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Comments
Like most of the “issues” in Skyfall, a simple line or two of dialogue could’ve cleared it up.
For example, in this case, it could've been something like:
Bond: I do hope that isnt for me.
Silva: No, but as you’re standing there, that is...
Does anyone take Skyfall as realistic? Is Macau really full of picturesque floating casinos surrounding by glowing lanterns you can reach only by boat? I'm pretty sure it isn't! :)
It's just got the tone of a Fleming novel: extreme nonsense but treated in a (generally) deadly serious way. Just be glad there's no giant squid! :)
That's a good point, I hadn't really considered that. You could say it is a bit of a weird coincidence that his escape route takes him right by the crash site, but maybe his radio needs to be nearby as they're underground.
Why is Skyfall 'pretentious' exactly? Because it includes an oscar winning actor? Because it contains some very simple symbolism and delves a little bit into Bond's back story? Because it contains a line of poetry? (If so, OHMSS has to be the most pretentious of the lot...).
You are not exactly setting the bar high when it comes to 'pretentiousness'... ;))
Yes, can't disagree there. Some of the stylistic twiddles of QoS do feel a bit empty and half-hearted.
The arty fight scene in Shanghai. Give me gritty, bloody stairwell fight from CR any day.
The silly poem read by M. Q's dialogue exchange with Bond in the art museum. Moneypenny's exchange with Bond while she shaves him.
All of that grates with me. I know others don't have any issues with it (like your good self), but for me I find it irritating.
As for the poem in OHMSS, that is without doubt one of the worst parts of the movie, other than Hilly's dubbed Baker voice (even though I still love OHMSS).
You and your giant squid again...
:))
I enjoyed the CR fight scene, but I loved the Shanghai fight for looking pretty too. If we're kicking out stuff from a Bond film because it's pretty then that means we'd have to can all of Ken Adam's work, and that would be a crime.
The point of Bond films is that they have more artistry going into them (Ken Adam, John Barry, Robert Brownjohn etc.) than they really deserve. That's the joy of them, for me anyway.
Maurice Binder. How dare you forget him, or leave him to the “etc.” [-X The Shanghai fight is really great. Comparing it negatively to the stairwell fight in CR is a bit unfair to me as that was the very best fight in all the Bond series.
Couldn’t disagree with you more on the poem. One of my favorite little bits of one of my top five favorite Bond films, and I love every time hearing the late and very great Dame Diana Rigg say it. It gives another peak into who Tracy is: sharp, resourceful, intelligent, cultured. The more we see, the more we understand why James Bond wants to marry her. Her, out of all the women he’s known, she’s different, special.
Anyway..
Yeah, true he did do some great stuff, and the gunbarrel remains inspired. I think he also did some pretty bad stuff too so maybe that's why he didn't leap to mind(!), but you're right.
If Sam Mendes had been the first person to decide to film Bond from the POV of inside an assassin's gun pointing at him, I wonder if Willy would call that pretentious too..? ;)
Interesting thought.... yes it probably is, isn't it? Obviously the FRWL one is great, but that might actually be the most viceral, and I love the construction of it, going down the staircase with Vesper unable to escape it.
Yup, agreed there. She uses her intelligence and decides to charm him, but not just in the 'shall I get into this bikini you've left for me?' way of other Bond girls, in a much subtler way.
I also think that Silva had many devices planted around the tube. Again, this can be acted out by anyone with a cell phone (in CR, Dimitrios sent Mollaka the text; six years later, AI can do that on someone's behalf. How often have we received a text from a bot?) So the computer sends out the text to Silva's network, based on the conditions, and the job is done. Same with the accomplices showing up at the right time with a police uniform for him. (They aren't even really accomplices; just "guns for hire.") That wasn't planned out weeks in advance; it was planned out by a computer that sent directions and time to those accomplices just hours in advance. In other words, Silva didn't have to lift a finger--that is why he is so smug in his cell. He had everything programmed weeks in advance: the computer (AI) would take every possibility into account and adjust.
This is why the opening scene is crucial. Silva didn't need Patrice to steal the list from a hard drive. He could have hacked it easily. So why didn't he? The answer to that question is the beauty of SF.
Of course this actually makes it an open goal for 'Spectre' to make sense of its 'they were all working for Blofeld' retcon, because it's actually quite reasonable that SPECTRE would want those agents blown for some big plan and would help Silva to accomplish that by telling him where to find the HD or something, as they then help each other mutually. That's not that hard to swallow when you think about it. That they managed to make that seem unlikely when you watch it is a sign of how that film got bungled.
