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Comments
very well put @0BradyM0Bondfanatic7
@chrisisall Bond has no clue what was going to happen, he has to assess the situation and make sure he wouldn't be putting his own life in danger by making any rash decision...
i've seen Bond show less emotion in other films for the death of a women - but people love to nitpick this scene because they just love to hate.
so the confidence in bedding a woman is the same confidence it takes to make a life and death decision??
=))
if anything, what that shows me is NOT amateurish and manipulative film-making... but a character who is trying to regain his edge/nerve... yes, he was good enough to bed her and manipulate her - but look at what cost - by doing what he did, he compromised her life.... remember, Bond was flying by until that time thinking that he passed all the tests - then Silva threw the real scores at him - which he knew were real because of the fact that Silva brought up the "unresolved childhood trauma" line from the psychiatrist's report - to get all that thrown at you, then be forced into a situation that you are not sure what is going to happen - only to find out that you now have to shoot a shot glass of a girl's head - the same girl YOU yourself put in the situation........... yeah, no confidence issues at all - he should've just killed Silva and his guards with 1 bullet and ended the film early for all of us...
Dude, we over-analyze our obsessions. It's a fan thing.
I only hate MR, and as such, I rarely discuss it in detail.
The rest is play. B-)
And oddly enough, out of all my complaints with SF, Bond's reaction to Severine's death was not one of them. Bond remained detached as usual and didn't want to show emotion over her death, especially because he was planning his inevitable attack that happened a few moments later. I don't see the lack of realism here.
in FRWL... Grant should've just killed Bond instead of knocking him out.. he could've put a bullet in him, walked into the next compartment, killed Tanya - and then just walked out with the Lector scot-free..
in TB, Bond could've turned and shot Largo with the rifle while skeet shooting, could've made a miraculous escape - discover the bombs later with Felix and then call in the US military to recover them..
in YOLT, why not let Bond get into the rocket - then once it's in orbit, blow it up??.. Blofeld knew it was Bond getting in at the last minute, and the rocket had a denator built in (as we found out, courtesy of Blofeld).. why not just let him go up there and die?... and even if he didn't know it has him... just let him go up - then once something starts not going to plan - blow the rocket up then??..
in OHMSS, how did Blofeld not know it was Bond the entire time?? They obviously met face to face before... but not only that, why not just kill him - throw him down in the wheel house... let his body go undiscovered - by the time M and the rest of MI6 would know what happened, it would already be too late..
etc. etc. etc.
everyone one of those films were made and written by amateurs...... terrible - all of them
8-|
Don't forget in Goldfinger, Oddjob could have killed Bond in the first 10 minutes. Instead, Goldfinger let's Bond live and even treats him to some luxury in his Farm. Could have killed him, but no. Goldfinger's own stupidity was his downfall.
Have her die as seen, but don't have bond seduce her in the shower.
Have him seduce her in the shower, but let her live.
It was just handled pretty nastily IMO.
But it's only my opinion, based on the type of Bond scenes I am comfortable with. Andrea's death in TMWTGG was similarly off-putting to me.
Perhaps I need to reassess my Bond comfort zone.
The 'waste of a good scotch' quip is in bad taste but at that point Bond is being portrayed as damaged goods and he was still playing that role to Silva. Has there ever been many characters along Bond's way who've been directly involved in drawing the plot along that made it to the other end unless they were the Bond girl to bed at the end or another intelligence agent!? Sometimes they too don't make it....
* O look, Aki died! Aki who? Tiger, we have to get to that island and I have to marry a girl with a face like a pig.
* Miss Anders is dead. Peanut?
;-)
The Bond franchise is riddled with not too logical occurrences, but you indeed managed to avoid all of them in this list of yours. Remarkable!
(:|
if one cannot understand sarcasm, then one should reread my earlier posts - or one will feel like an idiot.
:)>-
Plus, Everyone seems to treat Severine as an exceptionally important part of Bond's life. He met her in a casino and then slept with her. That's where it ends. He spent more time with Rosie Carver! I'd be upset if Bond had openly lamented her death. He's caught in a nasty situation. Escape seems difficult, borderline impossible. Focus, 007. The girl is dead, but you needn't be. No use crying over spilled milk. The girl is spilled milk. So you see, I understand why he responded in as cold a fashion as he did.
I do find it a bit harder though to understand why he deliberately missed. But then, would it have made any difference. I bet Silva would have shot her anyway.
