Good point! I guess what makes it a bit more challenging to watch than the rest of them (and this is not a criticism) is you are trusted to infer Bond’s motivations, rather than having things as plainly stated as they normally are in the franchise. The special branch bit is good example. He’s directly accused of killing the man and he ignores the accusation completely, and tries to get at the next layer of the conspiracy by asking who the man was guarding. He then hangs up on her and she cancels his cards and puts an alert on his passports so it seems like she thinks he’s gone around the bend. Again, it moves quick and I think because of that it feels almost like a plot hole. I do think another script pass would have smoothed out some of the rough edges.
This is one of the things that I love about Quantum of Solace. While, at the end of the day, it’s a linear tale that has a beginning, middle, and end, it does give you some sense that you can make your own readings into some of the things that are going on. I’m sure that’s largely due to the script being pretty bare bones going into production due to the writer’s strike, with Craig and Forster doing a lot of on set revisions as they filmed, but I like that as a change of pace from the standard way a Bond movie goes about things. I always come back to that scene towards the end with Bond and Camille in the burning room after she’s dispatched Medrano. I think that scene is one of those scenes where you can read things into it if you want. I’m sure there were a good number of people looking at that as Bond just trying to comfort Camille as he tries to figure out a way to escape. I took in the complete opposite direction and was actually on the edge of my seat because, for once in a Bond movie, I didn’t know how they were going to resolve that moment, while also being impressed that a Bond movie was actually going to take a chance and go somewhere like that, even if only for a moment or two.
The scene with Camille in the burning hotel is remarkable and not mentioned nearly enough (probably because of how bleak it is but still). It somehow managed to make you think, for a split second, that there was no way out and that a truly horrible decision had to be made by Bond. I remember feeling a little sick when he tells her to close her eyes when I watched it the first time, and I was similarly moved on this rewatch. I think the reason it’s overlooked is the simple fact that such a genuinely harrowing moment is very rare in the franchise (I argue the first watch of the bomb diffusing scene in Octopussy is less brutal but equally tense). The only thing that throws me off every time is the quick resolution, the stroke of good luck of the exposed panel and the immediate gunshot to it by Bond that instantaneously sucks the air out of the scene. Your emotions literally exit with the airflow. Again, not bad for an hour forty, but the quick resolution does give me a bit of whiplash.
Completely agreed. The panel falling off the wall when it does happens several seconds too early. If there was ever a scene in the movie that needed the editing to slow down just a count or two, it was that one. They did such a great job of setting that moment up that they really needed to linger on it to get the maximum payoff that it deserved. It’s still one of the best moments in a Bond movie, though, at least for me anyway.
Generally I think that’s fair. A story like OHMSS demands being longer to do it justice. I do think a lot of films these days are unnecessarily long, almost just for the sake of it. The idea that people are getting their money’s worth when it’s only serving to bloat and bore an audience. Cinema is a specific art form designed for enjoyment and shouldn’t be a documentary. In the long run a tighter edit can work wonders. But there’s still a balance to be made. Scenes need to breathe.
That’s all good. Bond is often dirty and bloodied, which goes to one of Craig’s comments about a good suit lasting beyond just being stylish. I like how we get a makeshift smokescreen with the plane’s damaged engine, going with the film’s gadget-less approach. The Slate fight with Bond waiting for the pulse to disappear is cold as ice too, almost disturbingly so.
I believe that the writers‘ strike was the best thing that could happen to QOS.
Imagine how many cooks in the kitchen would have tampered with the script after the success of CR if the strike had not happened. Every nuance QOS would have been rethought countless times and finally smoothed out.
Bond is winging it - and the film seems to do the same thing, making us feel the pressure and the untidiness of the events.
For me, it’s the best Craig Bond. And one of the best films in the series.
For me that is too much praise.
The script is the weakest element of the movie. It could have been so much better. You have here a very weak villain for example with a worthless henchman. Both just don’t have much to do, the whole scheme is realistic, but It is not something that really appeals or creates a legendary setting people will remember. With everything, I get the feeling that it could and should have been much better developed, but we know why that didn’t happen.
They made the best of it that is for sure, but one of the best?
It is not a terrible movie, ofcourse not, but one expects just something extra from a Bondmovie and that is just missing. I like the flight scene a lot and the opera scene is also very well done.
To me it was the most realistic villain since Elliott Carver in TND…this is exactly the ones that rule the world today
Realistic for sure, but still far too weak for the main antagonist. QUANTUM’s problem is that the villain is split into Mr White/Greene/Medrano (in order of appearance) and is undecided which one to back. White is even such an ambiguous figure that - after just having been abducted by SIS, then helped to escape by his own guy in that outfit - he’s cool enough to hold some weird Spectre meeting a few days later at a high profile society event.
