Bond doesn't get the mission in the mail, he gets an important message. Giving him the mission would be MI-style and not Bondian, as you correctly point out.
On the other hand Bond has a tradition of using new tech. Toyota has invested a lot of money in their air taxi and it's planned to be operational next year, maybe in Japan. I'd like to see this in Bond movie! It doesn't have to be a big part of the plot. Maybe Bond uses the air taxi to move from A to B without much comment. The taxi can be hailed by smartphone like an Uber taxi and a pilot flies you.
Another possibility is to paint the taxi black or green and use it as an inflltration vehicle. the air taxi is electric and it generates only a small fraction of the noise a helicopter makes.
I liked Craig, they wrote it well but, what they wrote well was not something I liked. He was a burned out, betrayed tired agent who lost the love of his life.
So, here's what I want next time. I want Bond to be in full 100% top fighting shape - ready for anything. This 50ish guy, a zillionaire who's in the computer business, secretly has a satellite that will send a signal that can burn all computer chips of everyone on Earth. He wrote the code with another programmer - a cute lady in the 30s. James Bond is made aware of this and needs to get the girl to enter the code but, has to be done from one specific place. So he picks her up a US state - where he can use his car and this time - all hell breaks loose - gadgets galore on this car - make the chase scene longer and use new gadgets!
After the rescue they must leave for that specific place to enter the code - make it South Africa station. But, an evil henchman is after them. WE MUST HAVE a totally new classic villain in the style of Oddjob multiplied by Jaws. Bald guy with cross eyes, dresses all in white, very tall - not too big but extremely well trained in kung fu. His gimmick will a cane that he'll do all kinds of stuff with it and - it will also have a retractable knife at its end.
After finishing THE DAY OF THE JACKAL miniseries, I'm rather keen on seeing Eddie Redmayne playing a Bond villain. He'd make an amazing Scaramanga type character.
Have you ever heard of Bidzina Ivanishvili? No too many in the West has. He's a oligarch in Georgia, that is the country in the Caucasus. He's a former Prime minister and the richest person in the country. He owns 25% of the country's GDP! Ivanishvili is a key player in the party Georgian Dream that wants to come into the Russian sphere of influence against the wishes of the majority of the voters.
The main reason I write about Bidzina Ivanishvili is his house in the capital Tblisi.
is Ivanishvili expecting Mister Bond? it looks that way. He even has his own shark tank in the house!
This is his albino rapper son:
Georgia is a very beautiful country:
'
But Ivanishvili is moving it towards a dictatorship under his and Putin's control. Bond villains don't seem so unrealistic in some parts of the world!
Not only is that house amazing, it is 100% insanely bizarre: all that metalwork and vast spaces. It looks more like a parliament building than a home. I am reminded of Nero's palace in ancient Rome which supposedly overlooked the forum and was linked by a walkway bridge to the senate house. This modern dictator [a financial dictator] seems to have equally astounding and power-crazed architectural ideas.
For some reason I've been reading more about the Arctic and especially Greenland in terms of strategic importance lately. EON always say they look at current and near future threats when writing scripts for Bond movies. This is one that hasn't been used in any Bond movie or even action movie I can think of, and some of the locations will also be exotic and unknown for most audiences (even though scenes for the upcoming Mission Impossible movie was filmed in Svalbard).
In 2014 the first civilian transport ship sailed the North-East Passage (north of Russia) without assistance from an ice breaker, and commercial use of the new northern trade routes will only increase in the future. If you don't belive the scientists on this, perhaps you'll belive the leaders of China and especially Russia who invest heavily on this future. Those routes will only take about half the time to sail compared to the traditional ones through the Suez canal and the Panama canal. These areas of the world also have a lot of important minerals and about 1/4 of the oil reserves in the world hidden under the ice. In military terms the fastest route for missiles between Russia and north America is over the Arctic. While a Bond film shouldn't use Russia as the main villain or make something like "The hunt for the Red October", I think this topic has a lot of potential. Make the villain a shipping magnate for example. That magnate can be based in for example Japan or Norway, adding locations that has been underused or only used decades ago in Bond movies.
Subsea mining is another element that can be used in this scenario.
Ice hotels has unfortunately already been used in one of the lesser Bond movies .....
"Taiwan detained a cargo ship and its eight Chinese crew members after an undersea fiber-optic cable was severed, in a stepped-up effort to police such incidents, which are often seen as part of China’s pressure campaign targeting the self-ruled island.
