I don’t really think that there’s any way that they can go back to the Aston Martin in the next one. They basically killed the Aston Martin as a viable vehicle for Bond with NTTD, in which they used three different variations of the car, and had a finale in which they had Madeleine Swann, a reference herself to Teresa Bond, driving Timothy Dalton’s Aston Martin while the romantic theme of George Lazenby’s Bond film played over the end credits. All of that was about as subtle as the rocket Bond took to the face just moments prior and has, at least in my view, rendered the Aston Martin such a piece of nostalgia bait that they just can’t continue to go forward with it as Bond’s vehicle of choice. It was already becoming a bit tired by the time the credits were rolling on Skyfall, but they really accelerated its need for retirement in the two films that followed.
Ending the Aston in SKYFALL was a good idea.
Bringing it back in SPECTRE was like the resurrection of a character which had died gloriously, nixing any weight of it.
With CraigBond gone the obvious and best way would be to leave everything associated with him behind.
Including the nostalgia artefacts.
And really, after rewatching OHMSS again I almost consider NTTS an insult: as if CraigEon felt that „this time we do it the right way“.
And if that’s actually how they felt, boy did they completely miss the mark with it.
There is a bit of a funny irony there in that the last thing we see of the Craig era is a scene with someone who is not Bond driving down the road paying tribute to the two failed James Bond actors.
I continue to believe that NTTD is a solid movie and that it improved upon OHMSS. I also believe that it will age well, much like OHMSS did.
With regards to the car I think EON needs to tread carefully. Having an iconic car is no small achievement in a film series. EON has now done that twice (though the Lotus is a distant second IMHO).
While it would be wonderful if they could do it again, there is no guarantee that will happen. They might simply have a new car that no one notices. The obvious choice would be a Bentley but not sure that will have the same appeal as either the DB5 or the Lotus.
I would welcome the DB5 back but then again I always like the Batmobile in a Batman movie.
I am one of the people who was fine with NTTD including Bond’s death (surely 25 movies in they can explore it once, right!?) but the one thing about it I can never get over…
James Bond died holding a bunny named Dou Dou.
That’s ain’t right
EON choosing to have Bond die isn’t the problem with NTTD (nor is it the only problem, since the problems with the film are vast and far too many in number to accurately count), or at least it isn’t for me. The problem is choosing to have him die at the hands of quite possibly the lamest villain in the entire franchise. And, for that matter, to a villain whose plan is, at best, completely nonsensical and poorly defined.
If they could have clearly established Safin as a threat and then clearly defined what Heracles was being used for (or, hell, just who the buyers were who were headed to the island so maybe we could just infer what the actual threat was), then having Bond lay down his life to stop that would have been perfectly fine.
The problem that both SP and NTTD have going against them is that they take place in a completely empty world, where the stakes of the villains’ plots are not felt by any real people who would, in theory, be impacted by them. Outside of the pre-titles in NTTD, the only time you see real, actual people as opposed to people who are caught up in the espionage “game”, is when Bond and M are talking out on the street. Beyond that, it’s just the intelligence agents and those that are caught up in their immediate circle. So, when they are explaining what Heracles could, in theory, be used for, you don’t feel the stakes of that because the rest of the global population doesn’t really exist in the world of this story. Contrast this with CR, QOS, and SF, where we see Bond and company operating within the real world with every day people like us. Even with much smaller stakes in those films, they feel more impactful because those films are occurring in a world that we recognize as being very close to the one we live in and we can see how the villains’ plans can have an impact on the average human being. In NTTD, Bodn simply lays down his life because “if we don’t do this, there will be nothing left to save.” It’s just a throwaway statement here and it’s not something that is felt within the confines of the film in the way it is in most other Bond films.
As a queer man, the stakes of SP have real world implications–surveillance has historically been used by the cis-hetero elite to monitor/control queer lives and desires. Max Denbigh’s goal to “put the power where it should be,” is alive today as the rights of trans youth to access medical care is denied, with more oppression being promised by the incoming executive and legislative branches.
Agreed. Part of the genius of DAF is that Hamilton integrates the espionage world with the everyday world: an undercover operation occurs in Circus Circus under the noses of everyday people who go on gambling (amusing themselves to death). Similarly, Hamilton includes a shot from inside a casino during a car chase, where again the everyday gamblers are oblivious to what is going on around them. Blofeld’s criminal enterprise is effectively camouflaged by Whyte’s corporate empire (with the implication that it is a criminal enterprise in its own way).
