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So a "missed opportunity" might be more like it!
Anthony Burgess said that when he was working on TSWLM script, the idea was to have "a gross Orson Welles in a wheelchair" as the main villain.
Or perhaps what Eon might have achieved with Waltz as Blofeld. Is it even possible that the "cuckoo clock" line from The Third Man inspired the similarly anecdotal usage of "cuckoo" in Spectre?
Orson Welles? I would eat my shoe if they managed to bring him back to life and got him to play a Bond villain-- in an EON film that is. It would be delightful.
Funny I never thought of that. And I love the cuckoo clock speech from The Third Man.
There's an Orson Welles doppelgänger at the Spectre birthday party in Cuba.
Off topic, but there's a few scenes/elements that call back to The Third Man in SP. The funeral in Rome for instance.
That's what those in the biz refer to as a "plot hole"
Every Bond movie has a few
Not necessarily
P&W - How about nano bots?
B&W - Too far fetched
P&W - How about an invisible car?
B&W - Now your talking!
P&W - How about a tailored virus bio weapon?
B&W - Awesome!
Covid 19
B&W - On second thoughts, maybe a bit too controversial at the moment
CF - But we've already finished filming!
P&W - How about nanobots?
B&W - Perfick!
IIRC, Covid started after filming was over.
That doesn't mean it didn't have an effect. Any time after the intended release date was postponed could have led to a rethink and revision.
The nanobots are only mentioned and explained in one (or two?) conversations, small scenes that could easily have been reshot or voiced over.
When the fluid containing them is shown on screen there is nothing that really suggests they might not just as easily be a bio-weapon / virus.
Was Safin, in fact, 'Dr. No' at some point in the making of the film. Certainly the choppy narrative suggests that much might have been cut out of the final film to achieve a reasonable running time. Did they just miss this reference in the editing stage?
Fukunaga has confirmed in the latest Empire magazine that the film was not changed die to covid.
The thing is you can't always accept what people in the biz say at face value, due to the vested interests involved.
There are plenty of things Eon have said over the years which I doubt are true, but others accept as gospel just because Eon have asserted it
We all have to make up our own minds as to what we think really happened
For me nanobots remain a step too far, like "magnetic parachutes" and invisible cars
So I like to think the Bond creators would have enough sense to go for the more "credible" option of a virus as their first choice.
On the other hand they did choose to go with the "magnetic parachute" and the invisible car... so I'm probably over estimating them lol
And yes, they'd only need to change a few scenes, to swap the contagion from a virus, to a tech weapon.
I like it! I doubt it, and I'm not saying that's what they did, but like a lot of theories, it's an idea that could be built on to make a decent argument for it.
I can well imagine them not wanting to say they changed the plot due to covid. It would weaken the reception of the film, as people looked for the joins.
I like your thinking
And the whole poison garden thing is biological, not mechanical or electrical
I mean, the more you think about it, the more obvious it is. Safin's whole deal is biological, with him knowing the poison from the plants, and the Garden of Death etc.
And, the women dressed at Mormons carrying stuff . . . what was all that about? I reckon they could well have deleted scenes explaining Safin's biological virus, and created the whole nanobot stuff just to keep the covid confusion/comparisons away.
I think, in the pre-covid edit of NTTD, this scene would have been explained, but they had to edit all mention of Safin's virus, so we just get this glimpse of the virus harvesters. . .
Look at that image and think, agricultural, or technical?
They based Safin's nanobots on some speculative science about how you can make nanobots with acid and bacteria. That's why there's a giant pool with Safin's minions working. That is basically a massive acid bath the nanobots are built in, the one Nomi calls "the farm". So that bacteria farm provides the raw material for Safin's deadly toxins, that are cultivated using the island's nutrient-rich volcanic waters. Then, in the "factory", those biochemical nanobots raised inside the pool are encoded and loaded in the vials.
It's not a virus. Never been a virus. But it works like a virus. You infect the people and the people become the weapon.
Plus, this nanobots idea dates back to TWINE. Purvis & Wade considered using nanobots for that film.
All of this is stated in the Making of and Taschen books.
When were they published please? (I don't have them, sorry).
I think it was just the launching of missiles that were very likely to kill Bond.
Back in October.
I was looking forward for some kind of further explanations regarding all this nanobot stuff and even if all this concept it is still kinda weird at least they gave more context.
Even tho I find it cool that they are using the thermal waters of the island, that tend to produce a lot of algae that produce bacteria, as the main device to harvest the nanobots inside those acid bacteria pools.
I haven't seen the film in a while, so I don't have the scene totally in my mind, but I would say it's him realizing/coming to terms with the fact that he completely screwed up.
He should be very upset about what happened with Heracles. As far as we understand it, the whole situation isn't super far away from igniting an international conflict and he just ordered a missile strike, which is a very significant thing to do (and it's unclear how he is even allowed to do that) and will surely have foreign and security policy repercussions to come. On top of that, there is the whole situation of one of his agents being in peril/being dead (although it's not like him and Bond had a great relationship or anything).
Honestly, if you look at everything M pulls in this film and all that happens under his watch, you'd think he'd resign the next day and pray they don't put him before whatever court is responsible if someone breaks the Biological Weapons Convention. So if you read it that way, he is in the middle of his entire life and career disintegrating right then and there.