007 afficiandos - which sucks worse - "Moonraker" or "Die Another Day"?

Cafe Society
41

Can I say I liked them all? :smiley:

Sean Connery gets props for being first, but I was never all that convinced his attitude towards woman was part of Bond’s characterization and more of Connery being somewhat of an old-fashioned “wimmenfolk get back in the kitchen” mindset*. Plus his chest hair is just positively frightening.

*I exaggerate somewhat, but I always felt Connery’s condescension towards his female cast members to be vaguely discomforting.

Roger Moore is campy, but he has so much fun doing it that I’m willing to forgive him. The movies are enjoyable as a comic book version of the Bond world.

Timothy Dalton I don’t have any strong feelings about one way or another.

Brosnan gets props for playing the suave, charismatic Bond, with just enough cold-blooded murderer in him to remind us that yes, Bond is not a nice guy, but we can see why the Girl of the Movie gets her pants charmed off anyway. Plus he got to rumble around St. Petersburg in a tank - What Do You Mean It’s Not Awesome? :smiley: The extended torture sequence in Die Another Day did make me cringe - overall, the Brosnan Bond did seem like he took more lumps than the others. And his dynamic with M was hilarious to watch, with Densch playing Strict British Nanny to Brosnan’s pouting spoiled brat with wonderful toys.

Daniel Craig is playing Bond as a thug and a sociopath, and just starting to test some of his smooth moves. It helps that he’s delicious, delicious eye candy. :smiley:

42

I feel about Tom Mankiewicz the way **CalMeacham **does about Christopher Wood, so for me the nadir of the series is the DAF-LALD-TMWTGG trilogy.

43

Ditto this, despite having Christopher Walken it is seared in my memory as the worst.

I mean a final confrontation scene involving a blimp?

44

My rather idiosyncratic take on the Bond films. The films that everyone hates: eg. Diamonds are Forever and Golden Gun aren’t that bad and I found both quite enjoyable actually. At the same time the ones that everyone loves like Goldfinger aren’t that good and are quite ridiculous in parts.

Having said that I agree that Moonraker is pretty bad and the space scenes at the end are truly terrible. It’s probably the worst along with View to a Kill but IIRC I enjoyed the first half of even these two films. Die Another Day, I actually liked quite a bit though the last half hour or so was weak.

In fact I liked all the four Brosnan films and on average I think they are about as good as the much revered Connery ones.

45

Even though LALD has a special place in my heart, since it was my first r-rated movie (@12) and my first Bond flick, the Connery movies have always stood out for me. That being said, they haven’t aged well. The SFX are corny, the acting not very inspired, the misogyny rampant. I know they are the templates for many things to come and having seen those things done better, at least technically, takes some of the edge of the wonder I felt when I first saw them in the mid 70’s.

I’ll see if I can make this make sense. Thunderball is an awesome movie. From the opening teaser, the theme song, the action, the mystery. I didn’t see it when it first opened, being more interested in Flinstones cartoons at the time, but I’m sure it blew away the audience.

However, Never Say Never Again (not canon, but still), is not a great movie, but it’s certainly better executed or put together. Connery is older and has grown as an actor, Brandauer is not the Mad Evil Crime Boss, twirling his 'stasche, but manages to extract some sympathy from the audience, the narrative flows better, the SFX are of course more modern and by default better. Is it better than Thunderball? In almost every way but the impact. It simply didn’t have the oumph the original had 20 years early. It didn’t make the tiniest dent in pop culture didn’t give the audience in the 80’s the same feeling of “Oh my god, I’ve never seen anything like THAT before in the movies” which I’m sure Thunderball did on the original release.

Where am I rambling with this? Well, I’ve heard a lot of people saying that the modern Bourne movies are the Bond flicks of this era and that the re-booting of the franchise puts Bond back to what he should be. Maybe so, but IMO neither does. I love me some Bond, James Bond, but there is no way that a Bond adventure in 2008, not matter how well executed, will have as lasting an impact as Connery’s first five outings. I loved Casino Royal and I’m glad the franchise is still alive and at least somewhat modern, but I very much doubt that 30 years from now, people on a MB will discuss the merits of Matt Damon’s Bourne as compared to Craig’s Bond in the world of secret agents.

46

Ok, first of all, people don’t like Man with the Golden Gun?

Second, Tomorrow Never Dies was probably the worst Brosnan Bond film. Close behind is Die Another Day with it’s invisible cars and whatnot.

Moonraker and View To A Kill are probably the worst Moore films with Never Say Never Again as the worst Connery.

Really no opinion on the Dalton or Lazenby films.

IMHO of course.

47

I have a soft spot for Moonraker, as it was the first Bond movie I had ever seen (it might have been the first spy movie I’d ever seen, actually). So I thought Bond was some sort of space hero guy or something and was a little let down when I learned that he wasn’t. And then I started to catch up on the rest of the movies to that point and I absolutely fell in love with the books. So I can’t put Moonraker at the bottom of my list for sentimental reasons.

On the other hand, I don’t think Die Another Day was Brosnan’s worst turn as Bond; Goldeneye was. Goldeneye seemed to me to be a bunch of loosely strung-together vignettes, mostly stolen from other, better shows, with no real logic or story or characterization. I mean, the bit at the start where Bond flies, Bugs Bunny-like, into an airplane? Or the Die Hard 2 rip-off scene with the ejection out of the chopper just as it gets blown up? Or the bad guy’s lair hidden in a fucking lake a là You Only Live Twice? And, frankly, I never liked Brosnan as Bond, although I have always enjoyed him in other roles. I thought he was unnecessarily surly, with little or no discernible charm. His pictures were a big, fat disappointment to me.

Now the worst Bond flick for me has to be A View To A Kill. Class-clown Roger Moore looks creepy and lecherous throughout the film, as a very, very old Bond bedding very, very young women. Yeah, Chris Walken was in it, but I barely remember him in the movie, which doesn’t say much for his role. Moore’s cartoon antics as Bond are at their worst in this one – I think he even managed to up his double-take ante dramatically in this movie, doing it in virtually every scene and pulling off the difficult quadruple-take at least once, IIRC. Awful, awful movie.

I’m another fan of Timothy Dalton. His portrayal of Bond was so much truer to the Fleming character than Moore’s that it was like a breath of fresh air. His weren’t the best of the Bond flicks, but we did at least finally get to have the “He disagreed with something that ate him” scene which was so shocking and dramatic in the Live And Let Die novel and sadly missing from that movie.

48

Re: Brosnan.

I mentioned it it some other thread quite a while ago, but I would’ve loved to see him portray Bond the same way he portrayed his character in Tailor from Panama. Totally amoral, doing bad stuff for the fun of it, generally being a psychopath.

Because, really, if the real world was like the one where movie secret agents work, we’d have to hire psyco/sociopaths to do the job.

49

It worked fine in Black Sunday.

50

Really, the only problem I can see with the confrontation was that there may not have been enough blimps. Hopefully the next Daniel Craig Bond film will rectify that.

“What do you bloody hell MEAN he destroyed three Good Year blimps? How are we supposed to maintain any respect as an intelligence agency if our top agents keep destroying airships?! Is the man deranged? Oh that’s it, bring him to me, I’m going to shoot him!”:smiley: