There's loads of things to hate about those films and that kind of storytelling specifically, but it's effective and they are very good at it.
Thinking about this a bit more, it's kind of mindboggling that in two of the major death scenes in NTTD, one has a callback to a book from 1964 and the other to a film from 1969.