Is it a different one from GE? I confess not to have paid much attention to them. The DAD one, of course, stood out.
The audio is different and the CGI is updated, I believe.
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True, although Elliot tells Wai Lin to “call me Elliot” and so maybe he just assumes he can too?
I thought Bond was antagonizing Carver by calling him Elliott.
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Oh, yes, probably that as well.
My favourite moment is just after Gupta has informed Carver’s goons just how expensive the satellite is, Bond breaks it!! 
Now that is classic Bond!
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Also, it literally looked plastic. $300 million NOT well spent. Carver was obviously very cheap.
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MWAAAAAHAHAHAHAHHAAAAAAAAAH!
This sentence did not age well…
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Definition of humanity, isn’t it?
“Yes, we can…make it SO much worse”
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Compared to 2020 and 2021, 2018 seems comparatively tame.
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For whatever reason, this is one DVD that tends to stay on the shelf, but a couple of days ago I watched the film again on Amazon Prime. Go figure.
Anyway overall it remains my favorite Brosnan entry. For one thing, he never looked better, and he seems far more confident and relaxed in the role. Plus the whole thing is unrelentingly kinetic (even the traditional “briefing” scene occurs in a speeding car), the action largely works and the score is well done (exhilaratingly so at the time, coming on the heels of GE’s).
But it’s not without its problems. Carver’s plan is still ridiculous, there’s too much rat-a-tat-tat machine gunning in the last reel and the stunts tend to double-down on the “physics be damned” approach of the Brosnan era. In particular, Bond’s “solution” of ejecting the “backseat driver” who’s actively garroting him should have resulted in his head popping clean off, and whoever came up with the bit where the helicopter tilts forward to chop up a Saigon neighborhood obviously understood zero about helicopters, physics or logic. It’s a harbinger of TWINE and DAD and the devolution of the series into a sort of overbudgeted Road Runner cartoon. Moreover, I’m always turned off by Moneypenny’s and even M’s (!) participation in the vulgar one-liners sweepstakes. It’s cringey enough hearing some of the things Brosnan-Bond says, but to have the entire office sink to that level looks really bad for MI-6. The only time it ever worked for me was Q’s final line in MR, and even then only because he doesn’t realize it’s a double-entendre.
All that said, there’s a refreshing charm to the film, then and now, in its straightforward aim to simply entertain and not to pile on the pretension and pathos and pandering for awards. It may well have been the last time I had fun with the “Classic” Bond formula.
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My instant reaction all those years ago was of being underwhelmed. And yet as time has passed (which is the ultimate test of any film, not just within the parameters of a franchise) it has become the most re-watchable of Brozza’s era. And I don’t mean that in a backhanded way - it’s not to my mind a classic, but it does go down easy and satisfyingly on repeated viewings. It’s brevity helps its pacing - too many entries are 15mins too long, and too many sag (GE and TWINE weighed down in this manner particularly).
But as David M points out, it’s the crudeness of everyone at MI6 that is most jarring, a side-effect of the staff never being developed as characters beyond the superficiality of their re-casting (Q excepted) last time out.
If the era just ended has demonstrated anything, the regular supporting cast need to be fully-formed in their own right. Moneypenny is now a character beyond a charicature - so if she says something crude and crass, it’s a reflection of where she is at that moment in the story. Poor Samantha Bond played a character whose main trait (in TND) was a one-note potty mouth.
If as we move forward, MI6 are re-cast once again, I hope the same effort is made, rather than just a new name in the credits.
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I have an odd relationship to TND. I saw it opening night with several of my friends. It was a return to so many traditional aspects of the series that I loved while still being a bit too “by the numbers” for me. I instantly adored Arnold’s score with its emphasis on the Bond theme; it wiped out the bad taste of Eric Serra’s interesting but disappointing GE score and instantly made it “feel” like Bond to me. I love the briefing scene in the car and Bond’s fight with Carver’s thugs. I even liked the basic concept of Carver’s plan, but felt it never achieved any of its potential. I also never liked the remote control car scene. And yes, the helicopter scene is ludicrous and whole ending is so over the top with Bond essentially playing a version of the Terminator with machine guns blazing—it’s all so devoid of danger. It’s funny that we get a kind of variation of that in NTTD’s finale, yet there is stealth and cunning on display and it’s all directed with real tension.
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Strange, I always had the feeling that Q new exactly what he was saying in that line and he was ribbing Frederick Gray when he said it.
The cringe-worthy dialogue of the Brosnan era is a lot, the result of Bruce Fierstein who came up with some of the most embarrassing lines in the franchise:
The pumping bit in TND,
“You always were a cunning linquist, James” (another one that took me awhile to get)
“Do the job in hand”
“I though Christmas only comes once a year”
“Call it a hint of bigger things to come” (and that one is from a video game)
Though these even seem comparatively tame when contrasted with Jinx’s terrible dialogue in DAD.
