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It was obvious from that scene that Bond clearly knew Blofeld/Oberhauser, but in the remainder of their scenes together you don't get the feeling that Bond really cares about him. The scenes between Bond & Le Chiffre for instance felt far more menacing. They were going after each other and they both wanted to best the other. It felt like a cheap attempt to give some sort of additional weight to the relationship between them because the stakes of the film felt incredibly low as it was (which is especially confusing/frustrating when they decided to bring back Spectre & Blofeld after 40 years and couldn't muster a decent plot or villainous plan).
Then there were things like why Spectre even cared about Swann in the first place. Why in the hell would they care if Bond found her? Plus the reason for the rift between Mr. White & Blofeld came about because Blofeld was targeting women & children? What did Mr. White think the $ being raised by Le Chiffre in CR was going towards? Terrorist attacks that only killed grown men? The plot as a whole felt forced and the film opted to throw in a bunch of random back stories between the characters to try and heighten the stakes and in the end I thought it just made the whole thing more confusing & it came off as very lazy on the part of those involved.
Blofeld didnt take the path the took solely based on Bond but it was a part of it. Also Blofeld never tried to seek out Bond at all. Ever. Bond kept getting in the way for 9 or so odd years & finally after Sciarras death & funeral Blofeld was probably anticipating a confrontation.
It is not so much a cliché as a common trope that is used among other things for dramatic irony. I would agree that in Bond stories, at least in the novels, Bond does not create his enemies. In movies, it has been different: in GE and DAD, Bond was instrumental in the construction of the villain. Not that I like DAD mind you. In the novels, England and sometimes the whole West plays an indirect role in the creation of a monster, for instance in MR.
That said, James Bond did not create Blofeld. This is entirely Blofeld's assumption that this English boy placed in foster care was a cuckoo. And beside, Blofeld in the end created himself: he chose his new name, he killed his father, he built his shadow empire, etc.
I am not sure yet if I am quite satisfied with the Oberhauser is Blofeld yet. But it is still far better and closer to Fleming than an African warlord or a Miss Blofeld. Or a M is Blofeld (one thing some posters brought forward here years ago which I found so ridiculous and unthinkable). I am like @Brady regarding the early scripts: the end result is a million years better than some of the ideas that were there.
The way it's presented in the film is really the best of both worlds; Mendes gets his personal stuff but the finished product isn't derailed by a heavy handed way of shoehorning in this past relationship. Some might say it's underdeveloped but I think we got a good balance here. Do people want it to play a larger role in the film? Some are already complaint that it's there at all. One literally can't please every one.
That being said, Mendes, P & W, Newman, and Logan need to go. Let's get some new blood.
At first the whole Oberhauser thing didn't bother me that much but the more I think about it the shitter it gets.
In the book Bond requests to be assigned to the Oberhauser case so he can hunt down Major Smythe but in SP he doesn't even flinch when he finds out Hannes was murdered rather than dying in an accident.
I fail to see the point of any of this Oberhauser shite that was shoehorned into the film as Bond doesn't seem to give a toss about Hannes dying or Franz being responsible and having a vendetta against him. Take it out of the script and you lose absolutely nothing except some feeble motivation for Blofeld. Why isn't him being a super criminal motivation enough instead of some piss weak kindetgarten gripe? It demeans the character of Blofeld who wouldn't let such pathetic emotions affect the course of his life.
Reading through this thread and two points become scarily evident:
1. A lot of the people who have ended up making big decisions on Bond scripts seem to be happy to sign off on some absolutely shocking ideas. Some of the elements in various drafts of the script were appalling yet they were happy to send them to the studio and remarkably it seems that we were saved some of Logan and Mendes's more ridiculous notions by the studio pushing back and (praise the guy) Fiennes who just said a straight 'I'm not having that.'
2. I'm wondering what EON were playing at during all this shambles (I really cannot think of a more apposite word than that)? Despite having 3 years to get a script in shape SP seems almost as chaotic a writing process as QOS.
Shouldn't they be checking on Logan's progress and if what's he's coming up with is bollocks they need to be interceding a bit quicker.
As it is it seems that once again we end up with a script that is still being rewritten the night before shooting starts.
Here's an idea going forwards (apart from hiring a better writing team) - why not sign someone up by say end of March and let him start writing and see what he comes up with. Then rewrite, polish or if it's shit sack him and start again and repeat these steps until you get a good script.
The point is don't have a release date locked in and announced. By all means aim for October 2018 but if by mid 2017 the script isn't gelling (as SPs clearly wasn't) consider letting the date slip by a year.
The key issue is they lock themselves into a release date in and they simply have to start shooting on Jan 1st of the year the film is to be released whatever state the script is in.
So be it if the script ends up sparkling like the Akbhar Shah rather than paste and glass.
If they cant solve the studio problem in a short amount of time I dont think Craig will return.
They tainted Craig's previous Bonds by a trick to try to make Blofeld the villain to end all villains instead of just writing him that way.
This year Bond needed to step up and they choked. Never have I felt like they had no clue and ended up half assed. At least when they made DAD and QOS they believed in what they were doing. SP is like a moron trying to do brain surgery.
No reference to that torture sequence is inferred or intended.
Just my opinion. Be nice I'm not afraid to kick a can at you :P
JUST KIDDING!!!
Are you sure? It's a 32oz can :D
I'll reduce it then. ;)
Lol ok you win. Short of switching to bottles I've got nothing.
