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And was already one of the best actresses of her generation. Her best role still being the one from her first film back in 2003.
I, for one, loved their meeting on the train. Mostly because of Craig's micro reactions to their verbal poker game.
Agree, a great actress, but sorry, she would have been wasted on Brossa!
As Sophie Marceau was in TWINE!
Hell yeah, we need separate Eva Green appreciation thread :D and It's been a long time since i watch dreamers.
I'm in my early 50s now, but Craig has totally turned me into a fanboy again (hence my presence on this forum!) The whole Brosnan era passed me by. I didn't like his gun, or his hair, or the way he practically chewed women's faces off during the seductions. He's a genuinely great actor (The Matador, The Tailor of Panama) but - no offence to his fans - he wasn't for me)
Casino Royal blew me away because it seemed that for the first time in decades they'd actually set out to make a great film, that happened also to be a Bond movie. Craig totally inhabited the role right from the very first frame. He was such a breath of fresh air - the vigor, the drama, the confidence - and I've since come to love his tenure.
Yes, there were some dodgy haircuts and dodgy suits in the first couple of films (those massive tie knots...!!!), but from Skyfall on the wardrobe has been a deeply enjoyable part of his performances for me: I love the fact that he can wear over two grand worth of clothes (casual or otherwise) and think nothing of having them lost or destroyed in the next scene. Because he doesn't care, and that's part of what makes him appealing.
Yes, Spectre was ludicrous - the hammy dialogue ('Because right now, I'm your best chance of staying alive' etc.), driving through Rome in the middle of the night where there is no traffic on the roads... (had the producers ever seen an Italian city at night? it never stops!), Bond asking for his dinner jacket to be pressed on an ancient train in the middle of the desert, bringing down a helicopter with a Walther etc., etc., but I have to say, that while I was underwhelmed when I saw Spectre in the cinema, its one I've returned to at home over and over because for all its failures it still contains so much of what is fantastic about Craig's Bond.
I have high hopes for No Time to Die. Connery was 'The Man', of course - the first, but Craig has brought something amazing to the Bond movies, and I shall be forever grateful.
I hope you get what you wish for.
I believe Daniel Craig is going to be a a very hard act to follow!
(And I wouldn't take bets on it being a flop if I were you!!)
Nicely said @Brother_John -- you nailed many reasons why I am most passionate about Craig (and nicely summed up why the Brosnan Era just didn't work me either)...
Welcome to the forum!!
You knew exactly what you were doing, you wanted to get a rise, I've seen plenty of members on this forum who aren't Craig fans do it much respectfully.
I don't like the Brosnan but I don't go in there and pour this kind of vitriol on his appreciation or discussion threads yet you think that something clearly written to get people blood up is nuanced criticism and you should be respected for just saying nothing more than Craig is rubbish and that he is Bourne rip off.
Way to go with your succinct and measured critique.
I agree, it's very sad to see people not liking Craig. I don't understand, the lame gadgetry and fun factor of Bond is a thing of the past, it doesn't fit in today's standards anymore. I've seen and heard all the critiques of Craig's grittiness this and that but is that really an issue in this day? Times change, Bond always moves with the times and so far nothing has dampened Craig's tenure in the overall run. I find it hilarious to see Brosnan fanboys run around thinking they're some mighty high mountain just because he brought the franchise out of the dead after LTK, so what? Ok so Goldeneye was pretty good, but then he completely bored me with the following movies, and don't get me started on Die Another Day please.
Shartdlake and others, don't feel bad. This place is only as bad as anyone like Dr Dan makes it. Craig will finish strong with No Time to Die and I can guarantee that, I can feel it. If Skyfall isn't an indication of a great return to a proper reboot Bond, I don't know what is. Get over it guys, the times are changing and if you don't like it, then that's fine, don't come in here insulting other members just expressing their thoughts. You have those old movies to watch, just enjoy them then.
https://www.mi6community.com/discussion/5539/the-daniel-craig-thread-discuss-his-life-his-career-his-bond-films/p135
So by all means have different opinions, but keep it civil, and avoid name calling.
To be honest some of your statements were so exaggerated and filled to the rim with bitternes that they can hardly be called "respectful".
Exactly
Not really, if i don't like something i don't constantly go around bashing it. Fair criticism is always welcome, nonsense isn't.
In all honesty, as much as I hate to say it, the Craig era has been a bit of a disgrace to the franchise, in my opinion at least. On the basis of him being an brooding brute most of the time, I fail to see how he is an improvement on any of his predecessors, and even the emotional angst angle seems rather overdone.
As far as his movies are concerned, it's a mixed bag that has stripped Bond of what it's supposed to be about and what it was from 1962 to 2002, and made it a needlessly dark and gritty generic action franchise that is stripped of almost all of its' fun aspects and is about a protagonist who is psychologically rough around the edges, whose humor is almost nonexistent, who spends too much time pining after a love lost long ago, who constantly seems angry, bitter and temperamental and who even looks more like a KGB assassin than a dashing, suave British secret agent.
