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It's not just shaky-cam, it's a photo-journalistic style of coverage that is very considered. It brought a vitality to the film making. It moved the genre on. As for a combination of grit and glamour CR has already been there, done that. SF continued that. I honestly struggle to see what RN has brought to the table that is new. I don't knock it for that, not every film can move the goalposts.
This bodes well IMHO
What I'm saying is with that film, I saw a near perfect (imho) blend of glamour, action, style and grit for an action oriented film (which Bourne also is). The only action oriented films that came close to delivering all of those attributes in the recent past were QoS and MI-GP. For me, it has reset expectations in the action genre.
CR & SF are more leisurely paced, and tend more towards the suspense thriller genre.
I honestly think that getting the balance right like MI-RN did is far more difficult than people know. Cruise himself may have trouble matching it with the next installment.
I think maybe it's reset expectations for yourself, but genre-wide expectations, I don't see it. There are areas the Bond films can explore that will yield far more positive results than apeing RN. Bourne was a wake up call. I don't feel RN will impact on their thinking going forward.
Bond can do what it wants to do (and I'm sure Babs and Craig will). If they're smart, they will not try to emulate MI or Bourne, because I don't think they can. I think they were smart to go in the direction that they did with SF and that is where they will play best (dialogue driven suspense thrillers with some depth to them) going forward. I don't think they are smart to revisit the past. They need good writers and they need to create solid, confident espionage thrillers with excellent characterizations, like they did in the early 60's, and like they did with CR/SF.
True but Legacy was garbage and I don't consider that a "Bourne" film as Bourne himself wasn't in it.
Stomped the competition? Financially perhaps but critically I think more people resonated with Rogue Nation more and even then RN made just under 700million so I wouldn't even call SP's BO trouncing tge competition. Anyway, I'm pretty convinced GO and MD know more what they're doing with Bourne than what EoN are doing with Bond at tge moment and it's with more than enough good reason as to why I feel like this.
I don't really care what other people resonated with. Without Bond, Bourne and Mission Impossible wouldn't exist. EON are doing just fine.
In any event you're right, EON are doing fine, they're seeing huge paydays as per usual. Even DAD saw EoN achieving their bottom line. Agree or disagree, makes no difference to me, EON are lagging creatively and desperately need to step their game up and these days they only seem to do that when someone else is leading the pack.
You can ignore if you want, but in the melee of attacking EON let's not forget they are the custodians of the franchise in a similar way to Marshall and Crowley were for Bourne. Legacy was no different, Gilroy had scripted Supremacy and Ultimatum, came in to do Legacy and was also installed as director. It was an experiment and it didn't work out, so to knock EON and ignore their counterparts failure because it doesn't suit the narrative is disingenuous.
It's all change for JB, Marshall still in as producer, but Gilroy out and Damon and Greengrass on writing duties, so we'll see how it goes. I just feel we could cut EON some slack. We're aware of their shortcomings, but let's remember how difficult these things are to shepherd, especially when expectations are as diverse as can be. The others don't have to compete on such a level.
Finally someone has said it.
I'm also getting sick and tired @RC7 with the insinuations round here that RN is somehow the Citizen Kane of spy films.
It was a solid flick which I enjoyed at the time (but can't remember a thing about now) but the notion it delivered anything that Bond didn't do years ago is comical.
Femme fatale - 50 years ago and Fiona was better.
Hanging on the side of a plane - Ok it was Tom but he was clearly just wired to the side of the plane. I could do that. My gran could. Not so much a stunt as a publicity stunt. Check out BJ Worth and Jake Lombard 32 years earlier if you want to see how it's done properly.
Gadget guy and amusing comic relief sidekick - In MI it's the same character all rolled into one in the guise of the slappable Simon Pegg. In Bond it's Q and JW Pepper.
The notion that RN was a game changer bemuses me. All it did was mix the usual formula up reasonably well and, debatably, better than SP.
The one area where it seriously trumped Bond and where EON are definitely dropping the ball was action. But while RN beat SP in this regard (not the most Herculean task) there's only really the bike chase that had me on the edge of my seat with the sense of raw speed and danger. The rest I've already forgotten.
And where's this theory that it's somehow gritty come from? Cruise is Roger Moore to Damon's Dalton.
Back in the day Bourne was a game changer because it was innovative and gritty and EON's output back then was moribund.
RN is nothing of the sort it's just a pretty slick rehashing of the formula Bond had nailed in GF over 50 years ago but nothing more.
And the bottom line is EON need to sort their shit out re a coherent script and leading the way in action like they used to not because of any competition out there but merely because they should be striving to set the bar themselves.
As has been debated ad nauseam on the MI-RN vs. Bond thread, this is not about legacy and history. That's not even comparable. Not between MI & Bond. Not between Bourne and Bond either. Not even close. Bond wins every time.
What is debatable is which franchise has given us more consistent, interesting and exciting product over the past few film releases. In my view that is a much closer discussion. It was never this close in previous decades. Bond always ruled before. The competition has moved forward. They have taken what Bond invented and improved on it.
Bourne (excluding the bastard child known as Legacy) and MI have completely trounced Bond in 'action oriented' films over the past few releases. They are slick, highly engaging, with class leading action. Gritty in the case of Bourne, and slick in the case of MI. That is an area that Bond used to lead in before, but that ship has moved forward. That is where the competition is now ahead, immeasurably, and certainly based on the last two Bond films (yes, including SF which only had a few decent action pieces).
When it comes to story, dialogue, characters, and thriller orientation, I think Bond wins handily. CR & SF (more thriller oriented films) had more gravitas to me than any of the Bourne or MI films. The same can't be said of some of the other Bond films, and that is where people weren't all that happy.
