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Actually, you might have it backwards. XXX was always in response to Bond.
The Bond franchise, as much as anything else, has always pushed the envelope in terms of extreme sports. From scuba diving to hang gliding to ski-base jumping to bungee jumping to snowboarding to a barrel-roll stunt in a car.
The surf/ski scene in DAD, despite the poor execution and sfx, is actually rooted in extreme sports:
What if we had brief scenes of Hinx shadowing Bond and Madeline to L'American, and then again when they board the train. The characters have no idea they're being followed, but the audience does, ratcheting the tension for the expected confrontation.
To be fair, Jaws appears out of nowhere too. The precedent was set.
I agree with this.
So much was lacking in SP; but that's what happens when you squander 3 years scripting a crappy story and then trying to fix things at the 11th hour. However, the film could have been more tolerable if we the audience were allowed to be fully immersed and invested with what was going on.
Throughout FRWL Bond was being tailed by Grant which built up to the superbly suspenseful showdown, heck even in CR, seeing Gettler with his one eye standing on the peer watching Bond and Vesper added a little something but SP, this film just decided to have Hinx bulldoze his way into screen out of nowhere with more build up, no tension, no nothing. Your suggestion of Hinx shadowing Bond and Madeline after the tedious snowplane chase would have been a noticable improvement.
Indeed. In fact, from that point forward, little made sense. DC admitted that the tuxedo was used simply because "it's a Bond film," emphasizing that sometimes we have to accept bends in reality. And we do.
The Hinx attack was what bothered me more. Blofeld was obviously awaiting Bond's arrival (had even prepped for it) and yet Hinx is still trying to kill him? Makes no sense, unless Hinx had gone rogue, which was possible but NOT handled. All of these little peeves of mine in regards to SP could have been so easily taken care of with a line of dialogue here and there.
On a separate note, I was glancing back through the released shooting schedule from the email hack, and I must say: I like the original plot a lot more. Bond and Madeleine were supposed to have dinner with Blofeld. There was no torture scene. Bond uses the watch here, enabling his escape. They should have stuck to this.
Agreed.
That stated, the new Bourne film is for me the lesser of the three previous, not counting the Jeremy Renner picture.
The film has a dreamlike quality -the principal characters existing in a spectral like environment.
Background characters do populate the film here and there, but still there is sense of them barely being there.
We only catch fleeting glimpses of the few others on the train.
The mountain clinic is sparsely populated, I think by design.
When Bond and Swann arrive at L'americain, Mendes makes effort to keep the receptionist in shadow.
When Bond and Swann arrive in Tangier, they do seem somewhat eerily separate from the others on the street.
The night time streets of Rome are not surprisingly almost devoid of life.
Mendes touch is deft enough to allow that all these scenes easily co-exist in a non spectral reality as well, but the pattern is there.
Mendes sets the spectral tone right from the start with his opening statement - The Dead Live or whatever he actually said, and then right into extended Day of the Dead.
Others have mentioned the film does seem to lack extras populating scenes or just the bare minimum.
I do think it is by design.What background we do get seems suppressed. Blofeld's tech staff at the crater seem like zombies.
The Spectre meeting in Rome. Spooky.
Spectre. The iconic history associated with the acronym is obvious, but Mendes seems to be working with the ghostly connotations inspired by the word as well.
As if the evil pall of Spectre has cast a spectral dimension over Bond's world, at least for this film.
you are one of the few ones that seem to understand how Mendes ticks. Mendes also loves symmetry and Spectre is full of it.
Because it's a Bond film most overlook the unbelievable work that was put in the sets for instance, the cinematography and sparsely populated locations, all is by design and serves a purpose.
The dream like quality is another very good point.
Spectre is an incredible achievement technically and from an artists point of view. As it happens to be a Bond film, it is also for a mainstream audience, of which most won't see past the tuxedo of Bond and the hand-to-hand fights and helicopter/plane/car action.
