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Because the GB is a key ingredient. Dots - walk - bang - iris opens onto the action. Classic, beautiful bit of design. It's like the Star Wars crawl, or to a lesser extent the Indy paramount transition. It's part of what makes Bond, Bond. It's a timeless, iconic bit of imagery, rather than something that is firmly an icon of the 60's. Are they still going to have Bond driving a DB5 in 50 years? They moved on before, they need to move on again. I think Binders work commands a lot more respect.
I've been quite happy with the use of the Bond theme in DC's outings - either subtly integrated (QoS) or obvious blaring (end of CR/DB5 moment in SF). I thiink not having it to rely/fall back on as much as in the late 90's will encourage more creativity from the composer, especially during action scenes. I really want to hear the fantastic Barry 007 theme again though (last heard in the MR boat chase all too long ago).
I want to hear Bond, James Bond too, but the delivery is key. So far, DC does it well enough so that it doesn't feel forced (something I felt about PB's intro's) - however Connery/Moore were the masters at making it look natural and still have impact.
I don't need to hear the martini ordered - I loved the way CR made fun of the whole thing.
I don't need gadgets - I liked the way SF poked fun at them.
I really don't need Q or MP - I was fine without them. However, I realize that a reboot has to take us there eventually and so will accept the two re-imagined, somewhat reluctantly.
I personally don't like the DB5 because I think it's "been played out", to quote DC Bond, & I actually always preferred Moore's Lotus. So, I'd sooner see said Lotus, or the beautiful DBS from OHMSS, or the lovely V8 Vantage/Volante from TLD.
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Those are my preferences - but I'm a big enough fan of all the movies to not care all that much either way. Just keep it real (no more Austin Powers style DAD nonsense or too obvious 90s box ticking thank you very much) & I'll be happy enough.
SF hit the spot, noted flaws and all, as did CR & QoS. I'm sure SP will too.
Well, don't just leave it as such. Discuss what those plot holes are, so they can be addressed. :)
IMO, "Double standards" is a concept that must be forgotten when discussing art. If you fail to see it, it's because there's no logical explanation... You cannot really explain logically what is iconic and what is not, you just know one is and the other is not.
Jimmy Page is a genius, and Vanilla Ice is a thief, that's unfair but that's what everyone thinks :)
Before that, do you agree with me that SF is one of a very few Bond movie those story uses "a big twist" ? In GE, the author phones you the twist from the very beginning (and from the trailer too !), in LALD, it was confusing (so we were supposed not to guess the two guys were one guy ??), and in TSWLM, the tension disappears with a bottle of champaign. And that's the only ones I can list off of the top of my head.
Hence, because of this "big twist", the story is a bit more important than usual.
However, I must add it will be very difficult for me to discuss about it, because the Sony leaks tells a very important story about SF plot (yes, SF, not SP). And we have to wait one year before really discussing it.
You've lost me with the last paragraph. As for the SF twist(s): I knew M was going to die and figured everyone else did, too. So is that the twist you're referring to? I knew of her death despite staying away from all internet discussions/speculations on SF in the summer of '12, so the only twist, actually, that I didn't see coming was Naomi Harris was Moneypenny.
Not on SF being the worst in the franchise, which I don't think many will agree with you there, but that its the worst of the 3 Craig films.
CR felt at the time that it was an instant classic, and it has stood the test of time well. It's still one of my favourites.
QoS was deemed a failure at the time of its release, because it failed in comparison to CR, but I viewed it again recently and it wasn't half as bad as I remembered. Arnold's score is superb, Craig looks great as 007, lots of action, the opening car chase is superb, and still has that harder edge Bond feeling. It definitely is standing the test of time better than SF, that's for sure.
Watching SF feels like a bit of a chore now. The PTS is contrived, the opening titles are great, as is the song, but overall the film has a much better first half than the second half (a trend in the majority of Bond films).
