[Just your average movie goer]

I've wanted to write about this movie for a while actually. Now, it's been so long since it came out that it's almost topical again - as apparently, if rumour is to be believed, MGM's financial woes are over and a new Bond movie is reportedly coming out next year. Although, how a movie studio can have financial woes when it owns the right to a cash cow like the Bond franchise is anyone's guess. Anyway, I'm glad that they've sorted out their difficulties because, frankly, I think it would be a terrible tragedy if that roaring lion of theirs were to disappear from the cinema.

Anyway... QUANTUM OF SOLACE is the best damn Bond movie in years, decades even. It may even be the best Bond movie ever. Yet for some reason, the critics panned it, audiences turned away from it and nearly everyone acted as if it were a blight on the franchise. Are all these people nuts? Finally, we've seen how future James Bond movies could be and it was awesome... and now, because of strange audience reactions, we might not see its like again.

Now, is it flawed? Yes. It has huge flaws. I'm not going to turn a blind eye to them. In fact I will address them in this very post, because that's the kind of unbiased even-handed reviewer that I am. However, find me a Bond film that doesn't have flaws.

The classic favourite - and really the only respectable choice for a favourite from the first two decades of the series - From Russia With Love has plenty of flaws. The gypsy camp, while it gives the audience a chance to ogle some beautiful women, doesn't serve the story in any way. Neither does the follow up scene where Kerim Bey takes out that Bulgarian assassin. Then the movie comes to a climax with the thrilling finale on board the Orient Express where Bond battles it out with Red Grant and then the movie... doesn't end, but drags on with a series of dull anti-climaxes, culminating in Bond fighting an old woman with a poisonous shoe.

Then there's the new favourite Casino Royale. That's got heaps of flaws! It's a good forty minutes too long. It's pacing is off and it manages to have too much action and not enough action at the same time. No, that's not a typo. You read that right. If the story revolves around Bond's mission in the casino and the consequences thereafter, then there are far too many action sequences. If it's an action movie, then it's got problems - because the action comes to a grinding halt and stays there for a good forty minutes or more, and there's a clip from a romance movie near the end. It needed serious trimming. Bond doesn't even get to the casino until the hour mark has passed, when he should have been sitting down at the card table thirty minutes into the movie or forty at the max. Prologues are not supposed to be an hour long. And don't get me started on that awful torture scene. That was put in there for one reason and one reason alone - the filmmakers wanted to seem daring and out there. Well, let me tell you, if their film had been slapped with the R-rating that scene should have earned it, they wouldn't have felt half so clever.

So go easy on Quantum of Solace. The other films aren't exactly spotless either.

Now that we've covered that, let's have a look at these flaws first. Then I'll talk about the positives afterwards, which I feel outweigh these. I'm not excusing these flaws by the way - they're inexcusable. However, I think that after a shaky start (literally, as you'll see in a moment), the movie finds its feet and generally moves from strength to strength.

The very start itself is fantastic actually - not the car chase, mind you, but the way it was established with the camera panning over the water towards the mountainous shoreline. It was very scenic, a little mysterious and then once the cutaways to Bond, cars, bad guys and guns established what we were going to see, it was very effective. Unfortunately, the chase itself was marred by the bane of the cinema going experience - I am talking of course about the shaky cam and the fast cuts between shots. The sooner this is taken out of movies and filmmakers sign agreements with studios never to use it again, the better. It doesn't make you feel like you're in the action to see a camera moving wildly about. If you were in the action, you'd be controlling the way your head moved. You'd also have directional sound and other physical sensations to help keep you oriented. This can't be recreated on film - unless the audience is allowed to control the camera movements directly. As it stands, the shaky cam just makes people disoriented, dizzy and angry.

Now, the sequence was somewhat easier to follow on DVD but in the cinema, I literally couldn't watch it. So this is a huge flaw. Make no mistake. It's also a shame because if audiences could have seen the chase more clearly, they could have appreciated it far more. The section in the quarry, with Bond driving under the crane, is a beautiful homage to Dr. No - but I doubt anyone would have noticed that in the cinema because they'd be looking away from the screen to avoid getting headaches.

