After reading various fan reports, could it be international pressure due to their presence in the restricted/disputed area of the island? Thus making their actions seem more urgent before they’re forced to bail? Mixed in with Bond’s own repulsion of the operation, which he thinks needs to be destroyed ASAP. Escaping doomed bases isn’t scary to him, thus the lack of hesitancy to recommend the order. But things don’t go to plan this time.
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“Hey Russia, can you and Japan just chill for a bit?”
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“Happy birthday to you, dear Mathilde, happy birthday, love Dad”
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Have now pre-ordered the steel book and bought both Paloma and Nomi as pop vinyls.
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Thank you for the welcome, Dustin. And for your thoughts of course.
But even after some hours of sleep, i can’t see it this way. I’m all for humanizing the character, and i love many elements of the Craig Films that broke with tradition.
CR is/was my absolute favorite Bond-Film (can’t watch it at the moment). So i’m not asking for the old formula or clichees. Not at all. But why do you have to kill Bond, to make him human?
Nolan did exact the same thing with Bruce Wayne / Batman: Placing him in a world, that feels like our reality. He gave him feelings, a soul and an multi-movie-character-arc without sacrificing the hero for melodramatic purposes in the end.
The conclusion of NTTD is surely the dramatic big bang, that Craig wanted. But it still feels cheap to me, and that’s what makes me angry. Some say, it’s an earned ending. I don’t feel it. It’s the same problem, i had after watching Spectre. I don’t buy the romance between Bond and Madeleine for a second. I hadn’t this problem in CR. Bond and Vesper felt much more believable to me.
One more point. St. John Smythe wrote, that “Bond is not a quitter”. That’s exactly part oft my problem . Only because Q tells him via intercom, that there is no solution to his problem, he goes the suicide route and quits life. Talking about setting Bond in the real world: At the moment, we all live in a world, where a new deadly virus emerged out of nowhere. But science managed to produce effective vaccines against it over the course of one year. I think, Bond dies here, because they wanted him to die from the beginning. Not because the story or the character calls for it.
It’s stated elsewhere, that NTTD is far more effective in celebrating the actor, than giving the fictional hero an appropriate sendoff. Craig is bigger than Bond, that’s the message i get here and the sour taste in my mouth at the moment. I was a strong supporter of this actor from the start. But NTTD weakens my appreciation for his whole era now.
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So Bond is dead. Deader than dead. Blown to a million pieces. We know the 007 number is transferable.
I wonder how audiences are going to take to the next movie. Bond, the character, is dead. Unless they do some soap opera “it was all a dream” storyline. Does that mean in the next film the name is going to be transferable, too?
I’m clearly just not looking this in the right way.
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Another thought, I Know the movie was nearly over , but the scooby do gang in Ms office drinking whiskey scene seemed very low key, i mean ,could they have not filmed M’s reading of the book at the actual funeral?
I Know this sounds stupid,but when I saw the close up of the whiskey in on the table, I half expected to see a hand come and pick it up and It turns out to be bond saying “actually,I found a blow up dingy,just in time,like I did on Felix’s boat!”
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Hmmm, if that was the case, nomi would have been called Jane bond
A reboot with a new MI6 cast is a lot more likely.
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Apart from the elephant in the room, here are a few of the other issues I have with NTTD (I’m sure I’m forgetting some, as I’m still trying to cope with the shock of this movie…):
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Bond: he’s essentially shown as a decaying relic, having lost his touch, his wits and his will. He’s even bullied by the new 00. The “farewell gathering” is a shame (even farewell drinks at my office are more emotional).
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Madeleine: much too much screen time. It’s as much a movie about her as about Bond. And I don’t think that works.
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Safin: we’re told next to nothing about him. He’s almost as poorly developed as Dominic Greene. How did he become so powerful as to defy Spectre itself? What’s his Organization? Why does he want that virus, apart from just killing people? Why does he get back to Madeleine now, all of a sudden?..
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the “eye” business: did anyone understand how that worked, since Blofeld is supposed to have met only Madeleine during all those years (and surely she didn’t have the eye with her…)? How can this eye have then transmitted anything?
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the score: I think we could have expected much better from Zimmer. It’s quite generic, I didn’t feel any specific emotion except when they re-used old Bond themes.
Mind you, there are great things too. Craig acts brilliantly (although I don’t like what they wrote, I acknowledge he played it very well), there is some humor here and there, the scenery is great, the various nods to past films are a nice touch, etc.
But on the whole I find it, at best, a missed opportunity, if not simply an outrageous way to treat our Hero.
I guess the concept of what they wanted to achieve may grow on me after some time, but the way they actually treated it is revolting.
Ana de Armas was criminally underused, too.
Also, and maybe this is just my hearing getting worse as I get older, but was a lot of the dialogue drowned out for others?
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Genius. Pure genius.
Same way that people took to Ben Affleck after Christian Bale’s Batman ‘died’ in TDKR, or Tom Holland after the two Andrew Garfield Spider-Man films, or when Robert Pattinson is suddenly Batman when Ben Affleck is still technically the incumbent.
Audiences can delineate separate stories/casting/timelines now…
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And make sure nobody he touches ever touches them. This stuff is supposed to work its way through the population until it arrives at the target.
