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Can I borrow this passage for a seminar I’m doing next week? 101 misunderstandings in popular culture and other waffle.
A critical element of Bond / heroes that is sorely absent for me nowadays is “would I want to be this guy”. It’s the same for Indy, the goonies, ghostbusters, Han Solo, Luke etc etc. Im a child of the 80s as you can probably tell - As a kid I emulated each of these characters etc. As I’m sure most people my age did. Who now can kids emulate outside of marvel.
Everyone is miserable the whole time. Jesus did you see man of steel or Batman v superman.
There’s a reason why those 80s icons have endured. There’s a reason why they are still drawing crowds now, 30 years on through remakes / reboots etc. The people writing and making those films understood character and entertainment. You left the cinema wanting to see more, and re-enacted in your own mind the adventures they might have had.
I’m not a kid anymore of course but part of the appeal of all these IPs is that they have a nostalgia about them. Including aspects of bond. Sure you can push the formula but ultimately I don’t think NTTD would make millions of dollars if Connery and Moore hadn’t won people over 50 years ago
However ridiculous moonraker is, or even TSWLM, etc is that those films make me smile. They make me happy.
Who in 30 years is going to want to remake Bond dying?
At least in Nolan's Batman, the ending showed Bale's Bruce Wayne having a good life in normalcy with his loved one in a cafe even though at first we all thought he died.. Nothing as depressing as NTTD. That's how they could've handled the final run for Craig's Bond instead of showing our hero blown up to smithereens.
DAD certainly is a `never happened' for me. I dismiss it now as not being part of the franchise. Childish of me? Absolutely!
I thought the line about the ending was “they’re just following trends”. Surely if that’s the case then Bond dying would be popular?
Ultimately, fans (as in, those of us who come on this site, and have these sorts of debates) are a tiny minority. The film is still doing very well at the box office on the whole. Not so much in America, but there is a pandemic and lots of competition because of the massive backlog of films that have been waiting to come out. And the demographic they’re reportedly struggling with in the US is young people, who definitely don’t care about Bond dying. They’re used to that sort of thing in films now. The grumbling seems to be coming from older fans who miss the old formula.
We’ll never know how well it would’ve done under normal circumstances, but I’d imagine being up against Venom 2 is much, much more of a factor than Bond dying. My barber, a man who’d you never see discussing films in a geeky online space like this, understood that they’ll just “start again next time”. Everyone I know in real life who’s seen it did, actually. The only places I’ve seen grumbling about the ending are on here and in the Guardian comment section. And as recent elections should show you, the internet isn’t real life. I really don’t think most people are as up in arms over the ending as you. People are used to heroes dying, people are used to reboots. Most will just watch it and move on.
This is very much a modern phenomenon, where feelings trump facts. ‘I’ don’t like it’, ‘it’s not what ‘I’ wanted, so ‘for ‘me’ it didn’t happen’. Except it did. I don’t give two turds how people view the films, like them, loathe them, watch them, ignore them. But EON decide what’s canon. Let’s not get the two confused.
This ☝🏼
That's because there's a modern trend in Hollywood to make movies that piss fans off by killing off beloved characters for shock value. These movies are made by people who more interested in nihilistic subversion than telling a good story. I get that from the people who made the recent Star Wars and Terminator movies and I get that from the people who made NTTD, too, because they've all made similar comments about the franchises they were attached to.
Studios don’t make films to piss off fans. Regardless, this is irrelevant to my point.
Killing off characters seems to be the most "creative" idea scriptwriters can come up with, unable to think of something truly original, which is then dressed up for publicity as shock value and subversion... and has by now defeated the object by having become repetitive across franchises. In this sense, the "real" subversion was the way Nolan ended TDKR ;)
Whether people like it or not, does anyone really believe this was done for 'shock value'? Craig clearly wanted to do this and I don't believe at all that was his reason. It's a story they wanted to tell and I respect them for doing it. Others are saying this will cost them money and is a commercially terrible thing to do, so which is it supposed to be - controversy to bring in more money, or telling the story they want without regard to the box office? It can't be both.
