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Yeah, I can see it fitting a little better into SF thematically, but better to have him fake die in the opening.
Have you seen NTTD @slide_99 ?? I'd love to read about what you thought about the film as a whole!
I love that in SP his duty still belongs to Dench.
He has the choice of walking to M or Madeline on the bridge and then chucked his gun in the river- I think it's fairly clear! :)
In NTTD he then rejoins MI6, so to have him just leave again would be a bit repetitious- also it wouldn't feel like the end, bearing in mind we've seen him leave and return once before.
Not so sure about Spectre. Retrospectively, it became clear that Bond retired since that was the way they presented it in the beginning of NTTD. But it would not have been so inconsistant if Bond had been back on a mission in the PTS of NTTD like in Skyfall. Throwing away the gun in Spectre was also a sign for not killing Blofeld. Bond retiring and then coming back to MI6 is also quite a frequent phenomenon in the Craig era. It happened in almost every film so that it would not have been so out of place if they made him retire from the job just another time.
When I was drawn to Bond as a young boy, the huge appeal of Bond was he has a never say die attitude, always believes he'll come through and never quits.
I had a real problem with the fact he just quits at the end NTTD. "I love my wife and daughter but can never have contact with them so I'll just finish this mission, cos it needs done, but then give up and just get blown up". The Bond I fell in love with gets off that island by the skin of his teeth and then challenges Q and his team to remedy the nanobot situation, he doesn't just quit.
James Bond always coming through is at the core of the character for me, this NTTD Bond is alien to me. I'd actually put NTTD down as an anomaly amongst the movies. It's like the 1967 CR to me, a movie with a James Bond character in it but not THE James Bond. NTTD remains erased from my collection.
Hmm.. no it’s clearly him leaving. Q even says “I thought you’d left”. And Bond & Madeline talk on the train about what would happen if Bond stopped- she also leaves him because she can’t take that life any more. He most certainly leaves MI6 at the end of it, and that was the impression at the time too.
"I'm not going to ask you to change."
Bond tossing the gun is him making the choice himself without being asked. It's quite cheesy (I think the final scene of Bond and Swann driving off is particularly bad), for my liking, but it's there. And it leads to Bond's pissed off behaviour in the PTS of NTTD nicely. He chose to be there, to take a chance on living, and it feels like a came back to bite him despite his best efforts.
It seriously could have ended with the actual YOLT novel ending with Bond escaping the island at the last possible moment, he's actually alive but the blast and a hard fall/landing messes him up. Everyone thinks he's dead but is just injured and develops amnesia. Then we get the next film with TMWTGG opening with a new actor.
Yeah but personally still better than watching him die.
And certainly better than watching him give up and then die.
It wasn't very nice watching it but that's the point of a sad ending sometimes. It's like complaining that Bond should have had the bulletproof glass in OHMSS.
+1
After Safin infected him, Bond killed everyone on the island he came across, but he wouldn't risk Madeleine and Mathilde's lives by continuing to exist in the world.
That was the meaning of the almost-title: A Reason to Die.
Huge difference.
Agreed, he never would have looked twice at Madeleine, another problem I had with the movie though, technically, that's a SPECTRE flaw.
This is exactly why Bond quitting the service for Madeline made no sense to me.He learned a hard lesson at the end of CR that he can never have a normal life.The PTS of NTTD plays out like the climax of CR.He really should have known better.
But I guess love was the missing element there, and that's where Swann comes in.
You could say the same of Fleming’s Bond after CR. What a fool, Fleming’s Bond!
And yes, I am aware that the poison wasn't lethal to Bond, but still...
If Bond hadn’t been poisoned he would still try to escape, no matter the odds. Being infected with poison that would kill those he loved was the only thing that would make him stop and accept that death finally came for him.
Well he's Bond. We know he dies hard: folk around here would have been complaining if it had been easy because we've seen how he can escape death and bullets usually pose no obstacle to him.
I could accept that, if he hadn't been shot. But it was a struggle for Bond to climb up the ladder. Was he really going to be able to haul ass back through the submarine pen, while bleeding out and the missiles already on the way? His fate was sealed once Safin shot him, but that wouldn't make for a grand death scene.
“You only live twice, once when you are born, and once when you look death in the face”.