Now I hate YOLT as well. [-(
:))
Aki was a fairly basic character really. Efficient but not not portrayed as "complex" or "troubled"
I think it was due to a lack of confidence in his ability not to accidentally shoot her if he was actually aiming for the shot glass atop her head. We'd already seen Bond struggling to hit his mark on the shooting range target earlier in the film from a similar distance. Plus, he was now using a weapon that is surely less accurate than his Walther and that he, presumably, doesn't have much experience using.
Instead of taking the chance of accidentally killing her, Bond instead went with the slim hope that perhaps Silva wouldn't kill her.
Or not post when drunk after party ...sorry can't believe I posted that. Repressed anger
X_X
I don't agree that "he responded in as cold a fashion as he did".
Look at the scene again. His body language speaks volume. In fact, I honestly think that this particular scene is Craig's best in Skyfall.
You're welcome. :)
I think Silva set that situation up for the exact reason to get under Bond's skin. He could have just simply done away with Severine in some other, less elaborate way off screen, but he knew that Bond's marksmanship scores were low due to the test scores he had obtained by hacking into MI6, so he decided to use that to his advantage, making Bond look and feel weak and perhaps make Bond think that M has sent him out into the field unprepared to face Silva.
I agree ...the scene works perfectly if you get the subtext. Emotion would have ruined the scene...
99.9% of the audience knew something good wasn't going to happen - that is just common sense - and even Bond knew that...... but you're telling me, you knew that she was being dragged out to play a sadistic recreation of the ol' William Tell bit?... i highly doubt that...... he could've dragged her out to drop a piano on her for all we knew.
might as well..... lets roll out the hate wagon, on that film too.. \m/
and since it's not one of my favorites, i will gladly love ripping that film to shreds ;)
Again I relate to @gustavgraves opening post. I don't like the scene. I don't like Mendes and Craig's storytelling choices. This scene was off-putting IMHO of course. I find Craig's portrayal of Bond in general to be rather schizophrenic.
I also don't like the seduction of Severine scene. Not well done. The outcry from sex-slavery opponents and such was entirely predictable. Could of seen that coming a mile away.
I also didn't like the way the murder of the art dealer was presented, because the scene was presented in such a way that it opened up predictable criticism of Bond being portrayed as a disinterested party to murder.
These scenes can be conceived in such a way that you don't leave yourself open to such predictable backlash.
What bothers is that it seems the filmmakers were oblivious to the tone that Bond movies have generally had.
LTK was probably the darkest Bond film that we'dseen pre-Skyfall, but even it only flirted with the dark.
btw, I don't consider QoS to be particularly dark. Rather it was just a rather strange alternative portrayal of Bond storytelling, unique to the director Forster, with a dash of Haggis.
LTK's general tone was generally consistent with what had preceded.
If dark anti-hero Bond is the direction that Mendes and Craig want to go in. Fine. The sandbox is theirs for now, but it doesn't mean I have to like it, and I don't. [-(
But I am a Connery purist. Sean's Bond was dark enough and tough enough for me. Connery Bond was about as dark as I need. And he wasn't really dark at all. Rather he was simply tough and nastywhen needed, but generally he was a relaxed, at ease chap.
In the meantime, these dark Bond scenes don't really detract from SF as a watchable movie. SF is all over the map in terms of tone, but still it works as popcorn entertainment, if not the character driven, dramatic masterpiece that Mendes and Craig maybe hoped it would be.
I can analogize SF with some of the Moore movies, in that some of Sir Rog's films had moments that were way too light, moments that wouldn't have been found in the Connery films.
SF IMO veers too far in the other direction - to the anti-hero dark side. But neither Rog's frivolous moments nor Craig's flirtations with noir manage to sabatoge the films.
TSWLM MR and SF all work quite well as Bond adventures, despite their occasional departures from the perfect Connery era tone-template.
Rog, Jaws and Anya's van-hijinks at the pyramids actually bugs me as much as Craig, Silva and Severine's shooting games on the island.
If I was consulting these guys, I would insist that we all sit down and watch the first 6 films together and simply bring that tone forward into each film. Seems simple, but with Cubby dead - the last link with the golden era - maybe those days are truly gone. LTK, the last film that Cubby had control of, might have been the end of that era. The new breed of Bond filmmakers might continue to insist on doing Bond differently. C'est la vie. Life changes.
I don't think we ever thought we'd lose the gun barrel opening for even one film, let alone 3, but we did.