Taiwan’s coast guard said the incident was being handled as a national security matter and that deliberate sabotage hadn’t been ruled out. A string of such episodes has called attention to Taiwan’s vulnerability as it works to ensure that it has secure internet services to keep the island online in the event of an invasion or blockade by China.
Similar incidents elsewhere, including the cutting of data cables beneath the Baltic Sea, have brought global attention to security concerns surrounding the critical infrastructure. "
I could see a plot or sub-plot around the severing of these undersea cables. Perhaps Bond is tasked with investigated this and we have a scuba diving sequence but is tailed and has to dispatch some baddies but he recovers a dog-tag that leads him to a Chinese Military unit etc etc.
Lifestyle guide to the products and locations featured in the James Bond films.
We definitely need more military personnel appearing in the films. If the producers are concerned about how certain countries are portrayed i.e. Russia/China/NK etc. then why not make up a fictional one, or better still bring back that Latin American country from the start of Octopussy, and make one of them a rogue villain? That would be a neat bit of tie-in continuity IMO.
If the villain is a Chinese general I doubt if the CCP will let the movie play in Chinese cinemas or make it available in Chinese streaming services. That's a huge market.
I wouldn't mind seeing the ski-doo chase from the Logan Spectre script resurrected. That isn't really something that's been done before and could be very exciting.
Lifestyle guide to the products and locations featured in the James Bond films.
Look at this very short clip of a river in Kazakhstan where the ice is blown up to avoid floods! I don't know how it would fit in a plot, but I do want to see this in a Bond movie:
The Bond YouTube channel "Analyze this, mister Bond" mentions in the most recent episode that one of the early ideas for QoS was having the villain smuggle historic artifacts from Iran to finance his goals. I like the idea. It reminds me of Octopussy, but not too much. I also like the idea because this happens in real life. The Taliban and al-Quaeda sold Afghan artifacts on the black market to finance their operations.
I do always like that in Ocotpussy Kamal Khan et al sold the stolen Russian treasure in London at Sotherby's, where, what, they were hoping no one would notice?! Sotherby's?! 🤣
Also Sotherby's doing a terrible job of not making sure they weren't selling stolen goods- I feel like the provenance of most Fabergé eggs is probably fairly well documented.
I share your point, and I'd also add the most surprising thing is that the Russian authorities seem to know nothing about the auction in London, which is quite disturbing considering the kind of object to be sold. If this egg is supposed to be in the Kremlin, I find it questionable not to have any department checking what's currently happening on the art market on the other side of the Iron Curtain.
In The Property of a Lady, everything is wonderfully built plotwise while it's not necessarily the case in the movie imo. Having said that, I do enjoy Octopussy.
I'm watching Bond's apartment in the episode where he teams up with Ryan from "Analyse this, mister Bond" to discuss Bond films that could/should be-re-made. Here it is:
I found their thoughts about Moonraker especially interesting. Maybe Bond26 could be a version of Moonraker that's closer to the novel. These days we actually have super-rich people who develop their own space rockets. We also see Europe needing desperately lang-range missiles and Anti-air missiles. Russia tested the Burevestnik cruise missile (NATO name : Skyfall!) a couple of days ago. It's a nuclear-capable weapon Moscow says can pierce any defense shield. What if not-Elon Musk developed a missile like that on his own dollar and just gifted it to the UK?
The villain could be a modern version of Hugo Drax. He's a Iraqi scientist who was the lone survived and explosion during a British raid on one of Sadam's rocket research facilities in the . His face got burnt and he was miss-identified at the hospital as one of the British soldiers. His face was burnt so plastic surgery was used to repair his face and he claims amnesia. Later he builds a business empire and becomes one of the richest men in the world. Like in the novel he plans to use the missile to nuke London and they can finally use Gala Brand as the Bond girl. Much of the rest of the plot needs to be changed and expanded upon, but it would still be closer to the novel. I don't think they should use the title again.
As the headline says, Italy is investigating reports that very wealthy people paid to go on "sniper safaris" to Sarajevo in Bosnia to kill civilians for fun. Absolutely horrible! however I think something along these line could be a good background for a villain.
Jesus, that's horrendous. I think anything like that might be too dark for a Bond movie. I guess it could be part of a villain's backstory perhaps.
Although I've always thought that the manhunt/safari set piece in Octopussy could have been really effective if they'd gone a bit more tense with it. I can actually imagine Fleming writing it.