I get what you are saying, but the imacculate, perfect pin point timing of the whole thing still depends on a lot if circumstances. The fact that Bond finds the pass word key for instance at the exact right moment. Lets say he needed five minutes to go to the toilet first? Silva would not have reached the hearing in time. Not to mention had M decided not to read a poem? Or listened to Tanner´s warning to flee. Those are only a couple of examples of various things that could have turned out differently and disturbed the timing of the whole scheme. You can achieve miracles with computers and algorithms, but to account for all those details... it´s stretching it a bit, isn´t, it?
I agree. Silva got very lucky (or maybe not), and we can buy into that because of the brilliance of the script. Silva's timing in the virtual field is excellent; you are pointing out how his fieldwork is different. And, in fact, he did ultimately blow it at the hearing.
Silva hates fieldwork. He calls it "so dull, so dull." And yet he has decided to kill M on those terms. The clues are all there that he was (and is) a bumbling idiot in the field: he couldn't even bite into his cyanide capsule correctly! When he arrives at the hearing and Bond uses the smokescreen, the look on Silva's face is priceless (Bardem is brilliant). He can't improvise. He is terrible in the field. He is the true embodiment of madness: an obsessive need to not only kill M but do so in all the wrong ways. All Silva had to do was rig the explosion with M in the office. There. Done. But that would not have been enough.
I sure agree that the thematic elements and characterizations in Skyfall are excellent.
This discussion however, is more of a cold, technical one: Does the plot, and more concretely Silva´s plan, make sense? And it´s no doubt we are supposed to stretch our sense of disbelief in order to accept it. As you say, Silva got very lucky, and that would be completely fine of there wasn´t more to it than that. However the film implies that every detail in this very complicated plan relying on a lot of circumstance was immaculately planned even down to pin point timing, «years in advance». That is where the issue arises. I can buy that Silva planned to be captured and escape in order to humiliate M further and that he would have many backup resources at his disposal. I can however not accept that everything as it turned out was perfectly planned. That simply doesn´t make sense and I feel I have to challenge your claim that everything works with some clever algorithms...
That being said I am very much on your side in that I consider Skyfall a very enjoyable and excellent Bond film.
Bottom line is there are flaws in the script (like there are many Bond scripts). I think what makes it more difficult to stomach with SF is the attempt at some kind of realism in its approach, when it becomes as far fetched as anything seen in Moore's tenure.
The films based on Fleming novels have a level of plausibility, because it was thought through as a novel in the first place by a very credible writer, and not cobbled together as a script by committee, with rewrite after rewrite by different people. This has been the problem with many of the Bond scripts.
Maibaum had a sense of realism in his writing, and knew how to adapt Fleming effectively, which make films like FYEO, TLD and LTK more credible (despite Maggie T impersonators, Blofeld down a chimney and winking fish). ;)
It's why I think they should be adapting what is left of Fleming, and then move on to adapting the Horowitz novels - because they have the basis for a credible script already.
P&W and the rest of the cack hand script gang have proven they struggle coming up with `original' material. We end up with all the crap that we saw in the Brozza era, right the way through to gems like Blofeld being Bond's long lost brother.
Indeed: but it's not a problem for me with Roger's films- I enjoy them, partly because they are far-fetched. Bond films are far-fetched, that's the fun of them.
Well, I'll say again: giant squid :D They're not really plausible at all: Shatterhand living in his evil castle surrounded by evil plants? Even Casino Royale, right from the start, has a plan behind it which is absolute nonsense- and like this, the film of that treated like it was real. But, again: that's the fun of them.
I don't see what relevance the number of writers has, to be honest.
Indeed! Lets not fool ourselves and pretend everything makes sense in the old Fleming novels, even the most acclaimed ones. An infertility virus distributed by young, brainwashed women being manipulated from an allergy clinic at the top of an alpine mountain?? Come on! Bond plots are and were always supposed to be grandios and OTT, and Fleming didn't really care about plot holes.
If unused elements from the novels can succesfully be integrated into a modern action blockbuster I am all for it. However I cannot remember that last time anyone made a convincing illustration of that and how it could work. The garden of death is a good example. People keep shouting about it, yet never give any convincing ideas of how it could be a part of a greater story and actually improve the plot. If it's just about adding it for the sake of adding it, I'd rather make a proper original story from scratch.
Still, maybe it's in this new film and they've made something incredible out of it, I don't know.
Great post, well said.
I don’t think that all Fleming plots are plausible, but I accept them because they are creative, interesting and more importantly Fleming.
I think they should be adapting what is left of Fleming too.
