Does anyone feel like there is a very large divide in Craig’s tenure between CR-QOS-SF and SP-NTTD in terms of family drama?
There is no suggestion of it at all in the first three films, then suddenly everything is predicated on family melodrama and interconnections in the last two. I don’t dislike it, I just find it peculiar looking at the Craig films as a whole. Of course this was in part due to being unable to plan the entire arc from the start. It also feels that to some extent, once they decided to make Blofeld Bond’s foster brother, they felt that everyone had to be connected in some way.
Some of the connections I like a lot. I’d keep Madeleine being Mr. White’s daughter as well as Mathilde in NTTD.
I’d do away with foster brother Blofeld. I also didn’t quite like Safin’s motivation to kill Mr. White the murder of his family. Of course this was needed to fit the theme of childhood trauma, but it brought the extent of family drama outside the realm of credible for me (I realize how absurd that might sound in discussing a film with bionic eyes and eternal nanobot viruses).
Oh I’ve got my Benson Omnibuses and a few Gardners in a drawer don’t you worry Need a bit more space before I get another shelf. Not that it’s a competition………………
Quite. For me, the sin was not only to invent a family connection between Bond and Blofeld, but also to make this vague brotherly feud the main motivation for the most evil organisation in the world.
The other family ties are fine by me, as they are. I was always very much against the plan to make Bond a father (because there is only space for one child in the franchise) but oddly enough, I am fine with that in the context of his death.
My initial interpretation of the lyrics, and it works with what happens in the film, is that the singer is saying, ‘You’ve devastated my life [by betraying me] but this is not going to kill / finish me – there is no time to die’ i.e. I don’t have time to feel sorry for myself, I will go on living despite this trauma, I have things to do.
I only took a photo of my Bond stuff, because the rest is Batman comics, hardcover books, die cast models, etc. Other Bond stuff is amongst that too due to space issues.
How old do you suppose Safin is supposed to be in the flashback? In real life, he is older but only by 4 years. Could the character have been a mere teenager at the time? It’s not impossible.
Given he thought going to kill a professional assassin at his isolated home in the middle nowhere without any back up or plan, there’s a good chance he was. I love that aspect of the spectre arc, they all turned on each other and got wiped out by “children of Spectre” to paraphrase Blofeld.
Yes, I suppose Safin is meant to be very young when he arrives at White’s house. And entirely controlled by impulses as opposed to having a some more intricate plan than ‘kill them all’.
This also makes the mask an ingenious device, we can’t really tell how much older this guy is exactly than the girl. On the other hand, one would expect Madeleine to recognise Safin’s voice, surely in combination with the distinctive skin condition.
My original idea about Safin was that he had been experimenting with life-prolonging treatments or something similarly sinister.
I was reflecting that NTTD presents Awakened Bond (awakened to emotion, family, and love), and that Bond takes on a mission not as Robot Bond–conditioned to behave in this way–but as an autonomous person deciding what he will and will not battle for/over.
I was reading the Taschen book (it has arrived!) and I was somewhat amused that something I had offhandedly thought about as inconsistent with respect to Bond had in fact been (at least somewhat) thought through. In Skyfall Bond gets shot and then turns to vice and falls out of shape. In NTTD he’s off the grid for 5 years and in peak condition. It seems like the motivation was that Bond knew SPECTRE were still out there and probably looking for him, and in the back of his mind he was always going to return to duty at some point, which explains why he stayed in shape. A small detail but I’m glad they at least put some thought into it.
I would also suggest the robot part in NO TIME TO DIE is Safin’s: The ‘usual aims of domination’ without actually being able to lead anything like a meaningful life - a blunt instrument of its own cliché, unaware and unable to act outside pointless obsession.
