I'm going to watch all of the James Bond Films [Please avoid Spoilers for Goldeneye or later Bond movies]

Cafe Society
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Quantum of Solace (2008)

After tracking down the man responsible for the death of his sweetheart in the last film, James Bond discovers he’s part of a secret shadow society that’s cornering the world’s oil market, or profiting from deforestation, or securing water rights in Bolivia, or all or some of these things, and other stuff as well, I suppose. It’s all a bit murky.

But it’s really a film about revenge. Bond wants revenge for Vesper’s death, while in a parallel story, a Bolivian agent (the stunning Olga Kurylenko) is seeking payback on the man who killed her family when she was a little girl. They both – spoiler alert! – learn that getting revenge can’t end their pain.

Loosely hung on this framework are some really cool action scenes and a lot of raw-nerve emotion. The boat chase in Haiti and the airplane scene are the two standouts. These both felt like great classic Bond sequences, and the new grittier style seems to give them more weight and higher stakes, even if they’re still as over-the-top improbable as anything from the “old” 007 days.

Mathieu Amalric as Dominic Greene did a fine job with a tough assignment, playing a Bond villain with no real distinguishing qualities – no physical deformities, no super-human abilities, no gimmick. He’s just a guy who does evil stuff, and he manages to sell it in a really chilling way.

Judi Dench is terrific as always. I really like Jeffrey Wright as Felix Leiter, but again we see too little of him. And sadly, this is the last we’ll see of him at all. David Harbour was a nice surprise as the sleazy, corrupt CIA higher-up.

It’s not all great. Miss Fields exists only to look pretty, sleep with James, and get killed. Even in the Connery and Moore days, she’d be an underdeveloped character. And it’s starting to feel like we’ve seen the Bond-goes-rogue bit a few too many times. And why, exactly, does Quantum need to hold their secret meetings in public? At the opera, even? Apparently, a writer’s strike affected this film, and it shows at times.

It’s a decent follow-up to Casino Royale, but certainly not the best Daniel Craig entry in the series.

Next up: Skyfall

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There’s a lot that annoys me about QoS, but apart from the whole Strawberry Fields nonsense what tops the list is the Ford Pinto Hotel, where a minor fenderbender in the parking lot causes the ENTIRE HOTEL TO EXPLODE. That seems like a significant design flaw.

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I remember almost nothing about this movie other than part of it was at a hotel and part of it was on some salt flats or something. That is the sum total of the impression it made on me.

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Well, because the opera scene is fantastic (as I think I rudely mentioned upthread, sorry). I agree the film itself has issues, though for me it’s still an enjoyable watch - but that scene is one of my all-time favourites. I suppose it does help if you really like Puccini.

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Nope.

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Ah! I scrolled through his filmography and somehow didn’t catch No Time to Die in there. I’ve waited to watch it until I get there in order. Three to go!

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Quantum of Solace is way down in the rankings for its plot, but the action scenes are among the best of any Bond movie The opening car chase, the boat chase, the plane chase, the opera, the hotel destruction - all fantastic.

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For me, the worst plot is the villain’s plan. He’s going to…corner the water supply? And…charge a lot for water? It’s not gold, or oil, just water.

And how did that work out? Instead of paying too much for water, everyone living there left.

When this actual plan was tried in real life, it didn’t work.

And the Hotel de Pinto was beyond absurd!

And one detail: so Bond leaves the guy in the middle of frikken nowhere with no car and just a can of oil to drink. He’s certain to die. But yet, someone from Quantum/Spectre took the time to track hm down and make him drink the oil? How did this killer do it without being seen, and more to the point, why?

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I can’t disagree there, but I wanted to mention something I left out initially: I thought the foot chase through Siena and subsequent fight on the scaffolding were quite poorly done. With all the quick cuts and weird camera angles, I couldn’t tell which was Bond and which was the other guy half the time.
That had me worried about the rest of the movie, but fortunately the action scenes did get better.

When Medrano said something about “The power generators - the whole place runs on them,” well, we all knew what was going to happen, didn’t we?

