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I'm not sure that's true. By the time Bond has dealt with Krilencu, negotiated the fight amongst the two Gypsy women and more, I've almost forgotten about the main plot; something about a cryptographer and a lector decoder? What about YOLT, TSWLM and MR all just seeking adventurous excuses to get Bond to the big set-piece an hour-and-a-half into the film? Say, isn't AVTAK about microchip designs being leaked to the Soviets? Then why am I working my way through horse racing and dead French PI's, not to mention sea water pumping in San Francisco and something about dad's shares?
I'm not saying I hate these things, merely that a full-time focus on the main plot is rather rare in a Bond film. Usually, there is a B and C plot. In my opinion, few Bond films stay focused on their main plots. I'm thinking DN, LTK, CR and maybe a couple others.
Have to say, I've started skipping the whole Valdo kidnapping sequence.
I watched the second half again last night, and I really tried to approach it in the spirit of some here who really seem to connect with the movie, (particularly the second half). But if something doesn't work for you, it doesn't work. The idea of the cinematic James Bond smilingly meeting his death after being shot up and poisoned simply isn't what I want from a Bond movie. I can actually understand the Star Wars fans being so disappointed in the sequel series now.
I suppose we can take a quantum of solace from the fact that the whole Craig tenure can be seen as a separate 'series in a series' of sorts. Which would have worked for me, if they'd have ended with Skyfall or even SPECTRE. But this was a film too far for me.
The lack of villainous motivation was a shame, because when a villain is well drawn out (Sanchez/Silva etc) it can add to the movie. But it's not a deal-breaker.
Killing off major iconic characters is a deal-breaker, though. At least for me.
Yeah exactly, that was what I meant, and same :) Spectre’s a very flawed film narratively but the good stuff outweighs the bad for me, I’ve always liked it a lot. The direction they went in with that one and NTTD (keeping the fleshed out human Bond of Craig’s first few, while also bringing back more of the fun campy stuff) is probably my ideal sort of Bond. Give me gadgets and supervillains and all that, but I don’t want Bond himself to go back to feeling like a cartoon character again.
https://feature.variety.com/mgmunitedartistsreleasing/no-time-to-die-panel
______________
Hollywood Reporter's podcast with Craig (1 H 39 min long)
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/daniel-craig-no-time-to-die/id1039032256?i=1000547379736
@Contraband > Santa
Thanks again mate, you always deliver
While it surprisingly worked for me (for the most part) in NTTD, that's something I'm more than happy to deviate from, returning to something more stripped back and direct in its entertainment value; less screentime for everyone at MI6, no more personal angles and bits from Bond's childhood, no more deep romanticism, etc. I figure that won't be the case at all and they're likely to double down on this sort of thing in the future but I hope I'm wrong.
I doubt we’ll dive into Bond’s childhood again for a good long while. But yeah, if I had to guess, I’d say there probably will still be a bit of cutting back to London, and some sort of personal element to it.
I don’t think that has to be a bad thing though, because personal can mean a number of things. Bond sitting at the airport in GF, staring at his hands because he’d just used them to kill the Mexican hitman. That’s personal, right? It’s character driven and human anyway, which is what I think of when I think of “personal” stories. But I doubt there’s any posts on here criticising Fleming for making GF too personal.
I think it’s the mission always having to be about Bond that people have a problem with, and yeah, I do hope we can leave that behind for a bit now. I’m quite optimistic we will to be fair, because I doubt they’ll want to invite comparisons to Craig next time. They’ve got a complete clean slate, so I reckon the focus will be on making it feel new again.
Yeah I completely agree then, and to be fair I reckon that’s what we’ll get, because what other personal missions are left for them to do? We’ve had a couple of serious romances, a dive into his childhood and relationship with M, he’s had a kid, and he’s gone rogue and gone for revenge a good few times now. I think we probably will get a more standard mission next time because at this point, that’d be the most fresh feeling option. And that’s the aim of the game with any reboot isn’t it, making it feel new.
Then it’s probably for the better that you just walk away from this film altogether. If the very concept of Bond dying is unacceptable no matter how well done, there’s no point dwelling on it.
