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No, I can understand if fans don't like SF. It's not everyones cup of tea, particularly if you prefer the OTT escapist Bonds with plenty of humour and gadgets, or don't like Craig's Bond.
What I get more baffled by is fans who love CR and QoS, but hate SF. This is where I am perplexed, as to me they all cut from the same cloth, with just a slight variation for each film.
CR and SF both have their tone firmly in the world of Fleming. CR has a more violent edge, which is toned down in SF, but they are both down-to-earth, espionage style thrillers. SF replaces action set-pieces like Miami Airport and the Venice sinking building with more gripping, stripped back chase scenes such as the brilliant London Underground chase with Bond and Silva. I watched SF again the other night and forgot just how good that scene is.
Seeing Craig in the middle of rush hour on the Tube, and a panicing Q surveying whether Silva is on the train or not was just superb, much better than Miami airport or Venice, and better than anything seen in QoS. I think SF has many brilliant highlights - seeing Bond lose his fitness being just one of them.
QoS is the poorest of the 3 - bad editing, bad direction, weak script, yet still firmly in the Craig Bond world. The violence is now only superficial, with Craig looking bloody and battered, yet performing superhuman feats throughout, particularly the awful freefall scene.
I can understand fans not liking QoS but prefering CR and SF instead, but loving CR and QoS, yet hating SF I find very baffling.
ANYONE with only a Fiber of a Brain cell would SURELY know,that when someone Talks about realism in DAD he means the First Hour (which has realism and Storyline in abundance,at least compared to ....you know what.
Oh,sorry. I forgot,that i was Talking to Willy Guy. I meant Skyfall.
No, I can understand if fans don't like SF. It's not everyones cup of tea, particularly if you prefer the OTT escapist Bonds with plenty of humour and gadgets, or don't like Craig's Bond.
I can understand fans not liking QoS but prefering CR and SF instead, but loving CR and QoS, yet hating SF I find very baffling.[/quote]
A) ... Or insist on any Kind of Logic.
B) Sure you do!
The first hour in DAD is realistic is it? Which bit? Brozza faking his heartbeat in bed after months of torture, then springing to life to beat every guy in the room up? Was that the kind of realism you meant?
Which brain cell of yours is this registering with, Mr. Helm. Cell No. 1 or Cell No. 2?
I think you're missing my point - again.
One of the problems I have with SF is precisely the way in which it's gone back towards the Brosnan era box-ticking approach with a crazy camp villain, OTT plot, the DB5. It's like you can see P+W bolting the kit of parts together. I don't actually mind a bit of OTT or camp, but for me SF doesn't do any of these things very well. Silva's entrance is decent but after that the character becomes boring and directionless (his plan and plotting is all over the place).
A lot of people on here (even some who like it) have commented that SF feels like it's gone in a different direction to CR and QoS. CR and QoS felt like they were forging a new path - not constantly looking over their shoulders to Bonds past. I put CR and QoS mid table personally. I am not a huge fan of them, but I respect them and think they're both decent efforts. I just found SF a really retrograde step - badly written, directed and frankly boring. I actually found the 'character' stuff very weakly written and a massive disappointment. I just think all the stuff about a great script was BS - all we get is fragmented largely meaningless scenes that tell us nothing about Bond we didn't know already, but with a big spoonful of pretentiousness.
Again and only because i know about your limitations: COMPARED TO SF!
What I have noticed is that some see Bond as one continual genre, others evaluate each film according to their own logic. So, I like Moonraker because on its own terms, I think it works, hovercraft gondola and all. But. Put that scene at the end of FRWL and I concede it would be atrocious and I'd hate it totally. In fact, put most scenes from Moore films, and a few from Connery's, in FRWL and they would be out of place.
However. I'm not sure that many scenes in SF would be out of place of their accord in any other Bond film, loosely speaking. It's just, in the film itself, it just doesn't quite work according to its own lights. And that's how I judge it.