We should have seen one of these three front and centre as Bond’s antagonist, maybe while Mathis is taken/tortured. It needn’t have been a big scene, a few frames and a line or two would have been enough. As is, Greene stays bland and even their pretty good fight in the burning building is wasted. Greene in the end shares the fate of Miles Mellough in THE EIGER SANCTION. But Mellough’s impact, in spite of leaving the story about halfway, is several times that of Greene.
Realistic or not, there is a reason Greene regularly doesn’t survive Deathmatch’s group phase. Sadly, there is no shortage of real villains as we are constantly reminded. Few of them would make for a good Bond villain.
They should have gone with White and Quantum instead of this Bloferhauser nonsense…
Greene being a “weak” villain in the grand scheme of things doesn’t really matter, IMO, because Quantum of Solace isn’t really about the Greene and his scheme anyway. The title tells us what the film is about, Bond finding his small measure of comfort after the events of Casino Royale, which we see as the main through line over the course of the film. Of course, it happens against the backdrop of trying to stop Greene’s plan, but for Bond, stopping Greene’s plan is less about keeping him from seizing the water supply of Bolivia and using it to stage a coup, it’s about using Greene’s status somewhere in the middle of the Quantum organization as a means to find the people responsible for what happened in the previous film and begin to take the fight to the organization.
This was my main problem when I first watched Quantum of Solace. Since we knew Quantum of Solace was intended as a direct sequel to Casino Royale, I’d put a lot of stock in Bond avenging Vesper’s death by confronting Mr. White. For me, he was the villain, and I was anticipating some sort of climactic confrontation with him. But after Tosca, he just disappears. (I know, he returns in No Time to Die … but that was much later.) So initially, the ending felt like a complete letdown.
But once I got over the gulf between my expectations and the actual film, I loved it.
Oh, I’m absolutely a fan of QUANTUM OF SOLACE, especially since I share @dalton’s reading of Bond’s character development - pointedly, Bond doesn’t kill White, doesn’t kill Greene himself and doesn’t kill that Romeo whatshisname agent in whatever it is, Russia or Sweden or whatever Russia has invaded since. Bond never lost focus on the big picture, he’s never been away and is ready to hunt Quantum down now…
Shame Sam Mendes hasn’t watched QUANTUM OF SOLACE before taking on SKYFALL. 
The real shame with Skyfall is that the end of Quantum of Solace really set them up for what they ended up wanting to do with SF, with having a bulk of the film being in British territory. Having Bond on a mission to go up against Guy Haines and root out Quantum from areas in which it was entangled with British interests could have accomplished that. It could have even still be a vehicle for Bardem and Silva, with him being the pressure point applied to M and MI6 from Haines and his associates that we saw at the Tosca meeting.
SKYFALL should and could have easily developed the Quantum organization with Silva being a part of it, establishing the throughline they so desperately tried to shove in during SPECTRE.
Well, hindsight is easy.
Quantum supposedly had ‘people everywhere’, Silva could easily have been one they implied to be a traitor because they couldn’t buy him. M trashed him with the Chinese, they tortured him and Quantum bought him free. A lot of the film could stay as we know it.
Greene being considered a ‘weak villain’ is his strength in my opinion. He has a profile but he’s not overly loud. Greene is a corporate operator who hides behind something seemingly noble while getting governments and generals to do his dirty work. He can be dismissed as weird and forgettable but ultimately the modern world is a lot about manipulating existing power structures. When these people fall over they’re replaced by someone else and the show goes on.
Skyfall could easily have been a direct follow up to Quantum of Solace.
Some of the organization could have been rooted out off screen during the four years between the two films. Make the Quantum organization seem even bigger than they are hinted to be in QoS by making them directly responsible for the financial crisis of the late 2000s, with people like Guy Haines and the others at the Tosca meeting, as well as other unseen members around the globe, pulling various levers across the world in order to crash economies for whatever “noble” reason they may want to come up with.
Not sure how the Guy Haines bit could have been resolved, but maybe that’s the opening of the film. It also happens to be a mission that leaves Bond injured and left for dead. Time passes and what’s left of Quantum isn’t happy about Haines and others being rounded up and put in prison, with MI6 being blamed for the London “offices” of Quantum being shut down, so they unleash Silva on M to get revenge. Bond comes back from “death” because he sees that the job against Quantum is not complete and that they are taking the fight to right to his proverbial doorstep.
This is ten times better than the script we got…