I agree that it would've been completely wrong to show it on screen, but as a backstory it could work very well. Maybe it gets mentioned in a briefing? Even better: the villain belives he's just like James Bond and tells the story story to him as "proof".
Mr MartiniThat nice house in the sky.Posts: 2,739MI6 Agent
I guess they could do something similar to The Man With The Golden Gun. A excellent marksman, lets just call him Francisco, invites other marksman to compete with each other in duels. Or you can compete with Francisco. Live ammunition is used all the time. Francisco just needs a bigger threat. The gun play is what he does for sport. But what can be his villain plan?
Some people would complain even if you hang them with a new rope
I think that would be to close to TMWTGG. In my mind the villain isn't an assassin or even a sharpshooter. He's simply a billionaire who doesn't care about laws or people, he just wants to entertain himself.
Comments
.
Bond doesn't get the mission in the mail, he gets an important message. Giving him the mission would be MI-style and not Bondian, as you correctly point out.
On the other hand Bond has a tradition of using new tech. Toyota has invested a lot of money in their air taxi and it's planned to be operational next year, maybe in Japan. I'd like to see this in Bond movie! It doesn't have to be a big part of the plot. Maybe Bond uses the air taxi to move from A to B without much comment. The taxi can be hailed by smartphone like an Uber taxi and a pilot flies you.
Another possibility is to paint the taxi black or green and use it as an inflltration vehicle. the air taxi is electric and it generates only a small fraction of the noise a helicopter makes.
I liked Craig, they wrote it well but, what they wrote well was not something I liked. He was a burned out, betrayed tired agent who lost the love of his life.
So, here's what I want next time. I want Bond to be in full 100% top fighting shape - ready for anything. This 50ish guy, a zillionaire who's in the computer business, secretly has a satellite that will send a signal that can burn all computer chips of everyone on Earth. He wrote the code with another programmer - a cute lady in the 30s. James Bond is made aware of this and needs to get the girl to enter the code but, has to be done from one specific place. So he picks her up a US state - where he can use his car and this time - all hell breaks loose - gadgets galore on this car - make the chase scene longer and use new gadgets!
After the rescue they must leave for that specific place to enter the code - make it South Africa station. But, an evil henchman is after them. WE MUST HAVE a totally new classic villain in the style of Oddjob multiplied by Jaws. Bald guy with cross eyes, dresses all in white, very tall - not too big but extremely well trained in kung fu. His gimmick will a cane that he'll do all kinds of stuff with it and - it will also have a retractable knife at its end.
After finishing THE DAY OF THE JACKAL miniseries, I'm rather keen on seeing Eddie Redmayne playing a Bond villain. He'd make an amazing Scaramanga type character.
Have you ever heard of Bidzina Ivanishvili? No too many in the West has. He's a oligarch in Georgia, that is the country in the Caucasus. He's a former Prime minister and the richest person in the country. He owns 25% of the country's GDP! Ivanishvili is a key player in the party Georgian Dream that wants to come into the Russian sphere of influence against the wishes of the majority of the voters.
The main reason I write about Bidzina Ivanishvili is his house in the capital Tblisi.
is Ivanishvili expecting Mister Bond? it looks that way. He even has his own shark tank in the house!
This is his albino rapper son:
Georgia is a very beautiful country:
'
But Ivanishvili is moving it towards a dictatorship under his and Putin's control. Bond villains don't seem so unrealistic in some parts of the world!
Not only is that house amazing, it is 100% insanely bizarre: all that metalwork and vast spaces. It looks more like a parliament building than a home. I am reminded of Nero's palace in ancient Rome which supposedly overlooked the forum and was linked by a walkway bridge to the senate house. This modern dictator [a financial dictator] seems to have equally astounding and power-crazed architectural ideas.
He's a real life Bond villain. His son even looks like Zao!
All that P&W would need to do is change the names and location enough to avoid being sued.
I don't think the risk for P&W isn't getting sued in this case. I think Ivanishivili would've sent assassins, and I think he knows people ....
For some reason I've been reading more about the Arctic and especially Greenland in terms of strategic importance lately. EON always say they look at current and near future threats when writing scripts for Bond movies. This is one that hasn't been used in any Bond movie or even action movie I can think of, and some of the locations will also be exotic and unknown for most audiences (even though scenes for the upcoming Mission Impossible movie was filmed in Svalbard).
