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His hair looks real long a few minutes earlier when he says " Don't push any of the button on that car."
You're right on some level, of course. This all came out of a discussion of Bruce Feirstein's script not offering Pierce a solid characterization of Bond, and these recontextualizations, retcons, or revisions seemed to me like part of the problem, and "toppling dictators" is just one of them. His version of who James Bond is seems indistinguishable from that of a person who has never seen a James Bond movie. Without the other 23 (or then 16) films, a lot of this stuff is absolutely fine.
Though I wouldn't mind getting to see one of those dictator-toppling buddy cop adventures!
Yes, it doesn't require an explanation. Which is why I wasn't really offering an explanation for it. That was just a note regarding Bond and Trevelyan's relationship not being what it has been accused of being, here. It was the whole conversation I was referring to, rather than just that one line. The only chink in my armour there is the line "I trusted you, Alec".
Anytime I think I might be overanalysing something, I will refer back to this comment as a control, @ProfJoeButcher! :)) You have me, here. I actually don't even know what to say back to it!
I guess to me, none of these things are any more poorly done than any other transitionary film from actor to actor. The Craig era seems more egregious in its decision making as to Bond's attitudes, relationships, etc. But that's also in keeping with updating Bond for a new time. Obviously that has the benefit of being an obvious reboot - but while there's debate about timelines and things like that, I'm happy to not consider Brosnan's Bond as the same Bond as Moore or Connery or even Dalton. It was just another step in the series evolution while still being unmistakably Bond.
+1. Despite the relatively more serious aspects of CR it's the most "fun" Craig Bond film for me.
+1. I'm a huge fan of both MR and Dalton Bond also. I think MR is for me what TSWLM is for many fans while TLD is my FYEO.
I can see you what you're saying. MR was the last Bond film for Bernard Lee, Ken Adam, and (most likely) Shirley Bassey. In retrospect it was kind of an end of an era. I remember feeling let down when I first saw FYEO and the standard trope of Bond and the girl escaping from the villain's HQ as it exploded(which had, more or less, been there since Bond and Honey escaped from Crab Key at the end of DN) was discarded. With the exceptions of TLD, CR and OP, the remainder of the top half of my Bond film ranking list are all films from the 1962-1979 period due in no small part to the ambience and swagger they exude.
:)) Well, we've apparently had some kind of miscommunication! I thought you were suggesting that Alec was being over the top in his conversation with Bond, and should not be taken literally. I do overanalyze sometimes, but here, I'm just wondering where you're finding subtext where it's not apparent. I'm hardly analyzing the text at all. As to the way I'm characterizing Bond and Alec's relationship, to state it simply, they were regular partners who shared a credo and went on political missions together to topple dictators and undermine regimes. I mean, that's what's in the movie.
But I agree on each Bond kind of being its own thing. Continuity prior to Craig is just not an issue, obviously. But this one, and obviously I'm in a minority, strikes me as a major fundamental change to what Bond is supposed to be, and it's not applied only to the Brosnan era, it's applied retroactively. "Ready to save the world again?"
(EDIT) Wasn't Trevelyan originally an older mentor figure instead of a 00 buddy Bond regularly worked with? Aside from allowing Alec's age to make some amount of sense given his Kossack backstory, it would have also been less of a shakeup....
Anyway, I'll leave it here as I don't want to detail more than I have! Sixteen films of Bond generally going it alone against non-state actors are followed by a 17th that presents his history as being half of an equal partnership in undermining and dismantling enemy governments. That this is a (short-lived!) revision should be too uncontroversial for this thread anyway! ;)
That’s how I always viewed it.
I think many fans read way too into the “he’s planned this for years” line by Q, as if Silva anticipated EVERYTHING to the last detail. Except he never anticipated things like Mallory jumping in front of M to take a bullet.
Well, there are a few more items, like the doors opening exactly after Q stupidly attached the network cable to Silva's laptop. Rather a stupid mistake tbh, when you work in a highly secure environment, but how would Silva time that one? Makes little sense to me. It would be far more convincing if that didn't happen directly, but i.e. hours later -> then the timing would make sense.
