For Bond and Madeleine I could imagine that.
For Bond and Lucia… well… she was aware he could not see she was grieving (that funeral scene is definitely my favorite of the whole movie), and he was quick to dispose the two killers before they disposed of her. So… grateful she might be, but if she immediately allows him into her bed she either is still too traumatized to realize what she is doing or kind of kinky.
If only that would have happened.
But the real question remains: How in hell could Dench-M foretell Lucia would spill all the Spectre beans once Bond kills her husband? It’s not a typical reaction of a freshly widowed wife, even if she wasn’t overly enamoured with hubby’s wicked ways. Would have been easy to weave a thread of an old M operation there.
But again, why bother…
Introducing Bellucci and then getting rid of her so fast is one of the too many missed opportunities of that film.
Watching that movie for the first time in the cinema, almost the whole movie I thought we probably going to see her again in some kind of strange story plot, or twist, but that never happened, she was just… gone… written out of the picture.
It would have been a far better “twist” if Bellucci had ended up being Blofeld.
Now, granted, it still would have been terrible, but quite literally every idea this franchise has had has been better than copying Austin Powers in Goldmember, so any chance to improve that disaster of a film would have been greatly appreciated.
A thought that occurred to me: could it be that there was a vague idea of maybe bringing her back as new Blofeld’s new Irma Bunt in the next movie? Just an option, leaving her future – to quote Pierce Brosnan – deliberately opaque, depending on how well Spectre and Waltz’s Bloferhauser would fare.
As we all know now, the only reason for Waltz’ return was to have him killed off in a mere cameo, just to get rid of the character. No need for Irma Bunt. End of.
A solution could have been: cut the Oberhauser – Blofeld switch for now and give more emphasis (especially towards the end) on the C story, like it was in earlier script drafts. Have him imprisoned as Franz Oberhauser. For what ended up as NTTD, there would have been a jailbreak, masterminded by Bellucci’s Bunt, with Franz adopting the Blofeld name after that. Then, he’d do some more evil things and finally disappear – presumed dead, but in fact retreating to this remote island (as Guntram Shatterhand, of course) where he has that secret bioweapons project and poison garden running for several years. Take it from there to make it a proper YOLT adaption…
June 15
Vote one out, votey-votey
So mote it be, motey-motey
Fantastic ideas all around!
But I seem to remember from that earlier SPECTRE draft that Irma Bunt was a separate person, helping Oberhauser and being involved right up to the finale in the rain.
How delicious it would have been if Lucia had played Bond for her own goals…
It’s the missed opportunity I think
… but then EON has always used discarded concepts later on…
This is overly difficult since I dislike both to equal measure. Their problem is they try to evoke a sense of urgency and dramatic out of vehicles not meant for speed or conventional cinematic action. That doesn’t mean a truck isn’t intimidating, as anybody watching DUELL will attest to. And a tank is a dreadful weapons system, a machine capable to destroy most civil vehicles just with its sheer momentum under its tracks. But neither is a good choice for the kind of chase sequence you’d expect in a Bond film. Consequently, they employ different episodes to draw out their narrative, with varying results.
GOLDENEYE’s tank chase destroys buildings, vehicles, monuments, lingers a bit on product placement but ultimately doesn’t provide more than the staple 80s/90s action diet of wrecked police cars; this time Ladas. More than half of it is played for laughs.
LICENCE TO KILL’s tanker chase is the action finale of that film, dramatically more important for it and with only a few chuckles mixed into the bag. But it’s also showing the Indiana Jones aspirations on a shoestring budget, the goons in hideously oversized off-the-peg vulgarities, the conveniently placed roadworks, gunmen coughing their lungs out, so on so forth. The end is fittingly grisly but still something of an anticlimax.
Of the two I still prefer the tanker chase, if only because it’s the more serious of them.
One could even draw that out, make Lucia one of M’s agents who played M all the time to her own ends.
… and she rips of her Judi Dench-mask and says: You are being replaced by my more reliable rogue agent.
No-brainer for me - the tanker chase is one of the best finishes of the series and a rare occasion when the big action climax is on moving vehicles (not unlike the airship fight…
). Like the rest of the film, it picks up pace as it goes along, which cannot be said for a good many of the action finishes across the series (and many of the films).
It’s “real” with only the cab close-ups letting the side down, and getting that 18-wheeler up on its side is still some of the most amazing stunt driving in the entire series. TD sells it all and while Kamen’s soundtrack isn’t to most people’s tastes it works when it needs to. There are some throwaway moments, and the “time to start cutting overhead” line for Sanchez is funny, fitting, and brutal all at the same time.
Talking of Sanchez, while the series is always from the hero’s perspective, LTK’s finish is respectful (as best as any entry can be) of the other characters. Too often the main villain has been reduced to some hysterical third wheel, wandering around screaming and yelling “oh my God stop Bond.” Sanchez, like Silva, Largo, Klebb, OHMSS Blofeld, are still “active” parts of the story’s end, of their storys’ end.
The tank chase smashes the place up and while at the time I enjoyed it, it’s emblematic of what that era’s (see DavidM’s posts about the Trevalyan fight) action-to-excess beats were all about.
Along with assorted Skodas, into the river the tank goes.
(I also exempt the LTK tanker chase from my “too many shots of Bond wearing slip-on shoes” rule)
The tank chase from GE is the one that clearly has to go here. First, it’s not something that really feels as though it belongs with the rest of the film. Aside from the ridiculous jump off the cliff to catch the plane to close out the pre-titles, GE is a pretty down-to-earth affair that feels like a holdover from the Glen era in a lot of ways, albeit with a more polished sensibility in terms of its production value. Most of the action is fairly contained, being either a car chase, one-on-one fight scenes, a couple of escapes/shootouts, etc., but this sequence takes the idea of a “car chase” and amps it up to 11 and features Bond essentially destroying an entire city. It just doesn’t fit with the rest of what is going on.
The tanker chase from LTK, however, is one of the best action sequences the franchise has done and certainly one of the best finales the franchise has seen to date.
Easy choice.
I was fortunate enough to win a radio call-in contest answering Bond-related trivia in order to get tickets to an early sneak preview of GOLDENEYE. In fact, I was fortunate enough to win on 3 separate days during the week’s lead-up to the showing, each time giving the name of a different friend so that 6 of us were able to attend. To say I was excited after the long break between films is a massive understatement. In the end, I liked but didn’t love GE leaving the theater that night (an opinion I still hold), but I pointedly remember actively disliking the tank chase, much to the shock of my friends. I thought it was overlong, not especially entertaining, and far too light-hearted and glib for a movie that appeared to be attempting to be somewhat grounded and semi-realistic.
I had numerous problems with the tank scene. For one, there’s a lot of collateral damage going on with no regard for civilian lives. In particular I’m pretty sure there would have been fatalities involved when that cop car got crushed. It doesnt help that the chase follows a sequence where Bond mows down legions of Russian soldiers who probably had no idea what Ourumov was up to and were just doing their jobs (as opposed to, say, SPECTRE goons who are on board with the evil plot du jour).
The bigger issue is that there is no suspense or thrill IMHO whenever the “hero” is invicible. The Citroen chase in FYEO is a great example of Bond being outnumbered and “outhorsepowered” in a tiny, fragile beater with no gadgets and winning anyway, so it works. GE inverts this by putting Bond in an unstoppable, invincible vehicle against which the villains are the underdogs from the word “go.” Yawn.
The truck chase in LTK is more exciting for sure, and sets up a great, brutal end for Sanchez. Its also one time where Bond really does win out by the slimmest of margins.
Bye bye tank.
The tank is tanking.