Should there be a 2 hour limit on Bond movie runtimes?

Comments

• RichardTheBruce I'm motivated by my Duty.

  1:50am Posts: 14,433

  
• Mendes4Lyfe The long road ahead

  7:20am edited 7:35am Posts: 8,926

  CrabKey wrote: »

  We don't need cookie cutter Bond films.

  
  4 out of past 5 Bond films have been over 2hrs 20 minutes, at this point a 2hrs give or take film would be breaking out of the "cookie cutter mould.
  
  @DarthDimi
  
  I think you might be getting to wrapped up in how the thread is phrased "2 hour limit. Ofcourse there doesn't have to be a hard and fast rule, there's always exceptions. OHMSS is one of my favourite Bond films and it stretches across a large canvass, although I'd argue they actually had a story to support it in that case. But I do think certain conventions exist in popular cinema for a reason. Movies on this scale aren't made for the pure expression of the artists' proclivities, they're tailored to appeal to a specific often very targeted set of the population - otherwise they don't get made. There's no hard and fast rule which says you couldn't have a 3 hr romcom, but there's also no hard and fast rule which says that Indiana Jones couldn't swear like a sailor, or Harry Potter couldn't get hit by a car randomly in his 5th year and the rest of the story is about hermione, but these things would only serve to alienate the very audience the stories were designed to appeal to. When it comes to major franchises, especially in the spy genre people have been saying for years that the movies are unnecessarily padded. I was around for all of the Bond and Mission films from 2015 onwards and it was a repeated critique that parts could have been chopped out or slimed down. I don't know if you've heard of the nostalgia critic but even he said that as good as fallout was, he didn't really feel like tying in Julia was necessary, and that layer felt a bit tacked on.
  
  Spectre in particular has an insane amount of time spent just on establishing locations and mood setting. The opening, Bond arriving in Rome, Lucia walking around her house, Bond arriving at the clinic, Bond and Madeline arriving at Lamerican, Bond and Madeline waiting in the desert, the entrance into Blofelds base, being shown to their rooms, Bond being ambushed and breaking out in London, Bond running around the building looking for madeline... its a real problem and it doesn't help the film be anymore engaging, except perhaps with Bond and Lucia which is quite well done and atmospheric. Taking this as a blanket approach throughout the whole film really diminishes the effectiveness of its use. In short, it turns the film into a slog.
• SecretAgentMan⁰⁰⁷ Lekki, Lagos, Nigeria

  7:49am edited 8:01am Posts: 2,600

  I think we simply need engaging stories. No matter the length. Also, I prefer Mendes' style over Fukunaga's. Mendes immerses you in the film more. In NTTD, everything happened too fast...even the action scenes. Also, a director like Mendes would have shown more of Jamaica. He might have also added the spear gun and even film Bond fishing underwater with it, as his re-introduction after Matera.
• Mendes4Lyfe The long road ahead

  8:35am Posts: 8,926

  If seeing Bond fishing with a speargun doesn't ultimately add anything to the story I'm glad it wasn't included. I remember originally there was a whole sequence at the start of TND where Bond ice climbs to get to the arms base, but once they realised it didn't really add much they rightfully left it out of the story. IMO there's no point in including things for the sake of it or just because it looks cool but doesn't serve a narrative purpose. I would love to see Bond driving around Japan more in that little white car, but the story didn't call for it - se la vie.
• DEKE_RIVERS

  9:34am Posts: 1,999

  DarthDimi wrote: »

  Mendes4Lyfe wrote: »

  I see alot of people discussing the impact of MI:FR on Bond 26, and one big takeaway is that almost 3 hours for a Spy-Adventure movie is simply too much. When you look at SPECTRE, B25, Dead Reckoning and now Final Reckoning one common criticism about all of them people have is that they feel overly padded. Even Fallout, which got stellar reviews and reception from fans, I saw quite a few people saying they wished it could have been 10 or 15 minutes shorter. If Bond 26 wants to break the trend these types of movies have fallen into of late, then a slender 2hrs 15 minutes would really be a breathe of fresh air for audiences. I think this is doable because they won't be carrying the weight and expectation of finishing off a series the way B25 or Final Reckoning were (thats conjecture BTW, I have no idea if MI:FR ends the series, I haven't seen it, but it has "final" in the title and Cruise is in his 60's, so I'm just assuming) . Also I think that relying on more Visual storytelling and less scenes of heavy exposition would really help to cut down the runtime of these movies, and it seems to be a problem for Both MI and Bond lately. Look at the original Indiana Jones trilogy, none broke the 2hr 10 minute mark because they had a very strong visual sense to them, and the older Bond films certainly had that. Instead of bland establishing shots introducing each step along the journey, just cut to Bond where he's supposed to be already engaged in following up a lead, it will save on the overall runtime. This might be controversial but I think if they remade Live And Let Die today the movie would probably have to be 3hrs long, because the PTS alone would probably be 10 minutes longer as they establish the three targets, give them their own dialogue scenes etc. Instead of Baines already being tied up dreading his fate there would be a scene where he is captured first etc. And then we would need another few scenes setting up the Kananga/mr big dual operation in excruciating detail just to make sure no one is in the dark about what's going on. Instead, all of that info is communicated visually, and we just cut to the quick. It seems like we lost the art of snappy, brisk blockbuster cinema.

  
  I continue to find this reasoning awkward. And the 'ad populum' fallacy is once again used without reservation.
  
  Some stories require the 3-hour canvas, others don't; it depends on the material. You cannot strangle a genre into a 120-minute running length by default. Theoretically, a 4-hour Bond film that is nothing short of cinematic perfection could exist, even if some people would hate to be locked up in a theatre that long.
  
  I agree that it's pointless to stretch a story if it hasn't got the meat for it. Likewise, some films could lean up nicely after some fat has been cut out. But none of this can be cemented as hard rules. Imagine if someone were to suggest the same thing for Lawrence Of Arabia, Ben-Hur, Spartacus or Gone With The Wind: you'd think them positively mad.
  
  QOS is a brisk, fiery film. I like the result, but I wish we could have spent a bit more time at certain locations. CR, by contrast, is a longer Bond film, but I'm enjoying every minute of it. TWINE is of average length, and that film could lose a few seconds here and there in my opinion. But all of this has to do with how much I enjoy the narrative, not with an objective rule apropos the feature length a Bond film "should" have.

  
  I can only imagine TB with an epic length like Lawrence of Arabia. It might even have been better for the pacing of the film.
  
  But if you're not going to give me something like that, why do you need that runtime?