I know Bond films are not noted for their inherent logic, but did it make sense to anyone that an agent has to get two kills BEFORE obtaining his double-oh, license to kill, status?
IIRC, the license to kill status means that the government will shield the agent from any incidental murder along the way. Lesser agents can kill explicit targets.
Sure, one could be luck. The agent might not show any disturbance after a single kill. Two shows the potential 00 to be a mean, callous son of a bitch whose is utterly without feeling, just the guy they’re looking for. “Son, have you ever considered a career in Her Majesty’s Secret Service?” 
My group was confused and divided on a major plot development, towards the end of the movie (so I’ll put this all in spoiler-format) – sorry for the length.
When Vesper is taking the money to a one-eyed villain, is that Le Chiffre, or is that one of Mr White’s men who just coincidentally also has a bad left eye?
Here’s our dilemma:
Situation A: If it’s LeChiffre: it doesn’t look like him, face is thinner, although we can’t see him well under the hat. But if it is him, the whole villain’s plot makes no sense. That means Mr White hadn’t really killed Le Chiffre, it was all a sham to make Bond trust Vesper? But then why didn’t Vesper leave Bond the minute the money was transferred to the bank account? Why stay around for so long?
Situation B: If it’s not LeChiffre, just another of Mr White’s agents, then were the screenwriters so dumb that they created another villain with a bad left eye for the same movie?
We’re very divided on this. My wife and daughter-in-law think it was Situation B, while my son and I don’t think any movie-makers, however incompetent, could be so stupid as to have Situation B so it must be Situation A. IMDB and a perusal of online reviews has been no help. What do y’all think?
I think it’s Situation B. While I agree that the screenwriters might not have been completely thinking straight when they wrote Situation B, it would be worse to have it Situation A and have the plot make absolutely no sense.
Agreed.
A spoiler for the novel.
The SMERSH agent who comes to kill Vesper at the end wears an eyepatch.
Perhaps they felt compeled to keep that in the film.
To answer a question upthread about Kevin McClory’s rights. IIRC, he coauthored the screenplay that the novel “Thunderball” was based on. Thus he owns some rights to that story (he remade it as “Never Say Never Again”) and the character of Blofeld and the SPECTRE organization. Other posters can fill in more accurately, I’m sure.
Sir Rhosis
There’s actually been a couple of complicated legal fights about that. The original title for Thunderball was Warhead. When McClory decided to make Never Say Never Again, EON took him over to court over it, McClory won, (obviously) and the judge ruled that he could only make a Bond movie that was basically a version of Warhead/Thunderball, but he could make as many versions as he wanted. Then, in the late 1990s, he got Sony to agree to make Warhead 2000, with Liam Neeson as Bond. EON again took him to court and this time won, so the project had to be scrapped. After seeing Casino Royale, I can’t say I’m sad about that.
^^^Rumor (and I emphasize the word) around the Bond Geeks Campfire is that McClory might approach Brosnan to appear in his next remake (if he can win in court). The man is 81; he ought to just sell his rights back and retire.
Sir Rhosis
I agree. Anyone who tries to fill Craig’s shoes is going to have to be damned spectacular, and Bro
I wonder, if that rumor is true, if he started thinking along those lines before he saw Craig in action (he might have been one of those silly CraigNotBonders). No one with sense could say, after seeing Casino Royale, that Craig isn’t now the perfect choice.
We don’t need to see Brosnan back as Bond or a Bond-type character. Personally, I like him better when he’s doing other things. I prefer him 1000 times more in movies like The Tailor of Panama or The Matador or Evelyn than any Bond movie he’s done.
Sorry about that, my Mac got all fubared (had to reboot for the first time in a couple of months). I was going to say that Brosnan just ain’t good enough (and that’s not a slam against him) to play Bond after Craig. Clive Owen might be able to do it, he’s the only actor I can think of who could. I don’t even think a suddenly young Connory could compete.
The Ford car featured in the film is the Mk3 Ford Mondeo, a model specific to Europe and Japan and unavailable in North America. This is because like the European Ford Focus, it basically leads its class in performance and value, even compared to European and Japanese cars in Europe and Japan and also looks great. If Ford brought it to North America, as North American car buffs have been requesting, it will probably sell in large numbers and compromise Ford’s long running status as a non-profit organization. God knows what will happen then.
You’re a sick bastard! (And I don’t even like Ford’s!)
Ford has already confirmed that the Edge is the only new model coming to North America. Happy SUVing!
A correction: The featured Mondeo is the MKIV, not the MKIII as I statd in error.
Oh, one minor nit with the film that I had. There was at least one scene which really called for Bond to be smoking a cigarette, but he wasn’t. Yeah, I know, smoking’s bad, but damn it, the scene absolutely called for it. (Don’t ask me now which one it was, but during the film, I couldn’t help but think that it needed it.)
Brosnan said the same thing about one of the scenes in Tomorrow Never Dies, but refused to smoke in the scene because as a smoker, he knows how hard it is to quit. I have to respect him for that, but at the same time, I agree that it did call for a cigarette, and were I him, I wouldn’t have been able to resist firing one up.
To answer a question right on the first page of this thread, the lovely Italian lakeside villa seen right at the end is Villa La Gaeta, and the sanatorium seen a little earlier (you’ll know the place I mean) is called Villa del Balbianello. Both are on the shores of Lake Como.
Two observations from me: one, Eva Green is gorgeous (well, duh) but to me, she was over-made-up for a lot of the film. The scene where she’s getting ready for the poker game and standing in front of the mirror in the bathroom, though, is precisely what cinematography was invented for all those years ago. Wow!
Two, I know it’s picky to nitpick “unrealistic” events in a Bond film, but
How come gasoline/aviation fuel will usually ignite in movies if someone so much as flicks a lightswitch 50 yards away, and yet the bomb-rigged fuel truck being driven towards the superjumbo fails to explode despite being shot and holed several times, crashing through three other vehicles, causing flames to erupt around them, and finally having a jumbo jet almost land on it before pulling up and peppering it with red hot jet blast?
By the way, I was amazed to learn that the “Miami Airport” scenes where the above spoilered event takes place was actually filmed on the Top Gear test track in Surrey!
Ha. My suspicions were correct, then. At one point in the sequence I saw a clearly British police vehicle on-camera and said to myself “they filmed this scene in the UK, didn’t they?”
Oh, and now that I think about it, didn’t one of the more famous Top Gear segments concern itself with blowing cars away with the exhaust from a jet engine, as shown in the film?