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You're not even reading what I've written. I said the 'run time' is meaningless. The length of the film is dictated by pacing [ie. it isn't a set thing - it can be well paced and 1hr 30min, or 2hr 30min].I repeat again, so you get it this time, there is no correlation between run time and quality.
Restating your premise doesn't add to it's validity. Where is your evidence? So far we've got "Skyfall made a billion". Is that the whole thing, or is there more? Take your time.
My point is that it's irrelevant whether the run time is [conparatively] short or long. On the one hand you have OHMSS - quality and lengthy duration. On the other, DAD - lacking in quality and a lengthy duration. Likewise you have GF - quality and comparatively short duration. On the other side, QoS - lacking in quality and a short duration. You can mix and match as you wish, but none of it points to there being a benefit from keeping a limit on run time.
Capping the run time achieves nothing. The cut is poured over by many people and will be decided upon organically. They're not making a bottle of ketchup with a specific volume of liquid. It's a film.
I understand that, but the Bond films are going upward in length regardless of the story they are telling. Out of 24 films, only 8 have a runtime under 125 minutes and of those 8, 6 were released before 1974. The fact is, a longer run time lends itself to weightier storytelling. The Bonds films, while a cultural monolith, are still just spy stories at the end of the day. The Fleming Stories themselves are slim volumes designed to be able to pick up and read on a long flight. I don't see what we are gaining from the continued upward climb of these stories run time.
Bond films should be entertaining, gripping, exhilarating etc. And the longer you make your film, the harder that becomes to maintain. When they first started making Bond films, they only had the money to shoot the scenes that were absolutely necessarily. If you look at Dr No, he's straight onto his mission in the first 10 minutes. Now compare that to Casino, Skyfall and Spectre, and the difference is stark. Usually there's about 40 minutes of various chats and preamble before we actually start the major beats in motion.
You say that runtime is irrelevant, but I think if you were to chop these films down to 2 hrs each, it would help create a more satisfying experience overall, and save a lot of money. I'm constantly told that the Sinking house sequence at the end of Casino was 100% essential because you can't expect a modern audience to sit through 2hrs 20 without a big climax at the end, but what if the whole film was tightened up? Perhaps if it had moved along quicker, people might have been able to stomach the quiet, sad suicide at the end and there would be no need for an extra set piece to finish things off?
+1
Spot on,well said Murdock !
110-130 minutes is perfect.
First time I've seen this thread and after wading through 4 pages of pointlessness Murdock has effectively closed this rather futile discussion in 10 concise words.
Absolutely.
Yes, spectre was pointlessly long, while CR used its length to its advantage
The shorter running time of QOS actually works quite well but it could have used about ten more minutes to flesh out the plot a bit.
Apparently SF has a ton of deleted scenes and shots. Some sound interesting but the movie is already long enough.
SP was just too damn long. This is a movie that shouldn't have been more than two hours tops.
I'd like B25 to be somewhere between 115-135 minutes.
The film's first half feels a bit like explanatory padding that only points out Bond is on his first MI6 assignment as a post 00 graduate.
Very true, and well said. Glad I'm not the only one to pick up on this. Like they wanted to make a big deal out of the "rookie Bond" aspect when the story is not affected much by it (because it wasn't there in Flemings original). The film does feel a bit plodding until the train scene where it starts to ram up.
That's the one thing that bothers me most about CR was the gimmick of telling Bond's origin a'la BATMAN BEGINS. If I recall the book only uses THE NATURE OF EVIL chapter to indicate Bond's back story, and to me that was enough. The rest of the book is business as usual. The concept of the film as a timeline re-boot wasn't necessary, IMO because the novel itself already had a strong plot.