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I agree that the climax of the film should have been at the base, having the action return to England was clunky and not well thought out. A missed opportunity might have been to have a good old fashioned melee battle like YOLT, Spy or MR.
I think another missed opportunity was not giving Swann and Bond some more scenes to cement their love. As the film sits it feels like they fall in love for the sake of it, and not to really fall in love.
This^…. Yes, @thedove …. You nailed it. It felt like it was rammed into the script. It went from tension and distrust and Madeleine dropping a few threats about shooting him if he came close to her, to a passionate kiss, to being madly in love…
Zero to a hundred in a blink.
And this is one of the reasons why I do love NTTD: I was not happy when i heard Madeleine was returning. I was gutted.
But when I finally saw the film, I was overwhelmed how Fukunaga and team made the romance believable. I BELIEVED these two were lovers at the beginning of NTTD.
I FELT Bond’s shock and yearning for her when they meet in the corridor, right before the Blofeld interrogation, and;
I got the shivers up my back when he kissed her in Finland.
But, yes, the first time I saw Spectre, I despised the superficiality of their romance, and I thought the actors had absolutely zero chemistry (but Fukunaga cracked that code in the next film, thankfully!!).
Bond remembers his adopted father dying strangely after discovering gold and he tries to find Oberhauser's son (a guise that Blofeld is hiding behind to attract Bond).
In fact, I think the tone of this film is all wrong: it should be a spy thriller-esque storyline with all of this about Nine Eyes and C. But the story also tries to have its cake with the attempt to go back to the "fun" Bond. Because of this disconnect the key espionage bit of the plot is lost and the climax is just the same as a ticking bomb (despite that making little sense)
I agree.
I like these ideas best. The saddest thing about Spectre is how great many ideas are. A lot of them are either written or portrayed poorly in the final film. I still enjoy it for what it is.
Keep Oberhauser as Franz. Not Blofeld.
Have Lucia Sciarra's maiden name be Blofeld. She is actually in charge of the organization like how the novels did with Blofeld and his associates rotating who was Number 1 and 2 to keep their identities secret.
If the writers wanted a surprise twist, this would have been the only way to make it shocking.
I know it's a little weird, but I honestly thought she was going to have a bigger role to play.
The other idea is have Bond24 be James on a globe trotting adventure as he is dispatched by M (Ralph F) to investigate a series of bombings carried out by one man, Marco Sciarra. The movie ends as it did in the opening of Spectre, with Bond finding the ring. This would intoduce Spectre as a behind the scenes antagonist, without having to retcon Silva or Quantum. Though you could involve Mr. White still somehow.
Goodbye Mi6 symbol it is clear why and of course even more after the end of NTTD, but stil not a big fan of it. Till Brother /Blofeld thing i iked the movie.
Blofeld should have flyed a way after the fall of Mi6 with his helicopter so the movie can have end with him and his team return to take Lucia from the save house. Or that be begin of Bond 25. Mabey even Madeline can have visit to save house to talk Lucia. Felix can welcomed her so that we seen him in the movie. It helps that NTTD made Madeline a better chacter.
The return of Lucia and Madeline, the Vesper video be enough to name Bond 25 Property of Lady. Above the return of background girl of Daniel Craig era (Author of all you pain/' l American).
After Bond drive a way with Madeline, this is it for Madeline and now we can focus on Lucia, Blofeld. Or/and return of Camile and Quantum/Greene.
Oh and on a side note they could have kept the death of Oberhauser the doing of Blofeld and yet not make him Bond and him related. Far fetched, yes absolutely. Bit Flemingesque all the same and less so than what we had.
I wish M would have killed C differently, maybe shoot him like him or Bond did in one of the scripts. It just feels a bit clumsy how C fell to his death
Have a scene after the fight with Hinx to show Bond and Madeleine falling in love, similar the shower scene in CR. As it is felt like a mistimed gag
A different title rather than Spectre or don't deny Blofeld is in the film. Once it was called Spectre it was obvious Blofeld was back
I sure am glad we didn't have a gender switch for Blofeld. Completely unnecessary.
