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You´re kidding me, right? What´s gonna be next then, Blofeld being a random name out of a phone book? Wasn´t there a big hype here on the forums claiming that Mendes was such a big Bond fan?
Interesting perspective, I wish I could see that also in the film, instead of the idea that Blofeld spent the last decade screwing up Bond´s life.
That´s great that it´s "downplayed comared to the script", but that doesn´t help any, because it´s still much too prominent in the movie, and if it wouldn´t have been that prominent it would have been even more obvious how superfluous that element is.
Just off the top of my head:
"Well, we looked at what we have got, and there you have a few pivotal years in Bond´s adolescence that he spent together with Blofeld, which must have been the most defining years for Bond´s character, and we thought, wow, that´s a story that´s never been told!"
That would make even less sense. Bond and Oberhauser never met until after their death, never before. They only met as a result of it.
I didn't say it made sense. It was just a weird thought that came into my head, of what a nightmarish DAD like version of SP would look like.
But as you pointed out, I then slapped myself and realized the impossibility of it.
Well, Blofeld could have always been a bit on the sadistic side, and perhaps made some early studies about life and death with Bond´s parents, and possibly little James was there too. And then the experiment backfired in the shape of James surviving and becoming Blofeld´s foster brother. That would of course make little psycho Blofeld even more psycho. And here we are... >-)
I don't know about "mess," but often the finished product can be far different than what they started with.
I've read the first drafts by Michael France and Bruce Feirstein for GoldenEye and Tomorrow Never Dies respectively. They're extremely different, including concepts that got dropped. In the case of Tomorrow Never Dies, various hands rewrote it until Feirstein was brought back at the very end. He ended up with the only writing credit in the movie but he was far from the only one working on it.
By comparison, Purvis & Wade's first draft for The World Is Not Enough (which says it's "based on an idea by Richard Maibaum") is a lot closer to the finished product, but there are still significant changes. When Feirstein did the final polish, he included a bit that was in his original Tomorrow Never Dies first draft.
--Remember how one reason the reboot was necessary was that "Austin Powers f*cked us"? (See MI6 interview: http://bit.ly/1RgABhC)
That's why we got a more serious grittier Bond in 2006. Except, four films into it, they adopted an idea that's similar to the whole Austin Powers and Dr. Evil were really brothers. Not exactly the same thing, but close enough. Maybe they changed their minds about Austin Powers.
--Turns the conflict between Bond and, arguably, his greatest adversary into an installment of Family Feud.
--For me personally, I've seen this once before with the rebooted Hawaii Five-0 television series. There where arch foe Wo Fat was given a personal reason to hate McGarrett, which accounts for various events going all the way back to the pilot.
In their final showdown (in the 100th episode, which aired during the fifth season), Wo Fat and McGarrett have guns drawn on each other. Wo Fat calls McGarrett, "Brother." (He's not, really, but Mom McGarrett, who was a spy, wanted to adopt him). McGarrett replies, "I'm not your brother." BLAM!
I realize people outside the U.S. (and probably a fair number within the U.S.) aren't familiar with this. But for me the Bond-Blofeld "foster brother" bit was been there, done that.
I think Blofeld killing the parents of the boy who would then go on to also be his foster brother and later arch-nemesis would be just about the biggest instance of convenience in the entire Bond series. It'd make TB look like a sleek, smooth spy narrative in comparison.
TB for me has also the big advantage of being very immersive, which distracts me a lot from thinking about logic and convenience and such stuff, whereas SP´s look and detached feeling is inviting to look for all kinds of flaws.
I can't just forget about it too, but I can understand that for some it's just a minor random twist. When a director start to play with a franchise, you can have very different opinions depending whether you consider these movies as part of a franchise (or like me, as a genre), or just as movies.
To me, both SF and SP are more Mendes movies than Bond movies, a bit like if Alan Moore would write a Sherlock Holmes adventure in which he actually is Moriarty with a split personality, then it would be more an Alan Moore story than a Sherlock Holmes story.