These lines are also seem strange when compared to Goldeneye, which doesn’t have that and actually makes light of Bond’s rather difficult relationship with HR.
Is that any worse than seeing Big Rigs doing wheelies and driving on an angle?
Of all the Brosnan and even Dalton films, this is the one that sticks to the classic formula. Henchmen, over the top villain, three women Bond beds, gadget car and initial briefing. No resigning the service, former ally turned foe, cleaning up M’s past mistakes, childhood home or psych analyses. Just straight forward Bond. I think the first half is top notch up until he recklessly drives the car into the Avis rental shop. The Dr. Kaufman character and scene is almost pure Fleming.
But it is hyper violent. Machine guns are everywhere. The slaughter of the soldiers is hard to watch, almost as bad as Zorin gunning down his mine workers. It never slows down or has Bond showing much charm. He and Wai Lin have no chemistry. Jack Wade isn’t developed, unlike Valentin Zukovsky in the films sandwiching this one. Natalya Simonova and Elektra made for more interesting characters than any women in this film. And M’s relationship with Bond is suddenly cool after how frosty she is with him in GE. That’s why I think TWINE goes better after GE, than TND and DAD. Most of the other character’s speeches seem aimed at the audience and not Bond.
It’s still my favorite Brosnan Bond with GE a close second.
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Probably not, but I’m not a fan of that, either. I guess you could argue that one was even more egregious, because it works against the overall “grim and gritty” approach of LTK, compared to TND which never pretends to be anything more than silly, just sometimes arguably a bit too silly.
I’m the first to admit the entire series is based on stunts that defy logic, but I guess everyone has their line in the sand. On some level, I know you can’t tilt a big rig on one set of wheels, but for me it was more jarring to see the helicopter dig its blades into wooden structures and masonry – on purpose – with no ill effects to the vehicle or its occupants. Some things require a bit of technical expertise to call out, but that one goes against what I would imagine anyone would expect to happen in the real world. Bond effects an escape by making the chopper crash into a building and explode, but why does that work? Having established that the blades can cut through any substance as easily as air, why doesn’t it just pass through the building and leave a copter-shaped hole?
Somehow I just imagine the writers like two little kids with Hot Wheels and action figures, going “Swoosh!” and “Boom!” and thinking it’s so kewl it needs to go into the script. At some point we seem to have crossed a line with the series: for years, the stunt arrangers came up with things they could do with cars and planes and boats and human bodies, sometimes based entirely on the topography or architecture of a particular location, and it was the writer’s job to find some way to get Bond to that place and in that situation, no matter how tortured the plotting. Then at some point the power shifted to the writers, who came up with crazy stunts that couldn’t be done in the real world and it became the stunt and effects teams’ jobs to find a way to fake it. Culminating, predictably, in the nearly wall-to-wall CGI crapfest that was DAD.
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And yet, they actually did this stunt for real.
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Awesome!
But again, there’s those things that make me think, “I don’t know how that’s possible, but I’m seeing it so I guess it is” and other things that make me think, “I don’t care what I’m seeing, that’s just impossible.”
A successful Bond stunt exists in that narrow band of “technically possible, but very, very unlikely.” The trick is to not step outside of it.
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There’s this moment in MOONRAKER when Bond gets shoved out of the plane minus parachute. In the novelisation Wood describes a moment of utter terror; Bond has to struggle to keep his calm and recall an odd chance meeting with the Red Devils, an elite freefall para team*.
Bond gets his bearings, stabilises his tumbling fall and sets out to catch up with the pilot and his parachute.
That’s the kind of stunt that’s way out at the fringe of probability - but just inside the realm of the possible to make us shake our heads while we acknowledge that only Bond could pull off such an escapade. In stark contrast to something like BLACK WIDOW’s various comic strip fights which are nowhere near any rationale of physics or probability - and where nobody expects these sequences to be because it’s an animated real life comic strip.
*Back in the day when Bond wasn’t supposed to drive, fly, navigate any and all machinery as well as master every conceivable kind of ‘special forces’ whatever trickery.
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They did the wheelie too, still doesn’t mean it’s realistic. Just like how the Aston Martin flipping in Casino Royale wasn’t realistic. The car wouldn’t flip, so they had to use compressed air to pop it up from the back. The same thing was done with the big rig flip in The Dark Knight.
Yes, but to be fair I guess few people knew at the time that the Aston could not actually flip because its centre of gravity is too low or something. Most viewers probably thought of it as a car, and cars do flip.
I am not very much into cars, so not easily raked by impossible car stunts. But I do know a little about IT, and I am not yet over my disbelief and outrage at how it was treated especially in Skyfall… A servers room where you could hear a pin drop?!? A so-called computer genius who plugs an enemy device on the MI6 network to see what’s inside!!! Hexadecimal code that contains characters which are not part of the hexadecimal code !!! I guess many people with a basic knowledge of IT had to make an extra effort to maintain their suspension of disbelief… And why? Just because the writers know nothing about IT, and/or assume the same for the audience?
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