I disagree that it doesn’t enhance the film. “Final Ascent” is brilliant and really elevates the last few minutes of Bond coming to grips with his mortality.
Spectre did have the smart-blood, that makes three out of five Craig films where MI6 actually track him! plus all the nine eyes stuff which was very vague. I think the films do need to get back to villains with concrete objectives. I think Le Chiffre and Silva work because in each case they have a clear aim (albeit Sila's way of achieving it is ridiculously overly complicated!) Blofeld wanting to read everyone's emails is just dull by comparison with win money/kill M. Greene's plan is interesting in QoS and as has been said (and had a few friends similarly ask) what is Safin's plan exactly?
It seemed like the threat was less about what Safin intended to do with the nanobots and more the fact that he even has this weapon that once spread across the globe would be irreversible and everyone is a potential target just waiting for someone to press “activate”. Bond and MI6 make sure to contain and destroy it before it can reach anywhere else. This is why Bond allows himself to be blown up because even though Safin is dead the nanobots have already been activated to kill Madeleine and his daughter, and whoever the millions are. Thus James Bond dies with the grandest gesture of social distancing to prevent COVID from spreading! I wish I was a fly on the wall over the filmmakers realizing the parallels between spread of a virus. Weird timing.
And R.I.P. to the worst incarnation of James Bond and I felt the ending was so appropriate for this character. Now EON can break bread and give us a Bond who has his shite together. There's nothing wrong with a Bond who loves being James Bond, OO7.
Yeah, that's what I figured. I just wish that was better addressed in the film. Obviously, not a big deal, but it was something that stood out.
I saw it yesterday. Better than Spectre, but that isn't saying much. I was pretty meh on the whole thing. I bet a lot of people will be pissed at the ending though. The villian was such a non-entity. Did we ever even find out what kind of people he was targeting? Or why? I think all we got is "millions because he's evil". I wonder if he was Dr. No and they either changed that in editing or during production, and that's why he is so 1 dimensional, they cut most of his story out. Ana de Armas is as fucking amazing as she always is, even if her role was basically an extended cameo. I had a lot of issues with story choices Mendes made with his Bonds, but the film's were beautiful and full of memorable shots. It's been one day and I can't think of a single shot that still sticks out to me from this film. I could go on and on about what I liked and didn't like but I find I don't care enough. My biggest take away from the film? I thought "Dou Dou" was the rabbits name. But I'm dating a French girl and she texted me a pic of her blanket, calling it a "dou dou". Apparently a dou dou is a general term for like a comfort blankie or a stuffed teddy. So I leaned something I didn't know before.
I don't want to offend anyone of color in this forum, but the German scientist alluded to targeting Black people towards Nomi which at that point she had enough of that guy.
While it had its moments, this-series-within-a-series needed to end. The way they were bringing in the worst kind of soap opera cliches into the series (my enemy is actually my brother, my enemy used to have my job...), it was only a matter of time until they tried the "evil twin twist", or the ever-popular "one of us is a traitor". What is really sad is how ineffective MI-6 was ultimately revealed to be over the course of 5 films, the way that they were completely taken unaware by a rival spy organization they had no inkling existed and of how large it actually was, and for 5 years they were incapable at vanquishing it...until all of a sudden ANOTHER group they had no inkling existed virtually eradicates the first gang of evil doers in record time... Perhaps for the next cycle of films, those producers might actually embrace some of the over-the-top elements of the early Bond films (without this time falling into the near Adam West/Batman campiness the Roger Moore films sometimes embraced), because the Daniel Craig era approach (needing to be sooooo realistic) often exposed the script logic problems too clearly. In the Connery, Moore, Dalton and Brosnan eras, the action was 95% of the time taking place all over the world and far away from London, so it made sense that Bond played the lone wolf as he beat down the baddies (though sometimes with the help of friendly ninjas or US navy boys). But at least twice in the Craig movies they had Bond facing immense peril either right smackdab at MI6 Headquarters or within walking distance from it. Not just any ol' threat, but MI6 being destroyed and its leader M being killed while on duty, and never does Bond really get any help from his fellow agents. I can hear it already, the yelps that "this is Bond's movie!!!!!"...which would be fair enough, if this was the Mission Impossible film series, with Tom Cruise mostly in solo action with his gang of barely-there sidekicks, the only operatives for the IMF. Then you shouldn't portray Bond in such a "realistic and gritty" manner, yet still persist at mentioning often how he is a part of the British Secret Service, and how his codename is 007, implying directly that there are probably at least 6 other killers employed by M. And never is it explained why they are AWOL or even mentioned during SKYFALL and SPECTRE... Anyway, hopefully Michael Wilson and Barbara Broccolli will finally relinquish the reigns to someone who isn't creatively depleted, who isn't afraid to own some of the glorious flamboyant aspects of early Bond that made it so avant-garde, whereas now it just follows the trends...