Then there was the opening song. I don't know what the producers were thinking. Hip hop? Were they serious? I cannot think of a style of music less appropriate to a Bond movie. Now, I have to say that this is just another example of an ongoing issue with the series. The producers have forgotten how to do the opening credits. They are supposed to be a joy to watch in and of themselves and part of this is having a good song playing over them. I think Goldeneye's opening song was reasonable. Tomorrow Never Dies could have been the best ever except the producers, in a moment of idiocy, relegated the fantastic K.D. Lang song to the end credits and threw in a lacklustre Sheryl Crow effort because they thought it was 'trendy' - just as I'm guessing they thought this nonsense by Alicia Keys and some dude was. The key to great music in film is to rise above what is trendy, stick to your principles and use what is good. The instrumental piece at the start of From Russia with Love with the alluring dancer still holds up. Although nothing else in You Only Live Twice can be said to do the same, the opening song there still sounds enticing and beautiful today. Also, note that many of the films from Goldfinger onwards used the same song in the titles and the credits and it was good. That's what the idiot producers should have done with Tomorrow Never Dies as well - bookend the film with K.D. Lang's incredible song. It's called Surrender if you're interested in hearing it - and you should check it out if you've never heard it. It really shows how an opening Bond song should be.

Now, I don't know if this was made for the movie or not, but there is a song doing the rounds on You-Tube called Forever, I Am All Yours by Eva Almer that captures the essence of a great Bond theme beautifully. Now, it may have been written and recorded after the fact but if it was written beforehand and turned down by the producers, then that was a big mistake.

If you're interested in what makes a great Bond theme, consider this point. Could elements of the theme be incorporated into the score for the film as motiffs? John Barry did it with the Bond themes in the old movies (except for Octopussy - but he didn't score anything for that rubbish, bless him). Actually, in The Living Daylights, John Barry not only did it with the theme song, he even did it with the song that Necros was always listening to on his walkman - that's how awesome John Barry was. With Goldeneye, Eric Serra didn't incorporate the song into the score. However, that wasn't any fault of Tina Turner's. That was just because Eric Serra is an idiot - and his score actually makes the film almost unwatchable today. David Arnold (who I will talk about more later as well) took over from Serra and his scores are brilliant. Movie goers with keen ears like myself will instantly hear how he utlises K.D. Lang's song throughout the score to Tomorrow Never Dies (not Sheryl Crow's song, which those idiot producers failed to notice). And he also used that noisy little pop number for Casino Royale to great effect as well - and like A-ha's theme song for The Living Daylights, that wasn't even much of a song. However, it was still usable. The Alicia Keys one was not - and David Arnold, to his credit, didn't use any of it for his score for Quantum of Solace.

Now, you may wonder why I've talked at length about the theme song but the fact is that the theme song is a big deal. Get it right and the audience will be primed and ready for your movie. Get it wrong and you'll put the audience off-side. Now, I'm a defender of this movie, but I was actually one of those who was put off by the theme song in the cinema (I skip it on the DVD so it doesn't bother me any more) but it made me very resistant to the rest of the movie... so resistant in fact that it wasn't until I saw it again on DVD that I could really appreciate it. So if the opening song put audiences off, that's a big deal and it's a mistake the producers should take great lengths to avoid repeating.

Next, the criticisms that this film tried to copy the Bourne films a bit are valid and they're no minor charge. The Bourne films were a fad and a fad that's already fading, thank goodness. No slight on those books by Robert Ludlum. I don't care of anything else he wrote but the Bourne books are really great entertainment. The movies however are bleak, lifeless and full of form but no substance. Take away the stunts and Bourne's telephone calls and there's not much there. They're basically like the way MacBeth views life - full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. The Bond movies shouldn't be imitating these things. It's another example of the producers trying to be trendy again - and it's pathetic. Also, by trying to mimic others, the producers put themselves behind trends, when surely it'd be a far better thing to be setting them.

So, where is the Bourne-ification of Bond in this movie then? I see three main offenders - the shaky cam at the start, the overly long and rather uninteresting scene where Bond chases Mitchell (again, with that obnoxious fast editing and shaky cam) and the uninspired and silly little fight Bond has with that small-time hug in Haiti.

This post has been edited by Just your average movie goer: 22 May 2011 - 07:16 AM

[Just your average movie goer]

That's a lot of flaws, Movie Goer! Is that all of them?

I wish it were. Unfortunately, there's also some lame dialogue between Dominic Greene and Camille in their first scene together. Then there are two more things that bother me.

