It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!
^ Back to Top
The MI6 Community is unofficial and in no way associated or linked with EON Productions, MGM, Sony Pictures, Activision or Ian Fleming Publications. Any views expressed on this website are of the individual members and do not necessarily reflect those of the Community owners. Any video or images displayed in topics on MI6 Community are embedded by users from third party sites and as such MI6 Community and its owners take no responsibility for this material.
James Bond News • James Bond Articles • James Bond Magazine
Comments
Oh that's way cool, glad I'm not the only young guy here! We should form some sort of James Bond youth club. JBYC
Studying the various (Bond) girls "in-depth" will be one of the main subjects.
how about James Bond Juniors
A couple of years ago, we covered this. Somewhere, there are numbers that show that SF played HUGE with the 40+ film crowd. Older audiences went to this film en masse. And it makes sense, because Bond was being portrayed as too old, a dinosaur, a relic. This theme really hit home for those of us who are older.
On a separate note, based on other posts by @SaintMark ...
SF's brilliance can be pinpointed to three lines, all on the island:
Severine: "It's amazing the panic you can cause with a single computer."
Silva: "All the physical stuff. So dull, so dull. Chasing spies. So old fashioned. Your knees must be killing you.
Silva: "Just point and click."
Those three lines are the key to the film and the key to Silva, whose massive flaw is that while wanting to embarrass MI6 on his terms (pointing and clicking), he insists on defeating/killing M on hers (in the field, with all that dull physical stuff). And the latter is what sets him up for failure.
Some say that Silva ended up winning. But he didn't. While M died, she did NOT die in the way that Silva wanted. He wanted the personal satisfaction of it; he needed to be close to her physically. This is where the deeper psychology comes in and how "mother" takes on a whole different dynamic.
I could go on and on. SF is the only Bond film that allows such deeper readings.
you are funny...religion has nothing to do with it...
Some have called that pretentious. Others (including myself) would simply say that you are correct.
These themes are repeated with Bond's conversation with Q in the art gallery. Q actually agrees with Silva.
"Well, I'll hazard I can do more damage on my laptop sitting in my pajamas before my first cup of Earl Grey than you can do in a year in the field. "
Bond is being told from all sides that "the game is up". When Bond decides to "go back in time", he moves us to a location with no internet access, no 3G, no tech Etc etc.
He deprives the bad guy of his advantages and helps evens the odds.
"Sometimes the old ways " etc etc.
Can people go back to other Bond movies and see themes running through them , as Kermode said during his review "like words through a stick of rock"?
Ha. I do know I'm guilty of that too.
But even I didn't notice things like the change of sides regarding the steering wheel in the DB5 between CR and SF.
I was 16 as well. I can't believe so much time has passed.
Nice to know that we covered this years ago with a group of people who think Craig is god and the Craig movies are great. There are people that think differently I still have no clue what made SF so successful but it is just not a very good constructed movie when it comes to a realistic 007. Being a dinosaur has never really been that great a card since we heard it already in GE when M accused 007 of that particular sentiment. Must explain the succes then of GE and Brosnan and how that sounded to the +40 crowd at that time.
While SF is beautifully filmed, as was Moonraker, the movie made no sense at all and was very poorly scripted as an action movie or even a thriller. James Bond never was anything else even in Flemings hands. It was an attempt to show the character of a deeper James Bond and he was essentially what he always was drink, women and shoot some bad guys Oh and in the proces get his boss killed. Had he stayed in the bar she would have been killed too. So what was really gained but a false sense of patriotism and getting a shedload of people killed.
For me and many people I know that like to re watch this series ever so often it seems that we generally tend to watch the older 007 movies because they are better done by a team that seems to love the series and the character. With Craig and Mendes I feel that they want to do something to show how much he suffers under his job and then come up with story hooks that do the character favors. He loses a friend and treats him like garbage, kills his boss and finds out that the architect of all his pain is his foster brother Blofeld. Bond fans who like this should stop complaining about the Mark hamill role and TLJ. ;)
For me the franchise is losing steam ever since CR which is easily Craigs high moment in the franchise. I do hope we get a fifth outing that is essentially 007 doing his job without any navel-gazing in a decent actioner and without his archenemy Blofeld, who makes very little sense sand TB, OHMSS & YOLT which are in essence the Blofeld trilogy.
SF is a nice movie to look at but has so little content that makes sense at all, too many pretentious stuff with the poem and really stupid stuff like Silva being clairvoyent, flying war choppers through a very densely controlled piece of airspace and the Apocalypse now moment with M in essence being lead to her dead by an agent who did not qualify and oh what a surprise he effing failed. And then he gets reinstated for a failure. It does perhaps explain the governmental mess there is in the UK, in that case the movie was really a moment of the future.
This movie frustrates because of the really poor performance we get from Mendes not in one but in two movies. People complain about Brosnan but the Craig era has a lot of bad stuff too.
perhaps Barbara and Michael should pass on the reigns as they seem to have done poorly ever since they lost the big Broccoli himself. They have done both actors under their reign no real favors. I do hope the fifth Craig is a half decent movie because he does deserve it.
