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
Most Bond films have elements of their time here and there, but this one is really a true product of its time.
A really neo-niilist narrative, where all matters and nothing does. In the end, everyone that we were build to like
Honestly I’m tired of the DB5 too. I wish he had driven the Aston Martin version used in CR and QOS. I feel like they ran it into the ground.
Agreed and you're 100% right about Campbell. Bond is supposed to be fantasy and to a certain degree quite aspirational but for most of the Craig era Bond's life seems like a burden. The women, glitz, glamour, drinking, fine dining, sexy danger, spycraft and getting on with the job Bond is employed to do is what we want to see. When the new MI films come out they're going to once again dunk all over Bond.
We are in a film era of stern lecturing and melodramatic cliches, not fun escapist entertainment. Does anyone really think the next Bond flick will be going back to the fun entries of yore?
My fear is if bad word of mouth and spoilers cause audiences and fans to dismiss this film, we won't get B26.
He's right though, you can't "do" sexy in major franchise movies, games, or TV anymore without getting hounded - it's now considered channeling the "male gaze". Well if Bond films don't get to have a male bent, what does?? No one goes around demanding that chick flicks be changed to be more gender-balanced, why should anyone demand it of 007?
Equal opportunities for objectifying!
I'm not against the idea of killing Bond. It's a bold move and I assume they'll reboot with a new actor. My problem is how they've tried to make us care about Madeleine and his daughter and I simply don't. Daniel Craig and Lea Seydoux have no chemistry, the relationship feels forced. When he said I love you to her before death it felt like nails on a chalkboard that ruined a potentially poignant moment. And I expected something more graceful to honor his death than the MI6 people just having drinks in a room.
I also don't have a problem with making the film a serious affair and treating the lifestyle of a spy as a burden, but it clashes with such cartoony characters like the scientist, or Logan Ash, or a henchman with a prosthetic eye that falls off, or a villain literally called Lucifer. Come on now. The film feels so confused!
The new Bond girls, Paloma and Nomi, are severely underutilized. I hate to do it, but if I compare Nomi to Ilsa Faust, there's a glaring difference in the action and standout scenes that the latter is afforded. If anything Paloma got the cool fight scene over Nomi, which is confusing. Paloma was also a lot of fun coming naturally from Ana de Armas' charm. Lynch was cool as Nomi but the screenplay didn't give her enough to do other than bicker with Bond most of the time.
Which brings me to the action. I can't say I was impressed. When you think of the parkour chase at the start of Casino Royale, or the motorbike + train chase at the start of Skyfall, they are scenes that definitely linger on my mind and were outstanding at the time. I can't say the same for anything I saw here. The movie tries to do a similar climax to TSWLM, TND, YOLT, etc. But it just misses the mark because there's no fight scene that I can think of will stay in my mind.
I'm also confused as to why critics went so hard on Brosnan movies like TWINE, while going to bat for this one. I accept TWINE has its fair share of flaws and it is not one of Bond's best, but Sophie Marceau and Pierce Brosnan had more chemistry than Daniel Craig and Lea Seydoux ever will, and Robert Carlyle as Renard was no worse than Rami Malek as Lucifer.
I had my nibbles with Skyfall but wow after their two subsequent movies did not reach that level it only grows in my esteem.
Both of them in CR. Both of them 15 years ago.
I hope you're right.
That middle gen DBS like the DB5 is one of the most beautiful objects ever created by man. I know the 5 and to a lesser extent the V8 suit the 'old ways are the best' theme from Skyfall, and that he won it playing poker but I agree they could've used the DBS from those first two DC pictures in both Spectre and NTTD to great effect and the general audience would love it just as much as the DB5. That car was and could've been HIS signature Aston. I can live with the biggest blast of a bond theme in Skyfall being for the DB5 but to do it again just to shoehorn the gorgeous V8 in? Do us a favour.
The ending of NTTD has just got me thinking of the negatives of DC's era and I'm just looking back more cynically at the moment. I was defensive of Cary and Hans using whattitw in matera and even more ohmss score in the film but I think they really tried using that film for emotional payoff in this one and it's frustrating me. Boyle deserves a pint if he stood his ground and never wanted to kill Bond.
Agree @Jordo007 . Love the action but bond has ALOT to say in this film. Seems like they were constantly trying to find stuff that was profound for him to say and it was as you say clunky.
Was it just me who would've liked bond to actually apologise to Madeline aswell for shipping her off on the train and a bit more time for her to be angry with him. I realise it's an action adventure thriller but just thought that it seemed quite off.
And then the movie arrives in London and hits a brick wall. The dire telenovela nonsense carried over from the previous film is shoved to the fore. Bond displays the emotional maturity of a mopey teenager. Dialogue becomes interminable exposition, delivered in static back-and-forth. The action, when it eventually resumes, becomes rote and uninteresting. Allusions to previous films - OHMSS in particular, right down to Zimmer's heavily rehashed score - only show how little everyone involved understands why those films worked, just as the nods to some of Fleming's most evocative unused material - the garden of death, Bond potentially having a child - in the latter case contradict the point Fleming was making about his character (that no matter how much Bond, consciously or not, wants a peaceful domestic life, he can never have it because destiny will always draw him back to his duty) and in the former strips it of all its flavour, tension and strangeness - not to mention it having no logical place in the plot, aside from Safin's apparent love of gardening - in favour of having Bond and Nomi ambling through a rent-a-lair shooting the occasional mook. As for Bond dying at the end, frankly, I just didn't care: it was, as with much before it (including the same 'twist' happening to Felix and Blofeld), just a twist for the sake of a twist, revealing nothing, thematically questionable and seemingly only there to give Craig a moment and make the writers feel clever for pointlessly inverting OHMSS.
