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Nope, no symphaty at all. Her father didn't 'steal' the empire, he inherited it. As it goes with those who marry. But crazy lilttle spoiled Elektra didn't agree with his decisions, so she had him killed. M was right, they should've let her rot in hell. But that didn't happen as she managed to turn poor little Renard. Now here's a poor man to have symphaty for. First you just have a proper career in villainy, and before you know it you fall in love with a spoiled brat, just so you can have a bullit put through your head. What else to do then to help her blow up millions of people?
Yes, there is something quite tragic about him. The slowly dying man who feels nothing taunted in bed by Elektra King. And later, the dying man attempting to sacrifice himself for an already dead woman and her dead dream.
Still doesn't provide any reason to feel sympathy for them, and especially not their deeds.
You are what you do, I have no sympathy for bad life choices even on the anvil of extreme pain. Redemption I DO believe in. See: Vader tossing the Emperor
That's all true but I think in the grand scheme of things I am meaning here relative sympathy as opposed to absolute sympathy or absolving the villains and henchmen of their evil deeds.
Maybe it would be interesting to see a Bond villain who is a properly tragic figure, pulled and pushed into making all the wrong decisions, with 007 basically as the agent of fate sent to balance the scales.
Do you have an example of such a villain from other film series?
I think that Le Chiffre most fits the bill for that kind of Bond villain. His compromised position is a rather unique situation that we don't really see in any of the other Bond novels or films. He's quite atypical of Bond villainy in that regard though ironically he was also the first Bond villain.
As I said, I think the problem with having a truly ‘sympathetic’ villain in Bond is that it’s good vs evil. We can get a Safin or a Silva, but I don’t think a villain will ever be a sort of Frankenstein’s Monster (at least in the novel terms - ie. a victim of society whose evils and madness are a product of the awful world they live in and the wrongs people do to them). The Bond villain has to make a conscious choice to commit an evil for selfish reasons. Even if they’ve been put through it or have had suffering inflicted on them there’s more than a hint that they’re naturally inclined to that darkness anyway (ie. Safin’s family supplied poison to SPECTRE so we’re likely quite dodgy anyway, and of course his name is very much a clue to that inner evil. Even Silva was an agent prior to becoming a cyber terrorise and likely was already quite dangerous).
Jaws is another henchman who was humanized and switched sides in MR. I never had sympathy for him in Spy. In fact I felt more sympathy for his victims even though you could argue that these men were not on the right side of life either.
Finally I will circle back to Gobinda from OP. His "Out there?" says so much and his devotion to Kamal is admirable and at the same time draws my sympathy.
Ok, but where do we stand with Mr white. He's a criminal, he knows it, but finds himself ousted because he does have a moral compass, and it's the end of him.
HE was a kite dancing in a storm.... okay, some sympathy there...
SP almost stacked the deck and made the audience have sympathy for the guy. Quite a feat as in QOS and CR he is a shadowy figure who operates in a cold and calculating way.
I'm not sure if I found any of the Bond villains pitiable, they've been always portrayed as greedy, truly evil and maniacal ones, not worthy of mercy, these villains are Fleming's rules, they're made out to be unpleasant and to say, disgusting, their plans could've resulted in world chaos if Bond was not there to stop them.
Maybe Renard, because Elektra used him and he's motivated by her despite of not knowing that Elektra was just using him, Elektra didn't care for either man by the way, she used them to pursue her plans (yes, even Bond).
Or maybe those henchmen working in the villains' big corporations: think of the people working inside of Drax's space shuttle, or those men who worked in Zorin's company, or those men working in Dr. No's facility that got involved in Bond's thwarting of such businesses, nothing but treated as collateral damage like some of them may not be evil and just doing their jobs, but when their bosses became a target of MI6, their days were numbered.
Okay, from my recent memory I could count here Silva from SF, mainly because M was the cause of what he became of.
I also feel sorry for the employee who prepares the horses for Khan and Gobinda near the end of Octopussy and who Gobinda brutally kicks to the ground after he's served his usefulness:
I like this idea; maybe have the villain be so misguided that Bond has doubts on killing him but would rather help or even redeem him. Maybe try and talk the villain into giving himself up to the authorities if possible, which in a way would be a nice callback to M’s line in SP about a “Licence to Kill also being a Licence Not to Kill.”
But in the end Bond would have no choice but to kill him and we could see him wrestle with the consequences of that decision much like how Fleming’s Bond would wrestle with the concept of killing.
I don’t think it’d work for a main villain, but for a minor one it could be interesting. I’m thinking of someone like Dexter Smyth from the OP story. Or a much more tragic version of Dryden from CR.
Perhaps. I’m honestly just a sucker for a good “redemption” story, that I’d love to see EON try and go this route. Maybe it wouldn’t work, but at the very least it’d be a new idea; and nobody can really criticize EON for trying out new ideas.
Having read a lot of what fans have to say about EON on these forums I’d say that’s not always true in practice 😂 but I get what you mean.
It sounds a bit like what you’d get with a Batman villain. Often they’re victims of circumstance, mental illness or injury etc. and are effectively led into being evil, with Batman offering to rehabilitate them (often in vain). I do think Bond villains are a bit different in the sense they consciously choose evil for self serving reasons - power, money, revenge etc. But it’s a choice they make and comes from their desire.
But honestly, it really depends on how it’s done.
It is honestly how it's done. As I've said before, maybe some Bond villains could get the Batman villain spinoffs, as there is a decent amount of material for some of them.
Oh I didn’t even think about that 😂. Hey at least no one can call EON unoriginal anymore! I always hear about the days when the biggest complaint about the series was that it was too “formulaic.”
That’s a great way to differentiate between the two properties, but I’ve always wondered the set of life circumstances that lead to somebody like Hugo Drax wishing to destroy half of humanity. I’ve always wondered if the reason that characters like Blofeld, Goldfinger, and Sanchez sought out so much money/power was due to some personal inadequacies from their youth. I think if we got a Bond film where little by little as the plot moves along we discover just how misguided the villain is and what unfortunate circumstances led him to that point, it’d be something quite interesting I feel.
We sort of got that in both Goldeneye and No Time to Die where the backstories of both villains are somewhat explored but I don’t really think both films go deep enough into those ideas.