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M: Blast! Bond has been destroyed, along with the island.
Q: Not necessarily--
M: Out with it, Q.
Q: The missiles destroyed the nanobots, but not necessarily Bond's DNA, sir.
M: You mean...
Q: We can rebuild him, sir. Bigger, stronger, faster.
Daniel Craig
is
Ian Fleming's James Bond 007 (again)
in
The Six Billion Dollar Man
A nod to fans and it sets the tone for the danger ahead
Wonderful suggestion! It seems they were more focused on Bond dying at the end, I guess. So they sort of missed...carving out the more thrilling and suspenseful bits.
Exactly! As a Bond director, you need to get Bond doing something unusual. They could easily have made Bond's watch work in LALD, when he was trying to get the boat with his magnetic wristwatch only to find out a rope was holding the boat. But instead, he stepped on the crocodiles to escape....Unique!
It’s a very particular thing when it comes to Bond. Challenging too. You have to balance out an elaborate scenario (or indeed help come up with one) with a genuinely tense approach to the scene. Some directors just have that skill - Campbell, Mendes, Gilbert, Glen, Hamilton. For some directors it’s just not one of their strengths. Forster lacked it almost entirely I’d say. Fukunaga covered this gap in his directing with stylised cinematography and action. Even Young I’d say didn’t really have that special touch and GF cemented much of this ‘Bondian’ approach to action.
That's just it. Although, Forster got Bond upside down with a rope, before he turned and shot Mitchell. Also, Young got Bond to use pillows to deceive Dent and Dent shot the pillows, thinking Bond was sleeping. So I feel this are the extra things a Bond director needs. Also, apart from Campbell getting Bond to ride a tanker in a city, he put a statue on it as well. Roger Spottiswoode handcuffed Bond and Wai Lin to a bike....just to mention a few. Other Bond directors also did a lot.
I wouldn’t say the pillow thing or the rope moment qualify (the rope moment more so I guess, but it’s more a little flourish and we don’t get anything else of this kind during the many action sequences in QOS). Both things, while cool, could be seen in pretty much any other spy or action film. It’s more about being able to present something quite fundamentally absurd in a way that, within the film, makes it believable though not necessarily realistic.
Again, I’m thinking about stuff like Bond commandeering a tank and crashing through a statue. Bond showing up in a wet suit with his tuxedo already beneath it. Bond harpooning a plane and water skiing without skis. I think even the sinking house in CR had traces of it (and CR is a more ‘gritty’ film in comparison to many of its predecessors).
Even in FRWL and DN, two Bond films I love, we never quite get that level of heightened reality (the closest I think is when Bond blows up the boats at the end of FRWL). On the other end of this you have examples when this type of moment is attempted but fails. I’m thinking of the bit in DAD when Bond flips his car by pushing the ejector seat (it’s a silly idea, and everyone watching it in the moment knows he’d just be smashed through the ice). A better moment in that film is when he uses the snow mobile’s bonnet/parachute as a sort of surfboard, but even that’s somewhat ruined by dodgy CGI.
Yeah. All very good examples.
I love his portrayal in Matera, especially Jamaica and through most of Safin's Island. He's stoic and a bit sharp in his interactions, which suits a retired Bond. His meeting with Nomi being the best example "it's commander Bond" and "in my humble opinion the world doesn't change much"
He is a wounded animal, that Fukunaga spoke about in one of the trailers, but its forgotten when he gets to Cuba and even more so in London. I just think his portrayal is less interesting Cuba onwards
Yeah, the film is brilliantly shot for sure. Apart from the shift in tone, Fukunaga isn't very inventive with the action scenes. Action-wise nothing extraordinary happens in Cuba. The Norway chase looked like it would be a show stopper in the trailers, but it was very disappointing. The lab attack..nothing special...nothing suspenseful. Compare that to Necros attacking with milk and kidnapping Koskov in TLD. It's just the Matera sequence and the Bunker shootout that's very solid.
Yeah I still really like the film but I really noticed this when I watched the Craig films all the way through. It’s a very stylish action film, but it’s got a bit of an American flavour to it, I don’t think it feels like a Bond film in the way that the Mendes films in particular really, really did, despite all the ingredients being there on the surface.
I guess that’s why they generally tend to stick to British directors. Safer bet that they’ll “get it”. But even then it’s not guaranteed to be fair, I think the Brosnan era had a similarly American vibe at times.
