You’ve unintentionally created a great parody villain.
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Even more so as my hair is ginger!! 
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Let‘s not forget Thundergall and Blowbelt.
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Given Bond’s favourite hobby in Jamaica, I would go for Blowfish.
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Finally got around to watching the movie last night (hey, four months of dawdling isnt TOO bad, right?) so I’ve been avoiding this thread, but now I have a nitpick and the thread is so long it’s daunting to read it all through to see if its been asked before. So apologies if it has.
Re: Bond’s watch. I know its been asked before why it can’t be used to destroy the nanobots with an EMP and I know the answer is, essentially “because nanobots are whatever we say they are and they don’t work that way.” Plus even though Q says once that the watch can wipe out anything electronic, he says several times that the nanobots can’t be stopped by nothin’, no how, no way, nuh-uh. So there’s the power of expositional repetition.
But when Bond takes out Cyclops, he’s got him in a headlock and the watch blows out his eye so Bond can deliver a Roger-style quip to Q over the earpiece.
So with the watch so close to his own head in that scene, why doesn’t it blow up the earpiece, cheating us out of the next ten pages of maudlin dialog and scenery-chewing goodbye speeches?
Is that a minor enough nitpick? BTW, the movie overall gets a “pretty good” from me; not particularly engaging on any emotional level, but much more cohesive than the last few, with solid action sequences and all smoothly edited enough to make the run time feel less than it is. Also easily the most gorgeously photographed entry in 40+ years. The death scene makes for a good jumping off point. I may be ready to pack it in at last, and its nice not to be doing it out of bitterness, which is how I always thought it would end.
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Because the nanobots weren’t mechanical, they were biological. They would have been made from DNA or protein and then programmed to do a specific task.
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Ah, so they just call them that because it’s sexy to imply “tech” even when there isn’t any. That’s very trendy, so it would fit. Only this site says they are devices and not biological agents.
Between two different strains of nanobots and various injections of “smart blood” over the course of his films, Craig-Bond’s bloodstream must be a veritable sewer of lab-generated additives. On the plus side, maybe it’s what helped stop him from bleeding out from multiple gunshot wounds while climbing steps and ladders.
I still say the watch should have busted the earpiece, though. But thank goodness he had it in to preserve the hearing in at least one ear after all those explosions.
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Regardless of whether the nanobots are “tech” or biological, one would have to suspect that there’s a way to either get rid of them or neutralize them. That’s probably easier if they are indeed tech, but surely, with a bit of time, some kind of “vaccine” could be concocted to interact with them if they are biological agents and keep them from carrying out their intended processes. I have a hard time taking Q’s word for it not being possible since he also thought that plugging Silva’s computer into the MI6 server was a bright idea.
Given that Heracles is already circulating around the globe before Bond reaches the island (he and Madeleine, as well as Mathilde, and whoever they have they have touched post the Safin/Madeleine meeting and subsequence Blofeld interrogation), it wouldn’t be the worst idea for the British government to be looking into some way to counteract it in the event that some other nefarious entity is able to do something with the technology.
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Well, there’s always more missile strikes.
Honestly, if Bond had made his last stand in Wuhan circa early 2019, we’d have had a much happier last couple of years.
I want to clarify that my “nitpicks” here are just that: there’s nothing in this film I find any more egregiously nonsensical than elements of any other Bond film. Certainly there’s nothing so frustratingly illogical, insanely dependent on coincidence or ignorant of physics as what we got in SF, which lost me as soon as Bond was shot and fell at terminal velocity into a river with no lasting ill effects and only went downhill from there. Daft “science” is a hallmark of the franchise, just a MacGuffin to facilitate the action, so it’s no deal-breaker for me.
Also, I view it like Clark Kent’s glasses fooling his closest friends, or Cinderella’s glass slipper that stays glass when the rest of her outfit returns to their rag origins. Some stories can only work if we accept the occasional illogical element.
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The ones in that link might have been, but the ones in NTTD are biological. Q tells us this in the scene in M’s office.
The same applies to reality. So many things illogical, you would never believe…
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True enough. If the last five or six years of real life had been presented as a film, it would’ve been laughed out of theaters as utterly unbelievable.
It also doesnt hurt to keep perspective and remember no matter how good or bad a given movie is, at least it beats watching the news.
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My nitpickery would be that despite a possible explanation for all those questionable details… why is the story cluttered with so many of these?
Too many cooks in the kitchen, working for too long on constant changes so everything must be made to fit somehow.
NTTD is definitely one of the most complicated narratives in Bond film history. And I would hope the next film can get back to a simpler one.
Granted, twists and turns have always been complicated in Bond films. And too many contemporary movies indulge in that, too. Leading also to too long running times.
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I´m with David_M and say Skyfall´s script is so much worse…
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There may be no movie that doesn’t have some illogical element to it if you look hard enough, and certainly they abound in the Bonds. The key is whether you’re entertained; if a movie is pleasing me, I don’t see or don’t care about the stuff that doesn’t add up, but if a movie is failing me on some basic level, then I’m usually sitting there finding fault with every little thing. NTTD is the first Craig film since CR that had me on its side throughout, and I give the credit to Fukunaga’s direction and Linus Sandren’s astonishingly beautiful cinematography, which was such a step up from the eyesore of Spectre that it left me reeling.
As far as “nanobots,” ah well, it is what it is. Or more accurately, what the script says it is. If Q wants to say they’re not tech but biological constructs, fair enough. This is after all the same series that said “gene therapy” is checking into a day spa as a genetic Korean and checking out genetically reborn as an Anglo Saxon, so labels are pretty flexible. I choose to view it as a “deep cut” Easter Egg to the spirit of Cubby “It’s Not Science Fiction, It’s Science Fact” Broccoli.
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Golden words, should be printed and framed.
It’s what I usually say about weird storylines: if the story would follow logic and conventional ways, it would be just a forgettable every day matter of not much interest. The strange or weird or extraordinary improbabilities that happen to the protagonists are what makes the story worth telling, be it as a movie or a novel or a comic or whatever.
Don’t let logic get in the way of an entertaining story.
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And really, aren’t we socialized way too much believing that people behave basically with logic? And didn’t we learn too often, definitely in the last five years, that logic all too rarely is something people base their actions on?
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Yes, but logic isn´t the problem sometimes…the plot from NTTD may be a bit overcomplicated but again: SF´s plot (which is rated very high on this board) is so convoluted and overconstructed, Data and Spock together couldn´t have made that plan work Silva made…
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“People aren’t logical” is good enough to explain why Q says nanobots are biological when they aren’t. On the other hand, surviving the fall at the start of Skyfall isn’t a failure of logic, it’s a suspension of the laws of physics. Unlike people, things like gravity, ballistics and human biology are pretty consistent.
Likewise, if Silva had just come up with a ridiculously convoluted plan requiring dozens of unguessable factors to work out exactly right, that just proves he’s nuts, which is fine. The trouble is, it actually worked, which means the universe itself would also have to be nuts. Given recent events, I’m willing to accept that premise, but it would still qualify as the most statistically improbable perfect storm of good luck for Silva or bad luck for Bond.
It’s like taking the craziness of “I’ll escape by running across the backs of those perfectly aligned alligators” and piling on the crazy until it’s “First I’ll get captured at 2:45 PM, then I’ll be left on a tiny island surrounded by alligators at 2:57, then three of the gators will line up at 3:01 and voila! I’m free as a bird!”
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And this Bond guy… how he could escape all those bullets for 25 films.
Finally, it got believable in the last minutes of NTTD.
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