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I have no problem seeing women doing those, as long as it's Ana De Armas, Wai Lin or Anya Amasova type.
It's time for these kind of women to get beaten up, something more of Bond's equal.
But if it's something along the likes of Mary Goodnight or Jinx, nah no way, they're not believable.
I also don't like seeing women as damsel in distress either.
Interesting points. But can you really see a woman as Bond’s equal in a fist fight? Thinking of elite contact sport - for example football, rugby, boxing, etc. (ok, not quite the same thing), you could never imagine a woman competing with the top men
I think TND's Wai Lin is very believable as a match for most guys, and I also buy Rebecca Ferguson's character from Mission Impossible in the fights she has.
Honestly I really liked Atomic Blonde showing the physical toll on Theron's character's body. Part of having Strong Female Characters™️ is showing the unglamorous reality of women's experiences, if we can have that for the men why not women too?
And, yes, Wai Lin may be a match for most men, but not men at top level. That’s why women and men don’t compete together in contact sports
Violence against all people should be treated as distasteful then. Violence against men isn't tasteful! :))
Neither is Bond a match for all men at top level, that's why he gets beaten up sometimes. Hinx is about to kill him until Madeline helps; but they're films, the plot goes how they need it to. The trick is to make it believable.
Yes, don't forget Priyanka Chopra in Quantico.
And implausible - which is why men don’t box women.
And, as we have had male henchmen being gratuitously beaten up and killed for decades, are we going for 50% henchmen/henchwomen in future?
I have no problem with it, at least it's fair.
Heck Bond did something distasteful to them by slapping them and their asses (Dink, anyone? Or Bond slapping Tatiana, Tracy or Tiffany?)
Seeing women got beat up was just showing how tough they are and how men are treating them fairly and equally rather than slapping them and they're asleep, which was the common used trope in Hollywood.
Look at how Gobinda slapped Octopussy and she's easily asleep, same with Hinx and Madeleine in the SP train fight, was just slapping really made these women to be knocked off?
1960s Bond slapping a woman’s arse was acceptable in those days, and far more preferable to, for example, being head butted. I remember arse slapping not being a big deal in the 1980s.
Although I accept social standards change, modern revulsion against domestic violence and violence against women in general, shows that men injuring women is still regarded as unacceptable.
Yes, I agree with you.
Based on your words, you're a bit of a gentleman.
Well, yes injuring women was really bad, but I still want to see tough female characters, but it doesn't need to be brutal.
I'm giving some examples:
think of Natalie Portman in Star Wars: AOTC when she's injured at the back while fighting an alien, or Jane Doe in Blindspot when she's having a punch or when she's practicing boxing with a sparring partner.
I'm quite amazed at Pussy Galore doing Judo or Tracy fighting Gunther.
And Wai Lin kicking those bad guys.
I just liked to see some strong female characters doing some physical fights at least.
Injuring them in a fight is still good at least, to make it more realistic.
I’m interested when you say that it’s offensive because it portrays that women as ‘weaker’. Women are physically weaker. So can you explain what you mean?
As for violence against men, surely that is the essence of action films?
First of all, it is true on average that men are more physically strong, but that doesn’t apply to 100% of cases. Second, my main meaning in this context was that a woman hitting a man isn’t seen as a big deal, and is even played for laughs often times, so the portrayal is showing us that they shouldn’t be taken seriously essentially, which is sexist. I hate violence against women, I truly do, all I’m saying is that men can be hurt just as badly physically and mentally. And the physical aspect doesn’t have to just come from smacking either, it can be objects used by the women to inflict plenty of damage. Treating violence unequally between the sexes does no one any good.
Agreed! 👍
Foreign interests make for less claustrophic world building. Villains always are rouges if they are foreign servicemen, so you do not complicate access to international markets.
Some kind of scheme against the Pound necessitates Bond going undercover in the City, but the action quickly moves to some overseas financial centre - Hong Kong, Singapore, Toyko. Maybe take some cues from the Wirecard scandal (read up on that, it's wild) where one of the biggest and fastest rising companies in Germany turned out to have basically been one big accounting fraud - they more or less just made up 1.9 billion Euros in assets - and the COO of the company may have been an asset of the GRU for decades and most likely fled to Russia, when the whole thing went up in flames.
Anyway, setting the film in the banking sector would allow for some delicious interplay between cliché banking bros, who all want to be like James Bond and the actual, real James Bond, who of course is more refined, more restrained and a public servant as opposed to these guys.
Edit: The more I am thinking about this "wirecard scandal as a backbone for a Bond movie thing" the more I like it. Braun and Marsalek, the two main guys at wirecard, certainly had a bit of Hugo Drax going on. Suddenly, there's this company that is so succesful that they are shoving one of the old established German banks out of the DAX (Top 40 German companies). They made their start processing online payments for the porn industry and then provided a services in the growing online payment world.
That is what journalists think made Marsalek interesting to foreign intelligence services: Having an online payment processing company in your backpocket is really helpful both for uncovering illegal revenue streams and for covering up your own payments by having them disappear in the mass of payments wirecard is processing daily.
So our story begins with the guy MI6 had planted in this up and coming payment processing/fintech/banking-whatever company to help them pay-off foreign assets turning up dead. Bond is sent to the Singapore branch to investigate. With the help of some ally or another - maybe a tip off from Leiter, maybe a female accountant Bond has been sent to protect - he figures out that it's not just MI6 that is using this company. They are rotten to the core. Criminals of all colours and nations, terrorists and the intelligence services of other nations are using this company for money laundering and covert payments. A bit of le Carré's Honourable Schoolboy as an inspiration here, maybe.
At this point you can have your pick who you want your main and secondary villains to be. Either the leader of this company is the real baddy and trying to play these interests against each other for some nefarious plot (think Elliot Carver), or he's just a stooge and the real threat are the gangsters/the terrorists/the other spys.
Shootouts and explosions ensue.
A scientist discovers a tear in the space time continuum. His work is funded by a Max Zorin type villain. The villain forces the scientist to develop a space time device that can open the continuum so wide that Earth can be sent through!
The villain blackmails the UN. If they don't pay up or surrender he'll send the planet into another dimension. The villain has a robot AI or AI drone army and tries to destroy the 00 division.
I accept this is very sci-fi for Bond, it's a departure from the Craig era, but a villain threatening to send the Earth into another dimension, one with hidden dangers, a nightmarish parallel dimension, could be cool.
Make the storyline serious. No dumb jokes like we had in DAD. Over the top villain and threat but serious in tone. Bond saving the entire planet from potential destruction. ;)
Believe me, if EON ever decides to go this way, the Fandom will go nuts. (Mostly the Tim & Danny Fans).
;)
Lol. Sending the entire planet into a parallel dimension... that's something new!
The villain activates the weapon. Above in the sky a huge tear opens to reveal the trace of a new dimension. The rift in space time.
Villain:
Behold, Mr Bond, our new Eden.
Bond:
More like our damnation.
I still think we're going to have to wait a film or two to get a world domination plot again though, and they'll ultimately go with something low key. That's fine, a film like like SF showed us that relatively low key villain schemes can potentially have higher stakes than something larger in scale. To some extent it'll be centred around what this iteration of Bond fears, as BB and MGW recently said.
I think that's what they will do next.