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I'm not really sure that's relevant though. It's a slight note of difference, but I don't know why it would mean that the cinematic version shouldn't suffer.
Except he flirted with that not happening in FRWL, and I would suggest that Fleming, like Conan Doyle, would have killed his creation off sooner or later. He was pretty broken by TMWTGG.
It's one thing to divest from the past five films but BOND 26 must still be a Bond film, not an elimination game to avoid what came before or has always been. So for me homages are welcome as part of the film formula, and are really unavoidable anyway.
By killing off James Bond at the end of a specific actor's tenure, and promising more James Bond adventures later, the movie is essentially telling the viewer that the character of James Bond is dead, but the character of James Bond isn't dead. It's a construct that simply wouldn't fly in literature (thankfully).
Nah, the books would simply reboot and most people would understand that conceit and move forward with it because they all understand it’s all fictional. Publishers and studios are NEVER gonna just sit on a property just because the character died.
Steven Spielberg has been saying that DIAL OF DESTINY will be the very last Indiana Jones film, but that comes off incredibly naive on his part because everyone knows that when he, Lucas, and Kennedy all pass away the studios will do something with the property.
What does that even mean?
This is a level of hostility from the Bond team that was formerly only associated with the likes of the Star Wars producers. Babs and MGW eventually fell for it, too: "Accept our content or you're toxic." It's a cynical way of critic-proofing their (bad) movie.
Fukunaga is emblematic of the real toxicity of Hollywood, calling Connery's Bond a rapist only for he himself to be unmasked as an abuser of young actresses. These people are all the same: rich, raging hypocrites. And their self-righteousness only makes it worse, because they aren't even talented.
NTTD is filled with sloppy direction, poor storytelling, and bad acting. I don't care about being "fair" to NTTD because the people who made it aren't fair. If their attitude is "f*ck the fans" then fans have a right to say "f*ck you" back.
Exactly!
You’re agreeing with someone who has yet to even see the film.
And to get this angry at a film is kind of over the top (especially when you haven’t seen the film as a whole). Once again, I find the arrogance overwhelming.
EDIT: from Higson ( @slide_99 , although you’ve not bothered watching the film, you should take note, it may help you cope):
“All the films still exist. If someone writes a new book, or makes a film, looking at Bond in a different light, it doesn’t alter the past or somehow cause the other stuff to disintegrate. If you don’t like it, ignore it and move on. Why get so angry”.
And to both @slide_99 and @SIS_HQ: to think filmmakers made a film to tick off the fans is a terribly conceived concept. Do you realize this is called the film “business” for a reason? It’s a business where more bums in the seats means success. It means that the financiers will want to get back into bed with the filmmakers. To go out of their way to do what you believe they did (do you know the producers? You can read their motives?), would be to burn bridges and never work in the industry again!
But as far as I know, everyone wants to be a part of Bond— from the money people, to actors, to directors and writers and set designers and costume and music and editing and stunts……..
No, SIS and slide, they didn’t go out of their way to do what you insist they did. They made a film that you don’t like. That’s it.
Time to move on from this…
And if, indeed, he still has to see the film, saying things like "NTTD is filled with sloppy direction, poor storytelling, and bad acting" only invites questions such as How would you know?
I agree about the anger. It's a film. I get that, as fans, we can be passionate about Bond. But such anger is unhealthy.
The Craig series did a better job of exploring less fantastic storylines than the frequent silliness of the Moore films. In many respects FRWL feels like a one off. It has a feel I would like to see captured in a future film. My hope is the next film(s), while acknowledging a formula, can manage to feel fresh and avoid feeling like 'been there, done that.'
Oh, I think you have a point too.
Thanks for clarifying it to me.
I mean that any (none sci-fi) author wouldn't kill off a character, then bring it back without explanation, expecting the reader to simply shrug it off as being 'an alternate universe'.
That's what I mean when I say it wouldn't usually happen in a series of books, but it's become accepted in a series of movies.
In each script there is a three act formula. Inside the three acts themselves there are formulas, and also specific timings on when to reveal plot twists— no matter the genre. There is even an acceptable baseline page count-formula for each screenplay dependent on the genre (for example, horror films want to be between 90-100 pages, action and it’s sub genres 95 on the very low end to approximately 110 pages, and drama is generally allowed 120-130 pages (readers will definitely turn to the back of each script to see how many pages they have in front of them).
Scriptwriting is about execution. To not be derivative is the skill of great writers. They take archetypes and flip them so they feel fresh, and new.