SP also works with theme of criminal/business activity merging with government institutions–an existing real world danger. The world’s richest man now goes by the name Kekius Maximus (with Pepe the Frog as his avatar) on social media (google “Kekistan”). He also, without standing for election or being subjected to legislative confirmation, has been tasked with the job of reducing the government. Lastly, he is trying to influence Germany’s national elections. He has out Blofelded Blofeld. Bond films (especially DAF and SP) were ahead of the curve in depicting the alliance of business/criminal interests and government instituions.
And I think that you’ve highlighted here why I think that this is a weakness of both SP and NTTD. Intellectually, we know what the stakes of these villainous schemes are. People generally know that the surveillance issues presented in SP are not good for the average citizen and are very much the kind of ideas that would be pursued by a villainous entity like C or Blofeld, but at the same time, these stakes are not really presented within the confines of the film. And since the film takes place in a world that seems completely void of real people who are not caught up in the spy games that Bond and Blofeld are playing, it’s hard to look beyond the the more simplified “hey, the villain wins if he implements this new surveillance system” stakes when the film doesn’t give the audience any real reason to make the inference that this would be something that would have a direct impact on them as well if they were to be living in the world that this film is taking place in.
If we look at CR, QoS, and SF, the stakes of those films, in terms of how they would affect the average individual global citizen, are pretty low. But, at the same time, we know that it will affect them in some way because we know that such people exist in the world of those films. We see Bond mixing in and blending in with the public to accomplish his goals. The danger is brought to the people in those films. We see Bond having to stop the bomb from going off at the Miami airport in CR, which in one respect works on the higher level of directly affecting the villain’s main scheme, but also on a different level of having to protect the lives of innocent people on the ground in the moment in addition to the funds of the average citizen who may have stock in the stock market, which would also be affected by the scheme being successful. We see innocent people killed and otherwise put directly in harm’s way in QoS in addition to seeing that Greene’s plan to cut off the citizens of Bolivia from a reliable source of water actually have a direct effect on these people rather than just having to infer what that would look like from listening to Greene talk about it and then having the audience do the math in their head. And in SF, we see Bond and the villain directly put people in harms way in the markets in Istanbul at the beginning of the film and then the assault on the subway system in London in the second half of the film. Even with that film, which is very much focused on the personal stakes for Bond and M, it still manages to operate within a world that we recognize as being like our own, which is populated by more than just the people who engage in espionage for a living.
Do we even see any of this in SP? I don’t think that we do, outside of the pre-titles and, even then, that massive crowd of CGI people around the helicopter doesn’t really lend itself to making it feel as though there are stakes in play for those people on the ground. But after the PTS, we rarely, if at all, see Bond or the villains encountering anybody that isn’t working outside of the espionage game. What could have been a truly high stakes chase through the streets of Rome is stripped of any and all tension by having them completely empty the streets. Now, I’ve never been to Rome, so I can’t speak with any authority on their traffic patterns, but I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that, regardless of what time of night that SPECTRE meeting was happening, that Bond and Hinx would encounter more than one other vehicle while they were chasing each other at high speeds through one of the most famous cities in the world. Instead, the streets are completely void of any semblance of life and the one person that the two characters encounter along their merry little street race is there simply to provide some comic relief for the audience.
Later, on the train, there are other people there, but then they magically just disappear once Hinx comes in and attacks Bond in the dining car. There’s nobody else there to share the danger with Bond and Medeleine once the danger arrives. Once Hinx shows up, it’s just the three of them. No shots of people scurrying for safety, no instances of an innocent bystander getting caught up on their fight and suffering some form of an injury, nothing of the sort. Then we have the finale which takes place on the very oddly empty streets of London and then through a dilapidated MI6 building that has nobody in it except for the Bond, Madeleine, and Blofeld. SP ends with Blofeld blowing up a massive building along the River Thames and then having his helicopter crash into a bridge. Yet, somehow, this is not something that seems to register with the city at all. We see M show up with a couple of policeman, but there’s no sense of panic, no sense of this having impacted any of the citizens of London in any way whatsoever, which is kind of odd in this era of the public having some concept, at least in the back of their mind if not right up at the front, that they could directly experience terrorism or some other form of violence right where they live instead of seeing it in some far away land on their television set. SP and NTTD seem like movies that still operate in that world where the richer countries felt that they were fairly insulated from those kind of direct threats, but that’s obviously not the case anymore and films like CR, QoS, and SF show that it really helps to connect the audience to the stakes of the vllain’s scheme if the film presents itself as something that takes place in a world that the audience can recognize as something that they themselves could very well be living in.