Silva's character now feels a bit silly, taking itself way too seriously, and living in the shadow of Ledger's Joker. The score is probably one of the worst in the series, and Craig's appearance in the film looks mostly off putting for the most part. Yes, he wears the right clothes, and yes he looks physically fit, but a grey bearded Bond, sporting a shaved grey skinhead look is not how I imagine Fleming's Bond to look like.
The DB5 even at the time almost made me roll my eyes, particularly with the OTT theme. Totally Bond by numbers, crudely stuck in.
The quiet speaking dialogue between Q and Bond on first meeting, and the Moneypenny shave scene dialogue now comes across as nothing short of annoying.
And Dench reading out that poem really hasn't aged well. That scene comes off as nothing short of pretentious now, and I cringe every time I see it.
My favourite scene in the whole movie is probably when Silva is getting Bond to shoot the glass off Severine's head. That for me felt like real drama, and also felt like it could have been penned by Fleming, (not including the ridiculous spectacle straight afterwards, with the radio, helicopters, and another tacked on OTT awkward soundtrack theme moment.)
Totally agree, I could live with the GB not appearing in CR, because it did actually appear (kind of) before the opening song. I also lived with its absence (just) in SF, as the opening track from Arnold - the slow, low, growing, menacing brilliant Time to Get Out build-up actually works, from the moment we hear it over the Columbia logo to the opening panning shot across the river.
But in SF it almost felt rude, like it was purposely not done, as a slap in the face to fans, and an almost perverse attitude that the GB was no longer needed, that it should only belong tacked on at the end.
To me the opening GB moment is essential to a Bond movie. When I see those opening dots, I know I'm now watching a Bond film, whether its the early, dated GB before TB, the latter Connery ones, Lazenby in his hat, Moore in his flairs, Dalton's, or the update Brosnan ones.
And I agree, this is as essential to the franchise as the Star Wars opening. If I don't see it where it should belong in SP, it will put me in a pissed off mood before the film even begins - that's how strong I feel about it now that we've lived without it for the Craig era.
The twist is : Silva's capture was part of Silva's plan, Bond was a puppet all along. I don't remember another Bond story where the audience is "fooled" by the story hiding that Bond has actually zero influence on the happenings up to that point. In TLD, Bond smells a rat and doesn't kill the sniper even if the beginning of the movie is about a fake event too. In SF, he smells a rat only when all the doors open... In DAD, well okay we find out people are not who they were supposed to be but, hm, rumors say that to shoot the scene in which Bond's pulse goes to zero, they just asked Brosnan to read the new version of the script so...
The Sony leaks tell us that originally Silva's plan in SF would have been revealed in SP to be actually stronger than it seems. We can discuss this in one year (even if this idea is now totally obsolete, you just can't discuss "past leaks" without annoying people wishing to stay spoiler free).
I think CR has a similar twist. And it's a double twist, in that Mathis is first thought of as the double agent, and it's really Vesper. (Though anyone familiar with the novel saw this coming.)
We can really only work off of the finished product, as it is on screen, and not take into consideration what could have been or what might be.
I never believed that Silva had this long drawn out, "years in the planning" plan, as Q suggests. He didn't need to. Remember, he tells Bond he can change things with the click of a button (a mouse, in a bit of irony when juxtaposed with his rat story), things that don't need intricate planning. I don't think Silva knew of his own capture until Bond sent the radio signal aboard the Chimera. Until then, remember, Bond was supposed to be killed in the casino. Silva had no use for Bond until it became apparent to him that the Brits were coming. Then, he became a ticket in. The whole conversation and the set up with the antique pistols were merely a time killers, and Silva lucked out that Bond didn't kill him in an altercation that Silva didn't foresee. So I see Bond as a puppet only from the time he sent the signal to the moment the helicopters arrived.
The only long, drawn out plan that Silva had was to make M suffer, and then kill her. How he accomplished that, and how long he'd make her suffer, was fluid, because he had the ability to manipulate things so quickly.
Q would have been the last person to believe when it came to matters of espionage.
Same in that MR was to tie in with the space shuttle launch but didn't, and Bay's Pearl Harbor might have been celebrated as a classic had it tied in with the 9/11 attacks, but as it was ahead of that, was rightly slated.