Those suggesting that Bond owns the 'action' roost these days like it used to during the days of TSWLM and for much of the earlier decades are kidding themselves. Either improve dramatically on this front, or cede leadership and focus more on where you have a competitive advantage. As an example, if EON try to make a TND style Bond film today (which would be much closer to a Bourne or MI) they will be clearly shown up based on recent evidence.
What I don't want to see is EON putting out shoddy action and expecting audiences (outside of the hardcore wankers) to buy it. They won't.
Not quite, in my view. Cruise in the last few has found his niche. He's bringing a nice combo of Moore, Craig and Connery to the table. I like his persona in the last few. I didn't like him too much in the previous 3. There is more weariness and irony to his characterization now (like Moore) but also the intensity of Craig and none of the emotionality of Dalton.
In terms of it being gritty, I think the way they edited and filmed all the action sequences (the immediate, visceral nature of these sequences) combined with glamour / style was impressive. The Opera sequence in MI-RN and the Indian dinner & parking garage sequences in MI-GP were quite stylish and grand. However, the action in both was suitably intense and certainly more Bourne than Bond (jumping off the hospital window in GP, the parking fight also in GP, the escape from Janik Vinter, the aforementioned bike chase, and car chase in RN) to my eyes.
Bottom line, RN impressed me a lot because it combined grit with class, style and pace in a modern way. The pace was Bourne quick but it certainly had more class / glamour than a Bourne film. I think they've found a nice niche and I hope they go with that for the next one.
I'm curious to see where Bourne plays on this front. I think all out grittiness is done, so they'll have to inject some style. Vikander and Cassel being cast suggests they know this. I'm excited.
Legacy is like EoN making a Felix or worse yet that proposed Jinx movie or a film about another 00 agent, and slapping, packaging and patenting the Bond name over it without Bond himself being in it and shoving it down our throats. Fortunately EoN havn't made that mistake yet and I hope they never will.
However, Damon and Greengrass are very much integral to the whole process of bringing Bourne to life that transcends the creative input of the whoever producers and writers. If the script is garbage they'll either change it or walk away. In Bond's case particularly as of late, irrespective of the quality of the script it's full steam ahead. QoS went into production with an incomplete and half baked and free styled script. SF made very little sense even by Bond movie standards and then with SP, even after the whole world witnessed the mess of a script they had they still went ahead and filmed it.
I agree vehemently with @bondjames, the fact that we have to drudge up films that were made 40/50 years ago to toot EoN's horn does indeed say it all. EoN have the experience, they have the talent, clout and worse yet they have enough source literary source material to adapt and yet these days we get 3 to 4 year gaps between films where the films are of a standard that leave a lot to be desired.
I enjoyed SP but it wasn't close to great and worse yet, I find it quite forgettable. The Craig era is qualitatively inconsistent and that ails me as a huge Bond fan. I can appreciate you wanting to give EoN a break but when I look at various things EoN do, I just can't accept their behaviour and their overall attitude so easily. They waste talent, their dvd/bluray packages are below subpar, they just seem to be coasting and it's annoying. EoN are masters at hyping a Bond film; that much is clear but a satisfying execution tgeyre still a way off from and thats been the case since 2008.
I love Bond and always will. He's my guy but for me, others have been impressing me more and doing better and I stand by that Damon and Greengrass will once again upstage Bond and I won't be surprised if the new MI mext year does better also. The last truly satisfying Bond film for me was 10 years ago. That leaves me deflated. I expect and we as fans deserve more and better.
Bingo. See, how sad is that as soon as it was announced that Damon and Greengrass were reuniting for a new Bourne film way back when, the first thing that came to my mind was, ok excellent that means irrespective of how SP turns out Bond 25 is going to be the film that in all likelihood knocks CR off the top spot of the Craig era?
I preferred RN to SP. Considerably. That doesn't make me more of an MI fan than a Bond fan, as some disingenuous types here have tried to suggest. On the contrary.
I just say do what you do well. RN did. For me, it's the best action driven film since MI-GP. When I think action oriented films these days, I think MI. I have to go back to CR to really recall Bond impressing me in that space, outside of the pretitles in SF & QoS. Which is fine. Bond impresses me in other areas (story, dialogue, characterization). When it fails in these areas, then it really fails for me, because the action is not normally up to snuff any more.
But Bond's remit isn't solely action. They have a lot of plates to spin, many more than M:I or Bourne. Is that ideal? Not really, but that's the way it is. They're taking it in directions they feel the general audience would appreciate (not necessarily us) and the figures suggest they have largely achieved that (whether we agree or not). The whole talk of SP being worse than DAD is just ludicrous to me, but this is the age we live in, where people talk in invective absolutes. There's as much chance of B25 being an absolute storming success as there is it being an absolute stinker, regardless of how one feels about SP. There are avenues to be explored and stories to tell that can satisfyingly wrap up the Craig/Waltz dynamic. There's no reason for them to bail just because another film did some action well.
PS: SP is nowhere near being worse than DAD, but I do think DAD executed on its no doubt comical remit better than SP did on whatever objective it was trying to achieve.
Jason Bourne Crossover
;)
I consider "THE BOURNE LEGACY" a Bourne film. It's my second favorite movie in the franchise, after "THE BOURNE SUPREMACY".
Now, I like all four films. But the one that is the worst in my eyes was "THE BOURNE ULTIMATUM". It had too many plot holes. And I could tell that Greengrass had started filming before the script was finished.
IMHO, we know enough about Treadstone for the audience to buy into other stories concerning other agents. It also makes sense the the agency would have chosen female agents etc so there is plenty of material
I'm including an article below with some snippets on Vikander's character.
<a href=http://www.ew.com/article/2016/02/08/matt-damon-jason-bourne target="_blank"> click here to read EW article on Jason Bourne</a>