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It's a shame they weren't allowed to hint at Spectre the organisation throughout Craig's run, then it could have lead to the reveal of the organisation in the 4th film
Yeah, I think a problem is disconnecting Bond from the Denbeigh/C plot. It's a Bond film, he should come up against the baddies.
Giving a top actor like Fiennes a baddie of his own to beat seems like a good idea, and like most things in Spectre if you showed me it in a script I'd probably even say I like the sound of it(!), but in practise it just doesn't quite work.
Mind you, I guess you could say that Orlov in Octopussy is kind of similar: Bond only meets him once briefly and he's not even there when he's beaten, and yet that doesn't feel too wrong. I dunno, making films seems tricky! :D
We can probably agree, as we're in this thread, that Craig does absolutely nothing wrong in it and is actively fantastic, and is so despite having a broken leg!
Like he did for Miss Taro and Paula? Nonsense. In any case, finding 'something more to do' with a character because you like the actor is probably not a recipe for improving a movie. Lucia had her three excellent scenes, and that was her bit.
I think with Spectre, as with most any movie, you have to at least try to meet the film where it is. If you look at the car chase, maybe you want to remove the humor and exposition, put Monica Belucci in the car for some reason, and then roll it over seven times, but then you're just making a completely different kind of scene. You could replace the L'Americain scene with something like that too. But why? I can definitely think of more than one less exciting car chase in the series, and they're also less funny and less pretty to look at.
Even the third act, hated even by some of the movie's fans, fails to stand out as somehow particularly bad in a franchise with a fair share of underwhelming finales. I obviously love it: 'That is the general idea of a safehouse', 'We know what C stands for', 'I've really put you through it, haven't I?', Bond breaking out of the zip ties, even bringing down the helicopter--I'm never more than a minute away from a moment I love.
It's human to have an emotional reaction to something (*ahem* Brofeld *ahem*) and then concoct a dozen arguments to explain it, and that's more or less what I see with Spectre.
I see your point. But having a femme fatale would have made the film more interesting. Because it would have expanded the plot.
It certainly works much better for this traditional Bond movie fan than QoS or NTTD. It's slick and stylish and I love the crater base sequence especially. I can see its faults but they don't spoil the movie for me the way that certain elements of NTTD do. I'd be quite a happy bunny if SP were the end of the CraigBond era/timeline/universe/character arc/whatever you want to call it.
100% agreed, and for me it actually makes Spectre more enjoyable than Skyfall to me. Skyfall is expertly designed, no doubt, but IMO they were too precious about crafting the most classic Bond film possible for the 50th that they forgot to make it fun. Spectre ends up a mess of course, but it feels like the production freed itself up a bit to be more fun, and the composite parts are all a blast as a result.
Totally agree with you too @ColonelAdamski, but I do like NTTD too. Craig firing on all cylinders IMO.
I'll take Spectre over all the Roger's
NTTD is a hybrid of OHMSS, YOLT and the EON game.
I love all of them
That’s a bold statement. But I agree. It at least tried to be and feel like a classic Bond story.
Same here. I wish EON would have had a novelization released with it.
I’m also happy that the actors kept continually coming back to their roles. They were all cast well. I hope that can continue with the next era, in particular if it’s another story arc.
“Craig’s run” would probably be more succinct.
I still say they should have had some sort of a stinger at the end of Spectre showing a bunch of armed guards taking Blofeld to his cell, and it zooms in on one of them and they're wearing a Spectre ring.
Some time ago, many of us tried our hand at what would have made that movie markedly better. And we all came up with far better ideas than what the professional screenwriters did.
For me, the biggest issue is Madeleine walking away in the middle of the night...and Bond simply letting her. If Spectre and Blofeld were "everywhere" as Mr. White suggested, then it stands to reason that she was not at all "safe" in that "safe house." That needed to be a substantive part of that final act. From there, TSWLM provided the perfect blueprint: Bond saves the day, kills the henchman (maybe), kills the villain (maybe), and saves the girl.