As for the characters, Felix was great and Paloma was wonderful, but Safin was a non-entity of a villain with little discernable scheme beyond wanting to kill loads of people for the sake of it (basically a reheated Avengers Endgame, with a villain with less screentime, charisma and presence), all of which was treated as an afterthought compared to the Bond/Madeleine/Safin/Blofeld soap opera that was the film's real plot. I feel sorry for Lashana Lynch, who played her character with an agreeably understated charisma but whose only impactful function was as Bond's driver. You could take Nomi out of the plot entirely and only really lose a few instances of Bond having access to transport. Even less useful was the addition of Mathilde, whose presence was precisely as welcome as every previous occasion a 'cute' moppet gets crammed into a movie to force unearned emotional stakes.
Barring that fantastic opening scene, all the attempts at 'modernisation' and revisionism were half-measures for the sake of changing something, lacking any real narrative or thematic purpose. All these calls for the series to 'radically evolve' undermine how the series has always done exactly that - how else would it have survived almost sixty years? - and done it remarkably well, give or take a few undeniable missteps. While I liked both Nomi and Paloma in this (Madeleine less so, given she still barely registers as a character), the whole 'new type of independent Bond woman' narrative in the build-up also does a serious disservice to the fact that the women of Bond are iconic precisely because they're so varied and memorable in their own right. Yes, there are some damsels and some dimwits, but also mob bosses, scientists, fellow agents, civilians rising to the occasion, computer technicians, manipulators, warriors... there is no one type of Bond girl/woman and the fan favourites are always those who do more than look great in a bikini or slinky dress, though that is as much part of the job description as Bond has to be as sexy to women.
Either way, I found everything in NTTD post-Cuba to be a real bore and one often as misguided or half-baked as SPECTRE. Craig's tenure hasn't been my favourite but has produced two series classics in Casino and Skyfall, so it's a shame his time ends on a note casting those two successes as exceptions rather than the rule.
"I found everything in NTTD post-Cuba to be a real bore and one often as misguided or half-baked as SPECTRE. Craig's tenure hasn't been my favourite but has produced two series classics in Casino and Skyfall, so it's a shame his time ends on a note casting those two successes as exceptions rather than the rule".
My feelings exactly!
On another, small note, they even cut the scene where Bond enters his Jamaican home with the speargun!!!!!!! How could they cut that scene? It was soooo cool. He now arrives in his boat with the speargun and the fishes but then gets a gun out as he enters the house. Why wouldn't he do that using the thing he already had with him, the speargun?
Once again, like in Spectre, we get this huge lair with a bunch of goons and yet nothing is exciting about it. It reminds me of how TND also tried to do that and paled in comparison.
I genuinely have no idea what you're talking about. Did you see Ana de Armas in that film? Do you see premieres? Promotion? Bond got to behave as a bit of a pest as usual. Everything is absolutely still sold on sexyness. If you feel that wasn't enough please tell us what more your 'male gaze' needs?
Also you know 90% of films forever have been male dominated, so your annoyance about 'chick flicks' says a lot about you. Essentially, everything has to be as a heterosexual male wants it hey? I imagine you're the kind who claims people today are sensitive and yet you are the first to be upset about anything reflecting reality rather than satisfying your fantasies, while the rest of us can see a gay person and not let it ruin a film for us. I almost genuinely feel sorry for you if that can spoil a film, except those kind of views are still ruining people's lives.
That it evoked the Garden Of Death beforehand only made it more infuriating for me because that's one of my favourite chapters from Fleming's oeuvre and one I've been waiting to be adapted since reading it as a child. Instead, as you say, it's just a bland, industrial villain base for Bond and Nomi to wander around. It doesn't even make sense for Safin to have a 'poison garden' given Heracles is an exclusively technological threat: I couldn't work out what those workers in hazard suits were supposed to be doing in those pools, or why they were acidic. The 'garden' reference, and Safin's earlier reference to liking gardening, seemed solely there for the sake of a Fleming reference, even though it neither meant or contributed anything. If there isn't Bond sneaking through poisonous flora, fumaroles and piranha lakes with random Japanese businessmen walking calmly into them to their deaths, all in aim of killing a Blofeld dressed in full samurai regalia, invoking the Garden Of Death isn't kulturny.
Fleming once said his books were targeted for warm blooded sexual males.
I like to think EON has gone way beyond that, recognizing there are such a thing as female and gay fans of James Bond. Bond has appeal for all demographics.
What's wrong with just keeping it traditional instead of changing it so much.... :-?
I thought it was a lost opportunity to go back to form. But then again, so was the entire film after the Cuba scene.
Who’s saying it should be?
All I’ve said was that it’s target has gone broader lately to please other demographics. Heterosexual males aren’t excluded.
This. It’s absurd how much flak it’s had to take and all the political correctness now. How is it even sexist or evil to just have multiple partners with consent as Bond does? It’s so stupid. Now that he’s officially monogamous, who knows, the next one could be totally sex-free. I think we are witnessing the beginning of the end of this character unless the right people step in and restore it to what it should be, but unlikely thanks to stupid societal pressures.
Oh, my post wasn't directed at you, @MakeshiftPython. And I don't disagree with your points. Quite the contrary.
Oh please. People complained about the same thing with Dalton over 30 years ago, that he didn’t have as many conquests compared to Moore rogering four different birds in a single film.
Please, spare me the psych eval.
Moralizing busybodies in this day and age always have to make it into something personal, you can never just criticize and debate the actual subject matter at hand.
Puritanical Redux.