Improved? In which way?
Old boss I used to work for always said sometimes change is good. I think with the new actor they won’t be able to help but change. They can’t just get a younger guy to do CraigBond. That would really be giving up.
Sorry gents, I got logged out of the app some time back and am trying to catch up.
Seems like main drama right now is Babs v Amazon. Really liked seeing the pushback from her a week or so back. As we Yanks would say, you don’t mess with Christmas. And folks shouldn’t mess with 007 either.
I understand there’s a sizeable segment that will never like the film or accept the decision to kill Bond. But I do think a new era will begin to heal the wounds. Enough time has passed for even DAD, once seen as an embarrassment to speed away from with realism and grit, to be more embraced. It’s the antithesis of the Craig era, something now being yearned for. It just takes Bond 7 to prove the show goes on and NTTD was not the end, but rather a creative choice they disagreed with. Now in the rear view mirror along with other controversial aspects like laser guns and pink ties. @MrKiddWint
Agreed.
I am not sure how they would be, or if they need to be. The ravages of drug addiction are not shown in LALD or LTK, or the devastation that will ensue if Zorin detonates his bombs. The villain’s plan is a MacGuffin, often on steroids.
I would argue that a viewer current with contemporary life would know the impact that widespread surveillance would have/is having on their life. To paraphrase Sy Syms: “An educated watcher is our best customer” (apologies to my international friends for a very East Coast reference).
First, thank you for expanding on your thoughts. I am understanding your position much better.
Second: I do not experience Bond among the people the way you do. The bomb on the plane is an imminent danger to the people depicted, but they are still movie extras working for their per diem. For me, such a bomb-threat-in-crowded-place is just as “real” as pervasive surveillance, and I am probably more fearful of the latter than the former (though events of the last 48 hours may be changing the balance of my response).
Agreed, but for me, it is all well-staged faux danger. I appreciate the cutting and the mise en scene, but never worry that people are being threatened. Could it happen in real life? Sure. But I know that surveillance is happening and expanding, so that danger resonates more with me.
Here is where we differ in approach. I take an art work on the terms it presents. I am not a “what-it-could-have-been” viewer, since all I have to go on is what the artist(s) actually made and presented. Is a Rothko painting bad if it doesn’t have enough green for a viewer? Is a Japanese restaurant deficient if a person cannot get spaghetti and meatballs there?
With your elaboration, I understand (I think) that for you a film is both experienced as presented, and also evaluated against your concept of what could/should have been presented (my best friend has a similar aesthetic lens). Where I disagree with you and him is regarding the validity of a negative judgement of a film which does not meet/match what is posited as possible/preferable by a viewer. The viewer may be disappointed, and not like the film, but to say the film is a failure is to elevate subjective taste to the status of aesthetic standard.
In the case of SPECTRE, I was thinking about the Rome car chase last night. By coincidence, I had to renew my Amazon Prime subscription yesterday. We had started this discussion, and I thought I should see if LTK was available to watch. When I searched “Bond films,” up popped SP asking me to continue watching. So I said yes–I was at the point where Bond and Madeleine split up in London. I finished the film, and then started it again (which I have found to be a good practice for studying cinema).
I noticed again how empty and large so many of the images are: Moneypenny running after Bond to give him effects from Skyfall (she could have handed them to him as he left M’s office); Bond’s apartment; Museo della Civilta Roma (cannot get much larger/emptier than Fascist architecture); the car chase on empty Rome streets; the small boat in the vast Austrian wintry landscape; the train with the disappearing passengers (as you note); Blenheim Palace’s exterior combined a la Kuleshov with a huge interior Pinewood set to create Palazzo Cardenza. The film presents a stylized version of the recognizable real world.
You would prefer to have
and
I do not see the need for audience proxies to enable a viewer
I like a film that makes
One WICKED per year is more than enough for me.
I think each viewer will bring their own formula regarding the amounts of stylization/literalness and presence/absence of audience proxies needed to allow them to experience a filmic world as recognizably real (and for the record I think even the most realistic works of De Sica and Rossellini and even Wiseman are full of stylizations).
If a film does not meet a viewer’s expectations/needs–okay, it is not to their taste. But I would argue that not being to a viewer’s taste necessarily means that the film is a failure.
Thanks for this great discussion. It is enjoyable, and I have learned a good deal.
