Because I’ve seen them twice and generally liked them, barring a few things, but I am still not entirely sure what happened.
I wanted to like them but I’ve watched them more than twice on HBO, half paying attention, and can’t figure it out either. Until you get a better answer here’s my understanding:
In Casino Royal, James Bond plays poker for virtually the entire movie.
In Quantum of Solace he eventually visits a desert and I think something about water may be involved.
Well, see, you’re working this thing crabwise, a James Bond movie begins with a collection of scenes involving action, beautiful women, and exotic locals and then ties them together in some sort of ‘plot.’ Sometimes it’s a pretty tangled route.
This isn’t what you wanted, but I’ve never seen the movie “A Quantum of Solace,” but I HAVE read the original short story by Ian Fleming.
Not surprisingly, the movie and the story have NOTHING in common but the title.
James Bond IS a character in the story, but he plays no active role in it. Rather, the story presents James Bond attending a dreary dinner/cocktail party with a bunch of stuffy British diplomats and their wives. Bond is bored to tears, and is particularly annoyed by his hostess. However, Bond’s curiosity is piqued by an older diplomat who tells him a soap operatic tale about a young, shy foreign service officer and his unhappy marriage to an unfaithful wife.
The old diplomat coins the term “a quantum of solace,” which literally means “the tiniest possible amount of comfort or happiness.” The point is that a man will remain in a marriage or a romantic relationship, even a troubled one, so long as he receives a quantum of solace from it. But once he no longer receives even that tiny amount of happiness or comfort, there’s no telling how cold-blooded or even cruel he can become.
After hearing this tale, Bond realizes that…
- His seemingly dull hostess was the unfaithful wife in the story.
- Even ordinary people have their own passions and their own stories to tell.
That second insight means more coming from an adventurer like Bond than it would have from an ordinary schmoe.
Something about oil, a guy named Elvis, another guy who cries blood…a big construction crane…uh…Daniel Craig’s balls…I can’t remember much else.
Both of them were awful movies, IMO.
In Casino Royale the evil guy who bleeds from his eyes acts as a sort of banker for bad guys. The evil old guy represents an evil organization who hooks the bleedy-eye guy up with new customers. The evil guy who bleeds from his eyes uses his customers’ money to play the stock market. He agrees to sell shares that he doesn’t own at a certain price at a certain date, then tries to get that stock’s price to crash so he can buy it super cheap and sell it at like a million percent profit at the agreed upon price and date. So he sends his minion to blow up a prototype plane being unveiled by the company whose stock he’s planning on selling. Bond, who’s been investigating all this, discovers the plot and saves the prototype and the day. So now the bleedy-eye guy is out a shitload of cash and the people whose money he used to bankroll his scheme are after him.
He’s a math genius so he decides to try to win some of it back by hosting a super high stakes poker game. The British people don’t want him to win because then he’ll be able to pay his customers back- if he’s unable to pay them back he’ll be desperate for a way out (because they’ll be hunting him down) so he’ll have no choice but to go to them and give them a bunch of info on his clients in exchange for sanctuary. So Bond goes to the poker game and beats him. Evil bloody-eyed guy is pissed and kidnaps the girl so that he can use her as bait to lure Bond into a trap and torture him in exchange for the bank code he’d given the casino earlier so that he can steal the money from him. He tells Bond that the old Hispanic guy Bond hooked up with at some other point in the movie was working for him all along. I think this is a lie. Dunno.
While he’s beating the hell out of Bond’s nuts people from the evil organization from the beginning of the movie show up. They’re pissed at the bleedy-eyed guy for ruining their reputation, or failing them, or something. They kill the fuck out of all the bloody-eye guy’s henchman and Bond and the girl get away. Bond wakes up at a hospital and sends the old Hispanic guy into British custody (we learn in the next film that they tortured the fuck out of him). Bond and his chick flirt, talking about fingering each other and stuff and go to Venice to blow all the money they won at the poker game.
But then the girl steals his money and runs to give it to members of the evil organization. Bond chases, kills the fuck out of a bunch of them and tries to save the girl before she kills herself via elevator drowning. Turns out that the evil organization had kidnapped her bf and threatened to kill the fuck out of him unless she gave them all the money. So Bond, in the final scene, kills the shit out of the guy from the evil organization from the beginning of the movie. Which kind of sucks because he’d be dead if it weren’t for him and he’s not really responsible for the chick’s death but whatever.
Actually, regarding the original “Quantum of Solace” short story, the host is the governor of Jamaica. Bond had attended a dinner party at the governor’s mansion with two other guests - a dreary Canadian businessman and his wife. Afterward, the governor tells him a story of when he was young and how a fellow member of the diplomatic corps had an unfaithful wife who he scandalously divorced and who eventually remarried a Canadian.
I found the recent two movies to be annoyingly incomprehensible, even by Bond standards, and I’m not a fan of Daniel Craig.