I agree with a lot of this. I like the connection to the current state of the UK as well. It has also struck me as well how there was something quite prescient about SF in tapping into that latent pathetic British sense of exceptionalism. As you say the film is actually rather shoddily written, poorly thought through and incoherent - the perfect cinematic metaphor for Brexit and today’s Britain. And just as with Brexit, Bond’s ‘strategy’ is sort of all bluff and bluster, with ultimate failure wrapped up as some glorious national triumph.
Well, first off, my preface about "a copule of years ago" was aimed at my recollection of box office numbers and not some sort of criticism of any stale conversation. Quite the opposite.
But to your points about SF. If you go back to the key lines from the film, they explain away some of the complaints you have, including the choppers and the clairvoyance. With a "point and click," it's more than possible that Silva can make himself disappear, even to military radar. Read this for an example:
https://www.wired.com/2007/10/how-israel-spoo/
Again, Severine and Silva have already established that he can do just about anything with a "single computer." And this even includes making people afraid. That leads us to the clairvoyance, which likely doesn't exist. Silva couldn't tell the future; he could only make you Q and MI6 (and even audience members) think he could. That's just another example of the script's brilliance.
--Did Silva know MI6 would head underground? Lilely.
--Did Silva plan to get apprehended? Not until he knew Bond was on the Chimera.
--Did Silva plan weeks in advance to hack into the MI6 network and free himself? Probably not.
--Did Silva know for sure that Bond would follow him through the underground to that exact location where he set the charge? Probably not. (He likely had his henchmen set up boobytraps like that all over the place.) And like the explosion at MI6, he wasn't interested in causing death by explosion. He wanted the hand-to-hand kill. Instead, he was more interested in showing Bond how "clever" he was...remember his message to Q: "Not such a clever boy." Silva is obsessed with showing everyone how smart/brilliant he is, even in instances when it doesn't serve his best interests.
More importantly, because fans love and appreciate SF doesn't mean they don't love and appreciate other Bond films from other eras. I love CR, along with GF, TB, FRWL, OHMSS, and so on. Heck, my guilty pleasures are DAF and LTK. I love em all. And that's the beauty of this franchise. It offers so many different tastes and moods. For instance, if it's 3 am and I can't sleep, I'd throw on YOLT.
I don't get the impression his review of SP will be a very positive one.
I think Skyfall is a pretty good movie right up until the moment of Silva's capture, then it goes sideways and becomes annoying for me. I also agree that Bérénice Marlohe was sensational in her role. One of the best Bond girl performances up alongside Eva Green and Diana Rigg.
It'll be interesting for sure to see SP a second time. QoS has escaped the bottom of my ranking and who knows SP may end up to be my No 4 in the Craig Bondography.
SF will never make it to the heights that CR has. CR simply blew my mind on so many levels.
SF is the next best thing, a worthy lower Top 10 entry. Not more not less. For me that is.
People think it will make Bond more interesting by us finding out more about his past. The thing is I don't think Bond was ever meant to be that interesting. He was a fairly bland slightly enigmatic character. I agree that this backstory stuff is feeling more contrived with each film and you can sense that things are being made up as they go along.
I'd forgotten about that clip of Mendes saying at the SF press conference that Skyfall "was its own story" rather than a continuation of Quantum. That's a big mark against SP in itself.
No matter how much time you spent to think it through ( or to fool yourself )or to what length you go to explain whatever away, there is absolutely nothing that can redeem Skyfall on the logical front. At the end it remains a mess whose storyline would insults a 12 year old, let alone an adult.
I'm in that age group and that theme didn't hit home with me. I go to James Bond films for escapism and a fun time, not to be reminded of such things, NSNA aside. Even when Moore was in his final adventures and I was a teen it wasn't about age, it was about James Bond, the character.
I think SF captured the surface essence of Bond style better than any film since GE and that is why it was similarly successful and responsible for bringing new audiences into the fold. CR, despite all its qualities, didn't really do that.
GE & SF are very different kinds of films but they both hit a nerve with the masses and were the right films for their time. They both were very clear about Bond's place in the world at the time they were made.
I don't know, either. I just remember that someone posted the BO numbers, and it was surprising. I do think the way the film was marketed, along with its storyline, somehow appealed to older audiences. I know my dad went to see it three times, and he hadn't been to a Bond film in a decade.
Yeah the whole dramatic dead parents (I know he was an orphan in the books but it was never played up as a big origin story) angle and Brofeld don't really fit with the ordinary guy (well Bond should never be ordinary, he's James Bond, but I think the point is he's just a guy doing a job and it isn't usually about him) who has extraordinary things happen to him that Fleming described.
We'll agree to disagree. Against all other Bond plotlines, SF comes out at or near the top in terms of plausibility.
That's what I liked about the earlier films. Bond was an enigma, but we could glean certain aspects of his character through how he reacts over a series of films to the scenarios he is put in. Recently they've tried to play up the 'hero' aspects (understandable given what's all the rage) but to me it's a bit much.