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
But maybe it would've been better if, as someone on here suggested, Bond put Madeleine on the train because he knew that she'd never be safe from Spectre if she stayed with him. Sacrificing his relationship to protect Madeleine at the start of the film would've resonated nicely with the even greater sacrifice at the end of the film, too.
I think that would’ve worked out nicely, I just didn’t like how he took the word of Blofeld, someone he hates deeply over the words of someone he loves and cares about. I just felt it made him look a bit dumb when he isn’t.
Just a really convoluted mess with this villain. At the end of the day he’s just a simpering little man-child that is dull and uninteresting with no clear goal to make sense of. I guess they thought if they give him the first name of Lucifer that’ll be enough to make him really EVIIIILLLL.
=D>
I can see what they were trying to do, and I did think he had some creepy moments with Madeline. An incel Bond villain could have been cool. But orphan turned psycho isn’t the most exciting or original idea in the world, he got hardly any screen time to lift that idea or flesh out the character, his dialogue was pretty clunky, and Malek didn’t have the presence to compensate for any of that.
It does seem like he was one of the criticisms most people seemed to share too, right from day one, so hopefully we’ll get a better baddy next time.
I think you can get away with a lot of contrivances when it comes to Bond villains, so long as their fundamental motives are clear and consistent. I mean, we don’t question, for instance, why Alec Travelyan goes to the years long effort of creating a criminal syndicate and stealing a military weapon when such a thing to do is so much extra effort even in the context of his motives. We know he’s a man who feels he’s been wronged by Britain his whole life and this is good enough.
The issue with Safin is once he kills the entirety of SPECTRE we’re left with the more implausible aspects of his character. He no longer has the tangible motive of revenge to support it. That’s one of the reasons I think people struggle with his character in the third act.
I understood the motivations, too, but I thought they could have been punched up a little more.
The only thing that I think needed to be worked out was his relationship with Madeleine, and @Mendes4Lyfe hints at that. I would have preferred that he'd been in touch with her all along, every now and then, like he was keeping tabs on her. And she, in some twisted way, always went along with it. Imagine him saying in her office, "I lost touch with after you left the clinic. You didn't even leave a resignation letter." Her burning the secret of the "masked man" would have made more sense and not seemed so convenient.
It's not that they're in love. But having a deeper, psychological connection would have made some sense and added a layer of complication to the story.
I like the idea of Safin in his mask following Madeline and Bond around in Matera just before the SPECTRE attack. You’re right, Safin keeping tabs on her and Madeline at least saying in hindsight she knew about him (possibly even figuring out who he was down the line) would have made the ‘masked man’ secret make more sense.
Then again NTTD is a bit of an overstuffed film in terms of plot points so perhaps I can see why something like this wasn’t included. I still don’t think it’d solve the fundamental problem that Safin’s motives seem unclear and inconsistent for him as a character by the end of the film. I don’t really buy him as an ‘anarchist who wants to create chaos’ type. If this had been Silva then I could maybe imagine him going off the rails and doing something like that, but not Safin.
NTTD is a right mess if you think about it, you can feel the clunky writing all the way through it. You can imagine the production meeting meeting where they decide to kill off Felix. . .
"Okay, next on the agenda, killing off Felix Leiter"
"Are we really going to kill off Felix, as well as Blofeld and Bond, all in the same film, isn't that a bit much?"
"Nah, people will think we're brave and cutting edge and 'breaking the mold' "
"Oh, okay. Are we going to kill of Moneypenny and Q as well?"
"I don't know yet, I'll ask Daniel when I see him, see if he'll give us the green light on that."
"Okay. Anyway, I've been thinking about this one, what's Felix going to say before he dies, he should say something poignant . . ."
"Yes! he could say his catchphrase"
"Great idea, a well-loved character saying his catchphrase before he dies always works"
"But guys . . . in all these years, in all these movies, Felix Leiter doesn't have a catchphrase"
"That doesn't matter, we can have him say it once early in the film, and the audience will think it's his catchphrase when he says it again when he croaks"
"Okay, so what's it going to be?"
"How about 'it's a good life''?"
"The sitcom with Felicity Kendall?"
"No, it's just a thing he says, you know, a catchphrase"
"But what does it mean?"
"It doesn't have to mean anything, it's just something we need him to say when he dies, he can't just go 'arrrgghhh' he's got to utter something"
"Okay, 'it's a good life', he can say that with his last breath, and we've got that poignant box ticked nicely, because it's obviously not a good life because he's dying. I'll write that down. It's. A. Good. Life. Great! That's Felix's last words sorted"
"Now, next on the agenda, how do we get Matilde away from Safin on the island, we can't just have her running off in a strop and him just letting her go, the audience will think that's daft"
"It's nearly twelve, break for lattes guys? let's take fifteen. . . "
I still think NTTD well enough made to be a workable action/romance movie, if it wasn't a Bond movie. It's got enough thrills and spills and the cinematography is great.