There’s definitely something to that. It might also be a case against some ‘workman-like’ directors (in the sense that I’d say a director like Spottiswoode or Apted are more likely to give us something more ‘Americanised’ and perhaps generic because they’re simply doing a job. Much as I love TND it does feel a bit too 90s action film at times).
And that’s not to say Fukunaga’s approach was bad. His style during action scenes is certainly polished and slick. I just find that more tongue in cheek/Bondian approach more interesting.
Good point about the workman like directors. In Cubby’s run it worked because they were part of the EON family. Glen was pretty workman like in how he approached it, but he’d spent his career working on Bond, so he got it. A workman like director who’s never had anything to do with Bond before is more of a risk.
And in TND’s case, I think the Americanisms in the script don’t help. I know we’re only talking a couple of throwaway lines, but I still can’t get over how nobody involved noticed how jarring Bond saying “cell phone” and “station break” was.
SF has moments such as the Shanghai fight scene where you can argue the long take/moving camera bears a similarity to Fukunaga’s style (it’s likely due to Deakins’ involvement) but otherwise I’d say Mendes’ style of filming/editing fight sequences is more similar to Campbell’s. Like I said neither style is inherently bad. I just prefer when there’s a sense that you can actually feel what these characters are going through during a fight rather than having that detachment. But that’s just me.
That said, I’m of the opinion his script was not, and was never going to be as strong as the one we got. So I don’t otherwise feel sorry we didn’t get him.
That's what I'd like to know too. I doubt the script's available (at least legally) as Eon like to keep scripts in the vault in case they need to cannibalise them for ideas later. I've heard Danny Boyle balked at the idea of killing off Bond and I've heard it might've seen Bond going into space again but that's all I know.
This is only my theory, but I believe they won’t release Boyle’s Bond 25 for two major reasons.
The first reason is I suspect when Boyle left, it wasn’t a finalised draft more than it was a series of drafts/treatments. I believe they were still trying to get the script into shape, which resulted in Boyle refusing to have script doctors/other writers involved. I think even he would say it wasn’t a project in its best or final stages yet, and it wouldn’t be right to release anything if one of the writers wasn’t fully happy with it.
The second reason it won’t be released is because it wouldn’t be fair to those who created the NTTD we got. EON have released drafts of Dalton’s planned third Bond film, but this was obviously impeded by legal issues and bears little relation to GE. A third Dalton Bond movie is not something we were ever going to get in this sense. Boyle’s Bond 25 is by contrast an alternate version of a Craig Bond film that got made. Even if it objectively wasn’t in shape to be filmed there will still be fans who’d read it and compare it to the film we got (perhaps even negatively).
It’s worth saying as well that Boyle didn’t balk at killing Bond. From my understanding he and Hodge pitched EON their idea, and EON in turn hired them but requested they weave their story ideas into it (ie. It had to be about a retired Bond going on one last mission, dying at the end, and perhaps even him facing off with a megalomaniac villain by the end). Boyle and Hodge seemingly agreed and this was what they incorporated/worked on when it came to the writing stage. They wouldn’t have been hired had they had an issue with Bond dying. In that sense Boyle’s Bond 25 would have been different, but would still have likely incorporated these broad ideas of the NTTD we got.
But yeah, it’s worth saying that if you disliked NTTD for killing Bond, then Boyle’s version would have made absolutely no difference. If anything it’s more interesting (for me anyway) thinking about what EON had in mind for this film that Boyle had to incorporate, and indeed made its way into the NTTD we got (we know an older Bond who dies at the end was always the game plan, but I’ve always said I suspect they also wanted things like scraps or broad ideas from the YOLT novel to appear, the villain to become a megalomaniac with a world domination plan by the end, a more impressionistic approach to the story etc).
Superb way of putting it. I agree wholeheartedly. The stakes aren't really that high to make Bond's death fitting. I never liked the idea of Bond dying, but if Bond died in a film like Licence To Kill....now that's an ultra-serious Bond film. Bond didn't even care if he lived or died, as long as Sanchez died. So had Bond died in LTK, I wouldn't have liked it, but I might have looked back and said it was worth it. i simply can't say the same about NTTD.
Me too. Well said, Crabkey.
I'm reminded of Cubby saying "no actor is bigger than Bond". Damn.