First, they kill Mathis off. Sometimes, movies want to be gutsy or demonstrate that things are serious by killing a character off. I get that. However, when a character's as great as this guy, you've gotta wonder whether that's a smart move. Now, presumably, they did it so they can develop Bond's relationship with Felix Leiter more and, I've gotta say, I love the new Felix Leiter. More Leiter in the next movie, please! However, can't we have them both?

Secondly, there's a gratuitous attempted rape scene thrown into the proceedings near the end for no reason. I think the filmmakers wanted to demonstrate that General Medrano was a really bad guy, since he seemed like a cuddly teddy bear - however, we did have that scene where Camille tells Bond what the General did to her and her family when she was a child. That ought to be enough to justify Camille going after him at the end, surely? Also, to make matters worse, neither Bond, Camile or the filmmakers seem to care whether the poor woman involved in this scene made it out of the building or not. Not cool. Not cool at all.

So, that's it? No, there's more. There are some issues with timing (for instance, how long did Bond leave Mathis alone at the party? Not long enough for the events that supposedly happened during that time, that's for sure). And Tanner? Kudos for bringing Tanner back, but does he have to be so useless? Also, I didn't care for that meeting between M and the foreign secretary - but that's just me.


Well, Movie Goer, you've bashed the hell out of this thing. I thought you were defending it.

I am but I'm being even-handed. Now, what does this film do right? Oh, so many things. Once it finds its feet - which is at the point where Bond goes off thinking he's rescuing Camille from the boat - the film really finds its feet and it becomes classic globe-trotting Bond. Also, the globe-trotting isn't forced from this point in the movie. The Haiti link, right after they lose Mr. White, is kind of dubious from a narrative point of view, but tracking Greene's plane to Austria, meeting up with Mathis, going to Bolivia... it all works and it all works beautifully.

It also brings something new to the table in that Bond doesn't always travel to the tourist spots for the wealthy elite, although he does a bit of that too. He goes to Bolivia! What's more is that, while it might not have been filmed there, the movie shows the country in a kind light. You can see the regular people (same with Haiti too) going about their lives. However, it doesn't shy away from tackling more serious issues either. Greene's plan to dam off the country's water supply so he can charge the population exorbitant prices for it may not be like the super lasers of late 60s Bond movies but it's cruel, calculating and perversely logical. Also, unlike Le Chiffre's victims, the victims of Greene's plan have faces. We see them in that scene where the villagers examine the dried-up well. This James Bond isn't out protecting the wealthy and the powerful and chasing tail (more on that later). He's helping real people, which brings me to the next point.

This might well be the most human Bond movie in the series and this may well be the most human we've seen the character. What's more is that it's Daniel Craig's second outing as Bond and he is much more comfortable in the role this time around and it definitely shows. We see how he cares for Vesper still - and it's handled very well. We see how he cares for Mathis, how he cares for making amends, how he cares for Camile - and while he is certainly motivated by revenge, he cares about the people he encounters along the way and the Bolivians who are the victims of Greene's greed.

What's more, it's all done within a brief running time. With 90 minutes, this film does more than what its predecessor did with 140. Its scope is far larger, there is a lot more going on and yet, after the shaky start, it doesn't feel rushed. It does what it sets out to do. It spends the appropriate amount of time on everything, gives weight to those things that deserve weight. One of the weaknesses of almost every Bond movie before this one has been their overly long running times. They'd often start well and entertain for the first hour or so but they invariably wore out their welcome. If the producers of the Bond series take nothing else from Quantum of Solace, I hope they take note of its pacing. I hope that every Bond movie from now on is 90 minutes because I think with Quantum of Solace, the filmmakers have discovered the perfect length.

On another note now, this movie is actually a lot of fun. It deals with serious issues but it never forgets (apart from that scene with M and the foreign secretary) that it is also supposed to be entertaining. The dialogue is terrific. Honestly, you'd have to be a pretty humourless person if you didn't smile a few times through the movie. There's that scene where Mathis asks his girlfriend/wife (?) Gema in light of everything Bond did to him, why she's offering him expensive wine - and she tells him that he only buys cheap wine. Then there's the part where Bond refuses to stay at the cheap hotel Miss. Fields booked and then goes to that expensive one with the little embellishment on their cover story - "We're teachers on Sabbatical and we've just won the lottery." There's another part where Bond tells Camille how someone in Greene's organisation tried to kill M, but he doesn't mention M by name. Camille asks if it's a woman, Bond replies that it is but it's not who she thinks, Camile then asks if it was his mother and Bond quips "She likes to think so." Honestly, the humour in the Bond films has never been done so well. It's fun - it's not cheesy or grating - it's just terrific fun. If none of those do it for you, then remember the bit where Felix Leiter answers the phone with his cover line and Bond tells him that he may as well just say C.I.A since his taxi driver told him where the office was. How anyone couldn't enjoy the sparkling dialogue, I have no idea.