But as a James Bond movie, it bloody stinks.
That was hilarious =))
Imagine the meeting where they had to figure out how the nanobots got from Bond's hands onto blofeld. :-j
He might have been telling you mate but he wasn’t telling most of the audience. There’s no reaction from Bond because he already knew, like most of us already knew. The revelation came as soon as we first saw her. Madeline saying “she’s not yours”, even as Bond points out how much she looks like him, was her way of saying “I don’t want you as part of her life.”
I thought that was incredibly obvious. Did you really think there was any chance of her actually not being his kid? Who else would have been the dad, some random off screen character? You can even see Nomi putting two and two together when Bond mentions the kid.
We criticise these films all the time for having obvious, clunky dialogue, like that Felix line you mentioned. Then when they try to have a bit more respect for the audience’s intelligence we slag them off for not spelling it out explicitly enough. No wonder we’re stuck with Purvis and Wade.
Yes this is my reaction too: I was a bit surprised that anyone didn't realise Mathilde was his daughter. Of course it's no surprise to Bond.
I'm also not really seeing the problem with Safin thinking he loves Madeline: he has more scenes with her than he does with Bond and we see the origins of their peculiar relationship (which he obviously sees as some kind of bond or debt).
Like I said it’s a bit of an overstuffed film.
It is an overstuffed film and there is a lot going on that went over my head when I first saw it, but that was never one of those things for me. They wouldn’t reveal a kid who wasn’t Bond’s the way they did, with that slinky falling down the stairs like a mic dropping. She’s been gone for five years, she has a “secret”, now all of a sudden she’s got a five year old kid with Bond’s eyes. Madeline shuts him down even though it’s obvious, Bond goes along with it even though he knows it’s his kid because he’s respecting her wishes. But I thought it was obvious they both knew, and there’s that bit in the car with Nomi that makes it even more obvious. “I didn’t know she had a daughter”, then she looks at Bond being all depressed and you can see her thinking “ohhhh” and it clicking in her head.
I'm talking about in the context of the film, there had to be a reveal moment, even though the audience suspected the kid was Bond's. As the film played out, I suppose it was Safin that came out with the 'reveal', and I thought it was a little clumsy, how he just said it almost in passing.
And yes, I did think there was a chance the kid wasn't Bond's the first time I watched it. I didn't take it for granted it was 100% Bond's, even though she did the belly-grab in the pre-credits sequence.
I don't watch a lot of movies, but they seem to come with a lot of twists these days. They make the audience think one thing, then turn it on its head. They could have done the same here.
Or perhaps I'm really as thick as you obviously think I am.
I wouldn’t say it went over my head. It just takes you out of the film a bit with the way it’s handled. I think my general thoughts watching it the first time were, ‘ok, she’s 5 and has Bond’s eyes, but this is a strange thing to do in the context of a Bond film and Madeline’s pretty clearly told us it’s not his… I guess she could be a surrogate daughter for Bond if she isn’t… weird.’
I dunno, maybe if they’d left it a bit more open ended at Mathilde’s reveal. Perhaps Madeline would refuse to answer Bonds question at first before it’s confirmed later…. Something like that might have helped.
I don’t think you’re thick, that’s why I’m surprised you didn’t know she was his. The reveal moment was her being introduced. Like you said, with the way they set it up, it would have been a twist if she wasn’t Bond’s, so I think that’s what would have needed a reveal moment if it was true. Suppose they could have been setting that up, with Madeline’s denial actually being the truth right there in plain sight, but I didn’t see any reason to expect that.
Yes, the film is subtle enough to let us infer she is his daughter (and the slinky drop, which is basically a mic drop) instead of beating us over the head with the reveal.
Imagine instead:
"I have a DAUGHTER? You didn't TELL me?" Then Brosnan pain face.
Yeah it could easily have been way more overwrought. I guess you could have Bond protest a bit more after the reveal, have her deny it a couple more times, show a close up of her looking conflicted when she does. But I prefer the way they did it. Why waste more screentime (of a film that’s way too long already) spelling out the obvious.
When Safin said 'daughter' that kind of took me out the moment as I thought 'ah, so we're now to assume she's 100% Bond's daughter, are we?'
The whole Bond as a dad thing, if they had to do it, was handled fine. From belly clutch, to slinky, to apple peel.
It's just Safin dropping that out when he did, it felt clumsy.
I think she denied it because of the way he flipped in the PTS. He took the villain’s word over hers because of his trust issues, seemed ready to let them both die at one point, then shoved her on a train and ghosted her. It makes sense that she wouldn’t want him involved with Mathilde after that, and that he’d have to earn that trust back.
The problem imo is they didn’t really show him doing that, because they introduced the kid too late in the game when they were already trying to do too many other things. He sacrifices himself, but I think they needed more build up to that than him making her breakfast and doing some of the usual action hero stuff.