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Comments
It’s a good idea for a topic :)
;)
I remember first watching A VIEW TO A KILL and wondering just how EON stumbled onto the set of TEMPLE OF DOOM's mine shaft, complete with water flooding.
What genuinely supernatural there is in LALD, apart from Baron Samedi reappearing in the end? That he survived those snakebites isn't completely implausible. And I've always seen his reappearance as a breaking of the fourth wall, a wink to the audience instead of something that actually happened within the story.
Fleming's novels of course have musings of religion, afterlife, etc. but nothing clearly supernatural ever happens in them - those stone idols nodding in YOLT might just have been Bond's wishful thinking like he himself thought.
I do remember having this sense as a kid that all movies had comedy foreign dining scenes and action set inside mines.
I always thought YOLT was the most supernatural of the stories, not just because of the stone idols but more because of how Bond rediscovers Blofeld in the first place. On one level it’s just coincidence. But on another level it’s fate at work, a kind of destiny. Bond and Blofeld feel like small characters in a much bigger and more elemental struggle.
I think the supernatural technically could work in a Bond film if they handled it properly.
However I fully expect they would not handle it properly at all.
Due to the nature of their work, individually, they were bound to continually run into eachother, I feel, until one of them is destroyed. An unstoppable force (Blofeld) and an immoveable object (Bond); only one can exist.
Ha! Well I guess they never did actually explain how he survived...
It's funny, I'm not against the idea of something like this but I kind of struggle to think of anything along the lines of what I wouldn't mind Bond facing. I tend to think it would have to be a brief mystery not explained rather than full-on Raiders-style phantasms.
Yes this. I think this is why LALD works. It’s a mystery, for instance, how Solitaire knows about Bond from the cards, but it’s not explained, nor do they even spend any real time on it.
Yes indeed, and Kananga's belief that her power is lost when her virginity is taken does seem to be correct, doesn't it?
I agree this was a fantastic implementation... the montage with her voice-over narration "he comes by sea... he brings death...", added a ton and didn't need to be explained.
But I'm still unhappy about that voodoo, supernatural approach in LALD. Lots of things don't make sense and are only bearable as an attempt at satire. But that's not what I expect from a Bond film (I didn't even in 1974). Where "suspension of disbelief" works in almost every other Bond film, it has to be replaced by "grin and bear it" in this one.
It walked the line of giving it screen time, without asking the audience to believe in it just about right for me.
Anyway, I accept this in LALD if only because it (unreasonably) has a special place in my Bond lover's heart.
The same answer to so many older Bond films - Plot Convenience! I always thought the cards with 007 on the back was more akin to a mistake/product placement than anything.
As for the cards having information pertinent to Bond - it's the same trick that gets pulled when a real con-artist fortune teller has you sat down in front of them. It's a an ambiguous guess, just the same as people find meaning in horoscopes. Who knows, maybe off camera the cards also told Kananga he and Tee-Hee would be lovers so he just decided to listen to the bits he thought more believable.
I will search it . is my kind of style of novels, and i have read alot of thrillers that have supernatural details at some point.
Seriously it can’t be that hard to come up with a more believable spy thriller.
?