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Comments
"Positive" was the word I used, not "Happy"
Something we are unaware of as we are watching CR for the first time, and therefore irrelevant to how we would be feeling in that moment
Now you seem to be accusing me of being a misogynist on the basis of ...?
Rene Mathis dies in QoS, which still has a "positive" ending for me, is that ok with you, or does that make me a Francophobe?
What I know for sure is that Pietro Pasolini's "The Gospel According to Saint Matthew" was set in Matera.
Yes and no.
I think there have always been series where characters made a "character development" journey, but the difference is that in the past they did not happen in the particular genre we are discussing here, being more the province of pure "drama" series, rather than in the "action / thriller / suspense" genre.
Callan might be an exception?
And yet all that "investment" is lost now that Bond has been killed off
The next Bond will not be informed by those experiences or able to build on them further
So he will end up having to learn the same life lessons all over again, "rinse and repeat"?
Fine post, and I agree that the OHMSS touches work.
I think you nailed it for me. Yes. Thanks!
Trying to suggest 24 was drama not action/thriller/suspense is a bit of a stretch.
If you believe that Craig Bond should have lived thats fine but the logic that goes with that is you do not see any difficulty in picking up the thread of his journey and just running with it as the new guy and by extension not recognising that the new guy is faced with an entirely different challenge to Roger/Tim and Pierce. I obviously believe that for the new guy to wake up with a bang on his head and then dismiss 15 years does not work you may think differently.
If there are more Bond movies there are many ways a new arc can be recalibrated with variety and avoid repetition. In fact Craig Bonds death has punched through a self imposed ceiling.
OHMSS mined the notion that Bond could never have a charmed domestic life and it is great drama to glance at Paradise but find death. The world is not enough.
NTTD mined a much deeper route and introduced the concept of sacrifice for love. He wanted to avoid the technology going to the highest bidder which in a sense is routine Bond, the Bond of Thunderball or OHMSS but he had a very personal additional reason to sacrifice himself to save Madeleine and Mathilde from him; that is christ like. Because whether you believe in the guy its a cracking story, he brought love into the world by sacrificing himself.
Lyutsifer coveted what James had and in James destroying his world rather than embracing it and seeing they were essentially the same he denied Safin.
Satan made the offering was spurned and denied Bond and as he says you gave me no option. The fallen one is always essentially the victim in mythology the misunderstood one. But I saved Madeleine I only stole technology your boss initiated!! Echoes of Prometheus.
What makes NTTD particularly interesting is it was filmed and completed before a Virus struck which only "targeted" the elderly and co morbid and rather than those people offer themselves in sacrifice for humanity's greater good we have sacrificed the well being and cognitive behaviour of millions of young and healthy people and at a technical level done a form of Goldfinger on them leaving a huge financial disconnect.
Somehow, in the last, possibly twenty years, the idea of noble sacrifice has gone out of the window and people should crawl toward their death on their knees. Craig Bond at an artistic level re established the idea that we can leave our mark and conclude it with the ultimate sacrifice and die standing tall and in our prime and for the best of reasons, our future.
Nice (OHMSS) touch there, thoughtfully expressed as always, and which perfectly fits with the ending of NTTD ... whether we see "our future" as a reference to Mathilde or, conversely, as "Your future" - as when Bond, in his farewell to Madeleine, says, "You ... have all the time in the world."
But while Bond undoubtedly does sacrifice himself, it's as a result of having both rescued Madeleine & Mathilde and done his part in destroying the nanobot farm & factory. I don't think he makes a deliberate choice to sacrifice himself, or only insofar as the acceptance & pursuit of every mission implies a willingness to potentially give up his life in favour of a greater good. Certainly, in my view, the conclusion of the film does not distinctly show him making that choice. But is it indicated indirectly? At best only ambiguously so ... perhaps as he touches the abrasions on his cheek made by the smashed vial and realizes with horror the implications of what Safin has done.
The conclusion of NTTD shows [not tells] us clearly that Bond, incapacitated by his wounds, has literally run out time to effectuate any kind of escape. Whether he would have done so not having been shot-up by Safin and faced with an oncoming missile strike is a question the film carefully avoids, in essence, removing the decision from Bond himself by presenting him with a countdown clock & debilitating injuries. In my view, all that he can do is take consolation in the survival of his family in the knowledge of his own imminent death.
If he could have escaped would he have done so knowing that he was infected with nanobots targeted for Madeleine & Mathilde? The conclusion just does not address that matter directly. But of course we know the hypothetical answer in some form: he would not have acted selfishly and put his family at risk in order to protect himself. That's not Craig-Bond. Indeed, that's not any James Bond.
Actually, I was thinking about that a couple of days ago: I wholeheartedly believe that any of the six incarnations we've had of Bond would have gotten on that rooftop rather than jeopardize his family. In particular, I think if Brosnan had been offered a final film with an ending like this, he would have leapt at it.
I asked them what they thought and she said "NTTD wasn't interesting and wasn't sexy" and he said, the action felt out of place in this long winded rom com 😅
While I disagree with most of that, I find it interesting that they mention it not being sexy, because I think it missed that and the glamorous lifestyle of Bond. It did feel almost like any playfulness/flirtation was gone.
It felt like Paloma was added specifically because that component of the film was sorely lacking, without her I think this film would have been even more dour
Lol, I think we have a generation gap here, I was not suggesting 24 was a drama, as, for me, 24 is part of the modern era to which I thought you you were referring, not part of the past to which I was referring. I would have thought my mention of "Callan" might have been a clue to that?
