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I agree completely, Mayday switching to good at the last minute was too much like Jaws in Moonraker. If your going to make an evil henchmen, at least give them a worthy death, not a sympathy evoking anti-climatic death. It was a grade A cop out. Though, It would have been nice to see her at least kill Scarpine or something. He was the weakest henchmen of the whole movie.
In my first Change I suggested Moore be Recast with Dalton so Keeping with my theme, were keeping Dalton in as a Hypothetical. :)
Though if Moore had tricked Mayday into blowing herself up then hell-- that would have been badass too
I've seen the film so many times, but honestly, I don't know if I've ever noticed that. Seems long enough to be a lot more noticeable, though.
Interesting points @Murdock! I like AVTAK but I also think it could have been much better if some details were fixed.
What do you think about giving Pola Ivanova more presence insted and giving a more central role to the KGB? For example, Gogol could ask Bond to kill Zorin because he as a British agent could have more freedom of acting in the US than a soviet agent.
Another susbtancial improvement could be to handle with class the fact that Bond is old. Perhaps he would come back for the last mission to help Gogol in exchange of some information (as in the novel You Only Live Twice).
They are just some things that came to my mind.
That's how I feel. It's not the greatest, but it's a lot of fun. It's actually one of the ones I had the most fun with when I got into the Bond series on VHS when I was a lot younger.
@Suivez_ce_parachute, if 'young viewers' watch this and think that it's okay to jump from such a height and be fine, then they deserve what's coming. It's a film.
For French viewers, in AVTAK there's one scene which looks a bit like a copy/paste of a previous Remy Julienne scene in a De Funes movie years before, it was actually a bit embarassing to "see it again" (that's the second scene in the video below)
It's not that I cannot enjoy the film, @Creasy47, but IMO it is flawed in every conceivable way save for the music and mostly the acting. I'm even this film's Bond girl's fiercest defender, thinking with all conviction that Tanya is too heavily criticised for being a constant nag. But the poor girl's just chewing out what was on the paper and that's where I think all issues come together. You see, the script might be the film's worst own enemy. Here's a story that moves from scene to scene with extremely thin in-film logic. Bond is interested in Zorin so naturally he travels to the man's estate. Still makes sense up to this point. He also believes that Zorin cheats in horse racing. SO, we're going out on nocturnal spying adventures trying to dig deeper into the horse race cheating. Why? The minister is concerned about a leak in the microchip industry yet Bond finds nothing better to do than go sniffle through Zorin's stables in search for steroids. Wow. But since this thread goes absolutely nowhere, we open up another thread: pumping seawater in Zorin's installations. Ok, the horse race cheating was one thing, now let's discover that Zorin is about to flood Silicon Valley. Fine with me, only it feels extremely amateurish in every way. I have no problem with a connect-the-dots plot, so long as the dots are connected in a convincing manner. But this film jumps between almost entirely unrelated issues. It's like trying to catch Bin Laden for 9/11 by putting your best spy on his collection of pirated video games. Not to mention the fact that Zorin, who at this point has so much to lose, is willing to personally assist Mayday in killing a private detective concerned with the horse cheating. Dude, you're about to become the next monopoly holder of the microchip industry. If any crazy French detective, named after a vegetable, ever talks to tabloids about horse race cheating, that's about as lame a move on his side as having topless photos of your wife published. No-one will care at that point! Yet you risk everything just to get him removed? What's with this horse race cheating anyway? I don't see any horse race cheaters on the FBI's ten most wanted list...
There are things to enjoy in AVTAK but there a plenty of things not to like too imo.
That's how I feel about Bond smoking. Pretty much everybody knows it's bad for you so if somebody watches Bond smoking and takes it up because of that then you can't blame the movie for it, and it's not a good reason to take away what's been a character trait of Bonds since the Fleming novels.
Correct!
Let's not forget either that Bond kills a whole bunch of people in his career, sometimes even with a funny line. Not the best way to teach kids the value of life, huh? ;-) But look, removing stuff on that basis would be disastrous. Look, I grew up watching the Bonds and yet I neither smoke nor drink, don't shoot people or jump off tall buildings. A proper education offers fertile ground for learning the difference between the real world and the film world. ;-)
@DarthDimi, well stated. I can see where you're coming from with the plot confusion, and it does put a bad spin to things. I need to sit down and rewatch it soon.
I do hope that the new M smokes pipe at his office!
- James Bond cannot smoke.
- But when you put it in the right perspective, he...
- No!
- But your kids will understand it's just a m...
- No!
- But Homer Simpson can be seen sm...
- No!
- Then how about the older Bond movies, when...
- No!
- You're not even trying, are you.
- No!
- Eat my shorts.
- No!
- No?
- No!
- You're annoyingly stubborn.
- No!
- Crybaby.
- No!
