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Bond should be in a modest, vulnerable car, like in the car chase from FYEO. If anyone has to be driving tanks, it should be the villain.
I think there's plenty of room for Bond to be involved in chases where he's either pursuing or being pursued. It doesn't have to be only one or the other. So long as the sequences succeed in their goals.
I see what you’re saying here, but maybe just once in 20+ films, Bond gets the tank. ;) we cant just keep redoing the same things.
Thanks for the perspective, it is an interesting one. Nonetheless, I still find it poor.
Ah, yes of course! The argument to end all arguments ;) ;))
We have Sylvester Stallone and Jason Statham for that ;)
Spot on. I was toying with the idea of leaving a similar post but ultimately felt it would be a waste of time. It's a Brosnan film, we don't like that **** around here.
:P
Love this.
Honestly, even if I was buying that argument, it doesn´t make the scene any better...
And at the end of the day, who cares.
My point was that it seemed as if people were judging it as a suspenseful chase, when it clearly wasn’t meant to be viewed as such. It’s all there in the sight gags and the jovial music. It’s a very lighthearted scene. Comparing it to a conventional chase where Bond is pursued and vulnerable is like comparing apples to oranges.
I agree with you. I like to think of the chase as a bit of cathartic release as well, as you mentioned in your previous post.
It doesn’t really matter what I personally think......Marketing Executives and Producers wouldn’t ‘green light’ a gay actor as Bond. It doesn’t match the ‘Bond brand’ from a business perspective. It’s a commercial gamble that can be avoided.
You'd think that, but then again EON cast Daniel Craig, who probably would have never been on the radar for any other Marketing Executives and Producers just for his blonde hair and unconventional looks. If EON wants to cast an actor who just happens to be gay in real life, that's just something that will force everyone else to either fix their hearts or die.
All true. But why would they take the risk. The press would have a field day and it would overshadow the film. If having blonde hair and being perceived as ‘bland’ was treated so adversely in 2005, imagine the reaction to a ‘gay Bond’ (as they would undoubtedly dub it).
I was in my early 20s when TND was released and mobile phones may have been primitive, but they were getting widely used. The car was borderline deus ex machina, it did everything required and Bond did not seem in danger in the least. His confrontation with the Doctor earlier on was more suspenseful. And Bond's attitude is all wrong: he's got a big smile minutes after he grieved Paris. It's like the sequences were filmed months apart and they had forgotten what was meant to happen before.
Yeah, I see what you're saying and can understand that POV. But one of the things I like about TND is it isn't saddled the way the other Brosnan (and Craig for that matter) films are with the personal angle. Bond gets past Paris's death and he's onto the adventure and accomplishing the mission, sparing us any brooding "It's what keeps me alive" on the beach scenes.
Well, that's the problem with TND (one of its problems) : Paris is meant to be significant and he gets over her death within minutes. It's as if their past history was an excuse for them to get in bed faster, without a long courting.
Ever since the 80s, movies like Indiana Jones, Rambo, Die Hard, Lethal Weapon, etc have made the personal angle become such a norm in the genre that it’s a rarity to make an action film where the protagonist has no personal stake. It’s a trope that has persisted to this very day in newer films like Marvel, John Wick, Fast & Furious, that it’s now something audiences expect to see. Bond adopting it ever since LTK was one of the many attempts to make Bond relevant with modern audiences, especially given how people started to think Bond had become passé.
So the idea of an old fashioned/traditional formula hasn’t been a thing for Bond since the 80s, and after all that time to expect a Bond film to return to the zero personal stakes of the 60s and 70s films is now unrealistic. You don’t have to like it, but let’s not pretend to be surprised when, NOT if, film a new installment gives Bond even more personal stakes. That’s just how the action genre has been for 40 years and may continue to be for awhile.
I'm among those who consider TND a decent Bond movie, and in my case definitely a far better film than the two that followed it, and then a few. But I never considered Paris significant. In fact, one might as well have omitted her, except for the effect of Dr. Kaufmann killing her and Bond getting very, very mad about this. Other than that, the sidestory of past relations between Bond and Paris has no meaning whatsoever. And it's one of the things in this movie that I find distracting.
A thoughtful point.
To be fair, Fleming started it himself, as OHMSS’s ending made it personal for Bond, and YOLT then built on that.
But you are right, the trope is persistent and it gets everywhere.
When the TV show Sherlock started, with Benedict Cumberbatch, I thought, this’ll be great, they’ll update all my favourite old stories. I was really looking forward to it.
Then they destroyed the stories. They dropped the concept of someone going to Baker Street each episode to ask for Holmes’s help, and introduced a massively complex personal stakes thing with Moriarty “messing with Sherlock’s head” and an Irene Adler lust angle and then there’s Sherlock’s secret evil sister and oh Watson’s just married a special forces assassin. It felt like each episode just added a new personal stake to add to all the other personal stakes. Ridiculous. But very contemporary.
IMO Arthur Conan Doyle had the right idea all along. Each story is self-contained, and it starts with someone asking for Holmes’s help, and then Holmes solves it.
So the concept of Bond simply going to M’s office and being set a mission that has no personal relevance to him may now be dead and buried.
Yes, you are correct about the personal angle. I hate it, though, for the most part. Of course there's a place for it. But sometimes these guys, Bond especially, have to be professional. I like it in TWINE when Bond kills Elektra because it shows absolute professionalism. It's one of the best scenes in the series imo, even in a film I don't have much affection for. The continual emphasis on personal stakes on top of the job that needs doing is a bit tedious, though.
You mention Lethal Weapon. The first film is one of my favourites. The second is pretty good, but they introduced the angle that one of the villains had killed Riggs' wife prior to the first film. Ludicrous. By Lethal Weapon 4 it's one big surrogate family running around solving crimes. I don't want that to happen to Bond.
It doesn't help that they cast a rather average actress. Teri Hatcher is good looking, sure, but I don't believe one second that Bond could have fallen in love with her.
@MakeshiftPython I keep repeating the very same thing here: the personal angle is now an element for the whole action genre, whether you do a low key thriller or an apocalyptic scifi blockbuster. Unless the whole genre shifts, we won't see a change.
@IGotABrudder The issue with Sherlock was not so much the personal stakes, which was symptomatic rather than a cause imo. It was the overuse of plot twists and overly complicated and contrived plots for shock value. The source material was of course far superior, but there was plenty of personal drama, only it was lived by Holmes' clients. Holmes himself was like a "detective ex machina" , the stories otherwise were proper realistic fiction. But it's easier to have a hero with no personal stakes in a plot when the format is episodic in nature.
Funny, people always talk about how cold and professional Bond is when killing Elektra, but I don’t see it at all. I see a man who’s INCENSED because he fell for a woman that manipulated him, and finds out just how rotten of a person she is after he empathized with her earlier. Even right after he kills her, he approaches her body to mourn her, because even after all that he’s still emotionally mixed up and can’t help himself. And the thing about him being professional is an odd thing to say because she was ultimately unarmed, and when he kills her he obviously doesn’t look cold blooded, you can see in his face how utterly pissed off he is. He didn’t just kill her because the job called for it, he killed her because she betrayed him, and it’s DRAMATIC (in fact in the first draft she actually lives at the end, being taken into custody and Bond visits her, it was decided that killing her was more powerful ). Otherwise he would have subdued her another way, as a professional would. But he wasn’t cold blooded, he was very hot blooded.
If anything, Bond showed more professionalism in killing Kaufman. Even though it was personal, it was more methodical. He kept his cool. That wasn’t what happened with Elektra.
A moment of emotion comes after, then he's off to stop the nuke.
I agree with @RichardTheBruce on this one.