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This is why today's movies are so long.
Ah mate. Can fully understand about the former, Batman most certainly did not live up to the massive hype, I found it a bore!
But LTK, I love, and thought it was a fabulous follow up to TLD, and now it's my favourite Bond film!
Is QoS really Craig-Bond's revenge movie?
For me Dominic Greene is just a cog in the machine and hasn't got anything particularly to do with the death of Vesper
It seems to me that Craig-Bond's revenge is spread over several films, and by the time he finally achieves it he's not even really looking for it anymore.
By that I mean that Brofeld is the head of SPECTRE, so ultimately he is the end game of any revenge for Vesper.
Mr White is a step on the ladder and Bond ends up giving him a pass due to later developments
He manages to have Brofeld put away in SP, which is a form of revenge
Then he kills Brofeld by accident in NTTD, after he's moved on and is more concerned with other matters... not a very satisfying revenge
Refreshing my memory of QoS, Wikipedia says - "In Kazan, Russia, Bond finds Vesper Lynd's former lover, Yusef Kabira, a member of Quantum who seduces agents with valuable connections and is indirectly responsible for her death. After saving Kabira's latest target, Corrine, who works in Canadian intelligence, Bond allows MI6 to arrest Kabira"., which is also a pretty "luke warm" form of revenge.
Alternatively, if the destruction of Quantum / SPECTRE is the goal of his revenge, then he never gets it, as it's Safin who finally manages to achieve that end, not Bond.
So it must be LTK for me
That's a great way of putting it, yeah I agree. QoS is kind of about revenge rather than being a movie where it happens. Camille's life is an advisory tale to Bond.
I always think they should have edited out that shot where Bond steals the photo of Vesper and Yussef: it's such a red herring as to his motivations in the rest of the movie and because it's visual it sticks in the audience's mind much more than anything he actually says.
Again to me it's bad direction: all the way through it's quite to hard to work out what Bond's goal is; or if it's supposed to be opaque then even that isn't communicated very well.
For me Returns is pretty close to Batman 1989.
Bond is desperate to his hands on SMERSH and hurt their machine somehow. However, Bond's want for revenge is second to his job. His revenge is in doing his job properly.
LTK takes the moment in LALD where Bond kills The Robber out of fury and extends that feeling into a film.
However, while Quantum is a more classic Bond adventure, I'll alway prefer LTK to it.
Good observations about LALD, I remember that passage: Bond says or think he's been wanting to get back at SMERSH for ages.
Really?
More than one thing can be true and I think Fleming combined both when he wanted to, usually via the death of a Bond ally, but he used it sparingly, not wanting to flog it to death as a plot element, or make Bond a one trick pony.
In FRWL, personal desire for revenge becomes part of Bond's motivation after the death of Darko Kerim. Chapters were spent showing us how a bond (appologies for the pun) of friendship develops between the two men, that is more that just professional curtesy, and Bond takes his death personally. It adds another dimension to Bond's motivation when he finally encounters Grant. Also Grant is the embodiment of SMERSH, who Bond has been out to get since CR.
In the next novel, DN, its the death of Quarrel, who's friendship with Bond dated back to LALD.
Then in GF, Jill Masterton is killed. Bond only had a brief fling with her, but later he meets up with her sister, who is out for personal revenge, and subsequently, when she is also killed, I think the situation becomes more personal for Bond as well (which could be termed "empathy revenge"?)
That is followed by the 3 story anthology FYEO, the second being FYEO itself, where Bond's mission is to eliminate a group of people who have killed a British couple, in order to "send a message". However he meets up with Judy, the daughter of the couple killed, and she is out for revenge. Thus the revenge element is again indirectly introduced as a secondary motivation for Bond.
In YOLT, following on from OHMSS, I would say it's Bond's primary motivation and the fact that it is also a mission is purely incidental for him.
Meanwhile the movie franchise began with DN and FRWL, the two novels that used the death of an ally element, which led to that becoming a staple trope of the Movie-Bond template.
The third film is GF with the Masterson sisters
and so on
YOLT has Aki
OHMSS has Tracey, of course
DAF has Plenty O'Toole
OP has Vijay Amritraj
AVTAK has Patrick McNee aka Sir Godfrey Tibbett
In general, anytime a person who has helped Bond, saved his life, or slept with him, is subsequently killed by the villains, revenge is introduced as a secondary motivation for Bond.
Villains like Alex Trevelyan and Raoul Silva are also driven by revenge, in fact in the Craig-Bond era it became an epidemic amongst villains...
Brofeld "grew spiteful of him (Bond) taking his father's affection. As a young man, Blofeld killed his fatherOnce Bond became an MI6 agent, Blofeld became psychotically obsessed with tormenting him"
Safin wants to "exact revenge on his family's killers."
"Compliments of Sharkey". Quite funny how LTK is about Bond getting revenge, and even along the way he stops off to have a little bit more revenge!
