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Comments
I'm very conflicted about the film. The PTS sucks me in right away. Brosnan is awesome. Arnold brings the right sound. Some of the film is classic Bond and I vividly remember the Winter of '97; while everyone and their dog were taking some boat for a dive, I was looking forward to the next 007. The action is very good too. But some parts of the film are a jolted mess. More than that, the story let me down. After GE, a film that I considered to be a near-perfect Bond film, serious and clever, TND flirted a bit too much with the absurd, IMO. I didn't leave the theatre completely satisfied. Then again, my opinion of TWINE was even worse in '99... and then DAD happened. What I mean to say is that TND "improved" because its two successors lowered the bar.
Connery didn’t really conform to Fleming’s character either. In fact, none of the actors besides Dalton really did.
NTTD lowered the bar for me. Suddenly DAD is a good movie!
And Lazenby, but I bet most part of that was due to the film being closer to the book though.
And I think, Craig in SPECTRE also nailed the Fleming Bond in some ways (not actaully 100%, but in some scenes).
And that's the reason why I'm not a fan of Moore's Bond, sure, he made the character his own, but as you've said, for better or worse, although I'm clinging towards that latter part, and it's exactly the reason that he played Bond too far from how he's written, he almost changed the character.
Sure, I'm no against putting some new elements to the character, but with Moore, it's almost an entire, different interpretation (that's not almost recognizable).
He's what I call the built-in-by default type of Bond, in that, he used his own persona to play the character, he's built that way, in almost all of the roles that I've seen him in was basically much himself (pretty much the same, yes even the more serious ones), I just couldn't take the guy seriously.
Okay, back to Brosnan, I think the problem that I see with Brosnan's Bond was the lack of Fleming to worked with, I think what establishes an actor in the role is through a Fleming element.
It's the era where it's purely original scripts, and I can carefully call Brosnan's Bond, the EON Bond in the sense that all of the scripts that he'd worked with was out of the Fleming realm.
I think the problem was in that, Brosnan is a good Bond, he's flexible and he's easy to shape in according to the scripts, and given a proper material to worked with, he would've been good, almost every Bond actor had a Fleming material that brought out the certain characteristics of their Bond (again, except Moore, beause he had his own built-in-by default type of performance) something that Brosnan never had the chance to do.
He, unlike Moore, could be easily shaped into depending what the role wanted him to do, I mean Moore was given a lot of Fleming material to worked with but he had a default type of how he played the character, and that's not Brosnan, I think.
In fairness to Moore I think his take on Bond was relatively in line with the approach perfected by Connery. The cinematic Bond kinda took Fleming's character, heightened certain aspects of it, and introduced more of a tongue in cheek irony to the whole thing. That's not to say Moore or Connery didn't play the part with humanity (in fact knowing when to play things 'straight' is a talent those two actors had) but I don't think either actor was ever meant to fully conform to Ian Fleming's Bond.
Brosnan had his moments where I thought he resembled the literary Bond, and indeed the material he was given seemed to consciously evoke it. The beach scene in GE is an example, as is the hotel scene in TND with Paris. Both scenes are pretty solid in the sense that Brosnan is suitably understated. I think his problems came about because of a) his limitations as an actor, and b) the fact that the material he was given in his last two films were either out of his range or hadn't matured into what the series would do later. TWINE is the main example. His performance in that is downright embarrassing at times.
TWINE is and always will be my favorite of Brosnan's appearances in the role, in that there's so much going on or something to keep the viewer occupied. Brosnan should have been given the role back around '87 before Dalton, fans will argue he made his debut a number of years a little too late. His Remington Steel contract/s denied him but all told he did a faithful enough job for the Fleming character. Can never better Connery, Dalton or Craig however.
It's a film that had a great premise, but what we've got was this generic 90's action film with a lot of martial arts, with a villain that's very hard to take seriously as this mad man hellbent on creating a war for his own good (I see the character of Elliot Carver, as a narcissistic, politically active guy, he's serious and business minded throughout, but one can tell how crazy was him deep inside), and that's not what Jonathan Pryce had shown us, he's very funky, I can see him being a comic villain in the childish romp films like Home Alone.
Yes, none of the plots in the Brosnan Era really made sense and plausible if one may think about it, but this one in TND, where they've got it right in the concept, but failed again, because of how it came to the actual film.
It's a film that had a great potential inside, but wasted on the outside.
It's my favourite too. There's a thread that asks 'where does Bond go after Craig', well, I'd be quite happy with a film every two years, if it was full of fun and thrills like Tomorrow Never Dies.