What I recall -- and I could be wrong and/or conflating things with the book -- is that Leamas was already drinking (and by today's standards would be an alcoholic) and Smiley and the others essentially encourages him to continue -- in fact, he's ideal for their needs because he's probably already on the enemy's radar as a potential agent to turn. But I certainly could be wrong -- it's been probably 30 years since I read the book and half that seen the movie.
It's worth mentioning how poorly smart Bond is in NTTD. As everyone knows, there are different kinds of intelligence. One of the best known and most interesting to study is of course emotional intelligence. The ability to understand the world we live in and to interact with other people according to both their emotions and ours. And this last point bothers me a lot about Craig's Bond.
Considering Blofeld's propensity to base his criminal genius on lies and manipulation, having Bond so gullible when Primo tells him about Madeleine is a little bit disturbing. If we look at the facts (and only the facts), Bond has no tangible element to suspect Swann. And this is where emotional intelligence comes in. Fleming's Bond would not have flinched so easily. He would have done everything to regain his senses and would have analyzed the situation.
In Matera, the character's impulsiveness is strangely reminiscent of his early days as an inexperienced agent, as if he had learned nothing from his past failures. When he tells Madeleine five years later it was an instinctive decision, what about the fact she had saved his life in Blofeld's lair ? When she rightly asks him, "Why would I betray you?", Bond's answer is completely irrelevant. Madeleine is a more mature person whereas Bond is emotionally unstable and this psychological fragility already appeared in SF (the way he behaves with M after Istanbul). This Bond has learned nothing from his journey, and the tragic fate he was facing was predictable from Matera.
This is a huge waste in my opinion because it ruins the excellent final scene of QoS, the one supposed to show the character has finally accepted his dark side and can handle it, which is the ultimate step in the construction of a myth. As if the path taken in the first part of the Craig era had been erased from SF to NTTD...
Sir MilesThe Wrong Side Of The WardrobePosts: 26,558Chief of Staff
@SeanIsTheOnlyOne If we look at the facts (and only the facts), Bond has no tangible element to suspect Swann.
Swann took Bond to Matera, told him to visit the tomb of Vesper - and he gets blown up. That’s pretty tangible to me 🤣
YNWA 97
Asp9mmOver the Hills and Far Away.Posts: 7,485MI6 Agent
No to mention she gets a phone call off Blofeld thanking her for her loyalty. With all these things coming together and chipping away at him, he wouldn’t be a very good agent if he brushed them off as nonsense.
Yes, Bond is moving backwards. In Casino Royale he recognizes Mathis could still be a double agent, to which M congratulates him on thinking properly and not taking anything on face value anymore. Quantum of Solace, for all its faults, continues that thinking. In this film, his attitude is, “Duhhh, I guess she don’t really like me, do she?” and then — get this — he runs away to hide in Jamaica for five years.
The only thing is Swann isn’t more mature. She acts as much like a petulant teenager as he is and should probably have her clinician’s license revoked. If I feel sorry for anyone, it’s Mathilde for being born to two dopes for parents.
But this isn't a movie that can work with smart characters, at least not as written. They have to fit the lurching plot, and that means lurchingly.
@Sir Miles but is it what we can call an « evidence » ? Like a fingerprint on a gun for instance ? Bond only had a feeling which turned out to be...wrong. Was it so unbelievable to conceive one second all this mess could have possibly been a trap ?
@Asp9mm same thinking. It’s Blofeld we are talking about. This part doesn’t really work for me because of the way Madeleine has been introduced in the previous movie. But once again, this is just a personal appreciation of how Ernst Stavro Purvis and Julius Wade imagine a story.
If only Madeleine started a relationship with Columbo instead...
I didn't finf the presentation of Bond's trust issues very convincing. He knows that Spectre "has people everywhere" and would be more than capable of tracking him without Madeline's help. He knows Blofeld is conniving and manipulative. He knows from what Primo tells him that Blofeld is pulling strings from prison. To not think of all that and quickly send Madeline away (without any further investigation either) is a plot contrivance, not the action of a plausible character, no matter how stupid he might be. And if he was truly in love it's just as plausible that he'd be live in denial of any sign of her possible complicity. Nor does the film afterward show Bond coming to terms with these supposed trust issues or acknowledging them. So if had he survived and settled down with Madeline, the next film could have shown him leaving the house in a huff after mistakenly thinking she was having an affair, etc.
