Thinking back about Quantum of Solace and the whole convoluted thing with raising the price of water in Bolivia, or whatever…
Which Bond villains had evil schemes that actually, on their face, seem reasonably sound? And which are just fundamentally flawed even if they weren’t stopped?
Even if Goldfinger was able to somehow irradiate the US gold reserves, it’s not as if he’d be able to go on trading his own on the open market. I’d have to think gold would just be delisted, and/or they’d nab him for income tax evasion or some such bookkeeping thing.
Live and Let Die has a fairly sound evil plot. He’s governing a small Caribbean island where he’s secretly growing heroin, and he even has a distribution network in the US. He’s going to give it away for free to increase number of junkies and bankrupt the other criminal elements, then double the price once the other “families” are out. At least it makes sense?
The Moonraker plot, about wiping out the world’s population, doesn’t seem very logically sound. I mean, there are presumably ways to do it, but they don’t really get into actually being as thorough with it as the scheme would need to be.
From Russia, With Love was pretty down-to-earth. M and Bond knew that it was certainly a trap, but for a chance to get ahold of a Soviet cipher machine, they were more than willing to risk Bond’s life.
For Your Eyes Only involved a search for a shipwreck with some classified equipment onboard. Neither the British nor the Soviets could publicly mount a salvage operation, so they relied on proxies to get it.
Goldfinger planned to irradiate the gold in Fort Knox, not destroying it but making it valueless, thereby making his massive supply of gold worth more. That always struck me as a decent plan as far as Bond villains go.
Actually, the scheme in Quantum of Solace was both dastardly and rather believable. Some people apparently had a problem with villains who ignored oil in order to control water, but it’s not an idiot plan. They were capable of overthrowing the government and seizing control of enough water to ensure the prosperity or ruin of most of the country. The best part is that nobody even suspected, and most of what they did was perfectly legal. They very nearly pulled it off, and would have effectively ruled the entire nation while making obscene amounts of money to build their network elsewhere.
I’m somehow surprised that the whole thread wasn’t inspired precisely by “The man with the golden gun”.
Scaramanga, Christopher Lee with three nipples, pays scientists and engineers to build parts for the first truly efficient solar powered energy plant. But because he wanted to sell it to the highest bidder (which included the commies, of course) and had a childish fixation with using his sun powered ray of doom to blow stuff up, the British government sends a trained killer named Bond to destroy all of his hard work.
You know, I’m going to bet that nowadays he would be considered one of mankind’s biggest benefactors, what with the unlimited supply of completely clean energy.
I don’t think gold would have been delisted just because America didn’t have any, not to mention I doubt he be dumb enough to hang around the US or an extradition country after this plan went off.
Poisoning all men taller than 4-foot-6-inches is my favorite. It might not have been particularly do-able, but I’ve got a low tolerance for the Bond franchise, and the dénouement solves that little problem.
Actually, I never understood why having radioactive gold would be a particular problem. Even elaving aside that Fort Knox gold isn’t traded on the market, iiradiating it wouldn’t particularly have any effect anyway. The structure of the gold won’t magically “hold” the radiation forever. It will just re-radiate it like all metals do, right?
Making money by controlling water isn’t an unworkable idea in and of itself. In some developing nations, corrupt bureaucrats have made themselves a lot of money by selling the right to distribute water to foreign companies, essentially privatizing what is usually done by a government-controlled utility. The foreign companies then underserve and overcharge the populace.
The problem in Quantum of Solace is that the hydrogeology involved in the evil scheme makes no sense whatsoever.
In fact, if you to the wikipedia page on gold, and click on the entry for isotopes, it should become clear that the worst possible scenario would have the product safe to handle in two and a half years. And if we assumed that it had all been transmuted to the most stable isotope, the daughter product would be nice and stable platinum, not exactly something that’s going to bankrupt the government.
Explain, please. I didn’t entirely understand some sections of that movie (and it was presented or edited in such a way that I’m not sure the writers did, either). I vaguelly thought they had been draining water away from natural streams and rivers and had simply used the excavation in the desert as a vast cistern, thus leaving most of the country sans water.
The biggest problem here (and in The Spy Who Loved Me, which is essentially the same plot) is the henchmen factor. How much do you have to pay someone to stay on the ground while you fly up in the sky and kill all the people on Earth? Maybe the launch controllers and such didn’t know, but someone is helping him refine the nerve gas and build the satellites. Wouldn’t you ask some questions?
I used to think this was one of the best Evil Schemes[sup]TM[/sup] in the Bond movies. I read the book a while ago, and in that, Goldfinger really does plan to steal the gold. It’s a surprising twist in the movie, and Gert Frobe is so good in the scene where he explains it to Bond. Even if the gold was delisted from open trading, that just means there’ll be a black market, and that doesn’t exactly drive prices down.
But Goldfinger doesn’t love money. He doesn’t love gold for the things he can buy with it, he loves the gold, itself. It says so right in the theme song. He even talks about its “brilliance” and “devine heaviness”, and how he welcomes any enterprise that will increase his holdings. For him to destroy gold seems out of character, even if it will make his own gold more valuable.
I agree completely on not following some of it and the possibility of the writers getting lost along with the audience. My interpretation runs thusly, and I may be misremembering things:
They don’t show any dried-out rivers or streams. Also, if the bad guys had diverted surface water, it would be very easy to spot the dam or whatever from the air, and a perennially running stream that just stops one day would definitely attract attention.
They do show poor people standing in line at a water tower (maybe tank) with no water. The tank is supplied by a pipe going into the ground.
Therefore, the water supply the bad guys are out to monopolize is not surface water (rivers, lakes etc.), but rather an aquifer (an enormous body of porous rock or soil, saturated with water, and located underground).
Most aquifers recharge via rain or snow soaking into the ground. The recharge zone for the movie aquifer is presumably up in the snow-capped mountains while the poor people live in the big desert, or at least a fairly dry area. If they lived in the coastal area, there should be ample rainfall and surface water.
The giant man-made cistern hidden under the desert cannot exist in reality because the aquifer is just a bunch of wet dirt that people sink wells into the downhill end of, while it soaks up water on the uphill end. You can’t do anything with wet dirt that would result in it being impounded in the manner shown. Even if you could somehow artificially stop the recharge process by blocking new water from seeping down to that part of the aquifer where the farmers are, there is a ton of water right near them. It might take decades to draw the water table down enough to get into trouble.
Beyond that, I liked the movie. Still not as good as Casino Royale.