I don’t think it’s really necessary to show exactly how drug addiction itself fits into the confines of LALD or LTK. The film accomplishes what it sets out to do because both of those films are very clearly set in a world that is populated with real people and that we can look at and recognize as a world that is very close to the one that we, the audience, currently occupy (although the supernatural elements in LALD does stretch this a bit).
Perhaps a better way to put it would be to go back and look at SP and NTTD. I would almost liken them to high school plays on steroids. You’ve got the main characters there and the main supporting cast, but beyond that, there is nothing. The settings of the films are quite sterile, much like you’d find on a stage production done on a very limited budget. It’s just Bond, the villain, and whatever other spy-related characters are necessary to propel the plot and the action forward. There are no real people in these films. Take the car chase in SP for example. That one overhead shot that we see of Bond and Hinx driving through what clearly should be a well populated area and there’s…NOTHING. It’s as though, within the confines of the story, the Roman government went on the PA to announce “citizens, British Agent James Bond and henchman Mr. Hinx need to chase each other through the streets of our beloved city; please remain in your homes until Mr. Bond crashes his Aston Martin into the river.” There’s no danger in this scene because there’s nobody to be put in danger. The only other person they come across is placed there strictly for comedic purposes and we know that Bond isn’t in any danger because he’s carrying on a casual phone conversation as though he’s sitting on a bench in the park while he’s being “chased” by Hinx.
I guess what it boils down to is that while, yes, the stakes of each of the two films could be intellectually derived by most audience members, it’s hard to get wrapped up in all of that because the world in which the films take place in doesn’t not in any way feel like the one that we, the audience, inhabit. It feels like the living room of a toddler who is making the story up with action figures on the floor. The films lose a great deal of depth and, I daresay, focus, because they are too concentrated on the personal stakes for Bond but completely lose sight of how the villain’s scheme would play out in a way that would impact the greater populace.
I would agree, although I do think that some acknowledgement of the people who would be affected by the scheme of the villain is necessary to some degree. It’s not something that CR, QOS, and SF really dwells on, but just the acknowledgment that Bond and the spy game around him is taking place inside a larger, “innocent” world around them goes a long way to connect the scheme of the villain and the stakes of that scheme to the larger world that the story is taking place in. When none of that exists, such as in SP or NTTD, it makes it, at least for me, harder to connect those stakes to anything tangible, even if I can intellectually make the connection, when the only stakes that the film seems to be concerned with are the personal ones that Bond is dealing with. NTTD makes the case that the release of Heracles could result in mass genocide on a scale the world has never seen, but this is played as a complete afterthought. Instead, the only thing the film is concerned with is the personal life of Bond and how Safin fits into that. It doesn’t seem all that concerned at all with what, had it been done in a more focused manner, could have been one of the more frightening villain schemes in the franchise. They show that map showing the theoretical spread of Heracles for a split second and that’s it, back to Bond’s personal life. Meanwhile, some viewers, such as myself, look at that and think, “shouldn’t we be more concerned with what’s going on with that map?”
I would add that the scenes in Harlem represent no world that people occupied then or now.
First, I want to say I am only arguing for SP here. Others will have to argue for NTTD.
Second, as the discussion proceeds, and I think about SP, the more its element of abstraction comes to the fore for me (which you experience as schematic/undercooked filmmaking). I admit that I am a believer in Godard’s quoting of D.W. Griffith that “all you need to make a movie is a girl and a gun.” I am a minimalist, and enjoy the stripped-down aesthetic of SP.
Is the film ridiculous? Yes. Conveniently empty Roman streets. A secret room in a hotel that goes undetected for decades until Bond discovers it. Not once, but twice, Bond free-falls through space to a harmless landing. A handgun brings down a helicopter.
Regarding the MacGuffin of a villain’s plan to merge a criminal enterprise with governmental institutions to surveille the world: as the fanboys say: “Day 1 purchase for me.”
In this abstracted (or schematic) landscape, Robot Bond is the perfect state-trained/sanctioned assassin. Once set on a mission, he does not quit until he runs everyone/everything to ground. His relentlessness is inhuman…until it isn’t.
It may well be that my love of the minimal combined with the strong resonance the MacGuffin of surveillance has for me makes me susceptible to SP and (what I see as) its charms. Even the sex scenes are palatable–following highly charged/emotional/violent incidents.
As you note, there are no people outside of those connected to the fable being told, and, because of the factors I outlined above, I am not bothered by their absence. As you said: I am doing the math in my head (which echoes what my best friend says about the differences in our approaches–I like head movies/plays, and he likes heart movie plays).