Now, on the subject of Miss Fields, since I just brought her up, there's been some complaint from fans that Bond shouldn't have been interested in other women yet, but I think this actually works. Bond's trying to connect with someone again, just to feel something. He's trying to put Vesper behind him, even though he can't. And when Miss. Fields dies, it compounds his guilt over everything he's been going through. Also, you see that he suddenly tries to connect with Camille as well - and it's too sudden and too soon, and it makes Camille get out of the car and walk away. It's quite a strong moment. Also, his relationship with Camille, along with their parallel stories, is very effective. Perhaps some viewers didn't see it - but it's Camille who carries out her revenge first, and Bond sees then that it doesn't bring her that quantum of solace that he's seeking (seriously, the title is fine). It is because of this that he is able to remain detached enough at the end that he can hand over Vesper's boyfriend to MI6, which would help more people in the long run than an act of personal revenge would.

Next, I want to mention the action scenes. Including the boat chase, and from that point onwards, the action scenes are superb because they are simple, thrilling, easy to follow and they serve the story - they move the story along. In Casino Royale, the action scenes slowed the story down. In Quantum of Solace, they moved it along. And the music that accompanied them - the thrilling music!

See, I told you I'd get back to David Arnold. This is my favourite Bond score ever (obviously I'm ignoring the opening theme song). It is the perfect blend of the classic swinging John Barry scores and the modern feel that David Arnold has mastered over the last few films. This is a terrific score with strong simple motifs that accompany all the events of the film beautifully. In particular, I love accompaniment to the DC-3 dogfight and the simple but effective showdown in the hotel at the end.

Which brings me to simplicity! Simplicity is so underrated in movies. Everyone tries to be so clever sometimes and often the higher the goal they aim for, the greater the fall. Sometimes, they get away with it (it'll probably be years before most people realise that for all its cleverness, Inception didn't have anything to say) but a lot of movies fall apart under the weight of their own pretentiousness. Not so with Quantum of Solace. And that finale in the hotel is brilliant in its simplicity. The building itself is sparse. The scene is brief in its duration. All the necessary elements for delivering an effective finale are put in place beforehand, including our investment in the outcome and then it starts, the music kicks in, and it is utterly fantastic. And if anyone thinks that Dominic Greene attacking Bond is ludicrous and not very scary, they ought to switch their brains on. Bond doesn't have a weapon in his hand and Greene is waving about an axe. It doesn't matter if he's skillful with it or not.

Also, Dominic Greene is the most brilliant bad guy in the series. He's got this brilliant devil-may-care attitude, effortlessly switches from socially awkward philanthropist to calm villain, and that meeting with him, the General and the head of the police is the best bad guy meeting in the series too. I love how casual Greene is in it. His lack of formality, his casual recital to General Medrano about what will happen if the general doesn't agree to use his organisation as the country's sole utilities provider... this is all very effective and very few people seem to appreciate it. Also, in the few brief scenes in which he's sharing the scene with Bond, the two of them play off each other very effectively.

All in all, this is a truly outstanding contribution to the series and it's a real shame that it's largely gone so unappreciated. This is the way Bond films should be made. Perhaps over the years, when people look back on the series, they'll realise just how awesome this movie is. I hope so.

[Mr Pye]

Haven't seen Quantum of solace yet. I'm guessing sooner or later I'll come across it wether I wish it or not, as often happens with the Bond movies.

I liked Goldeneye well enough, but the rest of the Pierce Brosnan outings didn't catch my fancy. It seemed like they were trying very hard but still didn't have the kind of edge that previous Bonds had. Mission Impossible before and the Bourne series after perhaps attributed to this, making Bond feel like just of many well produced spy-agent movies. In any case when one of them tried to pass off Denise Richards as a nuclear physicist I let my predjudices get the better of me an left the room.

