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See, I knew you’d come around to it! ;)
Is that a criticism? I tend to think that if you've worked at making your ending satisfying and a culmination of the whole story then that's a good thing.
They could have called the film The Death Collector, without giving too much away (unlike A Reason to Die).
Yeah, Bond’s an over the top character in an over the top film series. I think a character like that needs an over the top death.
There’s definitely the school of thought that the best kind of writing is starting from the beginning and working your way from there and coming up with the conclusion along the way.
But let’s be honest, that’s never been how Bond films (or books) were written. EVER. There’s always been that formula fans revere. You can’t call it “organic writing” when you’ve already got the skeletal structure of your Bond film written in stone.
Though the thought of attempting to organically write a Bond film amuses me. Just imagining those at EON trying to have a crack at a script organically, but then they corner themselves into a scene where Bond can only die. “Darn it! I inadvertently lead to Bond’s death! Now I have to rewrite from page 90!”
I am not so sure about that. Wasn't Craig's version of Bond always praised for being so vulnerable and human?
I don't mind Bond dying but I am not a fan of the overly heroic way he was killed. There have been times when great emotions have been shown in a much more subtle way. The brilliant ending of OHMSS comes to mind as well as the few references to Tracy's death in TSWLM, FYEO and LTK.
Yes that is fair enough, but I think with a film it's trickier as it goes through so many drafts. And as you say, it's not like every other Bond film hasn't been written with the idea of him beating the baddie and getting the girl at the end in the writers' heads right from the start and them steering the plot in that direction.
(No I wasn't being literal about every other Bond film, internet pedants! :D )
Ha! I can believe there's an element of that though. We were talking about the ending to Spectre the other day and how they probably considered killing Bond in that one as it seemed to be Craig's last, but the story with Blofeld being his foster brother and all that just wouldn't have let them take the story in that direction. It wouldn't have been a satisfying ending for Bond to die in that one.
Tracy wasn't a hero though: Bond is the biggest hero in the world. It would have been a 60 year anticlimax for him to just slide on some ice and bump his head whilst putting the bins out. He's a vulnerable Bond but he's still Bond: just watch Skyfall where he gets shot straight through the shoulder (from the back- and the shrapnel ends up in the front!) and then happily jumps off a digger onto a moving train. Then he gets shot and falls off that train about half a mile into a river below and still survives! I don't know about you, but I wasn't getting the impression he was easy to kill from that... :))
And was the ending to OHMSS subtle? I mean, I'm not saying it was badly done but I'm not sure it was subtle. And I don't go to Bond films for subtlety anyway.
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/StuffedIntoTheFridge
It's so over the top I can't help but break into laughter during the shot of Q trying to control his tears by deep breathing.
There are certain dramatic scenes in cinema history I tend to find unintentionally
hilarious. GOODFELLAS and HEAT have several funny scenes that were dramatic on their first viewing. The "Go get your shine box" scene in GOODFELLAS was quite disturbing when I first saw it. Suddenly that little interaction became hilarious.
Clark getting pounded in SUEPRMAN II after giving up his powers to so he could sleep with Lois is also pretty damned funny.
I think Bond's death in NTTD is right up there with those scenes.
Overkill aside, several people in the forum have mentioned that the circumstances of Bond's death are unclear (recently I recall @Some_Kind_Of_Hero). Is he dying from his wounds or is he sacrificing himself, or both.
Some people are convinced he wasn't going to die from his wounds, and so his death was the result of his choice to stay on the island to protect his family, and nothing else.
Others say he was already going to die from his wounds, and the poisoning merely made him accept death more quickly, knowing that trying to leave the island would endanger his family.
Others don't even care.
From reading what the producers have said about the scene, as well as forum posts debating the scene, to me it now seems the emphasis was definitely on having Bond sacrifice himself for the safety of his family, which is a more meaningful, heroic, noble way to go.
But why not leave it just at poisoning then? Why have the wounds?
A couple of months ago I discussed possible reasons with a couple of people in another thread. Maybe the filmmakers didn't want anyone to wonder why Bond didn't try to leave the island, poison and everything, so that later he would at least try to find a solution to the nanobot thing, Q's words notwithstanding. The wounds would have prevented him from escaping in time, or escaping at all, nullifying that issue.
More obviously, the wounds also make the scene dramatically more intense.
But whatever purpose the wounds might serve, I wonder if ultimately they make the scene more muddled than clear, just as it has been argued by some people. Perhaps Bond could have just decided to stay on the island while in good health, poisonous nanobots aside. It worked in Terminator 2, after all.
That's not even getting into the idea that having Bond both shot and poisoned might be overkill!
Bingo. This is the key. Once the Hero lets go and accepts, they transcend.
Thanks, and I agree; it's my least favourite Bond movie as well. It used to be Moonraker, but suddenly that film doesn't seem so bad anymore.
You monster!
I am what EON hath created.
Other films promised you the moon, but they, uh, "delivered."
Agree with all of this, I personally have DAF down there with MR but at least they are still both reasonably fun to watch, even if flawed. NTTD is firmly at the bottom of the pile for me.
It was extremely deflating to walk out of the cinema having watched a Bond film so flawed and joyless I had no desire to ever see it again. I knew I would never sit through that again and there was no point adding it to my Bond collection.
Hopefully, a new direction can reinvigorate the series again.
This I agree with. We are conditioned to assume that Bond, Q, someone will find a solution in the end. "Nothing will stop me now!" has always been step 1 towards failure for the bad guy. Most people are left unconvinced that Bond has died when MI6 is doing its little eulogy scene because they keep expecting Bond to walk in, even if we saw him get dissolved in a sea of fiery turmoil. The film requires us to intellectually process the inevitability of his sacrifice, while the emotional parts of our brains keep insisting on waiting for the big cinematic miracle, the happy ending. Even though NTTD does everything it can to convince us that Bond is dead (the nanobots, Q's conversation with Bond, Bond's conversation with Madeleine, Bond's bullet wounds, the blast pulverising Bond), he is James Bond, dammit! He's more man of steel than Superman! I took his death in as a beautifully poetic closure to Craig's tenure, but I understand why many still feel like something was missing...
Obviously I wanted him not to be dead, but that's why it's powerful.
I feel less lonely now. I couldn't even bring myself to buy the DVD.
Yeah, it would have been a cheat, an insult to audiences if he suddenly appeared alive at the end after all that. Would have shot the film down a few slots in my ranking.
Again.He doesn’t choose to die.He just accepted his fate.He was so badly shot that he was clearly dying.He barely managed to make it to the top of that ladder.Even if he tried to escape the blast radius,his chances of making it and surviving were about zero.