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absolutely mate, look at batman and superman they have endured for similar reasons the characters are often reimagined. In years to come bond will change many times again, even when i don't like some takes on bond i still love bond.
My rant moment: "Why in MY day, jumping off a three story build usually resulted in a sprained ankle, nowadays EVERYONE can leap off five stories & hit the ground running... while loading a gun."
Another is that Bond tackle everything on his own and that it was Moore who needed an army to help, however, in the movies THUNDERBALL, YOU ONLY LIVE TWICE, ON HER MAJESTY'S SECRET SERVICE and DIAMOND'S ARE FOREVER, Bond did need outside help from the military, secret service or even criminal (MAFIA) assistance.
And finally the idea that Bond should be more like Bourne to compete in today's dirty bomb world, well, to be honest, Bourne isn't like Bourne as the film of THE BOURNE IDENTITY isn't a patch on Ludlum's novel, probably because Ludlum's Bourne is largely Ludlum's version of James Bond but American and with Amnesia.
Moore did a number of good Bond films and some stinkers just like most Bond actors have. Each person and each generation has a Bond that is their favourite and although we bad-mouth each other's choices this is what makes Bond films last and has given them their longevity. Bond films aren't a genre of films, they are many film genre's, thrillers, family films, serious action adventures to low-key espionage dramas.
Good post. The phrase 'reality' is just a mis-nomer. I hate when people talk about 'gritty realism', what a load of BS. It's funny when people say they want movies like FRWL and OHMSS, ignoring 20 other films in a franchise. Surely the appeal of Bond is it's ability to diversify. I'll watch FRWL and TND and enjoy them equally for what they do.
I mean, wasn't Bond designed by Fleming to be sort of the Heavy Metal magazine version of spy characters & stories? And didn't the movies magnify that mostly (except the sex)?
To me, 'realism' is like, The Constant Gardener or something...
That said.... as much as I liked The Constant Gardener, I've seen it only once, and most Bond movies I'm on my 15th view of by now (or higher)...
CR and OHMSS tell us stories. QoS doesn't really do much in the way of story. It's some action set-pieces linked by a bit of dialogue and a slice of redemption shoe-horned in at the end. There are some good moments but in terms of story, it has nothing like the weight of a CR or OHMSS. Yeah, the scene with Yusef is good, but the film as a whole had so much unexplored potential. It's the only opportunity outside of OHMSS, where they had the chance to make a genuine sequel and they dropped the ball. I like QoS in part, but to suggest it's the best it could have been is way wide of the mark. It had the potential to be the best film in the franchise.
I didn't say anything about revenge? All though, on the subject, QoS should have been an out and out revenge flick.
Sorry, I meant to type redemption. It wouldn't work as a revenge film. Apologies for the confusion.
Haggis' original drafts were revenge based, and I bet they were a damn sight better than what we actually got. Don't get me wrong, I don't dislike QoS, my biggest problem is that it had the potential to be infinitely better than it was. I think it receives more love than it probably deserves. Hidden behind the beautiful cinematography and production design, is a film that doesn't know what it is, or what it's trying to achieve. It has neat 'moments', as evidenced by all the comments re. Tosca, Yusef etc but as a whole, it just isn't cohesive.
There was a subtlety about the Vesper arc in QoS, but it was masked by a paper thin plot about natural resources and bunch of redundant action scenes, mostly used to get us from A-B. I found I was ambivalent towards Greene and Quantum. There was nothing even remotely interesting, just a mcguffin couched in real world politics, which when done well (see SF agent leak) can make an impact, but it's much harder to care, when the organisation you are supposed to fear, are in the market of controlling water supply. In the real world it's quite scary, but for the purposes of a Bond film it lacks gravitas.
I can imagine if they'd saved that notion for SF - we have Bond returning to London, only to find Quantum have taken over 'Thames Water', with Elvis manning the switchboard.
It's a dog if you get in a writer to do a draft and then just jettison it (Haggis wanted Vesper to turn out to have a child, who Bond would have ulitmately left to someone else in care or something), better to have a rough idea first then hone it, a lot of time wasted there.
I'm pretty sure this is what happened. The problem is, unlike SF, the character work wasn't good enough for you to forgive them.
You have just described the Brosnan era.
But nobody is saying the Brosnan films are anything else. They're slick popcorn films held together by action and cool moments, that's generally accepted. QOS is praised as this masterpiece with a great story on this site. Saying that though I think GE and TWINE have better stories and TNDs isn't brilliant but it does have a nice theme (media gone bad) which is still pretty relevant.
Although I like it much more than I used to, I still think Quantum is a bit overrated on here. I think @RC7 described it perfectly.
Not sure what this has to do with Brosnan, but in any event I'd say GE's story was a lot clearer, and a lot better. I'd actually say the themes in TND are also much more interesting, not executed as well as they could have been, but all the same, strong.
QoS begins well, the chase is snappy and a decent opener IMO. After this, we have Bond chasing Mitchell through Siena. Why chase Mitchell? Because a roof-top chase would be fun? Surely Mitchell is infinitely more traceable than White, yet White is left to escape, all IMO to facilitate an unnecessary chase. Then we have the boat sequence, again, why? Because Forster thought he'd be a bit clever and have chases represent the elements of earth, fire, water, air. LALD's boat chase makes it look decidedly mediocre. The same goes for the plane sequence, it serves absolutely no purpose whatsoever, other than to move the story from A to B in a really clunky way. It lacks neither the originality or reality of something such as the Necros fight in TLD. The end is a decent enough sequence, but again, just another fight. It sorely lacks dialogue between Greene and Bond, all we get is the same old crap about the Tierra project with Medrano.
All in all, I don't dislike the film but those who judge it as a masterpeice, are either what we call 'awkward sods', or have very strange views on how you quantify 'masterpeice'.