When Daniel Craig was announced as the new Bond, and they intended to start from the beginning with Casino Royal I became interested again and went to see Casino Royal in the cinema, something I haven't done with bond since the Timothy Dalton days. Though I liked Craig as Bond I didn't much care for the movie. It felt like it was too long. There were many acton scene such as Bond running up a long crane where you felt this is there just so they can show off a cool scene. Ok that kind of thing as been done in Bond before but as chase went on and on I started getting bored. I never really recovered from that opening and perhaps was more harsh on the movie than it deserved but when Quantum of Solace came with a lot of negative reviews I figured I'll this one a pass and maybe pick it up some day.

Thanks for the tip about Surrender though, I was just looking for something new to play on youtube.

[Just your average movie goer]

Quote

Thanks for the tip about Surrender though, I was just looking for something new to play on youtube.

Not at all. Enjoy it. It's a fantastic song.

I can understand your disinterest in a lot of the later Bond movies though. Denise Richards as a nuclear physicist turned a lot of people away. However, honestly, I had more trouble with the notion of Denise Richards pretending to be an actress.

Goldeneye was pretty cool. Unfortunately, it hasn't aged well at all - largely due to that dull, excitement killing score by Eric Serra and partly due to the plodding direction of Martin Campbell. He also directed Casino Royale and for a movie only released a few years ago, it does not feel anywhere near as fresh and lively as it should. It's already showing its age. Hopefully though, the Bond producers won't make the same mistake again and bring Martin Campbell back for a third time.

I also was put off by that excessive over-the-top opening, especially after the promos went on about how this was the movie was going to bring Bond back to basics. The pre-credits sequence delivered on that. The opening chase scene however was one of the most excessively over-the-top sequences we've had in one of these films for a long time... and Bond breaking into the embassy? I know they were trying to make him seem reckless and all but that was taking things too far. It made Bond look like a thug and that wasn't good. Also, as much as M cares about him, she should have kicked him out of the service after that. That should have been the end of his career.

The airport sequence was also excessive and wore out its welcome well before it finished - and at the point where Bond's on the train meeting Vesper an hour in, I remember thinking "Ah, now the movie's finally starting." After all, the name of the flick is Casino Royale, not Miami International.

Mind you, it's a dumb story at a conceptual level anyway. Why would MI6 risk losing millions in an attempt to bankrupt Le Chiffre in a card game when they could just as easily extract him the old fashioned way? I can't imagine any intelligence organisation doing things the way they did things in Casino Royale, whether in 2005 or in the 60s when the book was written. Unfortunately, the filmmakers seemed as though they wanted to say they had finally adapted Ian Fleming's first novel. Well, hooray for them. I would have preferred it if they had just tried to make a good movie.

Fortunately, when it came to Quantum of Solace (a nice little segue back to the main topic), the filmmakers did. That said though, I have one more criticism of Quantum of Solace that I didn't raise earlier. Unfortunately, it requires audiences to watch Casino Royale at least once so they are on the same page because it follows up on a lot of things in that movie. I really would have preferred it if the movie was made as a standalone.

Many people therefore view it as a coda to Casino Royale and that's unfortunate, because as I've been trying to say in this thread, it's a great movie in its own right.

Anyway, if you've seen Casino Royale and you haven't seen Quantum of Solace, you owe it yourself to check it out. It really is that awesome.

[civilian_number_two]

I meant to respond to this a while ago, but then forgot about it. Recently I re-watched QoS and yes, I agree it is quite a good movie. When I saw it first, I had the reaction that many audiences had to it. I thought it was a terrible return to form, with a huge international association of supervillains, all hell-bent on ruling the world, a secular superpower that allows Bond to play out Cold War scenarios without actually confronting Soviets. I thought this was a weakness of the old films, even the ones I liked, and I was happy that CR has a credible villain with a contemporary motivation.

Couple of nitpicks with your critique:

: Le Chifre wouldn't have spilled the beans about his contacts and business partners if they were still his friends. The whole premise of the card game - and this is the stuff of old Cold War spy fantasies - was to put him on the outs with his friends, and therefore desperate for asylum. So actually the premise, of playing cards against a guy and then capturing him rather than simply capturing him, is perfectly reasonable.