Thats one mystery i cant solve. I like to pretend the guard is in on it, the one that says "going somewhere?", it is a strange but enjoyable moment !
That's a good point. Villains cheating or getting away with something easily feels very Fleming (and let's face it, tight plotting was not Fleming's strong suit).
Yet somehow it feels unfair if it's too easy for Bond...LALD, I'm looking at your buzzsaw watch.
The timing here never really bothered me that much, it'd be safe for Silva to assume the higher priority would be getting him in that cage, and then he just set his computer to open the doors as soon as it was plugged in, which he could assume would be after they locked him up. Maybe I'm missing something though.
No you don't read Flemimg for his plots. He is great at character and atmosphere, but he never was a great plotter.
But ultimately the Bond novels wouldn't be as memorable or as good as they are if they were tightly plotted in the manner of a classic detective story. Their atmosphere and characters and concepts are almost oneric--arguably they have more in common with surrealist works than detective stories. Fleming would sit down at the typewriter with only the loosest plot in his head; he would type headlong, never looking back for fear that he would lose his pace. The books have the spontaneity and headlong drive of vivid dreams. This also made them easier to adapt to film, the art form most suited to bringing dreams to life.
I love the buzzsaw watch as a gadget: it’s such a lovely design idea. But you’re right that it breaks the rule of gadget use: some you don’t have to set up (it’s fine for Bond to pull out his Sharper Image window unlocker credit card without us know about it as it doesn’t get him out of a scrape) but some you absolutely do have to be told about beforehand otherwise it looks too convenient and a magic solution. Sometimes it can come as a fun surprise (underwater Lotus) but sometimes it’s too much of a chest unless you know he’s got them.
In defense of LALD's buzzsaw watch, they do set up in the post-titles scene that Bond is getting a new tricked-out watch. I actually rather like that we sometimes see Bond use gadgets that aren't set up during a briefing. Like the watch detonator in MR or the piton and rappelling wire in TWINE. They're fun, surprising little moments, and it makes sense that Bond has some equipment that wasn't invented purely for the one assignment.
I think it does work better when they pop up mid-action sequence just to give Bond a little edge over the competition rather than as his one way out of certain doom, so I can see why the buzzsaw would feel like a screenwriting cheat, but the moment has never read that way to me. I don't think LALD's climax would have been improved any had Bond used his watch to slice M some fresh biscuits to go with his coffee. ;)
Interesting take. What makes that buzzsaw watch gimmick more frustrating is during that opening scene when Bond gets the watch they go out of the way to tease it having the ability to deflect the path of a bullet at long range but does nothing with that and instead produces something we didn't know about and is just too convenient.
My problem with the rappelling watch is it's hard to accept that there was that much wire to go that far and that it was strong enough to hold two people. The GE version of that gadget was more acceptable.
You'd have to think Bond would carry a few gadgets with him at any time. But when they seem too convenient is when it becomes a distraction. The worst offender is the artificial volcano climbing gear in YOLT. So Bond woke up that morning to investigate that cave where the poison gas came from and thought it would be good to have that gear with him cause you never know when you may encounter an artificial volcano you'll need to climb from the very top.
An ironic reverse of that is Bond having the mini safecracker in YOLT that solves the code in about a minute and then reverting to a huge machine in OHMSS that takes a much longer time to solve.
That one only had to hold one person. There are many parts of every Bond film that stretch plausibility. Nearly every gadget produced by Q Branch falls under that category. That's what makes Bond sci-fantasy. This isn't one of the series' many creative liberties I lose sleep over. ;)
I also think it's a generation thing: John Buchan before him was not a great plotter either (his novels were filled with contrived coincidences) and Raymond Chandler tend to get messy with plots.
(Which we did get in CR to some extent, but I wouldn’t want that every time)
I have problems with TWINE, but stuff like Cigar Girl waiting for Bond’s head to pop up from the blast hole on MI6 so to shoot at him so to instigate an elaborate boat chase is the least of my problems with that film.
Which is ironic considering he fails the mission lol
Well, not massively ironic as that's how Fleming wrote it! :)