Yes I agree here. It has lots of good ideas, and I think if I read a synopsis of the plot before seeing the film I would say that it sounds like it would be a tremendous Bond film. Or if it had been written as a continuation novel rather than a movie I think loads of us would be screaming to see it adapted to the screen.
I kind of don't know why it isn't a great Bond film: it just doesn't seem to all come together properly. People like Peter who know about films would be able to explain why better than I can.
Stuff which perhaps are opportunities missed is Bond and Blofeld's childhood past: it works for plot reasons (Bond recognising him etc.) but there's almost no actual drama drawn from it- maybe they should have actually used it for some character stuff. Blofeld is also pretty scary when he's introduced at the big meeting in silhouette- would it have been more effective to keep him like that for longer in the film?
The smart blood tracking stuff feels like a setup for something which gets thrown away too. Maybe a blood transfusion? Blood spatter? Bond gets injured and taken to hospital and his blood is analysed? He even goes to a clinic to meet Swann- could his blood have been taken there? (Maybe she takes a blood sample, has it with her for some reason, gets kidnapped and Bond tracks the blood sample to find her..? )Q measuring vital signs? Something like that: it feels like a Q gadget which was going to be used in an interesting way, but isn't.
Maybe one missed opportunity (which is not an idea I had and shamelessly stole from someone else) is that Helen McCrory could have returned in her role from Skyfall to play the Government insider threat character instead of C. I know she was a minister rather than a civil servant, but I'm sure they could have made it work and she would have been absolutely amazing as a Bond villain.
Maybe that's one way the film doesn't work: Bond and C's paths don't overlap much- they even only meet once. Should C have been revealed to be Blofeld? Maybe that would work better.
I would love to see a Hollywood script doctor take this script on and refine it: I think there's a really good film in there struggling to get out.
I think that is probably the most tangible missed opportunity in this entire thread, yes. Something which was right there within their grasp and which would have instantly made the film much better (for me, anyway).
With the John Logan solo script that would have happened!
I agree about Blofeld. EON needs to cutback on the code names for awhile. For the next version of Blofeld, EON should just say that it’s him. Casting Christoph Waltz made it too obvious that he was Blofeld.
Helen McCrory was already very sick around time of No Time To Die. For SF there can have considered that Vogel was at court too. It also made so the say Silva connection to Spectre more believeable, but back then it was all Quantum before producers deside to use Spectre.
When Malik was cast i hoped he mabey played younger Greene.
Yes, if anything the Oberhauser plot is a case of adapting Fleming for the sake of adapting Fleming, rather than it actually bringing anything to the film. Remove it and the only issue you're left with is that Bond wouldn't recognise Blofeld as he does in Italy; as you say, all of the other motivations and grudges would still be explained by their (retrofitted) past involvements in the previous three movies (Bond notably doesn't seem to hold any grudge against Franz, even though we're told he killed Bond's childhood guardian!).
I'm almost curious if there's a fanedit which chops out the scene with Bond looking at his burnt guardianship papers, him asking Moneypenny about Oberhauser, and Blofeld's later cuckoo talk in the crater base - if you take those out would the film still make sense? Quickly looking at the transcript I have a feeling it actually might, or come close to it- I think those are pretty much the only mentions the foster brother thing has...? Which shows how inessential it is, how odd. Does Bond even need to recognise Oberhauser to make the plot work? The word 'Oberhauser' is even only mentioned in the script 5 times.
If anything, the torture scene in itself would kind of be enough to explain Blofeld's fascination with Bond- he just likes inflicting pain on people and is kind of fascinated in a slightly detached way with seeing how they suffer, like the 'man being deprived of his eyes' thing.
I'll take credit for the McCrory idea...I saw Peaky Blinders about a year ago and posted how fabulous she would have been in a bigger role in SP. I like Andrew Scott in other things, but he is just terrible in this film.
I like the idea of a female Blofeld, TBH. Different, for the films. It could have been McCrory or Monica Bellucci. Both were or are more than capable actors and it would have been juicy to see either of them putting Waltz in his place.