: you lament the use of the shaky cam. In fact, QoS has no shaky cam in those opening action sequences. The so-called shaky cam effect is created by placing the camera unnaturally close to the subject, hand-held or on a Steadicam, and having the operator do his best to follow the action as smoothly as he can under these limitations. The car chase that opens QoS is all crane mounts, car mounts, the odd drive-by on dolly, and several follow vehicles. Some close-ups of Bond shifting geers at the beginning of the chase are achieved through a process where the car is shaken by crew members from the outside, while a tripod-mounted camera focuses on the action. The effect of shaking the car shows that it is colliding with another car, but the camera stays on the subject; it doesn't move "wildly about" at any time. There might be one or two hand-held shots there, but these are not out of character with shots acquired in action films of the seventies and eighties. The bit where Bond drives through the construction site couldn't be more conventional. The Dr No homage you mention is documented in four separate shots, and it takes about 3.5 seconds to play out. It is hardly "headache inducing;" in fact it is one of the slower bits in that chase, second only to the bit where the police notice the chase and join in.

The chase that follows, with Bond on the heels of the would-be assassin, uses I think two hand-held shots, and these are out of necessity, as Bond pursues the assassin through a narrow tunnel. However these shots keep a distance from their subjects, and what happens in them is straightforward and obvious. Throughout this sequence we are treated to standard Bond tropes, including a semi-comical old woman reacting to some dropped fruit.

Your real complaint, I suppose, is that you don't like the pace of the editing and the shooting ratio, but if you watch those sequences you'll see very conventional photography and story-telling. The sequences you say use shaky cam are in fact just the same as any other Bond film, only with more shots and faster editing, keeping with modern trends. The camera never moves "wildly about," and each shot is composed deliberately to reveal exactly as much as the director wanted to reveal in each frame. A defining characteristic of the so-called shaky cam is that the operator is never 100% sure what he will capture, the idea being that when an unconventional method is used to capture the story, then the audience will engage with the material in a different way. This is a style that is a lot less common than you say, and I doubt that it is something filmmakers really need to address as a problem.

Apart from those comments, I agree with your review, especially with respect to Mathis.

This post has been edited by civilian_number_two: 03 August 2012 - 08:36 AM

[Just your average movie goer]

I'm glad you liked most of the review. It's been a while since I wrote that... actually, it's been long enough that I've made a 180 degree turn with my opinion on Robert Ludlum's Bourne books in the interim, which I had re-read and then vowed never to read again. Perhaps reading them the second time was the problem.

With your comment regarding Le Chiffre, I'm afraid you'll have to explain that one to me as I don't quite follow. I figured he had already fallen out with his friends when he'd lost all that money to begin with. If Bond captured him before the card game then he would have no way to recoup his losses anyway and would have to cooperate with MI6. Ah, well. Maybe MI6 had an ulterior motive of getting some more funding. Perhaps there were government spending cutbacks that weren't mentioned in the film. But I'm all ears... or all eyes, given that we're communicating in the written medium.

As for the shaky cam comment, yes. You're absolutely right about what you said. I may not have realised that it wasn't shaky cam when I wrote that review or I may have placed fast cuts and shaky cam under the same label as I don't like either of them.

When I initially saw the film in the cinema, those cuts in the opening car chase were really too fast for me. I could follow the action all right but it was such a visual assault of flashing imagery, I ended up looking at the floor occasionally to give myself a break. It also could have been to do with where I was sitting. However, as I mentioned earlier, I don't have any problem following it when I'm watching it at home.

Glad you agreed about Mathis. That character was too good to throw away like that.

I wonder what Skyfall will be like. I've seen the early trailer but it really is one of those trailers that show absolutely nothing. Now, obviously from my comments in the Prometheus thread, you'll know that I don't want trailers to show us one minute summaries of the movies they're advertising - but I do like some hints about the story to pique my interest. As it stands, I know that Bond is going to be in the film and there might just possibly (spoiler ahead) be some action scenes in it... but I kind of expected that already.

[civilian_number_two]

Yeah, I would try to avoid the latest trailer if I were you. I think it shows too much story, and I wish I hadn't seen it. One major story element in particular ... gyarr I could have done without knowing that. Don't know why I even watched it, to be honest; I have seen every Bond film in the theatre since For Your Eyes Only. Obviously I was going to go to this one.