^^^Don't give them ideas or we will find ourselves once again looking at the last 60 years of a franchises lore being re-written to shoehorn in -00s before Connery's Bond because, well just because. lol
I hope they go backwards and make cold war period pieces for the next Bond, like they were talking about doing with Brosnan for Casino Royale, when Tarantino was in talks to direct. Would be a nice change of pace to see Bond in the 60's again. Give modern Bond a break, especially after Craig had a Bond franchise within the Bond franchise type deal. It would be less jarring when we got back to modern Bond than just jumping back in, imo.
I just don’t see that happening. As I understand it, period pieces are more expensive to make. And the likes of Man from UNCLE didn’t really set the box office on fire. I personally would love a retro Bond film, but I don’t think I’m representative of the average movie goer that way
I really liked it. As someone who thinks Skyfall is overrated and Quantum is underrated (so, up until now, my ranking of the Craig films has just been chronological), I was really just hoping for this film to break the pattern and not be worse than "Spectre," and to also bring back Felix, and it delivered on my very modest expectations. And talking of Felix, I both liked how he's apparently also had two movies of adventures since we last saw him, and became eccentric and weird, and how his death scene echoed Vesper's (I knew he was a goner as soon as he mentioned his family, but I was worried about it as soon as they started referencing OHMSS and I thought they might be playing the hits a bit of the Connery-Brosnen incarnation, so they might also be including some License to Kill in the mix). If it were me in charge, I would've teased "007 Will Return," and been angling for a spin-off series where Nomi and Paloma have their own spy adventures in the manner of Bond and Felix, letting the James Bond character rest a bit before bringing him back to film in a new reboot.
I don't expect they'll do it either, it's just what I'd love to see. Period pieces do cost more but they're spending $200 mil on the Craig Bonds as is. Blow up one less giant building and put the money towards period sets & clothing instead More down to earth, 60's spy movie and less first person shooter explosion fests which the last few movies devolved into
Ian Fleming stipulated in the deal with EON that they keep the films contemporary rather than make them period pieces. This is why Bond has never remained in the 60s. They were not made to be “retro”. Bond was always meant to be of the present time. Of course, Fleming never anticipated just how big the franchise would be either.
Do you have a source for that? I've never seen that before, not even when Tarantino was trying to make his 60's set Bond. I'm not seeing it googling either.
It was part of the same deal preventing EON from adapting The Spy Who Loved novel, I’ll have to get back on a source eventually, As for Tarantino, he had zero involvement with EON. In fact even tried to acquire the rights of the novel from Sony to make his own adaptation that would have been set in the 60s, shot in black and white, and have narration straight from the pages of the novel. He even name dropped Samuel L Jackson as his Felix. However, MGM traded with Sony the rights of Spider-Man for the novel. By 2004, coming off of KILL BILL, he said in the press that he was willing to work under the Broccolis which would have meant doing away with the retro style. But once they decided to let Brosnan go and look for a new actor, Tarantino lost interest.
Bond's been following trends for most of the franchise's existence. Arguably it's one of the reasons the series has continued by constantly reinventing itself. Blaxploitation, Dirty Harry, Chopsocky, Jaws, Star Wars, Indiana Jones, Lethal Weapon, Miami Vice, Bourne, Nolan's Batman films... hell, let's go almost right back to the beginning, at times From Russia With Love feels like North by Northwest with the serial numbers filed off. I guess the question to ask when determining how the series goes forward might be, what's popular now we can crib from? Maybe the MI films, although I doubt there's much Bond can take from them given how heavily they crib from Bond. Marvel? Eon seem pretty against an expanded universe (though Nomi and Paloma are being touted, just as Wei Lin and Jinx were) and you could argue Bond already has been given an arc like Tony Stark or Steve Rogers. What does that leave, the Fast and the Furious franchise? Doubtful. I hope they do do something different rather than just replacing Craig with a younger version of Craig. I'd like to see a slightly lighter tone, I'd also like a return to the 2ish hour taut action adventure films we used to get, I doubt we can return to completely standalone films, but if they are going to do arcs I'd prefer it if they had an idea about where they were going with the story rather than completely winging it, though I'm not 100% sold on this being a 5 film arc. For me it's two two-film arcs with a standalone film in the middle of them.
Agreed 100% with all of this. And I want to reiterate my desire for Nomi and Paloma spin-offs even though I know it will never happen.