It's just such a badly written movie. As with Skyfall, it relies on sentimentality to distract us from its deficiencies. Aw, James Bond has his heart broken. Aw, James Bond is alone. Aw, James Bond has a daughter. Aw, James Bond loses his friend, Felix. Aw, James Bond dies at the end. That is, unless the deficiencies are intentional for some subtext.
Your argument of sentimentality and emotion being a distraction can be applied to any Bond movie and arguably any movie you ever watch. Movies at their intrinsic level aim to forge an emotional response, whether that be laughter, happiness, sadness, melancholy, excitement etc.
The foundations and premise of the entire Bond franchise is that of life or death, struggles to overcome challenges or to lose them, to find love or to lose it. It just depends how much you want to focus on it as the core and primary element and whether it has been 'oversold' to you.
Personally I found the level of emotional rhetoric not overly applied and at a level that enabled me to focus on the plot as well.
I would argue there are a lot of deficiencies in previous Bond movies beyond being overly emotional but ultimately they won't please everyone.
No, sentimentality and emotion may be a component of any movie -- when used out of proportion to distract from everything else, it's a dodge, a hustle. The best stories offer a balance between emotions, themes, plot points, and, believe it or not, some sort satisfying internal logic. Bad movies get at least some of that wrong.
Again, though, that's assuming it wasn't all intentional to deconstruct Bond as a toxic White male who, at the end, after a relatively short but suffering life, loses everything at the end. Then it makes total sense.
Every movie at its core is written and created in an attempt to give the viewers an experience, and thus an emotional response.
It is not a component of a movie that can be chosen to be omitted, it is factually ingrained within every movie, whether a viewer leaves the movie happy or not is born out of their emotional response to what they have seen.
NTTD is filled with as many positive emotions as you list negative.
But it is ultimately your opinion that it was out of proportion, you're entitled to it. I am entitled to disagree....respectfully of course 🍸️
On the other hand, Hitchcock killed Janet Leigh's character half-way through Psycho (a much better movie than the ones you cited) and it came as a complete shock to the audience, as intended.
But NTTD would have been much better if we saw Bond struggling to survive, even if the struggle was for naught. The whole ending was tepid, lacking in suspense, and unfitting for the death of an iconic character.
I think we're giving a lot of attention to the plot for the simple reason that nobody making it did.
It's not a controversial opinion - director Roger Mitchell dropped out of QoS because - and read the fine book Some Kind of Hero for more on this - he just felt overwhelmed at agreeing to start a movie that didn't have a script. He later said that the producers don't much worry about that, they kind of paste it in later; problem was of course there was a writers strike so they couldn't easily do that anyway. But the signs are, especially as they ditched Danny Boyle - why, does anyone know yet? - so had to start, what, from scratch or did they keep a bit, who knows, but in a way for a film cobbled together in a short space of time they did very well, just don't expect stuff to make that much sense. Which would be okay - Diamonds are Forever is one of my fave, more enjoyable Bonds - but this one asks to be taken seriously.
Yes, but that's a completely different genre -- suspense or horror, if you will. Bond movies on the whole function as escapist adventures, with some detective, science fiction, and on rare occasion, romance and tragedy elements. Two Bond stories effectively operate as tragedies -- Casino Royale and On Her Majesty's Secret Service -- but within the context of a franchise of escapist works, we know they're not final.
The closer Hitchcock movies to Bond are North by Northwest (which many consider the prototype) and Notorious (which I consider the closest thing to a Bond novel ever brought to the screen, though the adaptation of LeCarre's The Night Manager is close, too). Now, each of these is a one-off and not part of an arc or a franchise with a couple dozen movies that have already established the essential formulae. In both cases, the stories proceed along the established path to the hero winning at the end. If they didn't, they'd break pretty heavily from the genre, to the degree audiences would likely be stymied, not entertained.
Psycho didn't have any of those restrictions. As suspense or horror, it will dispatch characters as it sees fit. In fact, the movie actually plays a game with us with its narrative structure. We think the movie is about Janet Leigh's character. It's not. Then we think it's about John Gavin and Vera Miles. It's not. It's about Norman Bates. That's why the movie is called Psycho, and getting to the mystery of who he is is the point of the story, which is why Simon Oakland gives his summary and the film closes on Norman Bates and the discovery of victim Martin Balsam's car.
