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Where did I call it a “more serious movie”? Are you confusing me with someone else who said that?
It's just an opinion!
There’s nothing “Greatest Hits” about GE, at least not when compared to DAD, and to a lesser extent Craig’s final two films.
Agreed, it’s much more than just a greatest hits Bond film. In many ways it’s a ‘reinvention’ Bond film as EON would say, at least in the sense it’s consciously bringing Bond into the post Cold War era.
Yeah Onatopp and Trevelyan both play into specific archetypes that the series set up previously but that’s the case for most Bond villains and henchmen haha - not that I disagree with you though.
Heck I’d say TSWLM is more “Greatest Hits” than GE was but even then the film has enough unique elements to where it doesn’t feel derivative of what came before.
It's not a greatest hits like The Spy Who Loved Me but it's more generic than, I don't know... TMWTGG.
GE’s a pretty unique Bond film regardless.
And she's not exactly a million miles off Fatima Blush either.
GE is very much 'give 'em what they expect from a Bond' but in a shiny new box. In the opening PTS he's doing a skydiving stunt, there's a big song sung by a well-established diva type with lots of naked ladies dancing about, then he's in Monaco driving that nice car that Sean used to drive, then he's in a dinner jacket in the casino where he plays sexy cards and orders a martini, then he flirts with Moneypenny a bit, he has a funny scene in Q's lab with all the gags in the background, then he meets his CIA contact in another country, he meets the amusingly colourful local ally character, he has a tangle with the femme fatale, he gets trapped in a deadly trap but escapes in an ingenious way, he has a big chase through a busy city, the baddie has a big base in a remote location and has an evil space laser and he dies falling off a very tall thing etc. etc. There's new stuff in there too, but it's all scattered around stuff you very much expect a Bond film to do.
It's kind of like, at that point if you asked someone to remember what a Bond film is like, they'd remember GE. He'd not even been to the casino at Monte Carlo before (aside from it being a video arcade in NSNA!) but I bet most people would think he'd been there every other movie if you asked them. It's a Bond archetype.
I came out of the cinema feeling ever so slightly underwhelmed in a way: it felt just like a Bond film, a sort of update of a Roger 80s one. I mean, I loved it and went to see it another four times, and yet it was very much 'Another Bond Film'. There weren't many surprises. And even Pierce himself has said he pitched his performance somewhere between Sean and Roger: he's a 'greatest hits Bond' himself. But GE is directed extremely assuredly and felt like 'an old Bond, but made today'.
I don't actually expect B26 to revisit all of the archetypes in quite that way, I think, 30 years on, folks maybe do expect a little bit more freshness, but I reckon it may well look to be a bit more of a typical Bond than perhaps a QoS or something like that.
Ditto :)
I'd agree with that. GE also feels like it could still belong to the same 'universe' as the films that came before it. The rest have another feel to it, polished differently maybe, another coating as it were. Not saying this to take down TND-NTTD, it's just what I personally experience with it.
It's funny because I think TND is the natural successor to the Dalton era.
I think GE is more of an island.
I vaguely remember first watching it and was actually quite surprised at how different I found it compared to other Bond movies I'd seen (at this point I'd seen the Connery and Moore films). It definitely readapts many of those old Bond tropes - although again I'd argue in a very fresh and unique way - but there was much about it that felt different just on a tonal level (again, it might be stuff like the violence/harder edge at times, the darker cinematography, and probably even things unique to the film - the tank chase, Travelyan's backstory, even the score as much as I'm not a big fan of it). I must admit it wasn't even one of my favourites until I revisited it a few years ago.
It's one that's grown on me a lot, and I'd actually put it above CR too (although that's just personal opinion). It's very much like TSWLM for me - another one I wasn't actually as big a fan of in the past. I'd say it's one of the highlights of EON's Bond run, and certainly of the modern Bond films as well.
https://www.marginallycompelling.com/p/cinefex-in-memoriam
They have a silly name, which I think is a problem.
Interesting, thanks. I'd be curious to know what they meant, shame.
I suppose they could be brought in heavily reworked. The Spang bros as they are in the novel are unremarkable, one of them barely in the novel at all. They’d definitely have to be much more than Italian-American mob stereotypes.
Well an obvious action sequence for Bond 26 is Bond fighting a villan in a London Eye pod or on the London Eye itself.
MI 7 used many cgi effect shots (despite the usual Cruise does it all for real shtick) so there is a very high probability MI 8 has used just as many cgi shots and that may or will include the biplane sequence which is marketed as all real. And Tom Cruise unequivocally lied when he said in promotion for Top Gun Maverick that the planes were all real. The film has thousands of cgi effect shots.
And yet Cruise says in the 2019 Comicon promotion of TG 2 trailer:
The comment is at the 3 minute 4 seconds point in this video:
So if Cruise can tell a whopper of a lie about Top Gun Maverick then he/and Simon Pegg can lie when they say Tom Cruise did all the stunts in MI8.
But my main point is Amazon need to show the next Bond actor doing a big stunt. Be it done for real or cgi fake, if we see Bond #7 hanging from the London Eye or whatever it is, and it looks real, people will think the Bond franchise is competing with the Mission Impossible franchise. We don't want Bond 26 - a new era for the franchise - to feel like it's in Mission Impossible's shadow.
Blending as much practical stunt work as possible and using light touch CG to enhance it seems the best approach.
Cruise hanging onto the side of the plane. That's easy to fake.
1) Cruise is strapped to the side of a real plane. The plane races down a runway at great speed. This generates real wind resistance hence why Cruise's hair is moving, hence why Cruise looks like he's struggling to stay on the plane! Camera mounted in front of Cruise to film the sequence. Plane never takes off.
2) The sequence is done again but without Cruise. Same camera mounted position. The plane takes off into the air. The background is real.
Sequences 1 and 2 combined. The shot of Cruise hanging onto a real plane on the ground composite merged with the identical camara shot of the same plane in the air = Ethan Hunt hanging onto a plane in flight. 😉 Cruise promotes it as all real.
This could be easily replicated in Bond 26. Bond actor hanging to a real object but added to the overall image in post production. Amazon could even lie and say "it was all real." We wouldn't know for sure!
Yes, he did; I brought that up upthread. But that doesn't mean that there aren't real stunts in the films, or 'the vast majority' of it is CG. A lot of it is enhanced with CG backgrounds etc. but that's not the same thing.
Even in Maverick it's clear there's an awful lot of stuff being done as close to real as possible, and the actors are clearly actually in real planes in a lot of shots. It looks great.
I mean, it's not. The slight problem with that shot is that it doesn't look massively different to a studio shot, it's true, and does look like a locked-off shot, that is until the plane banks and the sunlight hits him and then that really confirms it.