That moment is the one moment I don't like either. It's a shame Mr White wasn't around to knock her out: 'Spare the rod, spoil the child, eh?' ;)
I've seen other cool ideas for Spectre, but none of them seem qualitative to me. 'Problems' are not being 'fixed'. One would be doing better work having the OHMSS PTS make sense, elminating the many coincidences of Goldeneye, or helping Le Chiffre understand the account number/password situation. And if you want to just make changes based on purely subjective preference, you can do it with any film. People remove Spectre's color filter because it makes the colors 'really pop': well, the filter wasn't put there because they were trying to make the colors pop. Or wouldn't it be cool to have two armies face off at the crater base? (Answer, no, those scenes have never been among the most engaging, to say the least)
I always remember this movie coming in last on the production design ranking thread, and Daniel's performance being ranked as among the worst, and it's just hard not to see this as an absurd emotional reaction to something else. (Spoiler alert: it's Brofeld) Not unlike the hilarious interrogation about 'What made the boat flip in QOS?'
Same with Matilde in NTTD. That's been the problem with the post CR Craig era. You can kind of see where they had scenes they wanted to do, and to get to each of these scenes, there are these connecting bits where improbable stuff happens just to get to the next set piece.
This is where CR stands head and shoulders above the others. It doesn't feel contrived or forced in any way. It's driven by a greater story, rather than individual set pieces with connecting threads of not-so-good stuff.
Which is true of a lot of pre-CR Bond films too, to be fair.
Well, Bond finds a security video that, ridiculously, was filming the exact thing he needed to see. They wanted an action scene, so they had Le Chiffre put Bond in a huge car accident even though he needs Bond alive. They wanted to misdirect the audience, so they had Le Chiffre tell us Mathis was a villain. They also had him talk about getting the account number from Vesper and the password from Bond, which would mean he would just send the winnings to the treasury anyway. There is a lot of narrative flimsiness supporting the emotional beats of that film.
But as I said, it never felt contrived. Not to me, anyway.
Right, but it's an emotional thing. I don't like Casino Royale very much anyway, so the fact that most of the important bits don't make any sense jumps out at me. The emotional beats do feel right in the movie, so when the torture scene feels compelling, one might not be motivated to notice that it's incoherent.
If people like CR because it's dark and superficially similar to Fleming, they don't notice nonstop schlocky writing. If people don't like SP because of Brofeld, it has the worst production design in the series.... :-??
Oh, about that Madeleine scene--it's not good writing anyway, but what really ruins it for me is the lazy music cue. Sticks out like a sore thumb for some reason.
God, it's been ages. LTK is the last time I remember a decent underwater scene, and skiing, you have to go back 40 years.
I can accept all of that with CR (I mean, it's still a Bond film after all) except the Mathis thing.
Truth be told I'm still not 100% sure what actually happened with his character... I mean, QOS didn't exactly make it clear either...
Yes. Thank you.
I loved CR and QoS, but what Mathis did or didn't do is never sufficiently explained. And likewise, Vesper's connection to Quantum/White was never quite clear to me, either, nor was Quantum's level of surveillance of what LeChiffre was doing. Because Quantum and the CIA and Mathis were all, somehow, mysteriously, MIA when Vesper was abducted and left to possibly die in the middle of the road.
I quite liked the plane sequence, I just wish it had been filmed and scored a bit better. Like the car chase in Rome, it just lacked a bit of adrenaline, compared with something like the PTS of QOS
I assume they had Le Chiffre address the audience (and have Le Chiffre act suspicious) to maybe throw off readers of the novel. I thought they might have changed up the novel the first time I saw it.
But yeah, the movie never clarifies what was going on there (someone told Le Chiffre about the tell, and if it was Vesper, one should wonder why she didn't just agree to send him the money, as it was within her power) and the guy who's right about everything (James Bond) still thinks Mathis is a bad guy at the end.
It's not even all that clear what Vesper was doing for anybody before the ending, really. Not giving Bond the extra money? Possibly telling Le Chiffre about the tell? Did she participate in the abduction after the poker game, or did they really snatch her?