You think the people making Bond films like TMWTGG, AVTAK, DAF, DAD were more interested in telling a good story than the makers of NTTD? Some of you are hilarious. There was more 'real' Bond in this film than several of Moore's combined if we're going to start going down that road. But you know what, I still love Moore, even though he is definitely not the same man as Connery played, and bears more or less no relation to the books except a couple of scenes in FYEO. We've already had different actors playing a completely different James Bond. Even Connery within his own changed from a taut spy thriller to verging on sci-fi (and he himself didn't like it). Thank God for variety, imagine if we had 25 versions of the same film.
Honestly, consider Bond films history and ask if what you're saying makes any sense at all considering what's gone before. In the series' history there's been a lot more for those who like a camp action fantasy than something a bit more down to earth ...
From what I'm reading they seem to be annoying the right people so they've done something right.
Still believing the majority of the fans here are pissed off?
First (some) Bond fans were pissed off by CR because Craig wasn't another Connery copy.
Then, (some) Bond fans were pissed off by QoS because it looked more like a Bourne film than a JB film.
Then, (some) Bond fans were pissed off because Bond looked ugly and old in SF.
Then, (some) Bond fans were pissed off because they made Blofeld Bond's foster brother.
Now, (some) Bond fans are pissed off because they killed him off.
Point is (some) fans are always going to be upset by whatever creative choice. Obviously Bond dying is huge, but let's not forget how the foster brother angle has been blown completely out of proportions over the past 5 years. They can't make everyone's happy but one thing is for sure: EoN doesn't make movies in order to piss off fans. Portions of the fandom are always going to complain about something.
Why do you see controversy and "telling the story" as being mutually exclusive? It may have happened that the two considerations pointed to the same conclusion.
Are these comments really necessary?
Yes. I think Craig and BB wanted a big, emotional sucker punch for Craig's last Bond movie. I think they had blinders on and became so obsessed about killing off his Bond that they structured an entire movie around it and didn't even think about the broader implications because they've now succumbed to the reboot/timeline craze.
Hollywood cares about messaging more than it cares about profit. Far more. Hollywood absolutely greenlights movies it knows will bomb just as long as those movies are part of a larger cultural trend it is trying to force on the public. And NTTD doesn't really qualify anyway since no Bond movie has ever outright bombed.
Not necessarily, but they also weren't interested in burning the series down and subverting Bond's character the way they are now.
This^
The only thing we know for certain when a new Bond film comes out, is that some people will hate it and likely be very vocal about it on the internet. Trying to make a Bond film that pleases everyone is completely pointless, as it is never a possibility. What we should hope for is that whoever is involved with the film; producers, director and actors make the decisions that mean something to them and follow through on them with conviction.
They already took the hard reboot route 15 years ago.
Besides, Bond 26 would've been a total reboot anyway even without that massive ending, since the Craig story arc is deliberately the first self contained one.
Anyway there's someone really believing DAD was set within the same, let's say, OHMSS timeline? Every new actor from Moore on that took the role caused a soft reboot to the franchise, even before Craig.
This
If you don’t like the ending, cool, but criticise it on its own terms. I think it’s very unfair to make up an imaginary motivation for it and hold that against them. They told the story they wanted to tell. Whether you like that story or not is up to you, but I think casting doubt on their reasons for doing it is a bit of a stretch. Even if they were just doing it for the sake of following trends (very unlikely imo, I think they just thought it was a fitting ending), you have no way of knowing that. We’re random people on a fansite, we don’t know what the creative process was.
Criticise the film all you like, but please can we stop acting like we know what was going through the minds of the writers and producers. I also think it’s notable that we actually do have a few members here who work in the industry, and that sort of criticism never comes from them.
My heroes don’t die or sacrifice themselves. Rambo, Indy, McClane, Riggs, Bond. Until now. Now they can kill Bond as many times as they want. Because the producers are being “daring”. Nothing is off the table now. There are no rules. With the next film they’ll just pretend it never happened. Or it was a different James Bond. Bond is now a code name I guess. Anybody can be James Bond. Stuff like this can only make sense to millennials who grow up with this kind of nonsense. Those of us older actually stop and think “wait, this doesn’t make sense”. Wake up, people! Don’t be sheeple!
Nope.
I think I’m about your age and it made sense to me. @4EverBonded is one of our original fans who got into the series when Connery was still Bond, and she loved it.
Rambo died at the end of the original novel by the way, and I think that’s a very strange example to use if we’re talking about happy films starring happy heroes.
Didn't know most of the fans inhere are actually millenials, lol.