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It's for the question thread but I understand Denbigh (or what became the Denbigh character) was meant to be Blofeld originally and Oberhauser was supposed to remain Oberhauser? I must say, since I'm not a fan of Andrew Scott and always finds him a lightweight at best as a villain, I'm glad they at least had Waltz as Blofeld.
There's certainly a lot of that in people complaining about Brofeld. And again: it was not necessary. They could have taken it off entirely from the story and keep pretty much everything else as is without any discrepancies. But let's face it: personal elements are part of every. single. franchise. nowadays. Superhero movies, Star Wars, what have you. But apparently, Bond should remain as impersonal as he was in the early 60s. Even though there's a personal element in every movie since LTK.
Yeah that feels the wrong way around. To be honest, I think if I were writing it now I'd probably still have Blofeld as the one with the personal connection to Bond as he's the main villain and it just makes more sense. If you find out the guy behind it all is... just some guy, it's not quite the same.
Maybe it's the link to childhood which makes it a bit of a tough swallow. If Blofeld had been effectively Smythe and had killed Hannes Oberhauser when both were adults (and not been his son) maybe that would have easier to take. I'm not sure why he would have resented Bond, but I guess something could have been manufactured in there.
Aargh. The more I struggle with it the more I end up thinking the film version is the one which makes the most sense, even though I don't really like it. Everyone has motivations in place.
Agreed about Andrew Scott: I can just see him acting too clearly.
And even from the second film there was a personal element: Spectre wanted to kill Bond as revenge for Dr No.
I don't dislike a personal element at all, it just feels a bit silly here. And yet I can't come up with a better solution! :)
Yeah, it doesn't bother me all too much. I'd take far more issue with the fact that SP was pretty unengaging and flat, and likely would still be that way even minus "Brofeld".
I'm not letting Fleming off the hook for overusing coincidences in plotting. But when it comes to characterization he certainly never did anything so silly with a villain as revealing him to be Bond's resentful lost-lost foster-brother. That just feels like a desperate and excessively melodramatic attempt to make the villain's connection ultra-personal to Bond.
And I think Oberhauser would have been a lackluster villain even if he hadn't been named Blofeld. People might not have complained as much about him because he wouldn't be a screwed-up reboot of Blofeld, but he still would have been an uninteresting antagonist with a pathetic backstory, a definite stepdown from Silva or Le Chiffre.
Thrillers by nature depend on implausible events and plotting. Without them you have no way of getting the story off the ground of everyday reality. But the revelation of wildly contrived secret "family" relationships among already well-established characters is a hallmark of excessive melodrama that's unnecessary to the thriller, and in this case it's a cheap attempt to make things personal for the hero.
And I don't mind it anymore. It gives them a relationship that leads to some moments I really enjoy. When Blofeld cracks up and says "I've really put you through it, haven't I?" I think it's hilarious, and it works because of the somewhat contrived relationship they've established.
Just because he didn’t do exactly that doesn’t mean he didn’t do similar contrivances. He literally wrote Bond meeting the killer of Oberhauser (his childhood skiing instructor) in the course of his professional investigations, which is exactly what happens here.
The way I recall it that entire C character was supposed to be M. Meaning the plot would revolve around someone giving an external organisation (i.e. SPECTRE) access to the most inner core of British and Nine Eyes intelligence and in the end it turns out that person is M. Ralph Fiennes apparently shot down that idea and said he wouldn't do it, so they had to crowbar a whole new character in there.
As for the whole Blofeld hubbub. I think at the moment one of the things that irks me the most about it is the problem that scene and that plotline has between internal and external logic. The name Blofeld means absolutely nothing to anyone in that scene. He could have said "The man you're talking to now. The man inside your head is Karl Sigmund Stromberg." and it would have meant exactly the same to Bond and Madeleine. There haven't been whispers of a person called Blofeld. There haven't been any breadcrumbs, that would make this any kind of reveal. They haven't been chasing Blofeld for some time like in OHMSS. Nothing. The guy is just telling them he has an alias. Cool.