The French foreign legion idea is good but maybe the cannibalism was too edgy? Would have added a grittiness to the whole endeavor that tonally would work with CR and QoS but not necessarily SF.
And I like the idea of Swann being the daughter of Bond's recurring adversary...it's a clever riff on Draco and Tracy.
But somehow, despite all of these intriguing fits and starts, the film just never coheres. SP is perhaps the biggest missed opportunity in the entire series.
It should feel silly! Do you think that Blofeld is claiming that he caused Bond to fall in love with a woman Spectre had previously compromised, and that he caused that woman to kill herself? Do you think the writers wanted you to believe this impossibility? Does Bond appear to take it that way?
The brother dynamic informs virtually every interaction between Bond and Blofeld--from Blofeld constantly and desperately trying to get in Bond's head to Bond remaining cool and aloof in Blofeld's presence but displaying his hatred when he's not around.
It’s a brilliant idea: the film is already ten times better =D>
But the film is far from perfect. Some ideas are poorly executed, and some are warped. I was disappointed to see Hinx go before the climax -- it would have been exciting to see Bond run a ruined maze, going after a very menacing Hinx out of necessity since the latter might've been able to tell him where Madeleine was kept.
The foster brother plot, while not insulting to me, certainly is unexpected and... well... not good. Having Blofeld be the guy behind Quantum and whatnot (not Silva, though, come on!) isn't a bad idea. It makes Spectre very sinister and shadowy indeed. But wouldn't it have been so much better if Blofeld initially didn't care about this man, James Bond? As it plays now, his personal issues with Bond get in the way of him coming off as truly dangerous. Now he's the child who's never gotten over his daddy issues, poor thing. That reads sad to me, not threatening. The only redeeming element is that the entire film is replete with this theme of lost parents.
The 9-Eyes plot makes sense; it's topical, of the times, and not unreal. But the script fails to demonstrate exactly how big a threat it poses to us immediately. It's a threat alright, but you need to process that information in the back of your mind. The film does nothing to confront us with it directly. That's a missed opportunity for sure.
Other than that, I really enjoy the film. Unlike many others, I appreciate the colour scheme, the music, the acting, etc.
Yeah the moment he was rumoured to be in the film I thought Blofeld would be back.
I definitely agree here. Nine Eyes is a great device, but it's left to the viewer to realize the real danger.
But as was said, the issue is we never really get a sense of what the Nine Eyes can do, and because the threat is so vague and, on the surface, un-dramatic it gets to the point where there's literally a countdown clock Bond and everyone else has to race against even though this programme could presumably just be taken down minutes after it's launched.
Yes it's true: it needed a sequence where Bond falls victim to surveillance on one of his missions to some extent. The recent Mission Impossible film does this pretty effectively with the not-dissimilar AI monster threat.
Still not seen that film! Must catch up with it.
I think for SP the villain's scheme needed to be either dialled up or down. If they wanted to go bigger we needed to see a tangible threat (like how this programme could cause a massive attack or something that puts people in danger). That or just run with the idea of SPECTRE being this sort of Illuminati type group who have attained a level of power within MI6 and are slowly but fundamentally trying to change things for their own benefit, with Bond being put at odds/isolated from everyone else, and perhaps being tracked down by this surveillance programme by both MI6 and SPECTRE. The latter idea's just an amped up version of QOS anyway, so I guess it's in keeping with what they were trying to do with Quantum/that version of SPECTRE. But nothing about it quite gels together in the film we get.
Either come out and say Blofeld is the villain or say Oberhauser is the villain and keep him with that name.
Why eon was so quick to rush into using Spectre. I would love down the road for them to tackle a Spectre trilogy where we learn about the organization, Bond damages them, Blofeld is revealed slowly, we have a final and big battle between Bond and Blofeld that feels like it is worth something.
I have always thought they used the family friend and brother angle to rush the "this time its personal." A slower build would have been way more satisfying. A missed opportunity for me is the handling of Blofeld in this film.
The villain's plan is forgettable in this one, and is a big missed opportunity along with Blofeld