IIRC, the argument in CR was that Le Chifre still had friends, other than the terrorist who threatened to cut off his arm. Note that even that guy didn't hate him yet enough actually to cut off the arm. The card game, which apparently he was really good at until Bond came along, was meant to set things right, and he'd have been golden, but again IIRC he would have been able to get out of it even without the game. The game was the clincher that would put him on the outs with enough underworld characters that, as M put it, he would have nowhere to turn.

I hear you, sorta, on the fast cuts. I complained about The Rock when it cam out, and Armageddon after it, for their million feet of film (1000' is 11 minutes, so 1M' would be 11000 minutes. That makes a shooting ratio of about 100:1, which seemed pretty excessive). Looking at them now I'm sure their action scenes would seem quaint and old-fashioned. Like it or not, Michael Bay changed the way people shoot and cut action, at least for a few decades. We'll see whether the 3D trend slows down the editing pace. Already I have noticed that it has for some directors, who want their audiences to enjoy the 3D effect. The best way to make the most of 3D is with wider shots and longer cuts. It's possible that when these same directors move back to conventional 2D action, they will retain the pace of their 3D efforts. I hope they do. While editing is the one thing that distinguishes film from theatre, too much of it is definitely possible, and in the hands of a hack director (the aforementioned Michael Bay, the most accomplished hack working today), the effect is to make the action impossible to follow.

Either way, I have come to where I have no trouble at all following scenes with several cuts of less than a second, and where the longest cut might be a second or two, if they are planned and edited properly. It's gotten to where the only action cuts of longer than 2 seconds are establishers, and yet I have no trouble following what I would have found bewildering 20 years ago (the hand-held in Woody Allen's Husbands and Wives, from 20 years ago, troubled me at the start of the film and I was a bit dizzy. By the end of the film I was used to it, and haven't had that reaction to hand-held ever since, not even in the Bourne films). Somehow we become more able to watch and to follow these fast-cut films, so they're not really problematic. However I still think I prefer long takes and wide shots for fights, so I can watch the choreography, a la Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, for instance.

My original complaints about QoS, most of which I can let go now, are

: Mr White giggling like a supervillain with a terrible secret, when he obviously should be worried that he is about to be tortured to death. He's acting like he has some terrific resolve, like he will never give in to questioning, like he's some kind of action hero, when we know he's a soft-bodied businessman who rules the world on the strength of money. I thought the tone the actor took in that scene was cartoonish.

: Mitchell shoots a bodyguard first, and then shoots at M? If his goal is to kill M, he should shoot her first, and accept that he might be killed in the process. If his goal is to survive the attempt, he should have shot the bodyguard and then shot at Bond. Shooting at M made perfect sense; just not the order in which he did it. This may seem like a horrible nitpick, but it bugged me right away. My first impulse in that scene was "oh no; they're making another SPECTRE." My second impulse was "gahh, the action in this movie is going to be dumb."

: Bond boldly revealing himself to the conspirators in the opera house. I understand that it was so he could cleverly photograph them from his vantage point, but they shouldn't have been stupid enough to meet that way anyway. Only White was smart enough to stay seated. Spies work best, though, when international conspiracies of billionaires don't get to look them in the eye and learn their names. Again, dumb storytelling, in line with the campiest of the Roger Moore stuff.

: The dogfight between Bond flying an old jalopy of a cargo plane versus a small fighter and a helicopter. Superior technology matters; I hate when filmmakers try to fool me into thinking something is possible just because I can't see outside the frame. This is another scene where my reaction was that the action was dumb and I felt bad watching it.



Watching the movie again, though, I realized that was it. I had a strong negative reaction to a movie based on these things, and none of them, honestly, was integral. Played only slightly differently, the story would have worked just as well. Overall, it's a smart movie, and most of the action is engaging (not the dogfight though. Ugg). I do wish those parts had played differently, especially the dogfight, but some concessions have to be acknowledged. After all, Bond films have never been without some camp elements.

I am looking forward to Skyfall.

This post has been edited by civilian_number_two: 04 August 2012 - 08:44 PM

[Just your average movie goer]

Got another Forbidden 403 error trying to post a reply - a nice reply too. But it definitely wasn't copied and pasted. It was composed entirely in the little window provided. I think there's something definitely wrong on the Chefelf end of things with regard to these errors. When this happened to me before, I got that error more times than I can remember - well and truly in the double-figures territory.

Anyway, the gist of my reply was that I agreed with most of what you said and that you raised some interesting points. Maybe later, I'll see if I can post it in full or not.