"Could" have lived
Yes, the logic of the revised "Bond Universe" established with the arrival of Daniel Craig, would be that the new guy would pick up where Craig-Bond left off, including all the emotional baggage. The challenge is essentially no different - can you fill the boots of the man before you?
However In the current climate of "kill off a supporting character" every movie, that would probably spell doom for Madeleine and Matilde, ala Marie in "The Bourne Supremacy"...
Yes, even if Craig-Bond had not died in NTTD, personally I would be quite happy for the new guy to just appear on a new mission in the PTS of Bond 26 and not mention anything about what happened in the previous movie, as Rog, Tim and Pierce did. No bang on the head required.
You think so?
I've read many secret agent books, the existential questions raised by the profession are relatively limited and have already been covered many times, including by Craig-Bond.
Try reading some "Matt Helm", there is really nothing Craig-Bond has done that has not been done before elsewhere, just not by James Bond (Which is not intended as a criticism, just a reality check).
I don't want to say that NTTD is an "old man's film" [being close to one myself, lol], but maybe it is. It definitely has an autumnal feel about it, especially in relation to a James Bond who is actually playing his age for the most part [cf. Moore in the '80s].
But is NTTD "not sexy," however beautifully shot? Yeah, I guess so, as we're a long way from a truly buff Craig here. And of course the only woman he sleeps with in the film is Madeleine and he even seems befuddled at first in his early encounters with Nomi and later Paloma, an episode that feels distinctly added to the film to "sex it up" at bit.
It's not hard to imagine a largely if not entirely monogamous Bond in his retirement in Jamaica. [Those books on his table are definitely going to require a lot of free time to get through, though he does seem familiar with the club, haha.] Doesn't M later on refer to Bond as "living off the grid," or something like that? And while not having gone to the extremes of Mr. White in SP, he's not a million miles away from it. And it may even be imaginable that Craig-Bond would have gone to such lengths of isolation had he survived Poison Island, necessarily in order to protect Madeleine & Madeleine from himself. I can just about see a scenario where Craig-Bond remains on the island to live as a hermit, much like White in SP. But then that surely would have been the greater tragedy.
You know, I wonder if NTTD has greater appeal to older rather than younger Bond fans? I mean, a thematic concern with mortality, lol, is just not "sexy" ...
I can only imagine the mosquito bit in the Toyota Rav4 or whatever it was was sort of a foreshadowing bit that even if Bond was in total isolation, even a single mosquito coming into contact with Bond would mean the end of Madeleine and Mathilde.
I think this is a great post
This is an interesting phenomenon which often occurs both in books and in movies
Some stories, apart from also being entertaining, have a "higher" purpose, to communicate an idea or explore a particular concept, and the characters or environments created are only really there to serve the story, and are developed only as far as they need to be in order to achieve that objective.
But then the readers become attached to the characters or want to know more about that environment, and the author is persuaded to write a sequel which may have no real purpose other than meeting that demand. The point they were trying to make has already been made, and in that way the continuation of the story is redundant.
This is something I've only noticed as I've become older, when I was younger I used to just enjoy the characters / environments and didn't appreciate when the original reason for their existence was complete and the original "higher" purpose was no-longer present in the subsequent stories.
Not that I think James Bond novels or films particularly fall into that category, to me Bond is intended purely for entertainment.
Personally I don't need to know the details of Bond's background in order to enjoy the character, but it's in the nature of many people to want to fill in all the gaps and many people enjoy melodrama.
To each his/her own
Lol, this reminds me of an episode of Cheers I watched the other day, featuring an antique weight and fortune telling machine, where Carla managed to concoct an interpretation of every fortune to fit subsequent events.
Fair enough, your wife is interpreting the movie through the filter of her own knowledge and experience, however that doesn't mean the makers of the movie made their choices based on the same sources.
Personally I doubt they could afford to spend the time/money in order to achieve that level of detailed co-ordination between action and symbolism, nor do I believe they have such a deep commitment to religion that they would want to.
Aye Caramba!
Now that is brutal...
So, so you think you can tell
Heaven from hell?
Blue skies from pain?
Can you tell a green field
From a cold steel rail?
A smile from a veil?
Do you think you can tell?
Did they get you to trade
Your heroes for ghosts?
Hot ashes for trees?
Hot air for a cool breeze?
Cold comfort for change?
Did you exchange
A walk-on part in the war
For a leading role in a cage?
How I wish, how I wish you were here
We're just two lost souls
Swimming in a fish bowl
Year after year
Running over the same old ground
What have we found?
The same old fears
Wish you were here
In order to try and make your point rather than accept the reality of where we are you offer two options one that the story that has been told through CT to NTTD could have simply been foisted on the next actor or just ignored either proposition is ludicrous.
Fair play you straw man your own straw man.
You are entitled to your opinion, but sweeping statements don't make your argument
If you're not familiar with Callan or Book Matt Helm there's no shame in admitting it
Ah, you knew about the ending before seeing it the first time? I did as well, unfortunately, but still enjoyed the film.
@NickTwentyTwo Yes, I did. I was wanting to get some general impressions on the film, but that led to the full reveal. Ouch. It was a hard gut-punch. Didn’t blunt the hurt either. But I will give the movie this: I never left a theatre that emotional ...ever. Deaths of Spock and Kirk were close, but that was just so surreal. Even knowing, you think, “he’s gonna pull this out.” Illogical, but human : ) I remember being 7 and mom was telling me that Spock didn’t die, but I wasn’t buying it! Wow, what a rough outing. But that movie is near and dear to my heart. To this day.