It's purely the audience for whom the name Ernst Stavro Blofeld has any meaning and the audience either doesn't care or those that know enough about the series to find that interesting put that reveal together several months before the release of the film or at the very, very latest in the board meeting scene. And then, with the Craig era being specifically seperate from the previous films, it doesn't do anything other than being a name drop.
This is great. I can't believe I never noticed that.
Not anywhere similar in sheer silliness, melodramatic corniness, or outrageous implausibility to Bond coming across the head of a multi-national terrorist organization who turns out to be his resentful long-lost foster-sibling.
In contrast, Bond coming across paperwork for a cold case involving a friend from long ago simply isn't that sort of awful, impossible-to-accept contrivance. Fleming never tried to give his supervillains a childhood familial relationship with Bond. Spectre is a case where I wish the writers hadn't strained to include a Fleming reference--there's something twisted about seeing a simple, down-to-earth story used to inflate such a hideous zeppelin.
Well that’s your opinion and not a fact. I would say they’re both contrived and unlikely.
The Spectre one is more overblown, sure, but they’re Bond films, overblown is what they are.
Bond just happening to bump into Blofeld, supervillain and murderer of his wife, on the other side of the world in Japan in YOLT is another one which is presumably totally fine and not melodramatic in any way (bearing in mind the first portion of the novel deals with Bond not handling Tracy’s death well) :D
Indeed,the YOLT novel features surely the biggest coincidence in Bond. Blofeld in Spectre is more at the Paris Carver level. 006 in Goldeneye is probably worse: first a massive coincidence via personal connection, and then reconning Bond into a buddy cop relationship to make it work. (And if it's not enough, Bond stumbles across Alec's plot thanks to another massive coincidence in racing Xenia)
Whether they're successful is up for debate, but I think both YOLT (novel) and Spectre want the Bond-Blofeld thing to have a mythical feel about it, and they just go about it with different contrivances. I feel both work. And I doubt many non-hardcore audience were put off either.
I think the original contrivance of OP, the short-story, becomes clearer, when you look at it from Dexter Smythe's side: He finds out about this gold cache. He asks at his hotel, who the best mountain guide in the area is. He gets the guy, uses him to get the gold, kills him and dumps him into a glacier. And 15 years later, when the body drops out of the ice, one of the guy's former skiing pupils (!) turns out to be the worlds greatest secret agent (!!) who just happens to see the file at his office (!!!) and also just has great connections in Jamaica, where Smythe retired (!!!!). How unlucky can one murderer be?
On the other hand, it's not like Bond did some impossible piece of investigative work. Smythe had apparently officially arrested Oberhauser under his own name and then he just never returned or turned up at any prison or camp or anything. It's honestly more of a mystery how he got away with it for 15 years, now that I think of it.
Yes that’s true. I guess you forgive the 006 thing on the grounds that a defected 00 agent may well eventually do something which piques the interest of international security services, but then also there’s perhaps no immediate reason why Bond, or even MI6, would necessarily investigate the Tiger theft. I guess they’re just being world policemen. The meeting Xenia in Monaco thing is indeed a big ol’ coincidence: oddly I’d never really thought about it! :) Funnily enough they could have eliminated that coincidence pretty easily: just have Bond there because of the Tiger too (or maybe Caroline is working the Tiger security and wanted Bond there so she could evaluate him at the same time). But that probably just adds complexity where it’s not needed.
You could say that Bond causing the incident which makes Le Chiffre lose his money is a coincidence too (does Bond even ever know?), but I guess it’s kind of all part of the same case so nothing too bad.
Haha! :))
Those latter two things are likely what the majority of the casual audience remember about the film, too. The awkward shifts in tone and boring villain plot are also probably ahead of the Brofeld angle, also.
I think they only find out about Le Chiffre and the poker game because somebody did some forensic accounting after the Miami incident and found his shorting. M talks about how something similar happened after 9/11, so it's something they look for now. Bond then also being the best card player in the service (or in the 00 section) is a bit of a coincidence, but nothing major. Most of the chain from Mollaka to Le Chiffre and how Bond is able to follow it is slightly coincidental, but it is more a question of all of the bad guys having just the worst operational security you could ever possibly imagine.