That's a good point. No Time to Die is poorly plotted -- it's like the writers learned how to write a story based on watching movies and taking bits and pieces from them they liked without giving much thought to how it's all supposed to function. I also think if you took screen caps from No Time to Die and laid them out in a photonovel or comic book, they might convey what appears to be a more cohesive story than the movie actually does.
That may seem contradictory, but a medium like comic books (or graphic novels for the pretentious among us), usually doesn't have the same restrictions for plot cohesion. Why? Because a lot of the story is told through static image. A picture being worth a thousand words, it's easier to argue that an image conveys meaning that the plot or story does not. We bring more to it by what we imagine happens in the panels we don't see, while the image we do see resonates a lot more. In a film, there is a small universe of movements and expressions (not to mention voice) that provides significantly more information to add much more context. That context easily changes our perceptions. (If you don't believe that, just look at how many memes take a couple of images from a movie scene and recast them in a different tone and content.)
So, imagine the writers of No Time to Die conceived the story more or less like a comic book would tell it. They think the image of Bond standing forlornly at the train stations says volumes or the image of Swann crying at the end conveys deep levels of emotion like a comic book panel might. Those of us looking for more -- you know, because a film, like a novel, is supposed to provide more -- might find that at best the start, not the end, of what the writer is supposed to do. When we look for more and can't find it, or when we see things that contradict the plotting or characters or other crucial elements, it falls apart.
No Time to Die feels like that to me. They focused on the bricks, not the cement, and if I were to guess, kind of reverse engineered everything. That is, they identified some key elements or scenes, wrote them, and then figure out how to connect them together. The result is a mess, except maybe to those only looking at the bricks.
Daniel Craig’s much-delayed final Bond film proved divisive, with an especially controversial ending, but it was a huge box-office hit just when cinemas desperately needed one. The best and worst quality of “No Time To Die” is that it tries to be all Bond movies to all people: over the course of nearly three hours, it is both sombre and silly, grounded in reality and ridiculously far-fetched. Still, viewers got plenty of bang for their buck, and 007 aficionados could tick off the many references to their hero’s previous adventures.
Not a bad list, though it includes The Green Knight, that soporific botch of an adaptation. I liked most of NTTD but I wouldn't consider it one of the best films of 2021 or any year.
I see some have problems finding a belivable way for Blofeld to get a bionic eye in prison. I never had any problems explaining that. When Blofeld lost his eye and got arrested in SP, the prison system ordered an artificial eye for him from a manufacturer. It shouldn't be to hard for an organisation such as SPECTRE to find out who was making his eye. SPECTRE then threathend the person(s) working on the eye to swap it with a bionic eye, much like the sheep herder in Matera: do as you're told or someone close to you will get killed. Making the content of the eye should also be within the capabilities of SPECTRE.
Say that's not bad. And government budget cuts meant its nobody's job to actually look at this eye before letting Blofeld put it in his head! They've hired private sector rent-a-cops to guard Blofeld's cell since they'll do the same job without all those fancy unionized benefits. (Government budget cuts could also explain why nobody in MI6 noticed Madeleine had a child: Nomi's probably the only agent M still has working for him, that's also why Moneypenny and Q have to do so much work outside their job descriptions)
This is why it'd be good if they still did novelizations. That's probably too much information for an already bloated film, but the novelization could devote an entire chapter to the exciting backstory of Blofeld's eye, and another to MI6 staffing shortages.
No need for prison budget cuts, just the simple fact that the prison system don't produce artificial eyes. They buy from a company and people there can easily be threathend or bribed into substituting a one eye with another that's handed to them.
oh I know, that part makes complete sense. Its just that in this supermaximum security setup we see, its gotta be someone's job to inspect any object before its allowed into Blofeld's cell. Like when the prisoners' girlfriend bakes a pie with a file inside it, and brings it to the prison, its normally somebody's job to inspect that pie before letting the prisoner eat it. Even if the prison themselves ordered the pie it should be inspected!
as for the rest, I'm just having a laff imagining government budget cuts as the catch-all excuse for MI6's systematic incompetence over these last five films. maybe @Gassy Man is wrong, its not the writers deconstructing the Toxic White Male, its just MI6 no longer has the budget to do a halfway decent job. That's actually realistic!