There is a heck of a lot of subtext to SF, and a lot of it seems a dig at Britain really. I mean, Bond taking M to his old house ties in well with the subtext that her death allows him to grieve for his parents at last and move on. But superficially, as a narrative, it makes him a fool; he takes her to a gaffe he hasn't visited in a decade or so, and gets her killed. Nice one.
His pledge to save Severine only to balls it up just puts me in mind of Blair and his pledge to step in and liberate Iraq; both go in not knowing the lay of the land and underequipped, and usually somebody dies. This seems less extreme an analogy because the whole Silva thing is about being betrayed by the British Establishment - M smugly reveals how she turned him over, but that's okay cos she's a lovely old lady with received pronunciation - and while his death by getting a knife in the back is wholly undramatic and dull, the subtext is, of course, that he's been knifed in the back again, hence Silva's expression: "Jeez, not again!" Clever, no doubt, but as a narrative you watch it and think, what a dull death, a bit naff.
It's on the base level of plotting that it comes up somewhat lacking, relatively speaking. Interestingly, that didn't seem to bother the masses, given it's phenomenal box office. That's gives us something more troubling to ponder as well (since most members of the public likely did not consider subtext/theme when watching the movie).
Yes. Bond stumbles into Shanghai, something Silva ,however ridiculously omnipotent he appears to be, could never predict. The whole assassination job is a one-off gig undertaken by Patrice. The idea of finding Patrice via the bullet (TMWTGG) could never, ever be predicted. I guess it's to be assumed somebody identifies Bond at the Casino and then one assumes that this gives Silva enough time to sort his hack out, which then gives him enough time to embed it in presumably the only laptop he works on. Then he relies on Bond capturing him, rather than killing him. I mean, I don't really know. I just don't really think about it too much when I'm watching it, as I end up going around in circles.
Where it kind of falls apart for me is that Silva has a sort of jurisdiction, a level of power and control in the digital world. Which works, it makes sense that he's rigging the stock markets and elections etc, it's the idea that he still retains this power in the physical world that I find jarring.
One of the most ridiculous, implausible moments in the film is the tube train scene, when Silva blows up the tunnel and watches the carriages fall through......yeah right!!
So he knew exactly the moment Bond would find him in the tunnel, then press a button to blow it up at the precise second of a train falling through it.
There was way too much of these silly, not-stacking-up-correctly moments in SF, fobbed off as Silva being the brilliant mastermind behind it all, when really it was plot holes in a script that hadn't been through enough QC analysis beforehand.
And these script writers are supposedly professionals, that do this work for a living.... 8-|
No, it didn't make sense, was quite a stretch. But my guess is that Silva had a number of options on this. He chose that location at that moment over others he had mapped out because the timing was right.
I have to agree on the train thing being one of the most ridiculous moments in recent Bond history (perhaps since the infamous CGI ski). Totally preposterous. Truly a 'jump the shark' or 'wtf' moment. There's no defending or rationalizing that one, even though I'm a proponent of the film (based on other factors I've noted on this thread).
I would like to add Bond being shot twice, falling of a train from a considerable height and then popping up some time later without any explanation whatsoever.
There has been a serious attack aimed at the head of MI6, she comes home to what I would presume a seriously guarded home and yet there is our missing agent in her house, WTF
Bond gets back into the service without any problems, here Fleming, Le Carre and any decent writer of spy novels would tell you that such a notion would be more outlandish than MR or TSWLM could ever be.
We have a fully armed military helicopter crossing into Scotland in what could be considered one of the best guarded pieces of airspace in the UK and the chopper manages to arrive at SF without being shot out of the sky???
007 goes of with M getting her killed in the process and there is no SAS or something similar around to protect her, which is just plain the most stupid action ever undertaken by any 007 in any movie. If I were the new M I would make James Bond station-head of a station somewhere in a part of the world were only Inuits live, until such time that there a half decent scriptwriters that can write an action-thriller without the preposterous superficial intellectual sauce that is poured over this gorgeous looking movie. The last two MI movies actual managed that and make it look good too while telling a very personal story about Ethan.
