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Comments
TMWTGG. I honestly don't think I'd change the sound and vision presented. It works on so many levels, and the history of editing says things remain on screen with the idea the background flaws (mirror reveal of cameraman) will not be recognized by the audience during its initial release Absent a concept of our modern day viewing.
AVTAK. Visually well done and satisfying, this sequence is served up as comic relief. (Someday I'll tour the interior of Dunsmuir House after two failed attempts.)
DAD. The ejector seat flip is clever and more importantly visually well done (as is the Vanish). Still there are physical effects of tremendous and devastating force expended in close quarters in the car interior not represented. Very different from a charge outside the vehicle flipping the Aston Martin in CR. But apparently Q Branch compensated for and considered those things with a remedy.
QOS. Aerially stunning on a visual level with satisfying action. I can even explain away the freefall. The cuts don't detract for me.
SP. Train fight is awesome. I take the point of other passengers and staff disappearing. Was that the the work of Hinx? Or they saw what developed and found other things to do. It also relates to CR and Craig's own suggestion that after the winning at cards, the celebration with Vesper in the restaurant should evacuate the planned other diners to properly focus on the early morning hour and the couple. (In a similar way for focus and the late hour, the SP car chase ending at the Tiber works great for me. Thrilling escape from the SPECTRE meeting, and it's part comic relief and part bridge to more important things to come. It can't all be ramped up to eleven.)
DAF is the offender. Great venue and casting and setup and execution. Epic Bond history. To the point Bond "overcomes" two warrior women by holding their heads underwater. A different time there.
I drive a Land Rover LR2, known in Europe as Freelander. I may have to upgrade.
Equal and opposite reaction. It's not so much the gases exerting the force on the car, it's the seat- one pushes in one direction, the other pushes in the other, in the same way that your seat is exerting a force on you right now but in the opposite direction to the force you're exerting on it.
Genuinely, if you watch the footage, it's how they're actually doing it. Not with a seat I'm sure, and they've CG'd a seat in rolling away, but they're flipping it with a canon. They just use a cylinder to ensure the piston goes in the right direction, otherwise are you really saying that ejector seats are free to fire in any direction? That's obviously nonsense, they have guide rails; they are guided. They don't 'lose directional force' because they go in the direction they're designed to i.e. out the top of aeroplanes. Q would design his to do exactly the same.
If you were floating in space, with no gravity or friction from air acting on you etc. and you threw a ball, the force of the ball leaving your hand would propel you backwards in the opposite direction with the same force as you would be propelling the ball forwards. That's physics.
Alternatively, if you dangled your Corgi DB5 from a string attached to the back bumper so the car is pointing at the ground, and fired the little man out of the roof, the car would spin on its string anticlockwise away from the little man.
Equally wrong though! :D
Richard's point about the likely harm on Bond of sitting so close to the explosive effect of firing an ejector seat (at the very least his eardrums you'd think!) is a good one, but then that applies to Goldfinger too!
I will say worse for me still in DAF is the PTS. So many awkward moments and the one that always sticks in my mind is when Blofeld lunges at Bond with a knife and just keeps his arm outstretched for eternity.
Which is annoying, as it seems to have been covered in ketchup.
Ah, but John Barry.
I still somehow like the scene (at least in the crazy world of DAF). I mean, it is a nice variation that he has to fight two women.
The train fight definitely shouldn't be listed here. It is one of my favourite fights of all Bond movies. I don't care that there aren't more people but yes, there could at least be someone in the kitchen running away...
Some rightly visceral moments with the machinery.
Not originally noticed me, but the bad guy lying down on the conveyor undercuts the seriousness of the situation.
Saida's dressing room fight has great choreography. Bond smashing heads into walls and using various items as weapons such as the deo gives it an anything-goes street fight feel. The big guy getting knocked out so early, and from a chair over his back was surprising. I would've had him make a second run at Bond. Would love to see more fights like this in future.
The camera crew in the mirror is a bit distracting though once you notice them! Otherwise it’s great.
Yeah, this is easily the worst fight put forward so far. Its so lacking in any kind of energy and the heavy laying down on the conveyor is just silly and lazy.
Also, why does Zorin have a microchip packing facility underneath his fancy french chateau…?
