Which was removed in the final cut.
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The most cinematic Bond scene in the movie was a mistake?
For me, the mistake was devoting so much time on Boris.
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Wasn’t the most cinematic moment him riding the motorcycle off the cliff to catch the falling plane in the PTS? (Which was also ridiculous, but I liked it better than the tank thing.)
I have never been a fan of the GE tank chase. However, I never knew so many others shared my feelings. Has that been a “thing” within our community here that I’m just now discovering?
Ludicrous or not, I always loved the GE PTS, with the exception of the magically appearing gloves after Bond acquires the motorcycle. It felt like a spiritual cousin to the ski jump/free-fall in the PTS of TSWLM.
The GE tank scene is ridiculously OTT, but that’s not my problem with it (I am a Roger fan, after all).
My problem is it breaks one of the basic rules of a great chase/action/comedy scene, and that is that the hero is supposed to be the underdog. Instead, Bond is invulnerable, so it’s impossible for me to be anything but bored.
I like to compare this scene to the car chase in FYEO. In that one, Bond’s Citroen is outnumbered, outpowered and outclassed by multiple attackers. The car is homely, tiny, appears fragile and you wouldn’t imagine it being particularly maneuverable. But because it’s James Bond at the wheel, it comes out on top, anyway. That, it seems to me, is the kind of dynamic that drives (ahem) movie sequences from Keaton and Lloyd to Jackie Chan and in between. We have to believe the hero is in peril for it to be interesting.
In GE, Bond is completely protected by the tank’s armor, safe from bullets or collisions or anything else the baddies or police can offer. He hits cars, he hits statues, he hits buildings and walls and none of it matters. He has the upper hand throughout and he’s never in peril. So why should I care?
I’d feel the same if Bond went into a fight wearing body armor and letting loose with a machine gun against a team of opponents in their underwear and wielding baseball bats. I DID feel the same in 1989’s “Batman” when the invulnerably armored Batmobile drove into a factory and dropped a bomb to blow the whole place up…while Batman stood around at a safe distance and operated the car by remote control.
Sometimes I think movie-makers believe the audience is just in love with images of things being destroyed. And yeah, it can look cool, but if there’s no stakes, no urgency or emotional investment, then it’s hard to care.
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I tend to frequently point out my major gripe with the GE PTS:
Bond enters the factory after performing a bungee jump from a huge dam above the factory. But at the same time, the factory is located in a place high enough in the mountains that his exit is from a cliff so high that he can perform this bike/plane stunt. Makes as much sense as a Russian submarine captain with a Scottish accent.
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Yes, that is another issue as well. That lake on the other side of that dam is apparently literally at the very top of a huge mountain! 
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One might argue that one sole Brit highjacking a tank in St.Petersburg, wrecking everything in his path, even symbols of the Russian regime - and this as a relic of the Cold War himself - does put Bond into the underdog position, especially since it’s clear he cannot stay in there forever.
But even if you take the underdog out of the equation, the sequence is so damn fun because it is Bond being irreverent, not caring about the destruction to Mother Russia, just fulfilling his objective of never giving up or shying down. If a tank can come in handy, this impeccably dressed spy will take it - and adjust his tie.
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This is Michael Bay filmmaking 101.
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@secretagentfan
Hey, if it works for you, awesome. Obviously it does for a lot of folks or it wouldn’t end up in all the clip reels. But it doesn’t grab me.
Plus it relies on us believing that the Russian police never twig to the fact that if they just keep watch over the tank from a safe distance (like from a helicopter, maybe), eventually the thing will run out of gas and he’ll have to get out, at which point they can arrest or (preferrably) shoot him. Instead he just slips away to parts unknown, like he’s in one of a couple dozen Hyundai Elantras in traffic. Maybe I’d have liked it better if they acknowledged this with a truly OTT scene where a bunch of cops all look around in vain, then shrug at their lieutenant, who calls in, “We lost him.” And the voice on the other ends says, “How can you lose a TANK?!?”
I think this is also around the point in time I started getting more sensitive to the notion of “collateral damage.” From the moment he gets out of Ouromov’s interrogation cell, Bond is slaughtering Russian soldiers by the score, and they are not, strictly speaking, bad guys. They’re just soldiers doing their jobs. It’s not their fault their general is secretly a traitor. By the time Bond gets into the tank, I’m already uncomfortable with the body count of poor old regular Joes (Ivans?) who should’ve called in sick that day, and then as a follow-up we get to see police cars crushed in ways that are almost certainly fatal.
I don’t know, I just wasn’t into it. But if works for others, fair enough.
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You bring up a very good point - the collateral damage is a problem one never thought about in previous eras, maybe because it was all the make-believe good vs evil-fights of our (?) childhoods which we never really thought through.
At least M is worried about this at the beginning of SPECTRE.
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Once Bond sees the tank, you know he’s gonna drive it. It’s over the top Bond. Just like Craig with the bulldozer in CR.
But the tank chase is meant to be fun, symbolic, Bond literally dismantling Russian icons.