"Since these incidents Bond has sought revenge on a number of occasions beginning with Fleming's second novel Live and Let Die where Bond is almost completely uninterested in disrupting Mr. Big's setup to finance Soviet operations until he learns that Big is an agent of SMERSH. After learning this Bond makes it a personal mission of vengeance against the organisation."
"He had another mission of personal vengeance in Goldfinger after learning Auric Goldfinger is the treasurer of the agency."
How many of these deaths are central to the plot or inciting incidents? They happen within the story, are a result of the plot, but the plot itself is not revenge driven. Even in YOLT, Bond goes to Japan oblivious that he will find Blofeld there. It's the straightest revenge story of the novels (although FRWL is one film SMERSH's perspective), yet him finding Blofeld is completely coincidental.
QoS is more of a generic action movie.
Which one is more like a Fleming novel? I'd say LTK, too. Sure, James Bond didn't get revenge in LALD, but he didn't care that much about Vesper either. Both movies are reinterpretations.
For me, it's very much the opposite: LTK is a generic action movie from the 80s, where the revenge element is maxed up, while QOS is a Bondian movie with a geopolitical and economic conflict, where Bond has to balance his desire for revenge with his duty.
On a side note, I quite like the idea of a hero going on a revenge crusade, but not certain against who or what. I find it more interesting than just giving him a target that he shoots at the climax
Not a novel of course, but Fleming's Octopussy is a pretty straightforward revenge story for Bond too.
That's maybe the closest we have. And even then, Bond is not the main character in it, he offers Major Dexter Smythe the option of committing suicide, he even spares his reputation. We're far from, say, Mickey Spillane's I, The Jury. Thinking about it, Octopussy is again in many ways an anti-revenge story.
I don't know really; Bond does make it clear to Smythe how Oberhauser was like a father to him and how he took on the job because of that. He extends a professional courtesy to some extent, but he gets what he wants.
Indeed Smythe has the option of a court martial, I don't know if it would be a hanging offence or not (and although Fleming probably couldn't have known, hanging was abolished at the time of publication), but Bond basically plants the idea of Smythe killing himself in his mind- he wants him dead.
I’ve always thought Fleming plays with the idea of revenge in YOLT too (although maybe it’s just how I see the book). I always got the sense that Bond was going to be the one consumed by revenge going after his ‘white whale’. There’s something odd about finally seeing Blofeld in that final act: instead of this embodiment of evil, he’s a man who’s basically gone mad and is even this shell of his former self. He even tries to justify how he’s some sort of great mind because he owns a garden, and how if not for Bond his evil plans - which are so obviously self serving - would have benefitted the world. It’s an unusual way of depicting a Bond villain (generally they’re mad, but have some sort of bigger plan to back up what they’re doing).
Ha! Love it.
Good point. I guess OHMSS gets close to that: he has a plan, but it's insane. :D
Revenge keeps you going.
As I said, more than one thing can be true
Look beyond the surface at the mechanics of writing
The author chooses the circumstances by which his character will approach the subject
Clearly YOLT the novel is about how Tracey's death affects Bond and the revenge motive is a central theme.
As I quoted previously
Fleming was writing in the spy / secret agent genre, and revenge is one ingredient among many that he could deploy in order to vary the flavour.
So IMO you're splitting hairs, even Charles Bronson / Paul Kersey doesn't begin "Death Wish" seeking revenge until events trigger it. After what happens to his family, his intial expectation is that the police will handle it, he doesn't go out and buy a gun, he is given one as a gift by a friend and carrys it for self defence. There is more depth to DW than it's given credit for, which set it apart from most of the subsequent knock-offs it inspired.
NB Death Wish the book is an examination of an aspect of urban American society in the 1970s, not intended to be the "personal revenge wish fulfillment fantasy" it has become known as. In the film the original questions are still there, but the emphasis, and thus the implied conclusion drawn, is very different.
Wikipedia says
"In 1975, Brian Garfield (the author) was disappointed in the 1974 film adaption. He described it as "incendiary", because he felt upset that the film's audience was encouraged by the violence and vigilantism, despite the story being against both topics in his book, in which Charles Bronson agreed with.
Garfield thought that Bronson was miscast as Paul Kersey, because when the action-star appeared on screen, Garfield commented "you knew he was going to start blowing people away", which spoiled the plot-twist of his story for the audience who had never read the book.
Paul was originally depicted in the novel as something of a pacifist weakling, with no previous life experience dealing with issues of revenge or violence.
Bronson noted that, given he was really known better as a customary Hollywood tough guy, he was ill-suited for the part, saying, "I was really a miscast person. It was more a theme that would have been better for Dustin Hoffman or somebody who could play a weaker kind of man. I told them that at the time." The screenplay went through several writers and revisions to better adapt the role for Bronson."
Death Wish still did an honourable pass depicting an architect/family man, with a history having served in the Korean War, staunchly anti-gun/violence who ironically and tragically has a character arc where all his ideals get tossed out the window as he transforms into a vigilante killer, with his own twisted sense of justice.
Wait...an action film? in 1974? with a character arc? I thought that only happened in today's films! Characters didn't change in 1974!