Quantum of Solace:
Actually in the final scene of the previous movie Bond doesn’t kill the shit out of the dude but puts him in his trunk so that they can interrogate him. It turns out the guys organization is named Quantum and they have people, supposedly everywhere, including in M’s security detail. One of Ms guards shoots her, injures here and Bond goes running after the dude which results in a high energy chase during a horse race that ends up in a steeple with construction of some sort. Anyway, M6 is busy trying to find out more about Quantum, since they apparently no fuck all about this organization that has tentacles everywhere. Through A series of fortunate events Bond discovers information that leads them to the creepy guy with the scar who seems to be some sort of facilitator for Quantum. M tells Bond to back off, because the Americans are working with the facilitator, who is working on a deal to help some sort of military overthrow in Bolivia in exchange for some worthless land. M6 sends some woefully under-trained highly sexual secretary to “bring Bond back”, but Bond ends up bedding her instead, which gets her killed goldfinger style except with oil instead of gold paint. Of course Bond ends up with another woman along the way who wants revenge against the Bolivian general for killing her parents. Meanwhile, it turns out the land isn’t worthless but is like the nexus of all the water for Bolivia, created presumably by Quantum changing water tables throughout Bolivia with underwater dams and such. Quantum will now start charging the Bolivian government an exorbitant fee on the water rights. Bond tracks down all the bad guys down at this Hotel in MidlleOfNowhereburg where the girl manages to kill the Generalissimo who murdered her parents, the hotel gets destroyed because it is powered by fuel cells, and then Bond captures the facilitator dude, takes him to the middle of the desert and lets him try to survive and gives a quart of oil to drink if he so desires, hearkening back to them killing Strawberry Fields. It is reported that Quantum finds the dude themselves and makes him drink the oil and he is dead.
Joe Bob says check it out.
@Octopus - o ya
Well, first, Joe Bob says,
0 breasts
x car chases
x dead bodies
creepy weepy eye
elevator fu
nut buster fu
Then he says check it out
I agree, of course. There was much talk of Craig “re-inventing” and “re-starting” and “breathing new life into” the Bond franchise; he has done no such thing. I think he has turned a whole generation off Bond because his Bond movies lack the one thing that made people like Bond movies in the past: fun.
Craig-lovers can talk all they want about how much grittier, moodier, realistic-er, darker and therefore better the new Bond movies supposedly are. But this transformation removed all of the wild and krazy hijinks that made the earlier Bond movies enjoyable and set them apart from just another scowling, growling, violent action movie. In short, they’re now too “serious,” and they have no sense of humor.
People who like the Craig Bond films inevitably come back with “but…they’re closer to the book.” This doesn’t mean anything. Books are books, and movies are movies. The James Bond movie franchise built itself up into a distinctive cinematic experience. Changing all of that just because it’s closer to the book doesn’t mean it will be better movies.
Craig, through no fault of his own but rather as a result of bad casting and bad writing, has made the franchise drop dramatically in appeal and if it is canceled, as some people think it will be, Craig will be forever known as the man who killed it.
I enjoy the Fleming novels and until these two films detested the Bond movies.
Crane fu. Drywall fu. There was a lot of good fu in that one.
UM. Well, I am pleased to see it really is as confusing as I remember, though I am grateful you have made at least some sense out of it for me! Thanks…
Whoa. Suddenly I miss Brosnan and the simpler Bond movies.
I totally agree with Argent Towers, btw. There are plenty of “gritty” “realistic” movies out there. There wasn’t anything else like Bond.
And these people, they are… illiterate?
I liked Casino Royale quite a bit, although the actual ending (after the fake ending) was drug out. And I’ve never, ever read a Fleming book. For me, the attachment to this Bond is a bit of reaction to the Roger Moore era, where everything was tongue-in-cheek, almost as bad as 60’s Batman. I’ll take a little grit, thank you, just to compensate for crap like Moonraker. That said, I’ve obviously missed the Dalton and Brosnan generations of Bond, but Moonraker et. al. is a pretty good reason to skip Bond altogether, so I finally checked out the Craig era Bond.
OTOH, I skipped Quantum of Solace after hearing mixed reviews, so my Craig-era interest is not all that firm.
Heck, I liked Brosnan because he obviously felt pain. When he’s getting beaten up in the submarine in The World is Not Enough, he’s not just laughing it off and asking for more - he’s really geting fucked up.
So Roger Moore era… no. Brosnan era… okay.
Fuck.
Nope, he shoots him then kidnaps him, as is made clear at the start of Quantum of Solace.
YMMV, but I for one found the Brosnan bonds to be unwatchable. Casino Royale is one of the better action films I’ve seen. Quantum of Solace suffered in comparison, with a so-so plot and a unremittingly glum Bond (he is basically in mourning after the events of the first film, which didn’t make for great viewing).
The Bond reboot has been critically and commercially successful. The next Bond film has been put on hold because of MGM’s financial problems, not because the franchise has been killed off. Quantum of Solace made about $150,000,000 more than the last Brosnan film. Clearly it’s lost it’s appeal for you, but not for audiences in general. Check the reviews on Metacritic and the ratings on IMDB if you don’t believe me.