Edit: By the way: Why is MI6 involved in all of this anyway?
Now, Bond meeting the father of his future girlfriend, because Alex Dimitrios apparently couldn't use a burner phone or a cut-out or not do mission critical communication while on his way to gamble at his club, that's something :)).
I think one interesting thing about YOLT is also that, for all of the criticism of the Craig films of being 'too personal', YOLT is a totally personal mission of revenge, which is something the Craig Bond has never actually done- he's always been working a mission and found any revenge he wanted along the way. Unlike Fleming's Bond, he doesn't go after Hannes Oberhauser's killer because he wants to avenge him, he does so because the killer is the head of Spectre and he's messing the world up. The only Bonds I can think of who actually went out on fully off-the-books personal missions are Dalton and Moore (in TMWTGG)- possibly Connery in the opening of DAF too, it's unclear.
Even the opening of Spectre is a mission given to him by DenchM.
No, that's not something. That's happenstance. If you reverse chronologies and think ahead to future significance, everyone you know outside your family is there as the result of what you're calling coincidence.
Ah yes, Bond does know he's done Le Chiffre harm with the jet there, doesn't he. Kind of interesting he never uses that in a mind game once their masks fall.
As you say, the poker thing is a coincidence but nothing too horrendous.
Well I guess that question goes back to why they're watching Mollaka in Madagascar in the first place. Presumably there was some kind of initial threat to the UK we don't hear about?
Ha! Well to be fair, not a coincidence as such, that's just an unlikely event which takes Bond down a path leading to Madeline :)
We should probably start a thread about outrageous coincidences in Bond! :D
The problem is Bond doesn't know Blofeld exists, when he reveals himself. No drama there.
I'm sure there's a few German at the end of the war who got killed by "lost" bullets and never investigated fully, if at all. Must have been pretty chaotic at times. Who was Oberhauser to the allies?
I think a lot of the coincidences in both novels and films can be explained or at least handwaved by Bond's work environment.
You are right. I was being facetious. I will just never tire of how funny it is that Bond and his maybe later father-in-law (question mark?!?) met when the one saved the other from (further) genital torture and being murdered because of a card game. The glamorous world of espionage!
Your comment illustrates my original point perfectly. I like Spectre, but can appreciate those who don't and find it a flat film. My feeling is that people are not admitting that maybe Spectre didnt do it for them so they have to come up with some major flaw to the film. Brofeld is overblown in my opinion. Blofeld and Bond have a connection its similar to Silva, Trevelyan, and Carver. Its okay for people just to not like Spectre without tearing it apart for a plot point that many have noted could just as easily not have been there in the film. Bond for the last 20 years has relied on emotional stakes it just may not have been effective for some people in Spectre. As I said based on my work and appreciation for family dynamics it works for me, but I do have to be looking at it through that lens for it to have the emotional payoff. I am looking forward to No Time To Die because I think Cary can continue the trend of emotional stakes connected to Bond but do it in a more natural way.
I think you're pretty on the money here. Now, I should clarify that I don't like the Brofeld aspect at all, but it's way down the list on things I dislike about the film and I definitely would like to reiterate that I think most casual moviegoers who didn't like the film would feel similarly. I'd wager that most people probably don't care about it at all, in fact.
With every rewatch of the film, the lack of urgency surrounding the Nine Eyes plot comes more into focus for me and that's a bigger sin, along with the subpar action etc that @QBranch listed.
Basically, Brofeld didn't ruin a good film. It was just another mediocre aspect of a mediocre film, I feel.
I think you're right, the film in general just doesn't quite click together and the Brofeld thing (although a bit of an eye-roller) probably actually helps to tie it together more than it makes it fail: it's just a bit lacking in other areas.
I think it just doesn't have that satisfying nature to the plot which something like Skyfall does, or something like Mission Impossible Rogue Nation which I think has a sort of perfect plot which slots together in a totally satisfying way. I'm not saying it's a great or original plot, it just slots together perfectly and makes everything on the screen work perfectly and satisfies the audience. I'm not a writer so I don't know exactly how one does it and the other doesn't! :)