So EoN and their creatives will find the story they want to tell, then it’s about carefully applying their execution to make a 60 year film series feel fresh again.
But most writers will tell you: we’ve been repeating the same stories since the Dawn of our people. It started over the evening fires, the Greeks expanded, Shakespeare and his peers took from these great stories and brought them into their time. And so on, through the centuries.
Bond and the people that make him, will find a way….
I was trying to more expand and answer your statement: “ Difficult to do when working with a formula.”… All screenplays are, at their core, formula (whether drama, action, horror…), so the writers of Bond have always had this challenge, especially once the scripts deviated from the source material, or, when they ran out of the source material.
But that’s the art of writing, playing with the same stories, archetypes and formulas.
Yes, it is indeed accepted. Because people understand what fiction is and aren’t flabbergasted by the conceit of resetting a narrative featuring new iterations of iconic characters. People aren’t that precious about treating fiction like a chronicled document except the most obsessive fans.
You can keep nagging me all you want, I've seen enough of NTTD in the past two years to have an opinion on it. If my take on Logan Ash is incorrect, show me how it's incorrect. It seems pretty obvious what the purpose of his character is, because he doesn't actually serve any narrative purpose.
This whole attitude of, "Hollywood is not the problem, the fans are" reeks of punching down. As if fans of any franchise need to accept whatever they're given? If I'm a Star Trek fan do I have to watch and enjoy whatever Alex Kurtzman makes for the sake of brand loyalty? I don't think so.
In the end, whether you’ve seen the film or not, your reaction to it (or the bits and pieces you’ve seen), is quite over the top, very aggressive, and, unhealthy, and; to assume that you know what the producers intent was is quite arrogant.
In the end, it’s a business. No Time To Die was not made to give you the middle finger. That concept is misguided. And it shows that you know nothing about the film industry (or business in general).
As Higson rightly stated: it’s a movie. There’s nothing to get angry about. It’s a “take” you didn’t agree with. Enjoy the other books and films. But seriously, this is all a little unhinged, and it’d be wise to embrace your feelings, but move on from this idea that the producers were intent on upsetting you and the Bond community.
In my opinion, that take on Logan Ash isn't bad. Bad is selling it short. It's madness; utter lunacy. The purported analogy is absurd. It doesn't intersect with reality.
Ash represents the fans that wouldn't end up liking the movie? I can't believe I'm actually going to delve into this, but what the hell. For the analogy you suggest to hold any water, it's not enough to have Ash talk about being a fan of Bond (something which, as you know, turns out not to be true, and which is there only to spice up the reveal of Ash as a bad guy). No, for the analogy to work, Ash would have to be a legitimate fan of Bond, rather than his moral and ideological opposite. He would also have to witness the character of Bond changing in some way that Ash could find reprehensible. And then he would have to die, as the film's way of saying that his outlook was invalid. Is that too literal for you? I'm sure it could be reconfigured in multiple ways, but generally speaking, analogies in stories need that kind of robust foundation. Because they are arguments that are not presented in a straightforward way, but encoded into a story, there have to be enough hints within said story that can make you say "okay, I can see what they were going for here." Having Ash lying about being a fan of Bond and then killing him off isn't nearly enough.
A good, albeit certainly not foolproof indicator that it is a silly analogy is that in all the articles, posts and pieces I've read about this film, whether positive or negative, no one has ever brought it up as an example of cynicism from the filmmakers towards the Bond fans.
The narrative purpose of Ash? What, you mean apart from the purpose he serves in the plot, in helping to lead Bond to the trap in Cuba, picking up Obruchev and generally doing Safin's bidding? Not to mention the dramatic purpose he serves in providing the basis for a twist, whether you think it works or not? That non-existent narrative purpose?
You're projecting your opinion of the movie, and of its reception, onto a character and a story which don't support your claims.
In a strange way, I still appreciate your post, as it made me go through the mental exercise of trying to understand exactly why I found it to be completely wrong and misguided. And there is no snark in that comment, I assure you.
I'm being lazy right now so I'm just grabbing what I can find on Wikipedia, but $774.2 million at the BO doesn't usually mean that people dislike a film. Was it enough to make a profit considering its budget? Possibly not; such calculations tend to be very complicated. But if the film didn't make its financiers happy, then that's because of the budget. Audiences came to see the film, in COVID times, that's a given.
Judging approval ratings, and your typical websites like IMDB and whatnot, for what any of that is worth, it seems that NTTD usually secures something well over 7/10, or an A, or whatever such sites use. That doesn't strike me as a big failure.