So when the next director comes in, I can imagine that the Mendes Universe where everything is connected goes out of the window. Even with the same actors. Yes, I can imagine Blofeld never talking anymore about his brotherhood with Bond. On the other hand, if Mendes stay, I'm afraid they'll have to go even "deeper". The script went deeper.
Many will say "yes". But I can't think of another recent instance of a screenwriter giving an interview and saying publicly "I'm done with writing for movies", during the screenwriting process.
He's such a big Bond fan that he thinks he's the one who cast Kinnear as Tanner :)
More seriously, he's a fan but IMO not in the sens that he cares about Fleming. He talked more about the movies he saw as a kid. I don't think he sees something major in turning Blofeld into someone from Bond's past, and not have in mind Fleming's Blofeld.
Yes, IMO, he could consider "Blofeld" as a random name, a kind of private joke reference to the book, a bit like the Hildebrandt name on the door. Bond reacts like he doesn't care about the "Blofeld" name, I think Mendes doesn't care either. Wasn't it reported he said he didn't care the DB5 full of GF gadgets was illogical when P&W told him so ?
After all, SP's Blofeld ends up with YOLT's scar in every scripts IIRC. Fleming didnt give him a scar. And they didn't care about Dr Evil :)
Another script difference :
In the script, Oberhauser didn't know his real name. He thought he was Hannes Oberhauser's child. But Bond revealed to him he was in fact an adopted child, and tells him his real name was "Ernst Seban" ("Blofeld" never appears in any script, but it may have to do with obfuscation if a leak happened, oh the irony).
So you see, they were ready for even more re-writing of Blofeld's past. He could have discovered he was a child adopted by Hannes but not his real child, a bit like Bond. The "nemesis" symbol goes up, the subtlety goes down !
Sam Mendes' "Bond and Blofeld", by Netflix :)
I don´t even mind a director turning a Bond movie into "just a movie". CR and QoS invented a completely new Bond. But I could connect very well with those films, and I hope I get to renew that experience with the next director.
After reading what they did to Logan's original script, I'm looking forward to Mendes leaving the franchise and Bond getting back to some more straight-forward movies instead of needing these big, franchise-turning events happening in every movie.
I agree it would have been horrible to have one of MI6's stable become a turncoat and it was way too obvious that "C" was the baddie. Let's face it, the whole "C" storyline was to give M something juicy, yet believable, to play.
I still think it would have been more interesting to bring in M's IRA backstory somehow rather than the obvious C storyline. Or, alternately, they could have had C/Blofeld "framing" the MI6 regulars via video manipulation. It really doesn't make sense to hide C's evilness because it's just so obvious; they should have just had him wear it proudly and go for broke.
Whoever mentioned that the African warlord idea could work for a reimagined Mr. Big is a genius.
The whole brother angle isn't what irritated me about that aspect of the film, it was how it was handled. Their past together drove Blofeld to be evil and Bond accidentally helped to create a criminal mastermind? That's ridiculous. And Bond barely even acts like he knows Blofeld in the film. There doesn't seem to be any stakes for Bond. The stakes of the movie just felt very, very low.
There were certainly some great ideas in Spectre, but I felt like they were very poorly carried out.
How did the two of them go about there separate ways in life, and not know or keep in touch as to what the other was doing?
Someone might have it, but I'm not sure.
How is it ridiculous? It's the classic "hero creates the villain" trope.
You can call it classic, but I call it unoriginal, seen a million times, a cliche.
Besides, James Bond is not supposed to create his villains. I think this is the obvious influence of Batman.
You're right, that was clearly the intention of the filmmakers this time out. As you have stated this arc is very reminiscent of a number of different films, the one that immediately comes to mind is Tim Burton's 1989 "Batman". Here a gangster called Jack Napier killed Bruce Wayne's parents, therefore forcing him to become Batman. Soon after, Batman pushes Napier in some acid and he forces him to become The Joker. There's even a line in the film where he says something like "I made you, but you made me first".
It's a slightly familiar trope.