It’s the next movie that bothers me with Bond remote control driving a car into a car rental return shop. Civilians would have died
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re: collateral damage
In the earlier films, SPECTRE or Stromberg or Drax had their own private armies and they all knew what they were signing on for, plus they hung out in secret bases so it didn’t matter if the whole place went up in smoke. It’s only later on (like maybe with the ice race in OHMSS or the car chase in DAF) that these things start happening out in the open with lots of potential innocent victims in the crossfire. LALD has a lot of fun with the idea of “what if that human wrecking ball James Bond were set loose in public?” and after that it starts being more or less standard procedure.
It’s not just in SPECTRE that M frets over Bond’s excess: Judi-M is mortified/furious about his headline-grabbing antics at the start of CR. If anything, the whole Craig era is a litany of “Dammit, Bond, you’ve put all our necks in the noose!” followed by, “now here’s another job.”
I’m going to break a personal rule and reference a Garfield (!) strip here. Jon comes home to find an entire pan of lasagna decimated by Garfield and reads him the riot act. Garfield is contrite and penitent and hangs his head in shame. Jon says “Well, I guess I’ll have to go buy another one” and Garfield smirks, “I hope it tastes better than this one.”
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On the other hand, if one pulls at this thread (not this thread!) everything will unravel.
Even the people in Stromberg´s or Drax´ armies - did they really know what they signed up for? Didn’t most of them just need a paid gig? Weren´t some of them convinced that they were working for a benevolent entrepreneur because they were fed lies? Were they actively thinking they would contribute to evil or one really good revolution?
And when Bond escaped through crowded streets, landed in wedding cakes or escaped rockets which exploded a truck - should we feel guilty about the human lives he recklessly endangered, shrugging off the situation with a funny line?
And was Sandor really someone who needed to be thrown off a building? Couldn’t Bond just knock him out or alert the authorities?
Let´s face it: one should rather get out of Bond´s way. He is not a nice guy.
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Years ago I wrote a piece for the collection of essays, “James Bond In the 21st Century” and had a lot of fun with the insanity of those “bad guy organizations.” For instance, who in their right mind would sign up for SPECTRE, where you “train” by trying to get out of the way of live machine gun fire or flamethrowers? And who would want to be in charge of hiring when you’d have to be interviewing to replace the guys who failed those tests like every day of the week?
Did Stromberg’s army really understand they were signing up to aid a plan where every human who lived on land would be wiped out in a nuclear explosion? And is there not one hetero guy among them who’s a little concerned they forgot to include any females on Atlantis or the Liparus? At least Drax remembers to take some women on his arks, but would Jaws really be the only employee worried about that “genetic perfection” clause? I’m pretty sure I saw a couple of guys wearing prescription glasses.
The “wedding cake” thing is interesting. Roger starts his tenure by ruining a wedding on the bayou and ends by ruining one in Paris. I guess he figures if he can’t have a happy marriage, no one should.
I confess I hadn’t thought much about that exploded semi in “Spy.” I guess I just figured all the mattresses cushioned the blow. But if nothing else, he probably lost his job over it.
Then there’s all the wasted food when so many people are starving. Wine poured onto tables by astonished waiters, cakes dropped onto startled restaurant patrons, flaming kabobs jabbed into (equally flaming) henchmen, stuffed sheeps heads left uneaten… Oh, the humanity!
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You have inspired an idea: a novel/film/pastiche told from the viewpoint of a member of a Bond villain’s army, a la “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead.”
“We all had to stand or sit straighter when Blofeld was in the room, but no one seemed to care how he would slouch at the head of the table, his posture getting worse as meetings progressed.”
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I remember Dalton jumping that hedge in pursuit of Saunders’ killer, gun drawn - only to land in front of a terrified mother and kid. A rare piece of reality cheating its way into a Bond flick.
Shootouts, chases & fights in public are all going to attract unwanted attention pretty fast-ish. The least you can expect if you run with a drawn firearm through any number of people is a panic. If actual shots are fired it’s going to be a stampede. About 90 percent of the traditional Hollywood action staple is stuff that would land the good guy(s) in a confrontation with police/security and ultimately in the slammer*.
Meanwhile, the idea of Bond, of the 00 section, is a professional who quietly goes about his work with as little public attention and furore as possible. When the job is done they pack their stuff and disappear. And what kind of attention wasn’t at all avoidable, see The Man With the Golden Gun, is smoothed over in the newspapers and with the local puppet authorities.
No rides across Marcus Square in Q-branch vehicles, no resurfacing on public beaches. And surely no helicopter loops over the heads of an audience of thousands.
*For the same reason John Gardner’s ending of Icebreaker is utter lunacy: Entering any western airport, even back in the 80s, with an unlicensed firearm and drawing it is the best way to leave that airport on a stretcher - or a body bag. And look what happened.
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“Worst of all was the insistence we always wear dark suits, despite the certainty we’d all be covered in damned white cat hairs by the end of each meeting. Lunch breaks were taken in our assigned seats, poorly catered and limited to a trifling fifteen minutes, not that anyone had much appetite with the lingering smell of Number 9’s electrocuted corpse wafting up from below.”
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I think Austin Powers addressed this in his first movie. The baddies even had a moment of silence for one of their fallen henchmen, if memory serves.
And then there’s the guy flattened by the slow moving steamroller…