Exactly! Sod the DB5 - that's just a red herring smokescreen in this whole discussion distracting the core issues which are why I have so much trouble with SF - Bond is worse than incompetent and shouldn't be allowed back in service but be demoted to sharpening pencils in a basement in Whitehall...
But this is where I have to question this sort of criticism.
The lack of plausibility argument simply holds no weight....because none of the Bond films are plausible. It's unfair to hold SF to a whole new standard.
Actually they are, more or less. With the exception of the films which stray too far off course (MR, DAD), in general there aren't that many actual plot holes to pick apart in most of the Bond films, and we've never seen Bond being shot twice, and falling to a height where he would have been killed instantly.
This is where the producers really messed up. From what I heard, this was originally going to be the brilliant YOLT/TMWTGG opening, with a brainwashed Bond going AWOL, believed dead, then returning. Now that would have worked, as did most of the things Fleming wrote.
But I'm guessing the EON gang overthrew the idea, and went for something far more OTT and elaborate, which wasn't thought through properly.
I really think EON have run their course with the Bond films, and need some new owners in, as the still unused Fleming material that hasn't been used yet is being criminally ignored, and makes me question why we end up with shoddy written material like we had in SF, instead of using Fleming's work for inspiration.
I think it's more about rationale than plausibility for me. For example, in SF we have the moment where Bond cuts the shrapnel out and gets it tested. From this we learn that it could only have been one of three assassins, (Anyone else think - "Only three men I know use such a gun" at this point) from which he can identify Patrice. Now, this could be considered implausible, it's a hell of a stretch that everything is laid out so conveniently, but at the end of the day, there's a rationale to it. We see them join the dots, hey presto. If this is how it works in the movie world of SF so be it.
What I find jarring is the many instances where the dots don't join from A-B, they join from A-D or A-G and leave me with a 'How?', 'Where?', 'Why? moment. A lot of it is actually in the second half of the film and seems to stem from this idea that they'd created this the vague, omnipotent, ghost-like creature in Silva, but were then hamstrung by it when he manifests physically later. After all if you have a guy who is everywhere and nowhere, how do you have that work in the real world, especially without any rationale?
For example when he 'hacks' MI6 and escapes, why are the guards not armed? And beyond this - how does he take them out. There isn't a single point in the film where Silva displays any level of physical ability. Even inserting a scene on the island, perhaps where a heavy disobeys him and he dispatches him in a ferocious, but calculated manner with a bit of Krav Maga, would show to Bond and the audience what we're dealing with. Then you don't need to show him taking out the guards, you know he's capable. But no, he's still that digital ghost in the real world, which for me just doesn't stack up. This isn't something I've considered with hindsight, this is something that struck me on first viewing and I think it did for others too.
This whole MI6 escape sequence really took me out of the film, from the ineptitude of 'Q' to allow it, to the notion that this can be done with a file on a laptop, to Bond spotting 'Granborough Rd' in the code, it all just seems really trite and frankly, quite boring. It's mostly intangible nonsense. All this and we know that Bond was only in Shanghai by chance, so how else was this all supposed to play out if Bond had died, or simply not bothered to return to the service? There are so many what-ifs? It's never truly addressed, in a way that says to me they'd tied themselves in knots and didn't really know themselves.
And again, the tube train scene. No one really knows what's going on here. It's almost like they thought about a cool stunt, but not how it worked. Did Silva have bombs all over London? If so, tell me that. Otherwise I'm watching some kind of bastardised 'choose your own adventure' where I have to make up what's happening, rather than being told the story the writers and director should be wanting to tell me. And this isn't about filling in the blanks, this is like playing 'Wheel of Fortune' with no clue and a series of empty boxes, I'm just guessing five letter words.
Like @Bondjames I don't hate SF, there's much to admire in it for me, but I do find some of this stuff really frustrating. This is what happens when you try to spin too many plates in my mind.