I suppose the idea in SP is that Bond created his own arch-nemesis. Even Oberhauser says Bond is "responsible for the path I took". It is because of Bond that Oberhauser became Blofeld. Thereby, Bond created Blofeld.
Personally, I don't mind the idea. I just don't feel like the film really utilises it as well as it could have. In the original drafts the angle is more developed. In particular in the December draft where Bond and Oberhauser play cards over dinner whilst using chestnuts as chips to gamble with. There's a great story Oberhauser tells during it about Hannes connection to the young Bond. Sadly the whole scene morphed into the dodgy CGI drill-torture scene in the final film.
I was wondering if we knew anything about Sony or EON's choices for Charlotte King? She's a CIA agents and considering Mendes's penchant for casting well-known actors there is a lot of great choice.
Personally, I think Jessica Chastain would have suited that type of role
Also, I don't think it ever entered the actual scripting stage but an idea floated around at the studio level was Meryl Streep as the villain. Whether they mean for Blofeld or Irma Bunt, I don't know. What I do know from the e-mails is that Mendes was very keen to cast her.
From Logan's perspective, I have a feeling he always wanted to go with the African warlord idea. Which I kinda love. Chiwetel was always the ebst choice for the part for me.
What pains me is that Mendes had no clear vision on who Blofeld is. He went through so many different iterations of the character in such a short period of time. From African warlord, to ugly lesbian to evil step-brother. Surely the character of Blofeld has such a firm ingrained identity that none of these interpretations neatly fit within? It would seem that Mendes was merely creating entirely new characters and (frustratingly) saddling them with the name "Blofeld".
Having said that we do end up with something closer to the iconic character in the final film. However, that's only because Mendes happily embraces all the gimmicks associated with Blofeld (obscurity, the jacket, the cat, the scar, etc). On the other hand, Blofeld was never that fleshed out a character and always just a collection of gimmicks anyway. So maybe Sam felt he had little to work with anyway....
Yes, looks like they wanted to bring back Blofeld no matter what.
That's kind of what I was getting at. Bond essentially 'creating' Blofeld felt very weird to me. Especially given that all Bond did was latch onto the elder Oberhauser as a father figure 30 years prior. Then there's the fact that Bond doesn't even seem angry at Blofeld for killing Oberhauser and just seems virtually indifferent to Blofeld in each of their encounters. It was almost like they knew there wasn't a whole lot of real conflict between the film's hero & villain so they threw in the whole foster brother/Bond created Blofeld arc to try and add some depth to the relationship between the two of them at the last minute.
Contrast that to the relationship between Bond & Le Chiffre in CR, where we got to see their hatred for each other build. It was through Bond's actions in that film where he kept foiling Le Chiffre's plans that built up animosity between them (similar to how the Bond/Blofeld relationship was staged in FRWL/TB/YOLT). Not some 30 year old feud between foster brothers that's barely even mentioned in the film, yet is given as the entire reason the villain turned evil in the first place.
Well, Bond looks at Blofeld when he sees him for the first time IMO with a "HIM ?" look, and it's in the trailer. That had the photo scene.
Obviously since I had read the scripts when the trailer came out, I can't judge if it was obvious or not. But to me it was as obvious as the Madeleine / White connection in the trailer.
It's classic but it's not Fleming"s creation. Yes, as others have said, it looks like DC Comics' Bond. You kind of expect a Netflix TV series about their youth now, during which you will see Bond smashing all the teeths of a tall bully at school, who will then have some steel teeth :)
Another classic trope is that the father of the hero is not dead. Do we really want Andrew Bond in Bond 25 for the sake of another Mendes family business ?
Yes turning Bond into a rogue spy with family issues turned the Bond movie hero into a more classic movie hero. It may have brought money, but IMO, in the long term, it could kill the genre.
If it was in the public domain, well, no problem, others could continue in the genre. But only EON can produce Bond movies, they rule the genre. It's a problem IMO if they start to fill it with cliches from other genres. Because contrary to LALD and Blaxpoitation, TMWTGG and Kungfu, MR and Starwars, etc.; it's been two movies they are moving the movies away from the genre into Mendes territory.