Explaining MI6's ignorance about Mathilde is harder. Madeleine could be working half time at MI6. Perhaps one week on and the next week off like oil rig workers or some fishermen. Madeleine has a governess taking care of Mathilde when she's away. Maybe Madeleine even works while the girl is in kindergarden, countryside municipalities are desperate for pshyciatric professionals. Mi6 shouldn've known about the child anyway, but it works.
Having known someone who has ben in prison, the health services are appalling. They are unlikely to give him any kind of replacement eye and certainly not a bionic one. He might get an eyepatch. They really don't give much of a s* about prisoners well-being unless they are likely to die.
we should have a thread on the hotel rooms Bond stays in. Even if such rooms really existed, imagine what MI6 accounting would say when they got Bond's hotel room bills?
That scene in Quantum of Solace where Fields tries to take him to one hotel (realistic) and he insists on another (typical BondFilm hotel) is a good parody of this unspoken trope in the films.
_________________
@Number24 I applaud your efforts to explain the bits in the main body of the film that some (including me) have claimed are plotholes. To me the whole precredits makes perfect sense, its the main body of the film where some aspects seem cobbled together to make the plot work. But none of those examples are worse than what we saw over and over again in the Connery and Moore era films. I think it is because these CraigFilms take themselves so damn seriously, as @Napoleon Plural argued on the previous page, we judge their plot logic by a higher standard instead of just going with the fantasy.
...speaking of which, during one of the car chases, there's a helicopter waiting just over the horizon nobody notices until the first bad guy car is eliminated, then it immediately moves into position over Bonds car. like its been held back (making no noise) just in case all this time even though it would have been more efficient to start the attack with the helicopter if they had one. That's straight out of The Spy Who Loved Me, the exact absurd "contingency" problem Kingsley Amis had an issue with in his review!
Comments
What I recall -- and I could be wrong and/or conflating things with the book -- is that Leamas was already drinking (and by today's standards would be an alcoholic) and Smiley and the others essentially encourages him to continue -- in fact, he's ideal for their needs because he's probably already on the enemy's radar as a potential agent to turn. But I certainly could be wrong -- it's been probably 30 years since I read the book and half that seen the movie.
It's worth mentioning how poorly smart Bond is in NTTD. As everyone knows, there are different kinds of intelligence. One of the best known and most interesting to study is of course emotional intelligence. The ability to understand the world we live in and to interact with other people according to both their emotions and ours. And this last point bothers me a lot about Craig's Bond.
Considering Blofeld's propensity to base his criminal genius on lies and manipulation, having Bond so gullible when Primo tells him about Madeleine is a little bit disturbing. If we look at the facts (and only the facts), Bond has no tangible element to suspect Swann. And this is where emotional intelligence comes in. Fleming's Bond would not have flinched so easily. He would have done everything to regain his senses and would have analyzed the situation.
In Matera, the character's impulsiveness is strangely reminiscent of his early days as an inexperienced agent, as if he had learned nothing from his past failures. When he tells Madeleine five years later it was an instinctive decision, what about the fact she had saved his life in Blofeld's lair ? When she rightly asks him, "Why would I betray you?", Bond's answer is completely irrelevant. Madeleine is a more mature person whereas Bond is emotionally unstable and this psychological fragility already appeared in SF (the way he behaves with M after Istanbul). This Bond has learned nothing from his journey, and the tragic fate he was facing was predictable from Matera.
This is a huge waste in my opinion because it ruins the excellent final scene of QoS, the one supposed to show the character has finally accepted his dark side and can handle it, which is the ultimate step in the construction of a myth. As if the path taken in the first part of the Craig era had been erased from SF to NTTD...
@SeanIsTheOnlyOne If we look at the facts (and only the facts), Bond has no tangible element to suspect Swann.
Swann took Bond to Matera, told him to visit the tomb of Vesper - and he gets blown up. That’s pretty tangible to me 🤣
No to mention she gets a phone call off Blofeld thanking her for her loyalty. With all these things coming together and chipping away at him, he wouldn’t be a very good agent if he brushed them off as nonsense.