And the film also won a few awards, some more prestigious than others.
Again, these things mean little. A film's quality, or even popularity, cannot be conclusively judged by any of these, not even by all three combined. But it's not unreasonable to use them as indicators. And then it seems that NTTD found its audience. Nothing at least shows that there's any "visceral" reaction involved, as @slide_99 put it.
We mustn't focus too hard on angry YouTubers destroying films in 3-minute videos either. They are loud and they are in a laughable minority. Some of them are perfectly sincere, while others just seek controversy. Big films draw a lot of Internet blood. I used to think that - wow! - five or even twenty-five negative YouTube reviews must mean that "nobody" loved a film. I was mostly proven wrong by ratings, BO returns, enthusiasm for a sequel, and so on. It's easy to find confirmation online for any impression of the film, whether awesome!, mèh, or ieuw! Online opinions rarely inform, they mostly confirm one's own opinion.
So it's hard to "prove" that NTTD shocked audiences in a bad way, or satisfied them in a good way. The reality is probably a mixture of all kinds of responses anyhow. But I will say this, apart from members of this forum -- and admittedly, this forum is where I meet most Bond fans -- I haven't come across anyone (friends, family, colleagues, students) in the flesh who hates NTTD. Most people I know actually really like the film. Again, that doesn't prove anything. But it makes me very defiant towards that off-the-cuff assessment that the film caused "visceral" responses.
The easy answer is that @slide_99 is only drawing from the vocal minority that frothed at the mouth because that’s all he’ll listen to.
I find the defenses of NTTD as intriguing as the criticisms. Creative works are rarely unanimous in their praise. I don't find opinions criticizing NTTD different from opinions criticizing TB as slow, boring, in need of editing, and just off the mark. The criticisms of TB, though frequently voiced, are opinions and opinions only. They are not fact. There are aspects of TB I am critical of, none of which include slow, boring, in need of editing, and just off the mark. For the most part I like TB as is, but I certainly don't get upset by reading the criticisms of others. Had I had something to do with the novel or making the film, then I would have a personal stake in both and might be a bit defensive. Pretty much my opinion is I respect the right of others to be wrong. In other words, we can agree to disagree just as long as you (the editorial you) don't preach to me and act as if you are far more knowledgable and therefore right.
Yes, after Craig there will be a Bond 26. The writers will come up with something within the tried and true formula of Bond films. My hope is it will be as inspired as CR, but there is no guarantee. I may like it; I may not. Or I might be somewhere in between. Regardless, I will have opinions.
If my point really didn't have merit, I don't think you would've spent so much time on the reply. But anyway, just because an analogy is poorly-done doesn't mean that it wasn't meant to be an analogy.
okay, so what's the point of Ash always saying he's a fan of Bond? He says it once to his face when they meet, and that may have made sense in order for him to build trust. But then he says it again when he's flying away with Obruchev. At that point Felix is dying and Bond is all but dead to him. So why say it to Obruchev? What's the in-movie purpose of it?
As for Ash's narrative purpose, Felix himself could have discovered Blofeld's party and gone there with Bond, at which point Primo (who was already established as the henchman) could have ambushed them both. The movie is bloated with too many characters and plot elements; in my opinion, Ash, Paloma, and Nomi were all pointless and only made the movie longer than it needed to be.
It seems to me that people who enjoy a lot of mainstream movies don't seem to worry about shifting 'timelines' or 'alternate universes', but I can guarantee that people who are passionate about quality literature wouldn't be so forgiving of such blatant goalpost-moving.
Oh boy.
Ash was just a character.
The movie was a movie.
You didn’t like it, but the producers were not using Ash as a message to the fandom… They were not giving you the finger, @slide_99 .
I’m sorry you didn’t like the bits and pieces you’ve seen of NTTD, but embrace your dislike, revel in it, but leave your projections behind. The filmmakers just made a movie. That’s it. That’s all it will ever be. A movie. It wasn’t, and never will be the f-you message you claimed it was.
Since Eon is aiming for theater going audiences rather than snooty book readers, they’re probably gonna do fine.
There 'ya go.
@ColonelAdamski When I was younger, I read the Hatchet series of novels by Gary Paulsen. The third book made a point of completely writing the previous book out of continuity, and also rewrote the ending of the original. Now you could argue that those books aren't 'quality literature', but then neither is Bond.
You also never responded to a post I made months ago in which I pointed out that in YOLT, Fleming changed Bond's birth year from 1917 to 1924, thereby contradicting events in Bond's past we already knew about, and shifting the entire timeline of the series forwards.