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Upon reflecting I think my personal issue with the DC arc of films isn't so much with where they went, it's how they got there.
CR---great film. Bond learning the ropes and making mistakes was refreshing to see. The little touches to making him Bond were well done. I buy the romance between Vesper and him. The ending is tragic and then redeeming with the utterance of the line.
QOS---a straight on revenge movie. What we were clamouring for since OHMSS and DAF. Bond is on a mission to find and kill those responsible for Vesper's death. Ending is brilliant.
SF---a great start with the "death of 007". The film is well constructed, doesn't hold up to some logic, especially Silva's escape thru the tube. No mention of Vesper. The narrative threads are left dangling. We see Bond struggling in the tests to re-gain 007 status. Then he's out in the field and has no struggles at all. Other than a shaky gun with Severine. Ending feels like a new beginning.
SP---suddenly the rails come off. Blofeld becomes a jealous family friend. He's the one that masterminded all the previous films, and everything is retconned. Why? Not sure I think there were many other ways to make this personal besides have Blofeld and Bond be childhood friends. Vesper is brought up again, why? Bond falls very quickly for Madeline with no real explanation for it. He drives off into the sunset. A fitting end?
NTTD---now we are full on into Vesper and she drives the action at the start of the film. Bond wants Blofeld dead, after having a chance to do it on the bridge in SP. Why the change of heart? Don't know and not really explained. Now Bond has to deal with a past love, current love and a child. Yes, a child, but the child doesn't really drive any of the plot forward. To add to the ham-fisted way of her being introduced, Madeline lies to Bond and says the child isn't his. This robs of us of any depth of emotion or Bond grappling with being a Dad.
Where do the sins of this arc rest? I think SP undoes a lot of the good achieved by the first three films. NTTD seems to double down on SP and tries to fix the problem, but to me only exasperates it. It's like they felt they had to throw everything into this film. Are we to believe that Bond meets Vesper in 2006 and has unresolved issues from this relationship in 2021? Or 2020? Really? That was the one who left such a huge imprint on his heart?
How is this for an arc for the next Bond. Have him be the cocky and confident guy. Put him into a FRWL type of situation where his confidence is almost his un-doing. Have him battle back and find his way again. I could see this being quite well done. Or go another direction, have him be a jaded agent who almost has a death wish. Bring back the smoking, the drinking to excess and play up that this Bond is almost hoping for death. Have him find someone who he wants to live for. Then he loses her and has to re-build himself and clean himself up.
Those to me would balance story and "personal angle". Let's leave kids, family and villains who are family friends of Bond.
I love this comment!
Obviously I love Spectre just the way it is, but I guess they might have been thinking non-fans are barely going to know or care what Blofeld is, and perhaps they thought the nerdier fans would be along for the reboot era to the extent that they could accept that this guy knew James Bond as a kid. After all, as you point out, there's no real reason why it doesn't work, and for me personally, on the third viewing or so, when I reminded myself it's not Donald or Telly or Charles, it was fine.
The moaning about Skyfall's anachronistic shenanigans with the DB5 was pretty muted too, so maybe they assumed fans were more willing to just enjoy the movie than they actually are ...!
Bond falling in love with Mr White's daughter is almost equally overly interpersonal, and yet way less tricky to swallow because it all unfolds in front of us and they specifically meet because of their involvement in the two sides of international terrorism. Bond and Blofeld on the other hand knew each other before they worked for MI6/Spectre... and that seems a bit unlikely.
For a while I was working on my own version of Bond 24, keeping the inclusion Hannes Oberhauser, but making the villain more akin to Dexter Smythe from the novel, and having Oberhauser's offspring actually be Madeleine Swann as opposed to her being the daughter of Mr. White. To me, that would have gotten rid of all the baggage that weighed Spectre down.
That fantrailer was better than most real trailers!
Yeah, neither of you is wrong about that, in a sense, but I guess I kind of embraced the (rather trendy) epic hero journey-type stuff in Spectre. It fit the style of the film, if that makes sense, like the cinematography and the pretentious 'The dead are alive' stuff (both of which I know people also hate).
I pick on Trevelyan a lot, but that guy's story doesn't make a hell of a lot of sense in the sunlight and depends on at least as much contrivance/coincidence/architype hokiness...I wonder if Brofeld would have benefited from a flashback PTS as Alec did?