Nah, to me they were just there. they didn't nothing to for the plot except for Bond to find her audio tape.
Gogol and the KGB didn't even need to be in the movie. Zorin was ex-KGB they needed more development on Zorin not padding.
@Creasy47: I'm constantly reminded of how we're moving backwards on our planet. Our civilisation crumbles under its increasingly bigoted and myopic persuasion. Instead of progressively teaching our young ones how to watch and contemplate certain scenes in films, most notably scenes involving violence, explicit sexuality, offensive language etcetera, we actually simply shield them from such scenes and thus, in the long run, from the reality of life. Rather than seeing opportunities for good upbringing from film examples, many parents nowadays fail to see anything but the touch of the Antichrist in films. Given the wrong president in the White House, we might one day see film censorship take up a form and shape entirely unimaginable by liberal minds such as my own.
Granted, we here on the forum also apply strict rules concerning images and sentences expressing violence, offensive forms of sexuality and strong language, but we're a different medium. Ours is an interactive one, where folks drop by for a pleasant chat and smart discussion. Unpleasant images or expressions could, in the process of conversing with someone, effectively ruin one's day and actually discourage a return to the forum. Therefore, we aim to maintain a clean atmosphere around here. Again I must stress that an Internet forum isn't like a film. I can swallow even the most obscene images from films but I refuse to be persistently shocked or insulted in a conversation with someone else. Let it be known that I'm not the squeamish type so in order to shock me one must really bring the big guns. But I'm perhaps not the common denominator in that sense so I don't set the standard. ;-)
Fact is, James Bond smoking isn't something that offends me even though I'm strongly opposed my loved ones picking up the habit for well-defined reasons, health concerns being the most obvious one. And never once in my lifetime have I even tried to light one up like Connery in the GF PTS. I have tried to dress up like him though, realising that such is a perfectly harmless thing to do. Never have I tried to shoot someone, but posing on a high school picture with a fake gun posed no problems back in the day. I don't drink - don't like the taste nor metabolism of alcohol - so you can forget about the Wodka Martinis, but I never say no to a ride in an Aston Martin DB5. (Not that such an offer was ever made, mind. ;-) ) So you see, even as a young boy, when James Bond already meant the world to me and I so desperately wanted to be him or in the very least like him, I proudly clung to personal ethics, knowing that even if the occasion ever presented itself - and I was sober enough to realise it wouldn't - some habit were not going to be kept. I'd be a modified 007 myself. But James Bond lives in another dimension, where different ethics and moral codes apply. The barrier between the fictional world of James Bond in which I solely live as a fan and the real world in which I live as a civilian, was clear to me from day 1. My parents taught me valuable lessons, you see, and other parents should do so too. I know the lot of us come from proper upbringing in this respect. So why is it then that so many folks out there shun films with scenes that leave them an educational challenge? Why run away from challenges? Why not grab the opportunity, put your kid in front of a Bond film and tell him to love and embrace James Bond or else; but also to point out that - alas! - it's only a movie and some things must forever stay in the movie world. I'm sure young Billy will understand soon enough if the point is made sufficiently clear. Keeping him dumb and naive makes him a much easier target for some of the darker vices that exist among mankind I'd say.
You are on a roll today, dear sir!
Hear, hear.
=D>
First, the French don't dislike AVTAK : on the French allocine.fr site it's a typical Bond Moore rating, it's got a 3.1/5 note, which is exactly the same as for OP, FYEO and TMWTGG. MR has 2.9, LALD has 3.3 and TSWLM 3.4.
Also note my name ("Follow that parachute") here comes from that movie (I happen to run there very often, and that's the only line of dialog they say there) :)
What happened is that "we" know that it was Remy Julienne managing all this scene in AVTAK, and then it was a big "copy/paste" on screen from his previous works that "we" were all aware of (except for the car jumping on the top of the bus). A bit embatrassing considering one big part came from a French comedy franchise that had ran out of steam. As for the general French opinion about the main defaults, I'd say it was Roger was too old, and McNee killed too early (both the Avengers and the Persuaders were very, very popular here, the French TV mags did quite a bit on that topic at that time - AVTAK's French title translation even comes from the Persuaders's French title translation).
To compare, Skyfall happens to have an underground chase that looks a lot like the one from arguably the most popular action French movie from the 70s, Peur Sur La Ville. Chasing someone in the stairs and the crowd / loosing him / looking at screens to find him again / catching the train by jumping on it after the doors close etc... But we know it's not the same team at all, so it's not embarrassing.
I couldn't find a video of that scene, only the very end of it, when he catches the train (but what follows is even more mythical for the French action cinema audience - no stuntman here... -, it evens reminds a bit of another bit of SF : both stars really were on top of these trains)
http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x1abez_peur-sur-la-ville_news#.UWDa9FfNhLM