The underwater sequence from the novel Live and Let Die, the Spang brothers, the garden of death, Gala Brand, etc.
My Wife who hadn't seen it in about 6 years, I hadn't seen it 4 years, said she'd forgotten how well paced it is.
I know it is quite divisive on here but it sits at no. 4 for me. Comparing it to SP is laughable to me because it is night and day.
Mendes really wanted to make SF, Craig really wanted to be a part of it and it shows, neither were engaged with SP, SF is filled with suspense emotion and stakes, it's predecessor is possessing neither.
SF ended in a way like CR did that had you excited and just chomping at the bit for what was to come next. With CR we got QOS, its top 10 for me but not on CR's level. Though SF got followed by a film that had no conviction in what it wanted to be and went before the cameras with script that most of the key personnel really had no faith in.
It might have the same director but there is where similarities stop for me.
If you look at the most successful Bond films critically (and the ones most loved by fans), they mainly tend to be the ones that adapt fairly closely the Fleming novels, or even the short stories. Is that just plain coincidence? A 60's fad? How do you explain CR then? Or even TLD? Most top 5 films by fans and critics alike will have the likes of OHMSS, GF, FRWL and CR in that list. Mine also includes LTK, which relies heavily on Fleming scenes.
Who would have thought Bond sat playing cards throughout a huge part of a film would work well, then have Bond tortured by the villain, not have chance to kill him, and then the latter half of the film be nothing more than a tragic love story - how would that make a convincing argument to adapt CR?
The garden of death could be a great ending to a movie. Bond caught, tied to a chair above a tiny volcano that is about to erupt, manages to escape, kills the enemy and escapes via a helium balloon, only to be shot down and fall into the sea, causing amnesia, not knowing who he is.
Any scriptwriter worth his salt should be able to work that into the ending for a movie - easily. Far better than much of the crap we've had from `original' stories over the years.
It sounds like you despise the Fleming novels, fair enough. But just remember that the very best films work because they adapted the novels you dislike so much.
Bond walking through a garden is not exciting, obviously. But there is a bit more that happens during the end of YOLT than just Bond strolling casually around a garden, avoiding the plants.
You forgot to mention Bond being caught, sat above the tiny exploding chair, killing Blofeld, escaping via the rooftop on a helium balloon, being shot, falling into the sea, having amnesia, not knowing who he is.
Who knows. Maybe this is actually the ending to NTTD. We Fleming fans will rejoice in celebration, while all you Fleming haters or Fleming sceptics out there sit there in despair and disgust that they've managed to use an outlandish, bizarre Fleming moment on screen once again..... ;)
We have had similar discussions about this before, and as usual you resort to pretty ridiculous retorts and straw men. Let's get them out ofthe way first hand:
1) I love the Fleming novels! However I would never claim his stories made perfect sense which was the point I made relating to the previous, original discussion.
2) I never said I am against adapting more unused Fleming material. In fact I specifically stated the exact opposite: - "If unused elements from the novels can succesfully be integrated into a modern action blockbuster, I am all for it."
If you want to have a serious discussion with me you have to be able to treat the topic like a grown up and take into account what I'm actually writing, not making up drivel in order to attack me. If you are not able to do this, I will not bother...
I don't know you could say there's a perfect correlation though: TSWLM, MR, GE, LALD and of course Skyfall as we're discussing here.
TLD is a bit of a stretch too. Six minutes or so adapted from Fleming doesn't really give it a magic touch: it probably has less Fleming in it than Octopussy, so that should be on your list too.
It's a fair point, although it was always a pretty engrossing story. Was anybody saying they shouldn't adapt it?
Yeah that could be fun- I really wouldn't want amnesia though, that's too hokey. It was just about okay for Bourne as the whole story was built around it so it had to happen, I wouldn't want Bond doing it.
I don't think that's certain. It's a big, cartoony action adventure movie ending, sure, but I don't know if it's automatically better at all. I don't know what's better about hanging over a volcano than hanging off the Golden Gate bridge etc.
Is that needed?
When folks say they want the garden of death I've never taken them as meaning they want a volcano, though. To me those two things are pretty different. Whenever I've seen them talk about it they talk of how twisted an idea it is to have deadly plants, and people coming to commit suicide. If they actually meant 'flying on a balloon over a volcano' when they said all that then they talk in very esoteric terms! :D
It might well be the ending sure, but I have no idea why you have to be so bitter towards other people you're having a conversation with about it. It's pretty childish.
I agree with all of this. I have raised many of these criticism's myself.
I will concede, despite the stupidity of Bond surviving the fall, I do love the first half of the film. It just completely loses me when we leave Silva's island.