Well.
Thoughts?
I enjoyed it - I was nervous after the awful press that came out when the script leaked, but it was ONLY A SPOILER ALERT IF YOU HAVE NO IDEA WHAT A JAMES BOND FILM IS an enjoyable caper where a lot of stuff blew up.
Now, this has been out in the UK for nearly a week, but I’ll spoiler my spoilery film spoiler:
[spoiler]as to the big baddie. Pretty eye-rolly.
It kind of reminded me of that whole Dark Knight Rises debacle.
“And also there’s a female character. Played by Marion Cotillard.”
“IS IT TALIA AL GHUL?!”
“No. Her name is… something something non-specific. She’s just a person.”
“That’s odd, I mean Ras al Ghul already exists in this trilogy, and the main characters so far have been major Batman players. Are you sure?”
“YES. We’re sure. Just a normal lady. Everything you’ve heard is wrong. Let us prove it to you be having her play ‘normal lady’ for the first 75 percent of the movie.”
“Okay. Fine.”
“WAIT! She was secretly Talia al Ghul the whole time!!! Are you amazed?”
“… No.”
It would have been fine to tell us it was a dude who happened to be named Blofeld from the start. I can’t imagine anyone was shocked by this.[/spoiler]
I don’t think you were supposed to be in doubt about whether he was Blofeld. The setup with the table, and the people reporting their evil doings made it quite clear. And the movie is called SPECTRE.
If you followed the Sony hacks at all - there’s a lot of complaints about the twist from execs, and how poorly it’s done and needs to be re-written. And if it’s not meant to be a twist, why give him a false name at all and then reveal that he’s not Franz Oberhauser, he’s actually Ernst Blofeld?
I was pretty disappointed. I wasn’t expecting much, but it wasn’t even fun. Just every Bond cliche stuck in a blender and then tastefully adorned with an improbable explosion. Bond villains really need to stop building their secret headquarters out of explosives.
Far, far too much [spoiler]“Let me allow you to freely access my super secret lair (visible via satellite, BTW), and then adjourn to your room to freshen up before I take you on a tour. Amazing, no? Well, at this point, let me knock you out and strap you down, while I explain everything to you, and HOW IT WAS ME THE WHOLE TIME! Hahahahaha! Also, torture.”
“Drat, you’ve escaped!”
“Double-drat, you’ve blown up my entire super secret facility! With only a watch!”
“Ha HA! I survived! Bet you didn’t expect that? Yup, and now I’ll lead you around, once again, while explaining why and how, once again. Care to save your lady friend? Tick tock, times a-wasting.”[/spoiler]
I liked how the horrible outcome of the torture was going to be that Bond wouldn’t know or recognize the woman he had known for all of three days. No, not that!
But my favorite part was imagining what went into [spoiler]dressing the scene at the old MI-6.
Henchman#233: Boss, is there any human trafficking I can do for you?
Blofeld: No, go to Kinko’s and get photocopies of these headshots of former criminals and civil servants. Then, glue them onto the walls. Oooh, and some on the shooting range targets!
Hemchman#233: Seriously?
Blofeld: Trust me, it’ll totally be worth it when it freaks him out slightly.
Henchman#233: And then we kill him?
Blofeld: No, we lead him to an elaborately bulletproof chamber and GIVE HIM A MORAL DILEMMA!
Henchman#233: I better go buy some glue sticks before the arts and crafts store closes. [/spoiler]
NOT A CHANCE.
This is a Bond thread… he would have wanted it that way.
You’re like a kite, mr. jp, dancing in a hurricane.
I think the worst thing AND I DON’T CARE IF THIS IS A SPOILER, THE WORLD SHOULD KNOW AND RIOT ABOUT THIS was hiring Andrew Scott and wasting him completely.
The action moments were well done and exciting, but somehow also boring, like similar have been seen too many times already.
It was basically a continuation of the tired, bloated, paint by numbers feel of the old Bond franchise, with far too little of the refreshing change that was the Casino Royal reboot.
I literally found myself trying to see my watch during the non-action parts, in hopes of gaging how much longer I’d be stuck sitting there.
It looks like Bond is now back to being just another action character.
To be fair, for a mindless action explode-y film, it was fine enough. I didn’t walk out of there feeling like I didn’t get my money’s worth.
It reminded me a lot of the first time I watched the Dark Knight Rises - it felt like there was enough material for two full, well-plotted, exciting films there. Instead of making two films though, every idea was jammed into one film, with story lines that went nowhere, were just dropped, or weren’t wrapped up properly.
Again, like the Andrew Scott character. There’s no real point to it, as there’s no real peril. I mean, do we ever think that at the end of a Bond film, the big bad guy will win and Bond will be dead and the world won’t be saved? No, of course not, but we like feeling like something is at stake, and watching him foil this plan. However, there’s no intrigue to Scott’s character. No, I wasn’t worried for a second that by the end of the film, agents would be replaced with drones and the 00 programme would cease to exist. That’s a good twenty or thirty minutes of scenes that could have been scrapped to, let’s say, give the amazing Naomie Harris something to actually DO.
I agree that a bunch of great actors were totally wasted. The entire Monica Belluci episode was completely extraneous and could have been dropped into any other Bond film. “Uh, I have an American friend Felix; yeah, that’s the ticket. Just promise I never have to think about you again.”
Not to mention the bad guy summit which was more credibly handled in Cars 2. I think that’s the problem with the film: it just seemed tired (or lazy) – it made no attempt to subvert the Bond brand or update it or even raise it to a new level. We’ve seen 26 Bond films, we know what to expect. Give us something surprising; gritty or over-the-top or clever. Don’t just punch a button and spit out Bond mad-lib plot points: sexy lady, trick watch, bad guy lair. It seemed like no effort was made to do anything beyond mediocre; just the director fulfilling a rote obligation.
As a Bond fan, I actually like when the movie does things they have done before. If I didn’t like that, I wouldn’t be a Bond fan.
It’s variation over a familiar motif, like the verses of a song. I like to see the different takes on the Bond characters, the different ways to incorporate gadgets, the different henchmen characters.
My problem with this film is not that at all. It’s with the film being overly long, and with the main villain and his motivation.
Well to be fair, what havent we seen yet? Either in the Bond franchise or in another. For example “XXX” which mixed extreme sports and spycraft.
Either way the fans will say “oh this is just a ripoff of …”.
And really could it be worse than say Octopussy or Living Daylights?
Finally in this PC world they cannot have evil Asian, black, or midget henchmen. They all have to be Russian or German sounding so what is the fun in that?
[QUOTE=Bonaventure]
I agree that a bunch of great actors were totally wasted. The entire Monica Belluci episode was completely extraneous and could have been dropped into any other Bond film. “Uh, I have an American friend Felix; yeah, that’s the ticket. Just promise I never have to think about you again.”
[/QUOTE]
Heh. For something we sure haven’t seen before in this franchise, could you imagine if the Big Bad’s right-hand man was black – by dint of turning out to be Felix Leiter?
Could’ve been terrific or terrible, but it’d at least have been unexpected as hell.