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
Yes, I'm not sure if it was test screenings, or overdubbing because they were writing the script on the fly and needed to make the story clearer.
I wondered that very question as well. I remember thinking that it was obviously Bond's given the age of the child and the time of their relationship. Then as a viewer I doubted myself and thought, no Bond must not be the father.
I can see her wanting to protect her from the danger of Bond and his lifestyle. But then she and the child willingly jump into a car and she involves her child in the danger that she wished to avoid.
I haven't watched the movie in 3 years so I guess it might be time to re-watch it so that I can freshen my memory on why they both needed to go with Bond and not go their separate ways.
Because Bond finds out from Moneypenny, inadvertently, that Nash and goons were on their way to Madeleine's house to capture her for Safin.
Madeleine's only chance of survival would be getting in that car with Bond and trying to escape...
Neither did Craig. As Crabkey says, it’s only Silva who did that.
It's the way it was heard by certain ears, it has nothing to do with the word itself. I guess more untrained audiences heard "mom" instead of "ma'am" when Craig was in the elevator in CR, and I always took his later joke in QoS as a way to play on that very confusion.
As Crab says though, it often features in detective shows because it's simply the correct terminology and has nothing to do with jokes about mothers or anything like that.
It is a plot device, agreed.
The film does its best to sow suspicion because Madeleine brings up where Vesper was buried and hints that she brought Bond to Matera. So once the bomb goes off and Bond is painfully reminded of Vesper's betrayal, Bond stops acting rationally. He starts acting out of emotion and self-preservation.
Blofeld: How do you know?
Caller: We know. We're SPECTRE. We know everything.
Blofeld: Rght. Put a bomb in Vesper's tomb and have some sheep ready to block the road. Oh, and have plenty of black cars and fire power ready to go in the town square if anything kicks off.
.............................
I always marvel how the bad guys anticipate everything. I know Blofeld called Madeliene, but I'm hazy on the details how everything was anticipated and arranged. Wish we could have seen that planning and operations scene at SPECTRE HQ.
Kingsley Amis memorably remarked on this "second-sight contingency planning" phenomenon in the Bond films in his New Statesman review of Christopher Wood's James Bond, The Spy Who Loved Me film novelisation where her refers to the extended chase sequence in the film of The Spy Who Loved Me:
What nobody could have cut out is the element of second-sight contingency planning (or negligence) that gets by in a film, indeed is very much part of the style of these films, but obtrudes in a book. Your enemy has an explosive motorbike sidecar ready to launch at your car in case he’s forgotten to kill you for certain and in secret a few minutes before. In case that misses, he has already aloft a helicopter fitted with jets and cannon. Your car is submersible in case you meet such a helicopter while driving on a coast road. In case you submerge your car he has a midget submarine waiting. In case he has you have underwater rocket-launchers.
I love this. It's a feature of films that often take me out of the film. The traps set for Bond by Silva in SF always set me thinking about the planning and rigging up. Silva's position on the ladder to avoid being shot. The timing of the tube train. Same with SP. The red string and photos of M and past enemies pasted on the wall. Who planned that? When? Who physically set it up? And in NTTD, "keep those sheep on standby."
Q is equally problematic. Always anticipating what new gadget Bond will need. I get this is fiction, but sometimes things go too far. CR didn't have an omniscient villain, nor a bunch of gadgets. Not only is it enjoyable, but believable.
But really, it kind of works: they know Vesper's grave is there so they know Bond might turn up sooner or later, so they put one guy looking out for him there. Bond turns up one day, so they have enough time to get some more fellas in to ambush him and put a bomb on the grave overnight before he visits the it. It's not exactly the most far-fetched thing in a Bond movie.
That perfectly sums up the Gondola chase in MR for me. Surprise Bond with a knife thrower coming out of the coffin. If that goes wrong have a man with a machine gun on stand by (but don't have them just shoot Bond in the first place. That'd be silly). Of course if on the off chance that doesn't work out get the back up boat ready to intercept him. Hopefully Bond won't have some sort of super gondola at his disposal.
To be honest it's all part of the fun. I can't get annoyed at it. It's also why I can never understand some viewers getting hung up on plot contrivances long after they've watched the film.
Silva's march to M is a clear example of some massive logic leaps. From the train dropping by right in time for the explosion to the knowing that Q would be analyzing the drive with no firewalls or protection. It starts to bring the audience out of it.
Course every film has a point where the villain has Bond dead to rights. Instead of just shooting him, he instead plots an elaborate death. Course that is the fun of the films. In some cases we can overlook it, in others we are left to question.
Even FRWL, Grant has Bond knocked out on the ground. Put a bullet in him and leave the train. But he lets Bond up and then proceeds to chat with him. It gets explained away as Grant loving to see how Bond has been made a fool of. The other thing that always bothered me was Grant saying the first bullet won't kill you nor the second not even the third, not until you crawl and kiss my boot. It was supposed to be a murder suicide. LOL!
Back to NTTD, it's a complete stretch of logic that SPECTRE would have planned for everything with the grave site. My first question is why was Vesper buried in a small town in Italy? Wouldn't she be buried in England?
I do get being taken out of the moment when watching a film for the first time though. For me the only time this has really happened is in TB when Bouvar is revealed to be dressing up as his own widow. It was so shocking for me with Bond punching this ‘woman’ that I couldn’t help but think about why he’d done this in the film, and yet no answers came up (it’s actually an incredibly pointless thing to do without explanation). I think that’s the only time a Bond movie has really fallen apart for me.
The list of names that appear on the grave in Matera shows very distinctively that Vesper was buried in her own family grave, alongside her parents and other ancestors.
As you can see, over her name, you can read "Elena Saviani Ved. (vedova = widow) Lynd"
Just one thing more about that chase scene in TSWLM : if I do agree with Kingsley Amis about the side-car, the car and the helicopter, I don't agree with him about the mini-sub. For me, it was simply the guard patrol of Atlantis, with standing orders to kill anyone who got too close to Stromberg's headquarter. Standard Operating Procedure for any villain worth its salt, and I'm quite sure that a few divers have found themselves on the wrong end of a speargun before Bond.
DN begins with no gadgets. FRWL a very believable briefcase. And then there's GF and the tricked out Aston. That one works for me because GF is a formidable opponent. The ejector seat is a stretch because it anticipates Bond will have an undesirable in the passenger seat. Little Nellie was an actual mini-copter.
Once we get to the RM films, Q Branch and its gadgets are full on comedy relief. So much in that series of films is flat out silly.
I like that the Craig era backed off on the gadgets, but SF, SP, and NTTD relied on villains anticipating Bond's moves, which always strikes me as far-fetched even in a series that is itself essentially far-fetched.
My hope for Bond 26 is that we don't have a bunch of preposterous Q Branch gadgets that anticipate the exact predicaments Bond will get into and that we also don't have a villain who can anticipate Bond's every move with a series of traps and back ups each time Bond manages to avoid a trap.
The issue with the jet pack for me is that he doesn't need it. Just run down the stairs James! That would have been solved by setting it in a chateau with a moat.
At the very beginning, Madeleine says on the phone to her friend, "You eat too much because you're depressed." This foreshadows the psychiatrist that she is to become.
Clever! They really took a lot of care constructing the PTS.