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To me he was frightening because he was an incel with nothing to lose. As soon as I saw the film, I immediately saw him as this tragic figure with arrested development; a young man who fell in love with a girl a few years his junior, and pined for her through most of his life.
Well, Franz Oberhauser had a pretty distinct backstory, and many fans think his reveal as Blofeld adds very little. So they could be said to have a track record for that kind of thing! (Having said that, I personally love SP and NTTD and Brofeld)
The fact that a character calls Safin "Doctor" is pretty significant. They did not randomly have a single person call him "Doctor" when he is not obviously a doctor, for no reason. At some point, he was surely "Dr Something". We know the name was changed too. Malek joked in an interview about being unsure what his character's "final name" actually is in the film.
Maybe it was Dr Safin, maybe Dr No, or maybe Dr Smith. Just in my opinion, it'd be extraordinarily weird to have a Dr with a Noh mask who reminds people of Dr No and then call him Dr Smith. It would also be weird to think it important to backtrack on the name Dr Safin or Dr Smith and delete nearly all references to the Dr thing. If it's Dr No, you can imagine the decision to undo it.
While I feel reasonably certain that he was Dr No at one point (or maybe his dead father was), I don't think it would be that interesting. I'm more eager to know what else they had in mind--the cult-like atmosphere among his people on the island, for example, and the story behind him using that Noh mask as a logo on all those screens. There was clearly a lot more to what exactly he was leading. (Interesting that the word "Noh" isn't even said in the film)
I also remember Malek talking about filming an intense scene with Daniel, and that the two of them kissed after finally getting it right. It's hard to know what scene that could be...the chat where Bond is on his knees is pretty great and pretty intense, but they don't appear to have been filmed together.
Obviously I don’t know for sure (none of us do). But personally, I’d have thought if Safin had - as late as filming- been Dr. No at one point the producers would have taken more effort to erase any reference to this in post production. Taking the ADR’d ‘doctor’ off at the end of that sentence you mentioned would have been easy to do. But they didn’t. To me it comes off less as a loose thread and more as a sort of reference/easter egg (again, the fact that it’s ADR’d means it was done later in the process when Safin was presumably no longer Dr. No. It’s the process that would be used to change lines/get rid of those ‘doctor’ references, not create one). Safin is definitely modelled off of Dr. No, and the Costume Designer pretty much states that’s where a lot of the inspiration for his clothes came from, but it seems more reference than adaptation. His backstory is so specific and different to No’s anyway, and it’s highly unlikely to have been completely changed with the limited reshoot time and post production schedule they had. Realistically had Safin been No at one point it would have been in early drafts of the script. By shooting this would have long been written out to the point where the ‘doctor’ line would not be a leftover. I suspect Safin by design was always intended to pay homage to No and some of these more ‘classic’ Bond villains because that’s the direction the producers wanted to take this film.
I only did a quick search, but I can’t find any reference to Safin’s name being changed (but I don’t know for sure). I mean, the character’s name is literally Lucifer Safin anyway. I’m sure Malek would have questioned whether this was meant to be his character’s real name or an alias, and I can imagine that being discussed (I am genuinely surprised it was in fact meant to be his real name by the way). It’s funny watching him claim it’s pronounced a certain way it in interviews that barely conceals ‘Lucifer Satan’.
From my understanding Malek and Craig kissing probably happened more than once after intense scenes and was a little in joke they had (although I’m not even sure then if Craig was joking about kissing him more than once or not, haha). From my understanding they shot all their scenes together (I know what you mean though, that particular scene is filmed in such a way that each shot is a single on both characters, with only wide shots showing them together. It may well have been done like this to create more a sense of adversity. As I said I don’t know all the ins and outs though. And hey, before I knew I was under the impression Malek wasn’t the actor playing Safin during the PTS because we never fully see his face. We know it actually was him from BTS photos).
Some things that make it hard to suspend my disbelief: Why is Madeleine the psychiatrist for both Safin and Blofeld? Who decided it was a good job to hire someone who had emotional baggage with Blofeld to be his psychiatrist (never mind allowing Bond physical contact with him)? How the hell does Blofeld have a communications system from a high security prison? How does nobody realise Madeleine is pregnant and has a child? That isn't the sort of thin easily hidden.
More general film questions I have: Why not blow up the boats instead of the factory? Since nobody is there to load the boats, why are they a threat? If willing to blow up the centre, why not wait for the boats to get really close and kill them all? Why does Bond only go to open the doors (surely it would make sense to send the agent without their kid there)? Slightly funny but: what would Safin had done with the nanobots stuff if Nomi had come on the island?
And finally: Who made the decision in a relatively contemporary set of films with realistic stakes to produces an hour into future based film and plot? Craig's movies have all been contemporary threats: terrorism financing, unethical business practices and monopolization, cyberterrorism and sabotage, and government surveillance. Why does the film go straight to programmed nanobots that are unaffected by EMPs that affect DNA?
Lucifer seeks to disrupt order and unity. Therefore, chaos.
🤷♂️… I’ve got too many posts on why I think the character works for me. They’re all on here. Too long for me to go into again. But, then again, not for me to explain to anyone; it either works for you, or doesn’t. It obviously doesn’t for you.
That's what I was thinking as I first watched the film in the cinema back in October 2021. Not being in any way scientifically minded I don't know how feasible something like nanobots is but I would imagine it shades more into spy-fi territory or straight up pure science fiction than anything remotely grounded in reality. Of course, as Kingsley Amis pointed out in The James Bond Dossier, science fiction is a kind of sub-genre part of Bond's adventures sometimes since Fleming onwards but I agree that this goes too far in this direction. It seems like a development of the smart blood idea in Spectre and that was also pretty far-fetched sounding.