It's his best fight scene IMO. I never noticed the mirror thing and I watched the movie a bunch of times.
I think EoN have even said they wouldn't edit them out in any re-releases or anything like that. But yeah, it's one of these interesting little bloopers that you get in the older Bond films.
Looks like everything was built and shot in a studio (presumably Pinewood). A lot of filming and photography studios have white walls and floors (the logic being you can bounce light more easily off of them). That said I agree, it makes the crew even more noticeable! But I presume it was a case where the mirror was accidentally knocked, reflected some lights which, when angled towards the white wall, made the crew almost look backlit, and gave away an unfortunate amount (mirrors really are horrid things to deal with when filming).
I've been in a few and I would say that's not hugely common that I've seen. You might have a cyclorama, but if that's not removable you build your set on it more often than not (I did a bit of filming the middle of last year and the curved edge of the cyclorama we built our set on really played tricks with your head- you couldn't see where the wall curved up!). I wonder if it was some technique of the DOP's to get a large sort of diffuse fill light onto the actors.
I'm not denying Newton's third, I'm trying to show that the forces you think are directed, aren't. A bullit is leaving a gun at high speed because there's an explosion behind it. The gasses expand and are directed by the barrel. The forces find the way of least resistance (the bullit) and propel it foreward. In the meantime, those same gasses propel the gun backward. It's not the bullit that smacks the gun, like in your 'throwing-a-ball-in-space' comparison. Hence, when you want to launch a car upside down, you need a cylinder to direct the gasses. You need one side of 'least resistance' or the canister will just blow up.
Now, ejection seats in planes don't work with (directed) explosions, but with rockets (https://science.howstuffworks.com/transport/flight/modern/ejection-seat.htm). Making the flipping even more illogical. There's no counter force other than a lot of hot air. The only part that would actually work with newton's 3rd is the catapult which launches the seat the first few centimetres before the rockets kick in. Presuming it's the catapult ( I don't see any rockets in the Vanish) that does the job, it'd be one hell of a catapult beeing strong enough to flip an app. 1700 kilo car upside down.
I’ve been in a few where it’s been the case, but often they’ll have black curtains or whatever they can draw on the walls to cover them if needed. Not that I’ve been in that many mind (certainly not for major shoots). Difficult to say without knowing for sure though. It’d be a bit odd to place such a light directly behind the crew like that in my experience, but perhaps they’re not quite in front of it and it’s just how it appeared when reflected. But to be honest I’m not a DOP so can’t really say for sure.
The white light next to the crew looks like one of those square set ups that block out light from behind it, you can see an example of these light filters on set in one behind-the-scenes shot of Craig with the submachine gun at the end of CR.
Here's a simplified version which explains it:
https://www.physicsclassroom.com/class/newtlaws/Lesson-4/Newton-s-Third-Law
They even have a section explaining recoil:
Many people are familiar with the fact that a rifle recoils when fired. This recoil is the result of action-reaction force pairs. A gunpowder explosion creates hot gases that expand outward allowing the rifle to push forward on the bullet. Consistent with Newton's third law of motion, the bullet pushes backwards upon the rifle.
The forces are directed as one pushes one way, and the other pushes in an equal and opposite way.
The ball-in-space version explains how this law works on everything: it is a constant of physics.
Why do you presume that the ejector seat doesn't have this cylinder you're after anyway? Whatever explosive power is firing the seat out is clearly directed using whatever mechanism is appropriate, why would Q choose a method which doesn't direct the seat out of the car? I'm not sure why you've decided he would.
What do you think a rocket is if not a directed explosion? :D
What do you mean by 'counter force'?
If you mean the force pushing on the car, again; look at the ball in space concept. The seat is pushed away, it also pushes back on the car with equal force. Equal and opposite reaction.
I actually even found a video of a man in space demonstrating Newton's 3th for you:
It's not going to work the same as a plane ejection seat, because the point of them is to carry the passenger clear of the plane which is experiencing some sort of problem with a view to saving their life, and that would mean getting some distance away, and gaining as much altitude as possible before releasing a parachute. Q's ejection seat is designed to get rid of unwanted passengers, it doesn't need a rocket on it to get them safely clear; ideally they'll die. There's no need for a relatively gentle acceleration. So there's no reason to think it works like the ejection seat you've found there; it likely fires them out using an air cannon under the seat, just like the piston they used to flip the car for the movie. We can even see the seat after it has left the car in the film: there's no rocket firing on it.