So it's okay for hopimike to say, well, I prefer DAD to SF, because as bad as DAD is, it is trying to be a different film anyway. SF is trying to be more serious, and on that basis, relatively speaking, there are a similar kind of implausbilities and Wade and Purvis have their fingerprints over both, even the 'wicked old M leaves her agents to die/lures someone as bait' routine. And a continual sense of looking back somehow, to other films in the franchise.
Of course, other fans see it differently.
If you're saying what I think you're saying, then I think I agree with you.
"I'll Get You my Pretty & Your Little Licence to Kill Too!" :))
Yes, like sending yourself into cardiac arrest and then coming to at will
8-|
Again - i was comparing it to SF
I guess I'm saying that Bond films are largely post-modern and have been since Brozzer took over, even were a bit with Dalton. They cannot stick to their own thing, they have incorporate bits of tone from the past. And that jars for me, but other fans find it comforting.
So much of SF could, concievably, fit in to past Bond films. But within one film, it's a big ask somehow.
I don't mind so much when the film is more light-hearted perhaps, but it jars when the theme is serious, as with DAD, bits of QoS and SF. It's a distraction.
Why don't you explain why do you think the first hour DAD ( :-& ) is more realistic that SF?
You could argue that tracking down your key antagonist via the conflict diamonds he trades, is more plausible than tracking one down via some bullet shrapnel and a casino chip. I'm not arguing DAD is great by any means.
It's evident that P+W's plotting is sketchy at best.
I'm SO glad they've gone. I bet Mendes told Babs she had to fire those idiots. He spent 4 years working on the plot and script with DC (neither of them are writers) and the end result is still very poor. I bet DC had been angling to get rid of them since the start. It's no coincidence that Haggis and Logan were brought in on his films to try and add some life to P+W's dodgy screenplays.
However, P&W did also say the original script was based on Bond being brainwashed, from TMWTGG, and the title was Magic 44 (from YOLT), so maybe their ideas weren't all bad.
Who knows? I'm guessing the Bond scripts are all done by committee these days, so everyone has an input, then the result is a miss-mash of lots of ideas thrown into the mix, so to blame P&W solely for the scripts they wrote may be inaccurate.
I must admit I like that idea too. Maybe they could use it as a story for a future Bond flick (although for now we should maybe move away from the "M's life in jeopardy" ange as we had a big dose of that in the last two Bond films).
I'm worried that with all of the new, young actors and smarmy acting it's going to turn into an episode of Doctor Who or something *cringes*
To have the film start of with Bond trying to kill M, then trying to save her, sort of makes sense. Though ok, more sense to have M almost killing Bond, then him trying to save her, as was filmed. The symmetry doesn't really work though, better to have Bond realise we're all fallible in that he tries to do the right thing by M, but she dies, just as she screwed up in the pts.
But to have him forget himself (be brainwashed), then return to his old home, possibly to trigger his memories of self ,imo sort of works better than what we got in the film, where his old home is just thrown in at the end. That's the thing, a lot of these films get rejigged so you have the sense that good scenes somehow belong in another movie. Like the shrink, for instance. Would make more sense in Magic 44 (though that title might get mixed up with that awful recent US comedy, Movie 24 or something!)
Wtf? I always thought people were too hard on Purvis and Wade but for the SF script to be altered so that Bond can be focused on as the central character in his own movie makes me wonder wtf those 2 were thinking. As for Bond being brainwashed, really?? I know it happened in the novel but does cinematic Bond really need that especially at this time? Even now, SF is still being referred to as a Bourne wannabe (even though I don't see it).
Well, I am so glad they're gone. Hopefully Logan can write a decent script/screenplay that dials down the absurdity.
But I'm from that era. Ironically, it was NSNA that was the first to make it more about Bond than the villain. Now he's the guy, it's about his inner journey and so on. Actually OHMSS was Bondcentric too.
I get it, but it seems contrived to me, and of course can be way too gradual. I mean, Bond can't keep changing during the course of a movie. Then again, Moore moaned that Bond is always the same at the end of the film as he is at the beginning, but it used to be about the circus that is around him, while he is consistent.