Yes, but the 'smart blood' thing was just trackers. These are virus-sized robots capable of analyzing DNA, targeting, killing & replicating... I'm sure that in a Bond film in 2221 it might work....
I agree that the nanobots left me disappointed too. It feels so far into the future that they might as well have gone for time travel.
Five years or more into the future is plenty. At this point technology accelerates exponentially or thereabouts. So I didn't skip a beat on the nanobots element. Also recognizing the smart blood lead-in six years prior.
That's what I was thinking as I first watched the film in the cinema back in October 2021. Not being in any way scientifically minded I don't know how feasible something like nanobots is but I would imagine it shades more into spy-fi territory or straight up pure science fiction than anything remotely grounded in reality. Of course, as Kingsley Amis pointed out in The James Bond Dossier.
So that's how Bond could've survived! I hope Purvis and Wade aren't reading this. Don't want to give them any more ideas...
Okay, two points.
1) Where are our flying cars?
2) Why aren't we using nanobots for routine arterial cleaning at LEAST yet?
Answer: this is not the 22nd Century.
But given the theme of NTTD (We Have All The Time In The World) and with a deadly virus threatening the world, is NTTD not a loose remake of OHMSS.
As much as I love the Lazenby classic, I always found Blofeld's way of dispensing virus Omega to be absurd and silly.
In a Manchester nightclub a group of friends is enjoying a night out. Dancing and laughing, one of the friends looks at her watch and makes a mad dash to the exit.
Girl - 'RUBY...Ruby where are you going?'
Ruby - 'Ummm, nowhere, I just need to get some air.'
Girl - 'Has anyone ever noticed Ruby disappears at exactly midnight when we go out?'
Girl 2 - 'Yeah she does, one day she was in the toilet and I could hear some creepy sounding guy on a radio. She's never been the same since she went to that Swiss clinic to be honest.'
I always found the idea of the angels of death and their execution to be too much to swallow. Similarly to the nanobots in NTTD.
Well, the Jaws-like space capsule really did exist, and was British to boot :
I don't really understand how such a supertanker wouldn't immediately sink once its bows are open either.
Completely. Or even end with Skyfall's 'getting back to work'.
NTTD was a disaster for many aficionados.
NTTD was not a disaster for this aficionado, but I will concede this: the film didn't necessarily need to happen. Here's why.
There's so much undiscovered territory between Bond Beginning (CR - QOS) and Old Man Bond (SF). The latter makes us think of Bond as not a young man anymore; he may want to consider retiring, he looks out of shape, he doesn't pass the tests, and so on. To see him rebuild himself, gain confidence again and take out Silva would have been a great way to immortalize him before allowing him a peaceful pension. Yet SP completely forgot about all this old Bond stuff, and NTTD made his return after many years look like a walk in the park. All the drama from SF was either ignored or contradicted.
I simply think that the career jump between QOS and SF was too abrupt. At least two standalone films could have been positioned between those two. In 2012, I wasn't ready for signs of Bond's exhaustion just yet, but that's the hard bullet I had to bite through. I ultimately accepted the meal that they had offered me, and perhaps that's also why Bond's demise in NTTD didn't offend me all that much. They'd been saying goodbyes for almost 10 years! They'd been hammering nails in his coffin since the SF PTS. In a way, I was getting used to the idea that Craig's tenure would either end with a retirement (SP) or something more dramatic (NTTD).
Nothing feels organic in NTTD that is why it fails, to be fair the DC experiment had already failed long before this film.
P.S. I love DC's first two films.
I think you're onto something ....
"Goodbyes" and a lot of foreshadowing of inevitable death were very much a part of the Craig run from its very beginning.
His Bond almost seemed to be rushing towards death from that seemingly suicidal chase at the beginning of CR. Perhaps this was bound to happen when you leaven the fantasy of entries 1 - 20 with some markedly closer to the reality of human existence.
This semi-realistic sense of deathward trajectory includes the death of Vesper herself, and in Bond's fatalistic line about 00s having a short life expectancy. The matter of fact disposal of Mathis' body in QOS is also a smack in the face of those who didn't want to see it.
It's even hinted at in the Matera scene of NTTD, in the car, when Madeleine has to beg Bond to save them. For a moment he seems overcome by this death impulse, absolutely devastated by her supposed betrayal ....
It's this theme of mortality (not the fantasy of immortality) in which the ending of NTTD makes greater emotional sense. But it was there from the very beginning, if only we'd had eyes to see it ...
I blame Mendes.
Silva's 'Is there any of the old 007 left?' suggests that Bond has a far greater renown by the time of SF than can have been produced by the missions in CR and QOS alone. In NTTD, Felix says that he 'heard' that Bond had 'stopped trusting pretty faces a long time ago'. Realistically, that can only be a reference to Madeleine (and, by extension, Matera) - which suggests that Felix hasn't seen Bond since at least before the events of SP. Yet in the sinking trawler, Bond says to him 'We've been in worse than this' - that can't just refer to the dive bar in Bolivia in QOS. CraigBond and Leiter therefore seem to have been on missions that we've not seen on screen. Given the probably relatively short internal time gap between SF and SP, the likelihood is that those missions took place between QOS and SF. Ludovico's suggestion of a series of graphic novels set between those two films gets more appealing every time I think about it!
One caveat about Bond and ageing in SF. It is a key point of the story, it does play a part (the train fight with Patrice suggests that Bond's not quite the same killing machine that dealt with Slate in QOS) and it's certainly part of Mallory's perception of Bond as a veteran agent. However, the main reason that Bond's physically under-par for part of SF isn't actually his age, it's because he's got toxins leaking into him from the irradiated bullet frags. After all, he doesn't regain his full health and abilities later in the film by getting any younger - he regains them after the bullet frags have been removed.