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Once when you’re born, once when you stare death in the face, and once again when they reboot you.
I do. I've mentioned a few times before, but his silliness I find refreshing, and a good foil against the seriousness of the rest of the film. After four viewings, I enjoy him more and more.
Plus, the slow realisation that this weird comic relief macguffin type character might actually be the most evil person there is quite something.
This time watching I figured he picked the white guy doctor to help them/live in the lab kidnap scene rather than the woman as a foreshadowing to his later-revealed racism.
Maybe ... but I saw it more as being he picked the guy because hes hugh dennis who is relatively familiar to a British audience and it gave his cameo more time.
Or only insofar as we feel the need to speculate & impose those reasons upon the film, in many cases.
The reasons that we may find are often not internal to the logic of the film, which is comprised of blocks of set pieces & their interlocking scenes. In theory, NTTD should have been a much longer film, but while each set piece may work to spectacularly good effect, the character psychology that might rationally link one scene to the next is not always present, except by means of broad flourishes, ie. Bond's "distrust"; Madeleine's "secretiveness": Safin's "revenge"; Blofeld's "obsession", etc.
The movie is so rich with narrative detail & incident that it leaves us to fill in the gaps & plot holes where none might have existed - and so tightly edited as it is that much is left out of necessity, which we might not even notice until several viewings in.
Just my take on it!
Then Felix goes to Bond's home in Jamaica, leaves the cigar ash (which Bond finds)... And as he's driving he passes Nomi (because she was tailing Felix) and also Felix/Ash along the way.
I don't think she absolutely knew Felix was going to ask him, I think it may have been more of a happy coincidence. MI6 think Bond may have been dead as he'd "fallen so far off the grid" after all.
On that last point, I assume it was just a retort from M back to Bond, same as his “desk” comments.
It may look like they edited that out so that we are on the same page as Bond when it comes to the new 007 info.
As for why she is there, I was wondering that as well. Her shadowing Leiter makes the most sense, but then that leaves the question why they later need Bond to tell them that Ash was a bad guy. If she tailed Leiter, she must have seen Ash. When Bond comes back to MI6 and says Leiter is dead, it shouldn't take a genius to at least ask in Washington what happened to the other guy (who at that turn seems to have gone full heel).
However, I maintain that if they rolled that sequence of Jamaica and Cuba out as more or less the whole film and spent a bit more time tidying up these loose ends, it would make for a fantastic little spy thriller in it's own right.
Second addendum: A further collateral of jumping from QoS right into Skyfall and the sunset years of James Bond is that we never got a really good Leiter-in-the-field part for Jeffrey Wright. I would have to watch CR, QoS and NTTD in close succession, but as much as it pains me to say, he doesn't seem like an amazing field agent. I like Wright in the role, but his Felix is kind of always screwing up. They didn't get to LeChiffre in time or convincingly enough. He personally helps Bond in QoS, but the rest of the US presence in that film is a joke (on purpose) and here he gets outmaneuvered by Bond while tailing him, apparently is tailed by Nomi at the same time without noticing and it turns out has had the villain's henchman as his running-mate and not only couldn't do anything about it, but actually led him to Bond.
It makes sense however, because if we did find out first that Nomi was the new 007, we would be one step ahead of Bond, which is usually a nono in films.
And oddly enough, Fleming wrote that Bond and Leiter had 'shared many adventures' in one of the early books, (was it LALD?), although they had only met once previously (in CR). Any Fleming scholars back me up on that?
An interesting aspect I hadn't really thought of. The film is unique in bringing together characters through sheer coincidence, like Bond and Nomi meeting up in Norway because Bond was going after Swann and Nomi was tracking Ash, only for everyone to realize that Ash was actually tracking Bond/Madeleine all along, which brings the two together after Madeleine/Mathilde are taken by Safin.
One more question, about the production rather than the plot. Do we know for a fact that Craig had a stipulation that he'd return only if they killed Bond off?
Or is it that just speculation?
Based on that I believe he came back only if Bond would’ve died. There were 3 main things that they wanted to do in this one since day one: introducing a new 007, using a DNA targeted toxin and killing off Bond.