Yep, I thought that was ridiculous as well.

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I try, but I just cannot like this one. The aforementioned action scenes do very little for me because of the absolutely manic editing. I have seen this film a few times (self-confessed Bond fanatic, which is the only reason why) and I still have trouble working out what is going on for parts of them. Clearly they were going for a Bourne-like effect (highly ironically), but failed badly.

The opera scene is indeed the best section of the film, the music and action complimenting each other well, but even the ending to that chapter is butchered with more weird editing choices (specifically the part where Greene and co leave the opera house and Bond drops the heavy off the roof). I suspect this may have been down to the writers’ strike, something that must have had a seriously detrimental effect to the film overall.

The plot has precisely zero to do with Fleming’s original short story, but that is no bad thing, as it really is not suitable at all for big screen Bond. I think the film interprets a ‘quantum of solace’ in a different way to how Fleming defined it as well. The film shows Bond’s quantum of solace as being a small scrap of satisfaction in finding the man that betrayed Vesper, or perhaps a hint of comfort at being able to put that chapter behind him (although later films undo that, no further spoilers…).

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Er, they didn’t - they found his body some time after his death, and the autopsy revealed he had drunk the oil before death. In other words, he was so desperately thirsty that he felt compelled to do so (nothing to lose, right?). This is very clearly indicated by Bond saying as he tosses the oil can to Greene: “Here - I bet you make it 30 miles before you consider drinking it” (or similar - from memory). In other words, Bond makes sure that Greene suffers for his crimes, rather than putting him out of his misery. Another example of Craig’s ‘harder’ Bond, not something you could imagine Connery/Moore/Brosnan doing.

This confused me, too - but I think it’s intentional. We’re meant to be left wondering who the bodyguard (who we soon learn is a British employee of Special Branch, i.e. the police’s anti-terror division) is actually working for, even though he’s ostensibly on Bond’s side. Clearly he’s not on Greene’s team either. But yeah, not sure it really works.

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It was more the choice of the ‘detached’ way the action is seen by the viewer (eg there is shooting going on etc but it’s not heard, just the music over the top, it almost feels like it is edited as a trailer).

Just on Greene in the desert, M tells Bond right at the end of the film that Greene was found with two bullets in the back of his head and motor oil in his stomach. So one way or another Quantum caught up with him, either before or after he drank the oil!

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Well damn, you’re right! Still, I think it’s easily explained - “without being seen” is easy enough, it’s the middle of a desert. And why? They want to find out what Greene told Bond, and then to make sure he dies. Whether he drank the oil before or after being found by Quantum is not really relevant.

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I always took that he drank the oil was the heat and thirst drove him crazy enough to drink it, not that he was made to. Which was Bond’s hope all along.

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Of course, he could have avoided that by, you know, pouring the oil out on the ground when he still had his senses about him.

There wouldn’t have been the poetic justice, of course. Who said art has to make sense?

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Why bother carrying the oil can at all; in case he ran across an old car that was down a quart?

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You find a lot of things in the desert!

I’d have thrown it at Bond’s head.

But yea, the Spectre hitman, who must have arrived after the Hotel de Pinto affair, but not much after that he still saw Bond and Greene go into the desert, followed them without being seen in his car, and either tortured Green with motor oil and then shot him, or just shot him, and then left. Looking at subsequent movies, who was this incredibly competent hitman?

They should have just left the guy to die of thirst. It was good enough for The Eiger Sanction.

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Dump the oil out, use sand to clean out as much of the oil as possible. Carry the empty can and use it when you get desperate enough to drink your own urine.

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Isn’t motor oil poisonous?

I thought the point of giving him the oil is to give him an exit that’s slightly more pleasant than dying of thirst.

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I suppose that’s possible, though I usually think of Craig-era James Bond as being a bit cruel to the antagonists, generally. I thought of it as an ironic gesture like, “Here’s something you can’t drink - see how you feel when you’re out of water” deal.

While thirst seems like a dreadful way to die, I can’t help but to think that ingesting motor oil would be in the same ballpark.