Titles may focus on the villain, but the books were always, always about Bond himself, his thoughts, his feelings, getting inside his head. Fleming very rarely deviated away from this concept throughout all the books, other than OP and TSWLM.
This is why LTK, OHMSS, CR and SF work so well for me, in that each of these films has Bond as the main focus.
This is a sentiment I've discussed many a time with friends. It's also something I tend to stick with when developing my own ideas/scripts. I always take the view that a films hero is only as good their villain. Without an interesting threat to the protagonist, the whole thing falls apart. It doesn't matter how well rounded your protagonist is, if the threat is diminished, there are no interesting dynamics to explore. Look at The Joker, still possibly the greatest fictional villain in history.
My slight problem with SF is that Silva's beef is purely with 'M', and indirectly with Bond. Bond is effectively collateral, so at no point does Silva ever come under genuine threat until the very final moment. I never get the sense that Silva ever feels under pressure, nothing Bond does ever forces him to reconsider the situation. Even reaching SF is like clockwork.
I would say this is true in most cases except (perhaps) FRWL. It seems that, while the book is about an assasination plot on Bond, most of the time is spent with the other characters (Grant, Klebb, Tanya etc) and when Bond IS in the picture he is usually with other people listening to them tell stories and explain stuff (Kerim, Grant).
Although one exception for this is the shooting of Kerim's nemisis, which demonstrates how uncomfortable Bond is about killing in cold blood.
Silva is under direct threat from Bond long before arriving at Skyfall Lodge, as much as Bond is displeased with M he realizes that Silva has to be stopped, if for nothing else than his murdered colleagues, which we know going all the way back to the original era is something Bond takes very seriously. I do think that Silva was plenty unnerved when Bond survived in the tube and ruined his plan to kill M in public, and that was the instance where he felt pressure that carried on for the rest of the way. Now he's without a plan and has Bond hot on his tail, and is trying to figure out how to get to M next, this was a contingency he probably didn't consider thinking he had the perfect plan to begin with. Silva in his egocentric manner next doesn't seem to realize he's been set up, because again he feels the pressure to find M and finish her. The pressure relaxes because he thinks his skill alone is how he tracked down M, he's back on top. And while he thought he was a better agent than Bond, which he alludes to during their first meeting, I think he sees Bond in a different light when he reaches Scotland. When he realizes that he has the advantage in men and firepower, he wants Bond immediately taken out knowing he can't get to M with him still able to save her. So I feel there is a definite threat to the protagonists (both Bond and M) that is needed, as well as more of the classic case of the megalomaniac antagonist thinking he's got it all figured out.
Is he? Like you say, I think the only time Bond becomes a threat is when he 'changes the game'. If we go back to the notion that Silva's primary target is 'M', Bond does little to help until the final act. You'd have thought a man of Bond's intuition would have kept Silva and M at arms length for the most part. This is a problem for me throughout, the ineptitude of the key players. M, in letting her agents die, seemingly on a whim (a character trait straight out of left-field), a Bond who's lost it, and spends most of the film trying to find it again (interesting move, but done better in TMWTGG novel) and a villain who can somehow orchestrate the most audaciously convenient plan in Bond history, only to drop the ball at the last minute because someone shoots a fire extinguisher. Now I know, it's old vs. new symbolism, but I'd much rather have a solid plot than symbolism and semantics. All in all every character does the shittest job they possibly can.
1. Bond loses the list and fails to save M. Seemingly his two key objectives, outside of stopping Silva.
2. M leaves Ronson and Bond for dead, plus countless others whose identities are leaked.
Then along with Bond they leave Silva in a giant glass cell with one useless cockney guard watching him. This is a bloke who is apparently one of the most dangerous men on the planet. So dangerous she'd risk her own agents to pursue him but can't spare the funds to have him watched 24/7.
3. Silva goes to the trouble of orchestrating a plot over the course of many months, if not years, gets spooked by a fire extinguisher and then gets himself killed.
All in all not a good day at the office for anyone really.
Obviously this is all academic as amending my misgivings would require a wholesale restructure of the story, rather than some tweaks.