Can’t agree with this; in my view there was plenty of foreshadowing. Sitting in his car with Madeleine and doing nothing while the bulletproof glass splinters and cracks is already a heavy giveaway. Then Bond unarmed carrying Mathilde and as they come across one of the gunmen he’s shielding her with his body - this is a man who is putting his life on the line for his daughter.
His daughter, we have hardly assessed this turning point in Bond’s life at all. Mathilde’s existence changes everything from Bond’s perspective. She and her mother are now the causes to give everything for. I find this motivation not just plausible but also a significant maturing of the Bond character. Or maturing is perhaps the wrong word. A transformation of his character.
Which doesn’t mean I’m perfectly happy with the film, not at all.
The glaring fault of the script is of course that Bond supposedly suspects Madeleine at the beginning - when she’s only just been through an adventure with him and saved his life. She’s even sitting right beside Bond when the shooters put the Aston through the mincer. A plant would hardly cling so close to him. Nor is it really a big surprise that Bond would one day arrive at this tomb, all it takes is a remote controlled bomb and somebody in the vicinity to look out for Bond.
One suspects on sober reflection Bond should arrive at the same conclusion and discard any attempts by Blofeld to cast doubt on Madeleine. But that would mean he drops Madeleine knowing all along she’s not to blame but using this pretence to cop out.
Safin is another very weak villain that should have been given…more. Surprisingly, his motif of revenge is clear enough. But his sparing Madeleine’s life comes out of the blue. What this guy did in between the decades since (and how he came to gun down her mother and hardly age since) is another mystery, just like how he survived the gunshots.
A better idea might have been to have Malik as a Spectre member who has higher aspirations and seduces White’s teenage daughter. Or better, White’s wife. Madeleine then sees him killing her mother but kept her knowledge a secret, thus giving them a relationship and Madeleine an actual secret to confess. After all, she already talked about the man who called at her home to kill her father in SPECTRE.
But the greatest disappointment to me was the ‘Garden of Death’ idea that falls mostly flat. A landscape gardener in my neighbourhood
has got more impressive premises and the idea this is something Bond has to negotiate his way through to the dragon’s lair was entirely dropped.
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The sound recording / editing was atrocious IMO. Not only was Safin almost inaudible but so many dialogue exchanges happened with intense background noise - bullets, explosions, incidental music - it made a good slice of important lines unintelligible. I have read others disagree, so maybe it depends where you sit in a Dolby surround cinema.
And yes, Ana de Armas was an absolute joy.
From footage that’s been out for a while now we already have:
Q: “So you’re not dead?”
Blofeld: “When her secret finds its way out, it’ll be the death of you.”
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No. Hamlet, for instance, learns at the very beginning that his father was murdered and who did it. He knows that revenge, in whatever form, will likely lead to his death “To be or not to be… etc”. That is the tragedy. Bond’s demise and how it arises is not prefigured in the scene above, or anywhere else in the movie. Those mentioned are rhetorical comments and moments, which are open for interpretation.
This.
It’s the key point. The shift of priorities. Until now, he was the orphan with no family who lost almost everyone he ever cared for. And now he suddenly has… a daughter. This transforms him from the blunt instrument he still is to a human. And while protecting Queen, country and the rest of the world was top priority before, for which he was willing to give his life several dozens of times before, what kind of man would he be if he wasn’t willing to do the same for his daughter, even if he barely knew her. “It’s about what we leave behind.”
No foreshadowing? We knew it since the trailer was out: “If her secret comes out, it’ll be the death of you”. Certainly, we expected this to be hollow Blofeld talk, but they actually told us from the very beginning. This movie was about finding out about Madeleine’s secret, which would be the death of James Bond. And we knew that it would come out.
Blofeld knew exactly what he was talking about. He knew about Mathilde and that she’d make him vulnerable and he never doubted that Safin would make use of it.
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This is something I have been fearing about NTTD since it was announced that Craig was retuning. With him being given a producer credit, having a very large say in story/director etc. and Barbara Broccoli’s comments along the lines that she can’t see anyone else as Bond, it seems, since Skyfall, that Craig indeed has become bigger than Bond.
Connery, Moore, Brosnan, all of whom also had long, successful, popular runs, left the role with a smile in the arms of a lady. Craig though couldn’t just leave with the girl, a la SPECTREs ending, and had to come back to have a bigger, more ‘fitting’ send off and have the character die on screen. Honestly, I don’t think his tenure deserves that kind of special treatment, and it doesn’t seem particularly fitting or deserving an ‘honour’ for his era. In fact, one of my wishes for the next Bond is indeed an actor who doesn’t get the level of treatment and reverence Craig got from the producers and who isn’t treated as bigger than the character.
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It’s probably a valid point that, given enough time and resources, one might think of a solution to Bond’s situation. So the task was not to think of a way out for Bond but rather present this situation with the requisite inevitability to sell Bond’s solution as the only feasible under the conditions.
But I refuse this notion about Bond quitting here. Bond has seen the weapon in action. It was devised so that it finds its target on its own, just spreading naturally like a germ. To be sure Bond would have to have entirely avoided any skin contact, however fleetingly. With the lives of Madeleine and Mathilde on the line Bond couldn’t take even the slightest risk. His body has turned into certain death for his family.
Ergo…
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