Yes, Bond is moving backwards. In Casino Royale he recognizes Mathis could still be a double agent, to which M congratulates him on thinking properly and not taking anything on face value anymore. Quantum of Solace, for all its faults, continues that thinking. In this film, his attitude is, “Duhhh, I guess she don’t really like me, do she?” and then — get this — he runs away to hide in Jamaica for five years.
The only thing is Swann isn’t more mature. She acts as much like a petulant teenager as he is and should probably have her clinician’s license revoked. If I feel sorry for anyone, it’s Mathilde for being born to two dopes for parents.
But this isn't a movie that can work with smart characters, at least not as written. They have to fit the lurching plot, and that means lurchingly.
@Sir Miles but is it what we can call an « evidence » ? Like a fingerprint on a gun for instance ? Bond only had a feeling which turned out to be...wrong. Was it so unbelievable to conceive one second all this mess could have possibly been a trap ?
@Asp9mm same thinking. It’s Blofeld we are talking about. This part doesn’t really work for me because of the way Madeleine has been introduced in the previous movie. But once again, this is just a personal appreciation of how Ernst Stavro Purvis and Julius Wade imagine a story.
If only Madeleine started a relationship with Columbo instead...
I didn't finf the presentation of Bond's trust issues very convincing. He knows that Spectre "has people everywhere" and would be more than capable of tracking him without Madeline's help. He knows Blofeld is conniving and manipulative. He knows from what Primo tells him that Blofeld is pulling strings from prison. To not think of all that and quickly send Madeline away (without any further investigation either) is a plot contrivance, not the action of a plausible character, no matter how stupid he might be. And if he was truly in love it's just as plausible that he'd be live in denial of any sign of her possible complicity. Nor does the film afterward show Bond coming to terms with these supposed trust issues or acknowledging them. So if had he survived and settled down with Madeline, the next film could have shown him leaving the house in a huff after mistakenly thinking she was having an affair, etc.
It's just such a badly written movie. As with Skyfall, it relies on sentimentality to distract us from its deficiencies. Aw, James Bond has his heart broken. Aw, James Bond is alone. Aw, James Bond has a daughter. Aw, James Bond loses his friend, Felix. Aw, James Bond dies at the end. That is, unless the deficiencies are intentional for some subtext.
Your argument of sentimentality and emotion being a distraction can be applied to any Bond movie and arguably any movie you ever watch. Movies at their intrinsic level aim to forge an emotional response, whether that be laughter, happiness, sadness, melancholy, excitement etc.
The foundations and premise of the entire Bond franchise is that of life or death, struggles to overcome challenges or to lose them, to find love or to lose it. It just depends how much you want to focus on it as the core and primary element and whether it has been 'oversold' to you.
Personally I found the level of emotional rhetoric not overly applied and at a level that enabled me to focus on the plot as well.
I would argue there are a lot of deficiencies in previous Bond movies beyond being overly emotional but ultimately they won't please everyone.
No, sentimentality and emotion may be a component of any movie -- when used out of proportion to distract from everything else, it's a dodge, a hustle. The best stories offer a balance between emotions, themes, plot points, and, believe it or not, some sort satisfying internal logic. Bad movies get at least some of that wrong.
Again, though, that's assuming it wasn't all intentional to deconstruct Bond as a toxic White male who, at the end, after a relatively short but suffering life, loses everything at the end. Then it makes total sense.
Every movie at its core is written and created in an attempt to give the viewers an experience, and thus an emotional response.
It is not a component of a movie that can be chosen to be omitted, it is factually ingrained within every movie, whether a viewer leaves the movie happy or not is born out of their emotional response to what they have seen.
NTTD is filled with as many positive emotions as you list negative.
But it is ultimately your opinion that it was out of proportion, you're entitled to it. I am entitled to disagree....respectfully of course 🍸️
have Craig or Barbara ever talked about such intentions? or any other broad themes they are trying to explore?
On the other hand, Hitchcock killed Janet Leigh's character half-way through Psycho (a much better movie than the ones you cited) and it came as a complete shock to the audience, as intended.
But NTTD would have been much better if we saw Bond struggling to survive, even if the struggle was for naught. The whole ending was tepid, lacking in suspense, and unfitting for the death of an iconic character.
I think we're giving a lot of attention to the plot for the simple reason that nobody making it did.
