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I remember reading Some Kind Of Hero, they mention during the TWINE section the producers telling the writers "Bond never reveals anything about himself" which is perfect analysis about the character but some of the situations they place him in are baffling
It would have been worse than Blofeld being Bond's stepbrother. MR and DAD were too heavy with sci-fi elements, but Dalton would have been the worst Bond actor to work with a sci-fi heavy film. Especially after LTK. His whole tenure would have been seen as schizophrenic.
I think they were going to far in sci-fi territory in NTTD. But it sort of held together. Robots, androids, in the 90s especially that would have been too much. It would be too much now.
The film would have been high-tech, but not a sci-fi extravaganza. The treatment says the "robotic devices referred to in this outline are complex and exotic machines designed...for specific tasks and environments. They are not humanoid in form." The only exception would have come late in the film and be revealed as just another surveillance robot in human disguise.
The film's story has relatively down-to-earth roots in government threats to the 00 section, industrial espionage, and superconductors. The inclusion of one wildly implausible element is in keeping with Bond tradition, right down to the impossible nanobots of NTTD. For a Bond film to not have a single outrageous element would have been more unusual.
Nan, the robot henchwoman, is a minor character, not even the primary henchperson (that would be Rodin). She's introduced as a mute woman in the background; in her next scene she's told to kill Bond, unmasked as another of Sir Henry Lee Ching's security robots, and dispatched shortly afterward. That's all.
As Elditz writes, "the character Nan was not conceived with the intention of making a robot a central figure in the film; rather it was an attempt to dramatically expand on the premise that the villain plans to use cutting-edge technology to achieve his ends. In the outline, Nan doesn’t talk, which is possibly an attempt to keep the film from getting too outlandish, like the invisible car in Die Another Day, and risk disrupting the audience’s fragile suspension of disbelief."
The idea that the film would have been Dalton's DAD doesn't stand up. The problem with DAD was too many outrageous concepts: the invisible car, gene-therapy, race-changing, the ice palace, etc. This treatment (which if filmed would probably would have been named GoldenEye) only has one, and it's reserved for a minor character and not integral to the plot. And unlike MR, the story doesn't literally fly off into space--the climax involves Bond sabotaging a fire pump to flood Sir Henry's headquarters.
And even if some fans might not have liked the film, the public might well have. Let's remember that no Bond film was ever penalized at the box office for being too sci-fi. MR and DAD were big hits! Dalton needed a lighter, more flamboyant Bond film--the sort the public expected from the series--to course-correct from LTK. This story was just what the doctor ordered. Would it have caused his tenure to be viewed as schizophrenic? No more than the change from MR to FYEO did for Moore's. The public wanted a bigger, bolder, and less dark Bond film, and this treatment might have been Dalton's TSWLM. And even if it was his DAD, then at least it would have made lots of money and kept him in the role longer.
I think you might be confusing Bond 17 and 18. Dalton's potential third Bond film would have been Bond 17. Donald E. Westlake submitted a script for Bond 18 (which turned out to be Tomorrow Never Dies) while Brosnan was Bond. Unless I'm misreading your post.
I would actually be all for more "outrageous" elements in Bond, so long as they are handled in a realistic manner on screen (and by that I mean neither any of the wonky science tenuously explaining how the all-powerful, reverse deus ex machina nanobots work in NTTD nor any of the Sega Genesis-grade CGI in DAD). But if the concepts are futuristic and feel like they could really be a part of our world or one that's just a step into the future, I'm all for it. Put Bond in outer space again but with a serious script and visual effects the quality of Alfonso Cuarón's Gravity. Send in the killer Blade Runner robots. Give us James Bond vs. dinosaurs. Release the giant squid. Go wild with it, but make it look real enough and make the story strong enough that we believe it's really happening. That could be a really fresh way to move forward from Craig's era and a really great way to shake up the series.
Especially since the Nan character could have easily be all together cut in future rewrites, if the project was green lighted. Honestly, the thing that always bothered me the most in this script was the lack of Fleming's elements.
Agreed. If they had toned the robot idea down or scrapped it all together (Looking at you, Nan) in favour of a more high-tech suspense thriller, Dalton’s third would have been less outlandish.
