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Of course, I see it now, but somehow even in direct comparison to Pierce I didn't notice anything then...
What? She's been blackmailed for a while! She is already betraying Bond/MI6 when she meets him
I think when you’re a kid all adults are old, kind of all lumped together, unless they’ve got white hair and a walking stick, in which case they’re very old! I agree: he didn’t seem ancient to me as a kid, he just looked like an adult.
I don't see that. At no point do I feel like her portrayal is dislikeable. On the contrary, to be honest, Bond is the character that has the more dislikeable character traits which Vesper has to deal with. He is arrogant and thinks he is superior to everyone else, he is reckless, proud, cold and self minded. During the dinner scene he thinks he can roll Vesper over and dominate her with his intellectual superiority and is shocked to find that Vesper is able to stand up to him and see right through him. That is why he finds her attractive. I am not saying this as a criticism as it is a deliberate character arch for Bond during the film and Craig has just the right ammount of boyish charm and playfull charisma to make me still like him.
But lets be frank her: This is not the tale of a sweet and kind man meeting a frosty girl, it's rather the case of Vesper having to deal with a bit of a misogynist asshole and standing up to him, melting his heart in the process. She is the one seeing something good in him where others don't. And I personally see a lot of charm in her playfull banter with Bond.
That's one of the reasons why I don't want a new Bond cast in his 40s: even if like Moore or Brosnan he looks younger than his age, at some point the years will catch on and it can happen very quickly.
Good debate and some good points, thanks. I may look at it differently on my next viewing 👍
And the accent is rubbish ;)
This kind of leads me to an opinion that may be unpopular. I don't actually think Bond ever was meant to be sexist or misogynist or anything else like it.
He was created and written by a sexist guy, and is therefore sexist in the books, mostly in his internal monologues. But he's not designed to be "a sexist character", ie "more sexist than the world around him". And as far as I can see, EON has never tried to actually present him as a sexist or misogynist character. There's plenty of sexist behavior to see, especially early on, but it was how, in that time, someone would write a character that "men want to be and women want to be with". Bond didn't force himself on Pussy Galore because he's a misogynist character. This was just regular old storytelling at the time. (To be as clear as possible, that scene is pretty appalling!)
The only moments where I think the writers were trying to offer a Bond who is actually being inappropriately sexist would be "women drivers" in TSWLM and "a woman?" in MR, and both of those seem to be self-aware. That is, Bond himself knows he is being intentionally obnoxious, and we're meant to laugh either at him, or with him to the degree that he knows he's being a dick. A god-awful moment like Bond zooming in on a colleague's cleavage in OP is unfortunately just something that would pass as a joke at the time. The scene isn't there to show some deep, dark, jaded side to Bond. Indeed, the Q scene in that film is probably Bond at his most deliberately obnoxious, and it fits in with MR's "a woman?" line.
So for me this means I don't want to see any sexism at all from the character of Bond going forward, and I think we've seen little outside the realm of the highly debatable for quite some time. It's not part of his character, even if the occasional meta speech within Bond films suggests otherwise. He was certainly written by a sexist, and the early films in particular were made when different things were acceptable, but that's about where it ends. I mean, he was a racist in the books too: he saw himself as better "than any Korean", and was effusively approving of a colonial officer who gave a long speech about how Black people basically can't govern themselves. Does anybody want James Bond sharing any of these sentiments in the future, or think they're central to his character?
I think that's fair enough. And as mentioned in the other thread, in the novels he rarely even sleeps with more than one woman. We hear that he does engage in something like 'cold passion with married women' (forgive me, I can't remember exactly how Fleming describes it) but I.F is never making a statement on a sexist character- he's just a man thinking how men of the time thought (or perhaps how I.F thought men of the time thought :) ).
That that has now become part of his character in the movies in a way makes him a bit more interesting I think: we're not supposed to agree with him; he's supposed to be a bit of a bastard sometimes. I'm not massively interested in characters saying 'ooh you're a sexist' all the time to him because there's not much interesting in that, but if they want to use it dramatically I'm all for it.
Look, we agree on stuff! ;-)
God, can you imagine what it would be like if Fleming tried to make Bond sexist? :)) Anyway, I think Bond should be a bit of a bastard, and I don't mind if he's accused of sexism or things a bit because of his (usually-strategic) womanizing. But I wouldn't actually want him to be a reliable sexist, because then I wouldn't like him very much. Cheeky dismissal of women would kind of read as being as classy as smoking cigarettes, I reckon.
Possibly my favorite scene between Bond and any woman is his conversation with Camille in the plane in QOS, where she talks about sleeping with Greene to get close to Medrano, and asks if he disapproves. Bond laughs, "Not at all" with a broad, actually-warm smile. It's terrific. They're both cold bastards of a sort, and neither ends up as the kind of grossly bigoted type I'd block on social media.... :))
Bringing back Jaws, then giving him a girlfriend with pigtails and braces, then sending him to space, then making him a good guy...MR makes one wrong turn after another in the second half.