Casino Royale was admittedly a decent film, though a bit on the overrated side in my eyes. Bond here seems to act against the norms even more egregiously than the old Bond (the embassy incident and breaking into M's apartment are good examples). The supporting characters, as well as the action sequences, redeem it for me, and Eva Green, Mads Mikkelsen and Giancarlo Giannini are all terrific in their roles! And I enjoyed the dynamic between Bond and Vesper too, though the dialogue in the train scene was a bit off and eyeroll, as well as Mikkelsen as Le Chiffre. Quantum of Solace, on the other hand, is a weird one because as much as I hate the Bourne-imitating of the Craig era, QoS is actually for all its' troubles and faults halfway decent. The characters are somewhat interesting, with Camille's revenge plot against Medrano, and Dominic Greene, dare I say it, is the (unless Safin ends up being better) last good villain in the Craig era. The soundtrack is also pretty good again and some of the action setpieces are also pretty nice, such as the Bregenz opera bit and the eco-hotel in the finale. On the other hand, it is essentially humorless, the action scenes are atrocious to watch with the horrible amount of excessive cuts in-between takes, and the plot is rather weak. So Bond has to stop some guy from taking over a third-world country's water supply and that's it? Where's the world-endangering threat in that, other than maybe him running some cover company under the guise of environmentalism?
Skyfall though, I never really could get into it. I wasn't too crazy about it when I first saw it back in early 2013, and neither when I watched it again for the first time in over 4 years in 2017. And after seeing it the 3rd time or so, I couldn't help but just hate this movie. It really is rather awful: the rather awkward jump from "rookie agent starting out" to "he's too old, does the modern world need Bond anymore??", the plot makes no sense (going from "stolen hard drive with secret agent identities" to this Raoul Silva bloke and forgetting the hard drive as if it never existed at all), the villain is an awful Joker imitation mixed with your cliché obsessed stalker that you see on Investigation Discovery (though Javier Bardem gave a pretty good performance as him and I so wish he got to play a much better villain than Silva!), Silva's plan itself is convoluted and nonsensical, and Bond and M deciding that it would be a great idea to go into Bond's childhood home, seemingly assuming that Silva wouldn't find them, when it would be smarter to, idk, get M into some undisclosed location guarded by MI6? And on top of all that, for all these reasons, it doesn't even feel like a Bond movie in the slightest. And last but not least, Thomas Newman's soundtrack is absolutely awful. Again IMO, but I never got why David Arnold got the boot even considering Mendes's connections with Newman.
As far as Spectre is concerned though, in all honesty it's, in my opinion again, the absolute worst movie of the franchise. The plot seems to be a combination of a lazy rip-off of Captain America: The Winter Soldier (especially the key "intelligence agency getting inflitrated and destroyed from the inside-out" angle and the character of C is rather similar to Alexander Pierce, and to some extent the "Nine Eyes" program is somewhat similar to Project Insight as well), Austin Powers (the especially godawful "Brofeld" stuff). Also the rather dumb amount of setpieces and scenes that seem to be based off scenes from prior movies, especially the finale that eventually is set on the Thames River with Bond on a boat, similar to the Thames bit in TWINE. And last but not least, the ham-fisted attempt at making SPECTRE look more threatening by linking Le Chiffre, Greene and Silva together with SPECTRE, even though it was implied that the first 2 of them were part of Quantum, an organization that seems to have been thus completely tossed by the wayside. And as good as Christoph Waltz is as the villain, the reboot Blofeld is just awful, seeming to be only motivated out of a desire to get back at Bond because he was treated better in the family! While it's true (and somewhat nice) that they brought back some of the old Bond elements, they felt rather shallow and all that is pretty much undone by how awful and stitched-together the movie is.
So overall, a bit of a long-winded post, but this is why the Craig era has honestly sucked in my opinion. What could, perhaps, have been a decent, though different, take on Bond (and that's what it really seemed to me as even when I really became a Bond fan in 2017), appears to have gotten stuck in imitating what's popular (Bourne, The Dark Knight, Marvel), in making and keeping Bond a brooding, angsty brute with mental issues and being dark and gritty. To put my thoughts here to bed, though I personally strongly dislike the Craig era, if you enjoy it, well, that's fine and I won't jump on you for that. Bond for me represents this escapist franchise with this awesome suave British secret agent who defeats world-threatening bad guys, seduces any woman he meets and speeds around in fast cars. Not this melodramatic, hopeless in tone, "grounded in reality" casserole that it's now turned into.
Well said @Brother_John .
Although I have to disagree about Rome car chase, it was bad no doubt but our forum member here @matt_u mentioned once that there isn't much traffic in the middle of the night there anyway.
Happy to be corrected on nocturnal Roman traffic (I haven't actually been in Rome for 30 years so maybe its much improved!) but in that chase the streets were virtually empty, except the old guy on the way back from the opera, and it just struck me as a bit implausible. Maybe I'm just assuming that everywhere is just 24hrs like London... :-(
No, it's definitly not like London. Rome after 10Pm is pretty dead. Maybe not as empty as in the film, but close.
Yeah correct. Without forgetting that the chase happens after midnight...