It's not a controversial opinion - director Roger Mitchell dropped out of QoS because - and read the fine book Some Kind of Hero for more on this - he just felt overwhelmed at agreeing to start a movie that didn't have a script. He later said that the producers don't much worry about that, they kind of paste it in later; problem was of course there was a writers strike so they couldn't easily do that anyway. But the signs are, especially as they ditched Danny Boyle - why, does anyone know yet? - so had to start, what, from scratch or did they keep a bit, who knows, but in a way for a film cobbled together in a short space of time they did very well, just don't expect stuff to make that much sense. Which would be okay - Diamonds are Forever is one of my fave, more enjoyable Bonds - but this one asks to be taken seriously.
Roger Moore 1927-2017
Yes, but that's a completely different genre -- suspense or horror, if you will. Bond movies on the whole function as escapist adventures, with some detective, science fiction, and on rare occasion, romance and tragedy elements. Two Bond stories effectively operate as tragedies -- Casino Royale and On Her Majesty's Secret Service -- but within the context of a franchise of escapist works, we know they're not final.
The closer Hitchcock movies to Bond are North by Northwest (which many consider the prototype) and Notorious (which I consider the closest thing to a Bond novel ever brought to the screen, though the adaptation of LeCarre's The Night Manager is close, too). Now, each of these is a one-off and not part of an arc or a franchise with a couple dozen movies that have already established the essential formulae. In both cases, the stories proceed along the established path to the hero winning at the end. If they didn't, they'd break pretty heavily from the genre, to the degree audiences would likely be stymied, not entertained.
Psycho didn't have any of those restrictions. As suspense or horror, it will dispatch characters as it sees fit. In fact, the movie actually plays a game with us with its narrative structure. We think the movie is about Janet Leigh's character. It's not. Then we think it's about John Gavin and Vera Miles. It's not. It's about Norman Bates. That's why the movie is called Psycho, and getting to the mystery of who he is is the point of the story, which is why Simon Oakland gives his summary and the film closes on Norman Bates and the discovery of victim Martin Balsam's car.
That's a good point. No Time to Die is poorly plotted -- it's like the writers learned how to write a story based on watching movies and taking bits and pieces from them they liked without giving much thought to how it's all supposed to function. I also think if you took screen caps from No Time to Die and laid them out in a photonovel or comic book, they might convey what appears to be a more cohesive story than the movie actually does.
That may seem contradictory, but a medium like comic books (or graphic novels for the pretentious among us), usually doesn't have the same restrictions for plot cohesion. Why? Because a lot of the story is told through static image. A picture being worth a thousand words, it's easier to argue that an image conveys meaning that the plot or story does not. We bring more to it by what we imagine happens in the panels we don't see, while the image we do see resonates a lot more. In a film, there is a small universe of movements and expressions (not to mention voice) that provides significantly more information to add much more context. That context easily changes our perceptions. (If you don't believe that, just look at how many memes take a couple of images from a movie scene and recast them in a different tone and content.)
So, imagine the writers of No Time to Die conceived the story more or less like a comic book would tell it. They think the image of Bond standing forlornly at the train stations says volumes or the image of Swann crying at the end conveys deep levels of emotion like a comic book panel might. Those of us looking for more -- you know, because a film, like a novel, is supposed to provide more -- might find that at best the start, not the end, of what the writer is supposed to do. When we look for more and can't find it, or when we see things that contradict the plotting or characters or other crucial elements, it falls apart.
No Time to Die feels like that to me. They focused on the bricks, not the cement, and if I were to guess, kind of reverse engineered everything. That is, they identified some key elements or scenes, wrote them, and then figure out how to connect them together. The result is a mess, except maybe to those only looking at the bricks.
Gentlemen, many thanks. I have been engrossed in all of the recent posts and enjoyed reading them.
The Economist has placed No Time to Die among its "Best Films of 2021"
“No Time To Die”
Daniel Craig’s much-delayed final Bond film proved divisive, with an especially controversial ending, but it was a huge box-office hit just when cinemas desperately needed one. The best and worst quality of “No Time To Die” is that it tries to be all Bond movies to all people: over the course of nearly three hours, it is both sombre and silly, grounded in reality and ridiculously far-fetched. Still, viewers got plenty of bang for their buck, and 007 aficionados could tick off the many references to their hero’s previous adventures.