Thanks again.
I think you and tdalton are both right.
The Craig films - aside from QOS with its look at the village suffering from the drought - are so concentrated on Bond‘s perspective that they lack the outside perspective many earlier Bonds offer.
On the other hand that inner perspective also highlights the tunnel vision of Craig‘s Bond who might imply he wants to save humanity but seems rather intent on saving only those he personally cares about. What we see in SP and NTTD might be only what his Bond sees.
Of course, this is also a favorable interpretation of all the production problems leading to that absence of other people or the consequences for the rest of the world.
I know I am very harsh on NTTD recently, but after rewatching OHMSS I cannot find one argument for an improvement on that brilliant film.
The plot of NTTD is a hodgepodge of setpieces while OHMSS is a logical progression of a clearly outlined story.
In both films Bond gets involved professionally and emotionally, but in OHMSS Bond fulfills his duty first and suffers the consequences while in NTTD he gets dragged into one last mission against his will, causes dire consequences and sacrifices himself only for his daughter and his lover. Both have tragic endings but NTTD has lesser impact because the artificial construct of an invincible hero dying only until the next film appears is diminishing the impact. In contrast OHMSS dares to show how powerless the hero can be in his private life.
Wouldn‘t it have been so much more powerful if Craig‘s Bond had saved humanity but failed to save Madeleine and their daughter from infection, remaining alive but unable to ever see and touch them again?
I agree that for all the money pumped into them and the resulting “scale” of the last few films, they still feel smaller somehow, and that may indeed be because there’s no sense Bond is operating in a world where billions of other people – all potential victims – live. I continue to think of NTTD as revolving around Bond’s personal woes and have to remind myself that technically there is some kind of larger threat with the potential to impact huge swaths of humanity. Indeed, out of all the Craig’s, it’s the only one that does offer a large-scale threat. But all of that seems grafted on and half-hearted and pretty much incidental to the plot.
This is one of my biggest complaints about the Craig era; the feeling that it’s all about Bond and his girlfriends, his sort-of brother, his dead parents, his adoptive Mommy figure, etc, and battling villains and/or saving some small corner or other of the world is just how he passes the time while dealing with the emotional crisis of the week. It all makes the stakes seem so much smaller for me.
All that said, I think NTTD is one of the better Craig entries and possibly my second favorite after CR, if only because it moves well and looks good and the action is well-handled for once. And maybe because for me any exit from this run is a good exit. It doesn’t bear close scrutiny, but then few films in the series really do.
But in no way, shape or form is it better than OHMSS, and I found the re-use of the Armstrong song insultingly presumptuous.
That and quoting the line in the dialogue really is an empty nostalgia exercise, establishing nothing but a reminder of a story which has nothing in common with this film.
Agreed. I had never thought about a Bond film from the perspective of people he is trying to protect/save.
Maybe that is why SP is the only Craig Bond film I like, since it starts out with Bond only caring about following orders: Robot Bond is impersonal, and only comes back to life (and his humanity) at the end of the film. It is a one-off narrative gambit, and Craig’s tenure could have ended there: Bond saves people by halting the ultra-surveillance threat posed by his own agency/government. He has to drive off into the dawn, since now that he knows what he knows, he cannot stay. Why NTTD seemed superfluous to me (despite earning three-quarters of one billion dollars).
Another thought occurs: the first two major Bond actors–Sirs Sean and Roger–were products (to some extent) of the star system (and its mentality). The star wattage they supplied foreclosed the need for an interior Bond, or an actor who could play one.
Daniel Craig is a character actor who can carry a movie, similar to Dustin Hoffman and others. His star wattage, however, is of a different composition than that of Connery and Moore (Denzel Washington may be the last star/actor in the older tradition). Craig does interior character work extremely well (see under: QUEER), and his Bond films were crafted to suit his style of acting.
The earlier Bond films were crafted to be centered on and carried by a star following the Classical Hollywood tradition. There was no interiority needed, since stars radiate outwards, and only rarely reveal their inner core (think of Connery’s superb pause when Moneypenny asks him about a diamond in a ring in DAF).
Maybe this is why you feel that Craig Bond suffered from tunnel vision, and @David_M says of Craig Bond films that
because an interior Bond emits a different wattage than a Connery/Moore Bond.
Because Interior Bond is smaller than Star Bond. The question now is: how can (or should) Eon go back to making Bond films in the Connery/Moore mold, when actors are no longer formed by the tradition that made them? Acting schools/programs produce performers in the Craig mold.