Hah! I love this idea, you know. What a cracking little film that would have been. It wouldn't have been a behemoth in running time either. One of my friends said he wished there was more time spent in Jamaica and I have to agree.
So here's my question... Primo is also in Jamaica... So is he trailing Bond? Or is he trailing Leiter because he knows Leiter will lead him to Bond? At that point SPECTRE has Heracles and Primo goes to Jamaica and he steals Bond's toothbrush that he then gives to Valdo in Cuba.
Does that then mean Blofeld is playing the long game by knowing the two sides, CIA and MI6, are playing off against each other? Does that mean he then orders henchmen to steal Heracles and knows this will be too much of a carrot on a stick for Bond to resist as the CIA feel no choice but to get involved. He then gets Primo to track Leiter as he knew Leiter would likely be the only one to know where Bond is which means he can enact his revenge later on in Cuba... Bond's death all timed as the perfect birthday gift for SPECTRE's glorious leader and from there he will be able to use Heracles unrestricted as a weapon in the future without one giant thorn in his side, or so he thought...
EDIT: On top of that... Safin and Ash also know that Bond can get rid of SPECTRE JUST by turning up at Cuba as killing them all will give Waldo a way out too - Bond being Blofeld's big carrot on a stick in return. I feel like there's a lot of people playing 4D chess in this movie.
This part of the story also has my favourite version of Safin: The player in the shadows using all of these people against each other. Making them think they are achieving their own ends while in fact getting him closer to his own goal. He has SPECTRE steal Heracles. Leiter finds Bond. Primo releases the toxin and then Bond get's Valdo out and to Ash. In the end, Safin has Valdo and the toxin, SPECTRE is destroyed and he got his revenge and he basically didn't lift a finger. Like I said: After Cuba, tack on a finale in which Bond infiltrates Safin's layer, but the henchmen aren't just Safin's guys, but either SPECTRE goons who think they are still working for Blofeld or even soldiers from a different nation's military who were again somehow tricked by Safin into protecting him/attacking Bond and you have a very solid, twisty spy film on your hands.
As for Blofeld's original plan and what Primo is doing in Jamaica: It's another one of those things that stays just a little to close to the surface level and could/should have been explained better if those sections where longer. Plot mechanically, he is there to get Bond's DNA. However, at that point, they cannot know that Bond will come to Cuba. Someone in another thread mentioned Ash/Safin could have tipped SPECTRE off early enough, making them think Ash is working for them, funneling Bond to the meeting. That works, but it would have been cool to somehow see Ash play this triple-game.
My preferred variation (and I have mentioned this once or twice, I'm just not sure whether it was in this thread. Excuse me, if I am repeating myself) is that Blofeld initially just had his birthday party be the occasion where all of the SPECTRE people ceremoniously infect themselves with the Heracles-variant targeted at Bond. Then they let the thing take it's course while Primo continues shadowing Bond, so that Blofeld can see him, and at some point he'll shake some random guy's hand and drop dead. Or even just Primo walks up to him, so Blofeld can see his face, while he dies. That scenario makes more sense to me, because it uses Heracles to better effect. Why steal a highly secured DNA-targeting nanbot-virus, if your target will just stand right under the sprinklers anyway? Once Bond is in the building, they could arguably have used dozens of simpler techniques to kill him. And they could surely have created an easier MacGuffin for him to chase. Anyway, once Bond comes to Cuba and strolls into the party, Blofeld improvises, does his speech and hopes to see Bond die then and there and you know how the rest goes.
I checked my LALD novel a while ago, and when Leiter is found maimed Bond reflects on 'the many adventures they had'. Yet they only met in the previous book, (CR), and the Harlem job was only their second assignment together.
License to Kill had the best Felix/Bond cinematic relationship for my money.
And, where did they say Felix is from in the latest film? Somewhere in NY I think. He's a straw-haired Texan in the books.
“Felix Leiter, brother from Langley.”
Maybe it’s just me who saw it that way.