Not a bad list, though it includes The Green Knight, that soporific botch of an adaptation. I liked most of NTTD but I wouldn't consider it one of the best films of 2021 or any year.
I see some have problems finding a belivable way for Blofeld to get a bionic eye in prison. I never had any problems explaining that. When Blofeld lost his eye and got arrested in SP, the prison system ordered an artificial eye for him from a manufacturer. It shouldn't be to hard for an organisation such as SPECTRE to find out who was making his eye. SPECTRE then threathend the person(s) working on the eye to swap it with a bionic eye, much like the sheep herder in Matera: do as you're told or someone close to you will get killed. Making the content of the eye should also be within the capabilities of SPECTRE.
Say that's not bad. And government budget cuts meant its nobody's job to actually look at this eye before letting Blofeld put it in his head! They've hired private sector rent-a-cops to guard Blofeld's cell since they'll do the same job without all those fancy unionized benefits. (Government budget cuts could also explain why nobody in MI6 noticed Madeleine had a child: Nomi's probably the only agent M still has working for him, that's also why Moneypenny and Q have to do so much work outside their job descriptions)
This is why it'd be good if they still did novelizations. That's probably too much information for an already bloated film, but the novelization could devote an entire chapter to the exciting backstory of Blofeld's eye, and another to MI6 staffing shortages.
😁
No need for prison budget cuts, just the simple fact that the prison system don't produce artificial eyes. They buy from a company and people there can easily be threathend or bribed into substituting a one eye with another that's handed to them.
oh I know, that part makes complete sense. Its just that in this supermaximum security setup we see, its gotta be someone's job to inspect any object before its allowed into Blofeld's cell. Like when the prisoners' girlfriend bakes a pie with a file inside it, and brings it to the prison, its normally somebody's job to inspect that pie before letting the prisoner eat it. Even if the prison themselves ordered the pie it should be inspected!
as for the rest, I'm just having a laff imagining government budget cuts as the catch-all excuse for MI6's systematic incompetence over these last five films. maybe @Gassy Man is wrong, its not the writers deconstructing the Toxic White Male, its just MI6 no longer has the budget to do a halfway decent job. That's actually realistic!
Who would think of inpecting an artificial eye?
Within the logic of the movie the eye makes complete sense to me.
Explaining MI6's ignorance about Mathilde is harder. Madeleine could be working half time at MI6. Perhaps one week on and the next week off like oil rig workers or some fishermen. Madeleine has a governess taking care of Mathilde when she's away. Maybe Madeleine even works while the girl is in kindergarden, countryside municipalities are desperate for pshyciatric professionals. Mi6 shouldn've known about the child anyway, but it works.
Having known someone who has ben in prison, the health services are appalling. They are unlikely to give him any kind of replacement eye and certainly not a bionic one. He might get an eyepatch. They really don't give much of a s* about prisoners well-being unless they are likely to die.
Blofeld is a special inmate and it's a Bond movie. All hotell rooms are twice as big and prisoners get artificial eyes.
we should have a thread on the hotel rooms Bond stays in. Even if such rooms really existed, imagine what MI6 accounting would say when they got Bond's hotel room bills?
That scene in Quantum of Solace where Fields tries to take him to one hotel (realistic) and he insists on another (typical BondFilm hotel) is a good parody of this unspoken trope in the films.
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@Number24 I applaud your efforts to explain the bits in the main body of the film that some (including me) have claimed are plotholes. To me the whole precredits makes perfect sense, its the main body of the film where some aspects seem cobbled together to make the plot work. But none of those examples are worse than what we saw over and over again in the Connery and Moore era films. I think it is because these CraigFilms take themselves so damn seriously, as @Napoleon Plural argued on the previous page, we judge their plot logic by a higher standard instead of just going with the fantasy.
...speaking of which, during one of the car chases, there's a helicopter waiting just over the horizon nobody notices until the first bad guy car is eliminated, then it immediately moves into position over Bonds car. like its been held back (making no noise) just in case all this time even though it would have been more efficient to start the attack with the helicopter if they had one. That's straight out of The Spy Who Loved Me, the exact absurd "contingency" problem Kingsley Amis had an issue with in his review!
That's great, caractacus, it's lovely seeing Amis and his Bond work are still remembered.