Mendes was operating on multiple levels with this film, as you note. What we finally got was indeed deliberate, at least visually.
I didn't like it all that much, but knowing that it was intentional gives me hope for the future in case he returns, because he has the potential to give us something different yet again - this time more to my liking.
I am torn about Mendes returning. One day yes, the other no.
Probably because SF firmly sits at the bottom of my ranking while SP may well take the top spot forever.
But I believe actually, should he return that his third wouldn't be like SF nor SP. It would be something different.
For me it seems SF was his trial and error run, something about SF just isn't right from a directional point of view. With SP he probably made his strongest film since American Beauty.
As I've said on the Production thread, I'm firmly of the belief that if it's to be Craig again, then it will be Mendes. I just don't see it playing out any other way.
That said, I do find the films interesting, especially thematically. They are quite watchable, but not what I want.
But, I now would like to see Mendes return for one last film.
I say this because it does appear that B25 will be Craig's goodbye.
It's not realistic to think that Babs is going to oversee a major change in tone for his final film.
The Craig oeuvre is what it is. It's got drama and personal stuff going on. Guys like Forster and Mendes have combined to do the last three films.
So, I say, what the hell, let them indulge one last time. See what the Babs-Craig-Mendes trio can do with a Spectre follow-up.
See what thematics Mendes conjures up for this film.
Agreed, he'll do something different.
That way the three of them are happy. They might throw together something real good.
Craig's Bond persona I thought was quite convincing in SP, so I am looking forward to more of that.
Do bring back Waltz as Ernst. Write out Swann though, but don't kill her. We still need a break from dead Bond girls. The bodies were really piling up for a while.
And I do think Babs is patiently waiting for Craig and quite possibly Mendes to be available.
Craig, I think is a given. Mendes will take some coaxing, but I think it's doable.
The other two just have to sell him on it.
For me Mendes and Forster both have taken the franchise in a direction that is boring, somebody ought to take this franchise away from EON. It seems that Disney is the only one who really knows what to do with a decent franchise perhaps time to change the watch. With Cubby away perhaps Wilson & Barbara are way out of their depth. Being saved by the occasional Martin Campbell who still knows how to do a decent 007 movie. Too bad it has been close to a decade I was a happy 007 fan.
But I always have the books and the classics before QoB to enjoy.
I can't disagree with any of the above.
I'm just saying, what the hell, one more from Craig-Mendes, and then hopefully it's over and we can get back to as you put it, well written pulp.
That's a close enough description, or more to the point, I know what you're getting at.
Babs doesn't have the same vision for the franchise as Cubby did.
I also think Michael's influence has been reduced, quite possibly due to natural attrition.
He was of the Cubby school, but Babs has emerged as the Eon power.
Cubby is as great and as flawed as his daughter, and his daughter has some of his talents and flaws as well- like most established producers.
Cubby made MOONRAKER, he cast Brolin as Bond before Moore came back for OP. He spoke to Burt Reynolds and Adam West to play 007.
The man made his own errors and plenty of them, but, like Babs, he, and she, successfully have kept the franchise alive and healthy.
In fact, I would think Babs has more of a challenging time than her father: the genre is saturated with Bourne and Kingsmen and MI and TMFU.
Yet her Bond films not only come out on top (flaws and all, like any film), but substantially more when it comes
to worldwide revenue.
Like her father, Babs has made great bond films (CR, QOS, SF, GE) and not so good (DAD) and middle of the roads (TWINE, SP) with a film somewhere in between (TND).
Filmmaking is not an exact science. No one goes out of their way to piss "you" off personally when they're making a film. There are hundreds of thousands of decisions to be made during a production. Sometimes MOST of the decisions made are correct , generally. Sometimes, with all good intentions, the accumulative
Decisions didn't lead to a finely concluded execution.
That's the gamble of the film industry. If it was easy, everyone would be
Making their "passion piece".
I didn't see that in SPECTRE. I saw this attempt in SKYFALL, which is why I didn't like it very much. Especially the misogyny.