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Comments
Yes well said. It's a fine balance, which you nailed perfectly.
I too went for TND after NTTD :)
TND... definitely Bond comfort food.
I'll take just about anything they give us when it comes to more action in the snow though; the only one we had in the Craig era was very disappointing.
Would have been cool to have Bond grab a set of skis after leaving the Hoffler clinic while other Spectre goons chased on skis while Bond was trying to keep tabs on the cars.
This would've been so much better. Hell, even a snowy car chase would've been an improvement.
Like the entire London action sequence at the middle of Skyfall. From Silva's escape until the end of the courtroom shootout. Excpet for the tube crashing, the action itself during this sequence is nothing spectacular, but all of it is really great thanks to how it was shot & edited and that every bit of it serves to tell the story.
You also invite even more comparisons to OHMSS as a result, which still has impressive ski sequences even to this day!
It certainly does, and FYEO does a brilliant job too- and puts them in a ski resort, which makes as much sense as a ski scene could. TWINE on the other hand...
Whenever I go skiing I am struck by how silly ski chases are: the chances that both you and the baddies would be starting from the top of a mountain, and both happen to be wearing skis, seem pretty low.
I want them to be as novel as possible with the action scenes. Give us some stunts we haven’t seen before and try to be a bit more clever than “Bond shoots him, then him, then him” (although to be fair NTTD did do that very, very well with that stairwell gunfight). Maybe something with a wingsuit? I’m surprised they haven’t done that yet. I’d love to see DN’s obstacle course in a film too, complete with the giant squid.
I remember someone on here years ago suggesting Bond escaping by driving down a mountain slope. Could be quite tense if they do it right, the car thundering down in the snow, Bond struggling to keep any kind of control.
I’ll die on the hill that the plane chase in SP could have been great though. Imagine the nah nah nah nahhh bit of the Bond theme kicking in when he appears in the plane, him flying low and having to pull off some tricky ariel stunts to avoid losing them. It’s a decent idea imo, just let down by the limp direction of it and the score.
I think it might well have been you y’know mate, because now that I think about it, I’m sure I remember the person suggesting it posting a clip of that Top Gear episode too. It is a great idea.
It's a "tank through the wall in GoldenEye" type moment for me, which I think Bond is good at. When he becomes a blunt instrument. I also have a scene in my head with a superyacht and helicopter... at some point the helicopter crashes into the yacht and the finale takes place on a burning, sinking ship.
What about when he was in bed with Grace Jones?
Never has Bond been in such peril, before or since. Well. Maybe Casino. You know what she had under those blankets after all…
When I saw the NTTD trailer with the Land Rovers doing that crazy jumping down the landscape I was hoping we were going to get a real crazy, landmark offroad chase. But it was a bit featureless in the end and they didn't really have any big ideas for it.
I'm totally with you there: I think it had great potential which didn't really come off. And I do like the final stunt of piloting the wingless plane- that's a good idea. If I had two scripts in front of me, one with 'ski chase' and one with 'wingless plane skiing' on it, I'd pick the plane one every time.
I can agree. I also believe that IceBreaker, could have worked as an Older Indiana Jones novel. Just have him be looking for an artifact, in the 40s, 50s, or 60s.
I can't really see that: Indy doesn't do the sort of lateral thinking that Bond does in these action scenes, where he does whatever is logical to achieve his aims, regardless of how ridiculous it is. So he drives a tank though a traffic jam, he uses crocodiles as a bridge, he escapes in a Moon Buggy, he waterskis behind a seaplane etc.
Indy is more about using old school grit to win. Usually that means riding a horse(!) or just punching the baddies as hard as he can. He rarely goes clever or particularly cool in his action in the way that Bond does. Using a vehicle in an unconventional way to give chase is very much more a 007 thing, I'd say.
And don't forget that he doesn't want to be skidding down the mountain: he's basically having a big accident there. I know that Bond doesn't want to lose the wings from his plane, but the difference is that he sees a way to make that a win.
I’d argue that the more ridiculous stuff from the films is where Bond is getting away from its core, where as big outlandish fantasy adventure is in Indy’s, Indiana Jones being very influenced by old movie serials.
Debate of sorts from a UK news channel from yesterday.
Nah, even with fewer films it’s a proportional thing. A Bond moment is those moments where thinks laterally in a cool way to achieve his objective: that’s when the theme gets played and that’s why we like him- because he does unexpected things to turn the situation to his advantage, often almost effortlessly. So if there’s a heat-seeking missile behind him, he does an acrobatic stunt to use that to blow up his objective. If a snowmobile has blown up in front of him, he uses its ski as a sort of snow surfboard. A cello case becomes a sled; a Citroen 2CV becomes an off-roader; a plane ejector seat becomes a missile… there are so many of these; this is how Bond works. His ‘cool’ in action scenes comes from these clever ideas where Bond sees an audacious solution. They’re so audacious there’s often humour in them for the audience. The tank scene in GoldenEye is funny.
Indy action scenes on the other hand are much more down to Earth: he rides a horse to catch up with a truck and punches everyone on it (a bit of cleverness by working his way underneath it); he has a fist fight by a plane; he jumps onto a tank and fights/shoots the baddies etc. There’s some wit and invention in there because that’s an action staple, like jousting on motorbikes, but it’s not really his style in the way that it’s Bond’s defining action trait.
Now, Bond cutting his own wings off accidentally does have a touch of Indy I agree, because Indy often makes mistakes, but Bond then deciding to drive the plane down the slope in order to intercept the baddies is true 007 audacious invention stuff in the tradition of the GE tank etc.