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If we cannot see the villain suffer, he/she has to be extra charismatic to warrant any type of emotional appeal.
For the most part, I didn't mind Safin, I just wish he got some juicier material to work with. He's quite sinister when showing off the garden near the end but he doesn't have the same impact as, say, Dr. No, who finally, properly appears in the final 20 minutes and is totally classic with every shot and line.
Some nice ideas there. I like the idea of Bond going into self imposed isolation to protect them. But then it would make Blofeld’s taunting of Bond regarding Madeleine kind of pointless...
It would have required the dialogue during the interrogation scene to be reworked, but it could have been done. All Blofeld needed to do was ultimately taunt Bond/get him to snap.
Rami was great and did well with the material he had, but I wonder with his scheduling conflicts, if a different actor with more free time, would have made Safin a more memorable villain?
I suppose in the producer's minds having Malek was a selling point for their film. Obviously he'd won an Oscar and had been in Mr. Robot etc.
To be honest, I don't think there's much he or any other actor could have done. The problems with Safin all come from the third act, and while perhaps Malek's schedule prevented him from doing 'overtime' as it were, I suspect the problems go deeper. I get the sense the script wasn't quite ready yet for those scenes (apparently Malek and Craig went off and made up their dialogue during the 'invisible God' scene, and boy does it feel like it). Also, I get the sense that the buyer ships were added in post production and mentions of it within the film were ADR'd or added later into production. Presumably to artificially raise the tension and give the film a 'ticking clock'. I also suspect certain things were trimmed in the edit to the film's detriment (one example being Safin raising his gun at Mathilde, which I think we see him doing in the trailer. In the film we got Mathilde seems to randomly walk away, which I find to be unintentionally funny).
There are examples of ADR throughout the film. "Madeleine's a daughter of Spectre," etc.
Yes, another being 'It's working, only SPECTRE are dying'.
It's common practice in post production. Sometimes as much as 70% of a film's dialogue is ADR. It's usually done to enhance performances though, but fresh dialogue can be added to change plot details, make certain things more clear etc. It's not always ideal when used for the latter reasons though, but sometimes it can't be helped. I suspect NTTD actually uses ADR quite a bit for this purpose, more than most of us would suspect. The 'it's working, only SPECTRE are dying' moment is an example (watch it, Oburchev's lips barely even move and it's a relatively wide shot where a closer one would have been more effective), and my instinct is it was felt that it needed to be added in because it was felt this plot point wasn't clear enough. It actually makes sense, NTTD is a rather convoluted film and even I had to take a few seconds to think about what was going on the first time I watched it.
I've written it here before, but the idea that he is a villain who uses other people's resources against them is fascinating. He has MI6 give Obruchev the resources to develop and then manipulate Heracles (and I do think it's in the film that he built it differently to what MI6/M wanted and the whole "killing relatives"-thing wasn't supposed to be part of the original Heracles). Then he has SPECTRE steal the virus from MI6 and get Obruchev out. After that he has Ash use the CIA to get Bond to go into the party (and provide him operational support in Paloma) and give Blofeld a reason to actually trigger the weapon and then have Bond and Paloma exfiltrate Obruchev - fighting off MI6! - and the weapon. Until we arrive on his island, it's basically him, Ash and Obruchev and the three of them manage to take down SPECTRE and completely throw MI6 into disarray.
And then he suddenly has an army of balaclava-wearing henchmen on his island, plus a farm and a factory (whatever the hell that is supposed to be). Again, I've said this before, but I think the henchmen in the finale should have been other soldiers from a different country or from some other criminal organization that Safin manipulated - maybe SPECTRE remnants - into working towards his aims (protecting him, killing Bond). They even could have done a whole thing about parasitic plants that latch onto a host plant and get all their resources through that until it dies and then carries on.
I love the idea of Safin's men being SPECTRE remnants. To be fair I guess Primo is when you think about it, but he's just a lone wolf of sorts. It would have been interesting if the film had specifically said that Safin had made a deal or something with the remaining SPECTRE agents not to hurt them or their family with the nanobots if they helped him. Like they're being held hostage almost. It would have given this idea that Safin is a man slowly morphing from a man out for revenge into this maniacal villain, one who has created this little 'kingdom' for himself (so not unlike Blofeld with his Garden of Death in YOLT). It might have made him a bit more tragic if anything too, seeing what revenge can do to a man.
My favorite part is when Bond points the gun at him, and knowing that he's about to die, he just smirks at Bond because he knows he's won. Then Bond can't even look at him when he pulls the trigger. He's just so done with this loser and so angry that he ruined his chance to be with his family.
Yes, and IMO he felt much more realistic than Safin did. Malek was pushing, while Amalric was natural (again, in my opinion).
Safin has among the most deeply defined history and motivations and presence of a villain through a Bond film. If not the most. Where exaggerated or extreme, that's usually a good fit for a Bond film. Again, well received by me.
Two very different villains.
I get that. It's a shame - Malek is a naturally intense performer with an idiosyncratic manner to him. If the writing had been stronger in the third act or they'd allowed Malek to do something different we might have gotten a stronger performance. Compare his performance to Amalric's in QOS, or Bardem's in SF. Both Bardem and Amalric look like they're almost having fun with their roles (especially Bardem) and it gives the villains that extra bit of menace - that weird sense of glee they have when they hurt Bond/those close to him. Malek in the last third of NTTD just doesn't have that, and it looks like he's taking things just a bit too seriously with his generic nowhere European accent and horrendously cliched 'I'm an invisible God, you and I are not so different Mr. Bond' dialogue. Not all his fault of course.
Same here. Probably why I have not been on here for a while. @NickTwentyTwo gave us both a kindly reminder that we are no longer welcome.... ;)