(Obviously that would be terrible, but I thought Alec was kind of terrible too)
I wish I could get a fan poster for my phone
That would have been way better. Spectre using Bond to chip away at Quantum. I suppose they just took a gamble that the personal stuff would resonate more with the audience, and it didn’t pay off as much as they’d hoped.
If you literally cut out the two times they name drop “Quantum” in QOS, it wouldn’t have made any difference. They’re still a global terrorist organization trying to get rich infiltrating and manipulating governments. That’s why I wasn’t really all that bothered by how they were revealed to be the same group in SP because they aren’t all that distinctive from each other.
I'm not 100% sure why, but I like Bond falling in love with Mr. White's daughter (Bond very traditionally gets to the villains through a woman in their lives, this isn't too far from that), but I do not like the idea of Blofeld having a daughter that Bond becomes involved with. Maybe there's no logic there.
https://www.polygon.com/reviews/23365454/vesper-review-2022
I think there's a lot of truth in that. Also, we have to keep in mind SP had a rather quick paced pre-production. I suppose if none of them truly had time to step back, have a think about the 'big picture', and indeed just how silly the whole thing was, then it's understandable that we got this.
I love SP. The film is practically taylored to my wishes in terms of tone, visuals, locations and more. But the brother thing hurts, though not so much as to kill the fun entirely. I can easily chew out that little twist while swallowing down the rest, like enjoying a sweet grape and spitting out the seeds.
Even if they had had more time, I'm generally not a big fan of family twists. It feels too "soapy" in most cases.
It's interesting that the first time they adapted Octopussy they chopped out the personal angle for Bond. Not that it would have worked for the story they were telling, but you'd have thought they could have used it in some way. I don't think it would have been weird for Roger to have talked about his childhood mentor: he was a more human bond than Connery.
Later Bonds have not been. Sigmund Freud, analyze this.
- Facism/Racism/Bigotry/Fanaticism/Extremism (Peaky Blinders s05-s06, Schindler's List, Inglorious Basterds, Khalifat)
- Large Scale War (The King's Man, Sherlock Holmes: Game of Shadows)
- Climate Change/Pollution/Energy Scarcity/Food Security (QoS)
- Nuclear Winter (Oppenheimer)
- Inflation/Recession/Economic Instability (Big Short/Marigin Call/Too big to fail)
- Media/Social Media/Fake News/Free Speech (TND)
- Techonology/Robots/Automation/Surveillance (Skyfall/SP/iRobot/Matrix)
- Inequality/Corruption/Billionaires/Poverty/Class Dystopia (Gattaca)
- Civil Unrest/Populism/Authoritarianism (The Bureau)
- The continuing trend of dull, censored, uninspired, badly written, pretentious pseudo entertainment.
I'm not sure that's really representative of a decline in society or whatever you're hinting at, as the 'dwelling on the past' angle I'm talking about specifically came from Ian Fleming, years before.
Other 00 or foreign service agents are fine to be stumbled upon.
If you try to make him too much of a good guy he will become uninteresting very quickly, unless he is unusually attractive and romantic or the world around him is incredibly interesting.
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2022/sep/15/sam-mendes-next-james-bond-film-directed-by-woman
Silva trying to kill M was only half the story. The other half, and I would argue the more important half, dealt with meta-commentaries on Bond's relevancy and his legacy, and the "exploration" of Bond's past. They even retconned his middle-class origins and gave him a family castle so they could do just that.
As for Spectre, most of that movie's problems could have been solved by a simple story alternation: make Quantum and SPECTRE rival organizations. Bond teaming up with Mr. White, the man who killed his first love and is now the father of his current love, to defeat Blofeld would have been a much more interesting story. There would have been a ton of opportunities for character growth and conflict there to fullfil the need for a personal angle. No need for Brofeld or any major retconning at all.
Meaning that Connery and Moore's generation--and their Bonds--generally just got on with their jobs and didn't really think about it/question it. That's not the case by the time you get to Brosnan and Craig.
I'm not sure you read what I wrote: Fleming wrote Bond in the 1950s, before Roger or Sean played 007, and that character did think about his job and question it. I'm literally talking about an incident from a story written in 1962. It's not a matter of generations but just of differing approaches to the subject matter.