I agree they choked and did damage to Fleming's vision and the reboot in general. It's something EON will have to be answering to fans for the foreseeable future (I can already imagine seeing a resigned Wilson and a defensive Brocoli in interviews). They wanted Mendes which also meant Logan and they were busy doing other things and then come in and were given way too much trust and control. They should have delayed and gotten Spectre and Blofeld right. They talked (Craig too) for so long, about adding things back carefully, over time, and then they get Spectre and Blofeld and just crap it all out.
I don't agree that it's done more damage than DAD. DAD was the culmination of four total crap movies that made me (a lifelong Bond fan) stop and say I'm done with Bond. FU EoN, done. So no, its nowhere near that.
There would be more of Bond sharing the spotlight in the field. That should enrage everyone who complained about Judi Dench's globetrotting. At least they were giving screen time to an imposing presence that almost always got more out of Bond. When they throw in Tanner and Moneypenny and whoever into the field it's almost entirely useless.
Blofeld reveal is interesting, but I don't think there was a problem with it in the version we got. The worst part of it in the Logan script is probably that it occurs in the PTS. I think it works better to play with our expectations. The concept of decoding the name is interesting, though. Perhaps that was inspiration for the "decoding" of the SPECTRE organization itself with Q and Swann.
M as a traitor? And people are upset about the Oberhauser reference? Personally, I am entirely unaffected by the half-brother angle. Craig's Bond is clearly not literary Bond and it wasn't handled with any lack of tact. They knew each other for a summer, that's nothing on the level of any kind of sibling relationship. If the Oberhauser reference bothers enough people, chance are there is a laundry list of things that piss them off in Spectre since so many classic Bond situations are taken out of context already.
No Hinx? That alone would make the movie much less enjoyable. Hinx was one of the best parts (in fact most people have said he was underutilized around this forum IIRC). They did femme fatales so well in the Brosnan era. The difference between Brosnan and Craig is that Brosnan was more of a charmer. I just can't see Craig getting the same mileage as Brosnan in that department. Craig, being infinitely more physical than Brosnan, gave us a good show with Bautista.
The NATO base is one aspect that I would say sounds far superior to the final Spectre script. I just didn't feel very attached to any of the villain's plot. I've already said it would have been better if they could have narrowed their scope to some of the background actions they were taking that went along with consolidating spy information. We didn't really have that, so the danger was really only placed on the characters themselves in a kind of disjointed way. It would have been nice to have the methods of the plans cross the path of Bond more directly.
I'm glad we had P&W to improve the script. Let's have a proper screenwriter in the future though, please.
It's not a studio problem (as it was in years past). The contract with Sony is simply up.
And IIRC it was only around June/July that Mendes wrote in a mail "Now it feels like a movie" or something like that (I'm not 100% sure about the date though)
The hype was just too much for this one
I don´t recall anyone posting in this thread "how much better" the Logan script would have been. It´s just surprising that, after comments leaking last year that Logan´s script were totally unacceptable, the final film doesn´t seem so far from it, neither in terms of content, nor in terms of quality.
Mendes saying that something feels like a movie is hilarious, given that in his Bond films he basically does theater filmed for the big screen.
Well, calling a Bond film Spectre, and then referring more to things like the dead being alive than to the Special Executive for Crime, Terror, Revenge and Extortion, what the f*** were they expecting?
I would suggest that for the next film, the whole Oberhauser/Spectre thing will be ignored and SPECTRE introduced properly, with or without Blofeld, but not the Blofeld from SP, just ignore him, or better still, let Bond wake up in the first shot of the film and shake his head and mumble something about what a bad dream he had. That kind of forboding would actually be kind of Fleming-esque, much like in the MR novel, when Bond sees only part of the blinking Shell sign, thus reading the word "hell" blinking over and over at him.
Exactly.
They should have taken a little more effort (I was going to say spend a little more time..but that's clearly not the case since we waited 3 yrs!) in developing & thinking through character motivations and whether they would appear fully plausible & relatable with on screen, in the context of the narrative.
100% agree. SP on it's own is a better film than DAD (I happen to like QoS fine), but it went and mucked up Craig's era by shoe horning in the events of the prior 3 films. Never before has a Bond film done that. If it was bad, then it was essentially moving on and hoping to do better the next time. And it makes it feel so much worse when everything else about SP was incredibly lazy. I was ecstatic when I saw they were bringing back Mr. White & Quantum, but in the end everything was just so poorly tied together that I wish they'd just made Bond 24 a total stand alone film.
Having SPECTRE be the villains behind the events of Craig's first 3 films was not ever the plan until they got the rights back and decided to make it the plan between SF & SP, and it showed. SP was just an incredibly lazy and poorly written film that tried to heighten the stakes of the events in the film by calling back to the events of the prior films. I hope Craig is back for one more, but I very much hope they get new writers and a new director (or an old one if Campbell can be persuaded to return).
I also hope they just go into Bond 25 by making little to no mention of the events of SP. No Madeline Swann, Blofeld's out of custody with little to no explanation, Bond is back with MI6, etc. Just have SPECTRE & Blofeld be a threat and Bond is the one tasked with stopping them. That's where SP went wrong the most in my eyes - now Bond 25 has to be a good film on its own and correct the mistakes of the prior film unless they ditch so much of what SP tried to establish.