I feel that way for THE BOOK OF BOBA FETT. To me, that title character died in RETURN OF THE JEDI and that was that. I’m especially not going to bother with a show that tries to sympathize a henchman. Might as well make a Oddjob spin-off and try turning him into a good guy. NO THANKS.
Too right. That's what has me so damn excited about this next film, expecting something way more stripped back and straight-forward. For me, the first installment of an actor's era is almost always among one of their strongest and best films.
We haven't had that since 1987, and I doubt a standard mission, where Bond has no emotional stake in killing the villain, will happen again. Ever.
The best we can hope for in that regard is a CR, where the emotional stake emerges within the movie itself.
I wanted for many reasons. One, because I felt like it would be a good ending for me, personally, so I could move on. I could say, “O.K, I can’t go back to that. This is it. This is.” I was trying to protect my future in my head because I realized how much this was going to change my life when I was trying to grab some control and say, “O.K, right now I can move to a point and work to that point, then I’ll be good with this.” The other thing is, as I said to Barbara, “You had a real great chance with ‘Casino Royale’ because you’d never done it before to start at the beginning, and you don’t have that choice anymore. So if we reset it, you can do whatever the f**k you want. You can start from the beginning. You can go back, you can go forward, you can do whatever you want.” It was partly selfish, but it was also kind of trying to think to protect the franchise a little bit.
https://theplaylist.net/daniel-craig-cary-fukunaga-in-conversation-no-time-to-die-20220111/?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter
Pretty much.
This hope for a return to Cubby era films is misguided. Things getting personal for Bond has pretty much become the new normal since LTK. In fact, more than half the time span of EON’s run has been personal. This isn’t unique to Bond, it’s become prevalent throughout all action/adventure films in cinema, and EON has followed suit.
The only reason fans are still attached to the idea of a non-personal stakes film for Bond is because we’ve had that taste from 1962-1987. Other action/adventure franchises don’t have that. Spider-Man and Batman films have always been personal from the start because they began a time when personal stakes were normalized in genre films.
Furthermore, even before 1987, hints were carefully dropped of Bond having personal issues to deal with. They were still very sparse, like his response to XXX talking about his wife, but they were there.
Let's also not forget that if OHMSS had been a huge success, UA would most likely have pushed for a revenge story in '71. Who knows, had that become a thing, Bond could have gone darker, like Dirty Harry perhaps. I'd even go so far as to submit that the reason why they kept his mission so impersonal for so long, was the belief that OHMSS hadn't resonated well with audiences, due to the more personal stakes for Bond in that film, amongst other reasons. We'll probably never know. In truth, audiences have always seemed more interested in the tough guy doing things for some personal cause. From Bogaert's roles to Luke Skywalker: we usually prefer our protagonist to struggle with himself almost as much as with some distant enemy. Perhaps the Bonds were fortunate enough to get away with over a dozen films of just this guy flying in, connecting the dots, having a great time traveling around the world and getting a lovely nocturnal taste of the local flavours, before he thwarts the villain's plans with a smile and moves on. And don't get me wrong, I absolutely love this formula. It worked miracles for '60s cinema! Splendid material. But sooner or later, a character must begin to carry a heavier load lest we leave things in parody and pastiche. It was Dalton who pointed this out, back in the day, and "back in the day" is almost 35 years ago! We cannot say for sure, but I believe that if Dalton had been invited at the writer's table after LTK, we might've gone "Craig" 15 years before CR...
Yeah I’m not expecting no personal stakes at all. I just meant that I doubt the mission will be so overtly about Bond and his past next time, in the way the last few have been. Like you said, there’s plenty of ways of having emotional stakes unfold as the story goes on. And I think EON will be smart enough to differentiate the next guy from Craig’s Bond, who was all about exploring the idea of an orphan who’d been moulded into an assassin. So, I doubt we’ll get any links to his childhood or anything like that again for a long time.
Honestly, the more I think about it the more I think I prefer it this way. A reboot every time. The old way of doing it gave us some nice some overarching comforts, but starting from scratch every time means we’re guaranteed a complete reinvention every few films, which will help keep things fresh. I think that’s why GE and CR captured the public consciousness in a way that TLD didn’t. They just felt so fresh and new. TLD, while brilliant (better than GE and CR imo) did feel like another Cubby Bond film, the latest in a long line, and maybe that was why some struggled to accept Dalton’s different sort of Bond. I think they should aim to channel that sense of newness that GE and CR had with every debut from now on.