Now, you are right that the acceleration would be more powerful on the seat than the car, and the ejector would need to be overpowered to create the acceleration on the car we see in the film due to the much higher mass of the car (the one we see in the film would have been not much more than a shell, I'm sure), but we've swallowed more improbable things than that in a Bond movie.
mtm I believe is saying the recoil/equal-and-opposite force of the ejector system flips the car. Seat fires down, car goes upwards (off axis as the seat isn't central, so becomes a flip onto its wheels). The recoil force needed is preposterous, but as previously said, improbable and Bond are not exclusive, and this is the daftest of all the Bond films - the ejector seat is fitted to an invisible car after all. This explains it nicely in Bond World physics.
CommanderRoss and myself I think were going down the route of not entertaining the insane levels of force required for recoil to be able to flip the car, as our conclusion was what we thought would happen in the Real World, not Bond World. To that effect, the seat would eject, the recoil would have no meaningful effect on the cars orientation, hit ice travelling 50mph+ 90 degrees to the direction the seat is travelling, and so would just bounce about into the car or shatter. Regarding the cylinder/gasses it isn't quite the same theory as recoil flipping the car. In effect the cylinder system becomes an oversized, very powerful, instantly deployed car-jack. Newtons third in full effect and present as ever, but its the forces exerted on the ground, and the opposing forces of the impact with the ground going back through the cylinder/gasses/car that cause the flip. Good example at:
In essence, I feel like it comes down to where you draw line between real physics and Bond physics. mtm's theory (if I was right about it earlier) requires a giant leap of faith with recoil forces, which is how you can get to the Bond World conclusion that this was the method of flipping the car. Mine requires dropping any suspension of disbelief because I was saying what I thought would happen in Real World physics, which is how I came to the conclusion firing the seat would just send it flying into the cabin of the car.
And with that, I'm going to make this my last take on the matter, even if someone resurrected Newton himself and he gave a different answer - nobody visits a Bond site for an extended, combined discussion of Die Another Day and Physics. And if some do, I don't!!! There's more to life than being right on the internet :)
The film is bad, the flip is cool :)
Back to the Klebbies!
And yet it flies.
I have to say, in a film I don’t much like, I’ve always thought the Aston flip was awesome. That and Pike…
All this fighting is making me tired, ah look a nice spot for me to take a rest, let me just lay here and close my eyes a bit.
Sorry, I shouldn't bang on about this, but that's not how Newton's third works. The ground plays no part in it; the car is not pushing against the ground. A bullet doesn't make the gun recoil because it hits a wall a second later- the bullet is pushing against the gun. If the Aston were floating in space it would still spin away from the direction the seat is fired in.
This will probably explain it better than I can:
https://www.physicsclassroom.com/class/newtlaws/Lesson-4/Newton-s-Third-Law
But yeah, otherwise I agree that although the physics are right, it’s a bit OTT to really happen :)
It's totally improbable, highly illogical but if you want it too and let it, a bit of fun.
The ejector seat to flip the car is a nice little wink to GF.
If you want to look at the forces at play and how it couldn't work, I'd say that when the car is skidding across the ice on its roof, would it not be doing so nose down instead of horizontally as seen in the film?
That's a very heavy V12 under the bonnet of this car.
If you watch the film when the car flips onto its roof, the cars nose dips forward before cutting away.
Maybe we're spending too much time wondering about forces and whatnot in a Bond action sequence.
As for the Klebbie, I'll vote DAF and Bambi and Thumper.
Makes no sense.
Goon 1 falls back into the dresser while goon 2 approaches Bond:
Ma'am in the mirror: A mystery woman? appears standing behind the crew, wearing a blue/purple/orange sleeveless top. Could we be looking at Dana Broccoli here? The hairstyle looks similar. Or, perhaps a set decorator?
Crew members in the mirror:
It's all Roger's fault!
I'd be more inclined to think it's possibly Elaine Schreyeck who was part of the script and continuity department.