I don't care if the killer robot was meant to be very secondary character. It's already too far into sci-fi that it would exists! In DAD, one of the elements you mention alone would have been too many.
At what point would he have found out that he'd been squiring fembots?!
Hahaha that's the 3rd act twist
He never would have. Bond had two love interests in the treatment, a Chinese agent and a cat burglar; neither were robots. The folks scoffing most at the treatment should try reading more about it.
The Bond series has a tradition of including technology advanced and implausible enough to be sci-fi. You might not like that but audiences do. Bond's Aston Martins couldn't have fully functioned as a real-life road cars with all those gadgets; the amphibious Lotus in TSWLM still can't work in real life as a proper car and proper submarine; Bond's magnetic wrist watch in LALD was ludicrously powerful; YOLT had a rocket-eating relaunchable space ship that couldn't exist at the time (and still doesn't) and the same goes for the tanker in TSWLM; Blofeld's hypnotic techniques in OHMSS were wildly implausible; MR had a space station out of the future and a Buck Rogers laser gun battle (which carried on the tradition of unrealistic laser-weapons in GF and TMWTGG); NTTD had its impossible nanobots and magnet magic; and DAD speaks for itself. So getting bent out of shape over a security robot disguised as a human seems silly to me, especially since audiences have never rejected a Bond film for having a sci-fi element.
An android, defined as a robot with a human appearance, is not sci-fi--androids exist in real life, though obviously not in the sense of a Terminator robot. Having one in a Bond film would have been continuing the tradition of using technology that had its roots in reality but was far in advance of its time.
Blofeld's hypnotic technique was sheer malarkey though.
The audiences certainly made those films hits. They have punished the more down-to-earth Bonds but have never forsaken the outlandish Bond films with sci-fi elements.
I agree and submit that the security robot would have fallen under that category, since the treatment was otherwise believable.
Had that story been used for a third Dalton film, his tenure would have had some healthy variation in it.
Yeah, there's these things called 'jokes', see, and...oh, never mind.
From the New York Times: "Killer Robots Aren’t Science Fiction. A Push to Ban Them Is Growing."
Robots can build cars and perform acts of war. Putting a human disguise on a security robot (and those already exist) is far closer to reality than hyperdrive to space ships.
Working from interviews, Elditz writes that "Ruggiero dispels the myth that the film might take its name from Fleming’s short story “Property of a Lady” (1963). Instead, Ruggiero offers GoldenEye, the name of Fleming’s house in Jamaica and what would become the name of the seventeenth Bond film. However, Wilson and Ruggiero’s 'Bond 17 Outline' is a completely discrete story that seems to have nothing to do with the development of what would become Brosnan’s first Bond film. Their only connection appears to be that Wilson was considering using the title GoldenEye for both projects."
The summary itself doesn't mention GoldenEye, but the name could easily be given to one of Sir Henry's security/robot systems.
Ah, I see, thanks for clarifying. Yes, that could have been a hypothetical fourth film for Dalton.
The one benefit I am reading here, is unlike the three Bond movies I mentioned, the plot doesn't hinge around it.
It's certainly subjective, and different folks find the absurdity line located in different places. I think the OHMSS hypnosis was ok, and I understood it was the result of many more unseen - but referenced - hours spent with each individual lady, setting them up for the windup results the audience witnesses. Nano-tech already is here, so suggesting a more advanced form of it is not, for me, beyond the realm of feasibility. Same with the eyeball, though certainly a pair of glasses or a strap-on device on the user's head would be easier and would not require loss of an eye. But - a henchman required to lose his eye ? Hey, part of the job, and he's clearly whacko. For Blofeld ? Not unless he got it AFTER he already lost his eye. (Not to wander, but I'm fuzzy on the timeline on that point. Did he get his AFTER losing his eye ? He already was in custody ! So - is SP supposed to have managed to corrupt his keepers, or have corrupt keepers already in place, as with Quantum in QOS, already in place as of the very beginning of the film ? Or was Blofeld supposed to have been using it BEFORE Bond captured him ?) Yeah - the change your face bit in DAD was far-fetched for me, too, even in terms of "not yet but soon." And I follow your body-oriented vs. other tech distinction, quite so.