With CR, that was the only instance they actually did an explicit reboot, and with NTTD an explicit end.
This is a great comment, and your point on OHMSS underperformance (perhaps) keeping them from trying anything more personal or emotional for the ~decade that follows is a very interesting one I hadn't considered before.
Great comment...I also think that storytelling both past and present hinges on what film makers are physically able to accomplish during filming as well. Back in the day special effects and stunts were a lot more difficult to accomplish which took up a lot more time and resources to couple up with the actor's ability to pull off the scene, which affected deadlines. Today with CGI, cameras, and equipment, the stunts are so much easier to complete and the actors and writers have a lot more time to deliver on the story telling...example: Just compare the shootouts and car chases of any movie from 20-30 years ago to those of the last 5-10 years.
Not sure about that argument. I am not against pesonal and emotional elements in a Bond film but for that you have to have a good script and I think that this is the weak point in some of the latest Bond films.
CR and SF were great scripts. SP was lacking. NTTD seemed stitched together (though I still liked it very much).
There are two problems EON faces now: 1. Creating a unique storyline, now that we're 60 years or so into the spy genre of film and TV. It is extremely difficult to be inventive. I started noticing this with TND. 2. Creating villains that don't offend someone somewhere to the detriment of the BO. EON can no longer create Chinese villains or Russian villains, etc. I am not saying this is good or bad, just that it is the way it is. (Some critics went after Safin because of his facial disfigurment.) So the writers are very much boxed in.
CR and SF worked because the villains made sense. Yes, there were some plot holes in both (I could never figure out why Bond had to go through with the whole poker game...all MI6 had to do was abduct LeChiffre and he'd lose his money when he didn't return to the table). They were "small scale" villains. Dominic Greene worked, too, on this level. But Safin is the first "large scale" villain since Gustav Graves (Blofeld, as we see him in SP, is in between), and that type of villain is not right for the 21st century. I think EON wanted to harken back to the villains of the past, with their grand schemes, but those days are over.
When Bond arrives at the meteor lair in SP, I kept asking myself who the hell are these people working here? This was especially true of the techies, monitoring the surveillance systems. Who takes that job, in the middle of the desert?
Same with NTTD and all the people working on the island, mostly the security team. WTH. How does Safin "build" an entire army of soldiers and scientists? Makes no sense. I know I'm not supposed to ask these questions: I ask them about TSWLM as well.
Well, he calls the Henchmen Hotline of course. Just sad he couldn't get Jaws..
I know I am repeating myself, but I really like the version of Safin that uses people's assets against them. Have Spectre kill itself, trying to kill Bond. Have Felix send Bond to Cuba to trigger the use of the virus and to get Obruchev out. Have Spectre break Obruchev out of the MI6 lab. Smuggel Obruchev into MI6 to use their resources to develop Heracles. Even the two main allies he has are a US diplomat and a former Spectre henchman.
And then he ends up just having his own army of worker drones and henchmen. How boring.
Great comment, Sir! Have to agree 100%. I remember Robert Davi saying, that for him Timoty Dalton's Bond in some ways is the father to Craig's Bond.
It was a doppelganger that got dropped into the mud.
Was it a doppelganger in both movies
Not sure if a new super villain would not work today. Just take any kind of rich industrialists. It has never been as easy as today to become rich with a certain kind of technology. We all have the people in mind who have lots of money and a lot of visionary ideas to change the world. A new Zorin kind of villain would be great. The reasn why I call NTTD lazy is because they could easily give us a few explanations why Safin is so rich or why so many other minor villains work for him instead of for SPECTRE. Just tell that he is a rich entrepreneur. I mean the man is extremely rich, has thousands of people for him, has his own island, but no one really knows him. Really?
But what I actually meant in my earlier post is that a good script needs to foucs on something. It cannot tell 10 stories at the same time. It would not work. Characters need time to be introduced on screen and to develope or at least to become memorable. We usually don't care about villains who have hardly any screen time and who are only told to be bad or evil. A romance is also only believable if the characters involved are given some space in the film. Again, the romance is actually only told but not so very believable. It must be there because the writers wanted it to be there but I just don't buy it.