It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!
^ Back to Top
The MI6 Community is unofficial and in no way associated or linked with EON Productions, MGM, Sony Pictures, Activision or Ian Fleming Publications. Any views expressed on this website are of the individual members and do not necessarily reflect those of the Community owners. Any video or images displayed in topics on MI6 Community are embedded by users from third party sites and as such MI6 Community and its owners take no responsibility for this material.
James Bond News • James Bond Articles • James Bond Magazine
Comments
Well, other than Silva being 'camp', your thoughts mirror mine.
Yes he is an unusual character,some see him as camp,others don't,which to me signifies how well Javier Bardem played him .
I only see him as camp because of the way he treated Bond on the island (although I know he was trying to get a rise out of him) and his dialogue and manner/persona in general.
That was what it should have been, the sign off of SF was betrayed with SP.
We got Bond being handed a new mission by his new Boss, what was expected with the next film was a Bond film where Bond goes on a mission no more personal baggage we'd done that with SF and that was as far as it should have gone.
Though instead BB was hungry to get her Billion dollar boy back after his success with SF and Mendes was never coming back to make a traditional film.
Yes the window dressing is there, the gadgets, the car and also introducing Bond most famous adversary ESB and his organisation but no Sammy had to make it all psychological and personal once again and actually thought the idea of having Ernst be Bond's childhood nemesis was going to be exciting. I believe he referred to this element in an Empire interview as a depth charge.
To have this iconic character that had been made a mockery and lampooned by the Austin Powers series return. In the same way that CR had reinvented Bond for a new age is exactly what should have been done with the return of ESB and not riffing on a plot point from that very franchise to do it.
No wonder the film is looked at as a mockery in some circles, all the hard work done by CR and for me QOS and even SF to be undone in the space of one film, I doubt I'll ever forgive it.
We'll see if I'm still going on about it in 2020 like @Getafix still continues to assassinate Skyfall after 5 years.
I'd hope not, it's still pretty fresh at the moment but I hope I will have let it go by then, that being said this was an era I was most happy with and this one film has left a massive stain all over it, it can't be unseen and the damage done can't really be undone.
No matter what you think of it, everyone must acknowledge that it ended with a clean slate and no loose ends. The scriptwriters for the following movie had all the options open with a support team in place and Bond's emotional ghosts bannished.
"With pleasure, M, with pleasure."
I really upbeat way to end the movie. Lets move on and look forward to future adventures. Given that, its all the more unbelievable that they decided to go back instead of forward.
"I doubt I'll ever forgive it."
I won't.
I've always felt that SF should have been a closure to the Craig era. It truly seemed like the end of reboots and the start of something new. I sincerely hope they end B25 on a similar note.
SP being more different than traditional was always going to be a good thing for me, as tradition in this series doesn't hold up well or give the films enough identity. That SP takes some iconography but still makes it feel like a Craig film (real relationships, character development, earnestness, grit and rawness) is a plus for me and doesn't make it stick out too badly from the other 3 despite it at times not focusing enough on what the Craig era does best.
As for @Getafix, I don't see him using nearly every post I read of his to bash the film you list (mentioning criticism of Brosnan would've worked better for you), but I know someone else who does with his least favorite film. Take that as you shall...
Because the film starts post-shootout with Patrice, we're not privy to why exactly some MI6 agents (and perhaps some NATO too) were stationed guarding a hard drive of that kind. Perhaps M was tipped off that a list was out in the wild around Turkey and a team was sent to secure its safety, but things went wrong and Patrice, hearing about it from his tip off from Silva, got it to embarrass M in the long run as the operation hung on her head.
There's little reason for the film to follow up with that line of narrative later, as Silva had released a number of agents and was going to release more to the airwaves, but Bond killed him and his agents. But beyond that, the hard drive was a small pin prick for Silva to get at M and scoot her into a weak position that would see her facing inquiry, from which point he could organize an attack to get at her when she's most vulnerable. Beyond that the hard drive is useless to Silva and to the plot, as it wasn't meant to be a large part of the film, but a mere subplot where more information wasn't needed as the film went on. Perhaps the only context that would be needed would be getting a better idea of how the hard drive ended up in Turkey and how Bond found himself there.
Mallory says the "list didn't exist in the eyes of our allies", which suggests that for MI6, it was privileged information. It's logical that they would want to have it, though, since in their line of business, they just have to know what the rest of the world is up to. As to how they got it, probably from some mysterious, anonymous source.
NATO could've sent an agent to find the list once it's existence became public, and perhaps they did, but we don't get to see that in the film. It's logical that MI6 would send their own agent to recover it, though; it was their mess to clean up, after all.
The list was presumably recovered when Silva was captured. After that, the threat was not the release of the list, but Silva himself, who had only used the list as a means for attacking MI6.
Succinctly put. This entire post in a nutshell mirrors my own thoughts on the Craig era and the debacle that is SP.
I took it a little differently. Silva already had the list--he just needed to point and click and get it. The hiring of Patrice and the chasing after that list? That was just Silva taking delight in seeing all the running around--their knees must have been killing them. It was 100% manipulation. He hired Patrice to be chased, like a plastic rabbit at the greyhound park.
Silva also had Patrice hired for the Shanghai assassination too, though, so it's not likely he just hired him to go nuts and didn't let him know the danger he was in. I imagine they had some sort of working relationship.
Or he was recommended/supplied by Blofeld. That's loyalty that could only come from SPECTRE. Or MI6. ;)
I have largely forgotten about SF these days. Not a film I'm ever likely to rewatch and I don't dislike it in the same way as the Brosnan films any way - just find it dull and disappointing.
I personally find SP a more enjoyable watch.
But from my perspective its the Mendes era that squandered the potential of the early Craig films. SP is merely a continuation of the wrong turn they took with SF IMO.
vignette2.wikia.nocookie.net/jamesbond/images/8/87/Spectre.jpg/revision/latest?cb=20160221061237
Same here. I caught about a half-hour of it on cable yesterday and noticed the fight in the Shanghai gambling den was clunky, not a patch on the Slate fight. It seemed to0 comic and wouldn't have been out of place in SP as far as lighter fare.
politico.com/magazine/story/2017/09/08/how-facebook-changed-the-spy-game-215587
@RichardTheBruce, precisely. That was part of why I assumed so, in addition to Patrice's entire mood. Like all of Blofeld's "drone" agents in Morocco, Patrice is quiet and controllable, like a robot.
You're right, the list couldn't be "recovered". I was thinking along the lines of the fact MI6 got ahold of Silva's servers in the island, but clearly there's no reason to think the list wasn't backed up online in a million other online locations. However, are we meant to think the list was never stopped from spreading? I'm not so sure about that. My impression is the film wants us to think the list crisis was averted.
You assume that the relevant intelligence services contacted the agents in danger of exposure and pulled them out of the field before things got awry. It would set back the agency's terrorist operations immensely, but it would be a better result than having dozens of agents turn up dead after their deep cover was blown.
Because they knew they were watching a Bond film. Some still need to catch up. ;)
Yeah. Still, a disaster for MI6. That and the C situation in Spectre.
The beauty of that is Silva's actions against MI6 and London paved the way for C and his anti-terror program in SP. Mendes and co. bridged the gap well there, and they could've even taken it further, with C giving a presentation to Mallory, the PM and some other officials pitching the Nine Eyes plan with a reference to Silva. It's no secret why Blofeld would back a man like Silva and give him the tools to make a mess of London; it offered the perfect justification for his puppet agent to set about initiating his global surveillance protocol.