In AVTAK, the problem is the writing of Stacey, especially the creepy infantilizing of her in her childhood home. It's so weird: they made her a geologist and they gave her some decent scenes where she is correctly deducing the villain's plan, but man, those home scenes...
If they made Stacey more of an adult, Moore would have seemed less grandfatherly. I think Carole Bouquet is even younger than Moore in her film, but the way she is written as a capable, independent adult makes all the difference.
Certainly agree about MR's plot being better than TSWLM. Drax has certainly thought through his destroy human life on the earth to remake the world in his mage plot better than Stromberg did. Drax's space city provides a safe place for he and his minions to wait out his plan of global destruction. Wouldn't Stromberg and his underlings have been affected by the nuclear fallout from WWIII? And if they had survived how exactly were they going to replenish human life in his under the sea kingdom? The only females in Stromberg's empire(his secretary and Naomi) were both dead at that point. It's a good thing for him that he happened to capture Triple X just before his attempt to implement his plan or the human species would've died out completely fairly soon. Drax with his stable of "perfect" male and female humans to create his "master race in space" had certainly thought further ahead.
That said, it is the sort of slightly unlikely contrivance I could sort of imagine Fleming writing though!
I suppose in stories such as these there has to be some sort of "tell" as to what the dastardly villain is up to and this event, though perhaps contrived, was enough to bring Bond onto the case to investigate matters. At least it was later adequately explained why Hugo Drax was forced to hijack his own space shuttle and it wasn't an annoying loose end.
Fairly rubbish explanation though :D He stole his own space shuttle because, erm... he just did okay ? :D
And arguably (and legally questionably considering they didn't own the story) developed only slightly from the plot of Thunderball. The only real difference with TSWLM is that Stromberg steals the things the missiles are inside. He still hides them in a boat though, just like Largo! :)
The other key change of course is that he actually wants to use them!
MR doesn't have the "play two sides against each other" angle at all, and replaces it with something that makes at least a bit more sense. It's only really similar in terms of scope. And of course, they repeat the TSWLM idea of pairing Bond with a female agent. The only YOLT-original stuff is that there's a hijacking, and a gadget vehicle chase.
Bond is perfectly justified in using any means to escape this situation.Pussy at this moment seems to have no problem keeping him prisoner and having Bond be vaporised along with the rest of Fort Knox ( Not to mention the resulting disastrous enviromental damage and loss of life on a huge scale ).
Appealing to Pussys '' maternal instincts '' not only saved Bonds life but countless others.
Granted, as I said above, that element of the plot is rather contrived but the writer Christopher Wood has Drax later explain to Bond that one of his own Moonraker space shuttles developed a fault during assembly and he needed to hijack the one on loan to the UK. Without that happening Bond would have no lead into the story. Of course some other contrivance could have been written but that was what Wood ultimately went with. All that said, I still think Moonraker is the better film overall when compared with The Spy Who Loved Me where the story isn't quite so well tied up, especially in terms of the outworkings of Stromberg’s plan and the motivations behind it.
Well I know, it's in the film; it's just a really arbitrary, brushed-off explanation for the basis upon which the whole film lays. Why not just ask for it back? It is his, after all.
It would actually make more sense if he were stealing a NASA shuttle because one of his Moonrakers developed a fault. Then find some other reason for Bond to investigate him.
But that's okay, because Moonraker isn't really about the story: it's about the spectacle.
I love MR but TSWLM just clicks as a film better for me: the action sequences just work better and the jokes flow smoother. I love MR but it's a little bit clunkier whereas TSWLM is just a great adventure- I think it might be the best Bond film.
I always thought YOLT was a bigger and dumber DN.
It should have been like in the old novels: Drax blows his cover by cheating at cards ;)
I can only agree. I really wish Moonraker had been filmed faithfully as in my opinion it's Fleming's best Bond novel. The cheating at cards is certainly a more subtle "tell" than what happens in the film albeit that it's incidental to Drax’s real plot in the novel. It's all the more realistic for being so as real world intelligence agencies and police often stumble on smaller incidental things which lead to much bigger things being uncovered.
Octopussy is Roger Moore's greatest Bond film.
Part of me thinks MR should have been adapted in the early 60s. Some plot elements are vaguely reminiscent of The Manchurian Candidate.
I guess the issue is that Bond is the best of the best and should always really be investigating the big cases from the start. Having him coincidentally encounter these bad guys socially (as Fleming had him do in MR) is kind of only one step away from having the bad guy turn out to be his foster brother, and a lot of people didn't like that ;)
Something like Trigger Mortis is maybe a good incidence of that: he's sent out on a mission which befits his abilities to prevent what is essentially a Russian PR stunt, which then leads him onto a much bigger and more dangerous plan. I guess the Living Daylights movie is similar.
I've just realised that the opening of AVTAK is actually sort of a remake of the MR novel opening too: M takes Bond to a gambling event where the main baddie is present and they discover that he's cheating.