In 2014 the first civilian transport ship sailed the North-East Passage (north of Russia) without assistance from an ice breaker, and commercial use of the new northern trade routes will only increase in the future. If you don't belive the scientists on this, perhaps you'll belive the leaders of China and especially Russia who invest heavily on this future. Those routes will only take about half the time to sail compared to the traditional ones through the Suez canal and the Panama canal. These areas of the world also have a lot of important minerals and about 1/4 of the oil reserves in the world hidden under the ice. In military terms the fastest route for missiles between Russia and north America is over the Arctic. While a Bond film shouldn't use Russia as the main villain or make something like "The hunt for the Red October", I think this topic has a lot of potential. Make the villain a shipping magnate for example. That magnate can be based in for example Japan or Norway, adding locations that has been underused or only used decades ago in Bond movies.
Subsea mining is another element that can be used in this scenario.
Ice hotels has unfortunately already been used in one of the lesser Bond movies .....
An ornate golden diamond studded knife-gun? Every Bond villain should have one!
https://www.wsj.com/world/asia/taiwan-detains-ship-and-chinese-crew-after-undersea-cable-severed-287c8fd4?st=vxYXZo&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink
"Taiwan detained a cargo ship and its eight Chinese crew members after an undersea fiber-optic cable was severed, in a stepped-up effort to police such incidents, which are often seen as part of China’s pressure campaign targeting the self-ruled island.
Taiwan’s coast guard said the incident was being handled as a national security matter and that deliberate sabotage hadn’t been ruled out. A string of such episodes has called attention to Taiwan’s vulnerability as it works to ensure that it has secure internet services to keep the island online in the event of an invasion or blockade by China.
Similar incidents elsewhere, including the cutting of data cables beneath the Baltic Sea, have brought global attention to security concerns surrounding the critical infrastructure. "
I could see a plot or sub-plot around the severing of these undersea cables. Perhaps Bond is tasked with investigated this and we have a scuba diving sequence but is tailed and has to dispatch some baddies but he recovers a dog-tag that leads him to a Chinese Military unit etc etc.
It would be interesting to see a recurring General Gogol like character return. Maybe they could make him Chinese?
We definitely need more military personnel appearing in the films. If the producers are concerned about how certain countries are portrayed i.e. Russia/China/NK etc. then why not make up a fictional one, or better still bring back that Latin American country from the start of Octopussy, and make one of them a rogue villain? That would be a neat bit of tie-in continuity IMO.
https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/54207449366_6172c45100_b.jpg
If the villain is a Chinese general I doubt if the CCP will let the movie play in Chinese cinemas or make it available in Chinese streaming services. That's a huge market.
I wouldn't mind seeing the ski-doo chase from the Logan Spectre script resurrected. That isn't really something that's been done before and could be very exciting.
I couldn't agree more! But I haven't heard of the skidoo/snowmobile chase Logan planned before. Please elaborate if you know more.
Look at this very short clip of a river in Kazakhstan where the ice is blown up to avoid floods! I don't know how it would fit in a plot, but I do want to see this in a Bond movie:
The Bond YouTube channel "Analyze this, mister Bond" mentions in the most recent episode that one of the early ideas for QoS was having the villain smuggle historic artifacts from Iran to finance his goals. I like the idea. It reminds me of Octopussy, but not too much. I also like the idea because this happens in real life. The Taliban and al-Quaeda sold Afghan artifacts on the black market to finance their operations.
Well, in that case you should read the second chapter of the Kim Sherwood trilogy, A Spy Like Me.
It's exactly what the plot deals with.
I do always like that in Ocotpussy Kamal Khan et al sold the stolen Russian treasure in London at Sotherby's, where, what, they were hoping no one would notice?! Sotherby's?! 🤣
Also Sotherby's doing a terrible job of not making sure they weren't selling stolen goods- I feel like the provenance of most Fabergé eggs is probably fairly well documented.
I guess you mean Sotheby's instead of Sotherby's?
I share your point, and I'd also add the most surprising thing is that the Russian authorities seem to know nothing about the auction in London, which is quite disturbing considering the kind of object to be sold. If this egg is supposed to be in the Kremlin, I find it questionable not to have any department checking what's currently happening on the art market on the other side of the Iron Curtain.
In The Property of a Lady, everything is wonderfully built plotwise while it's not necessarily the case in the movie imo. Having said that, I do enjoy Octopussy.
I'm watching Bond's apartment in the episode where he teams up with Ryan from "Analyse this, mister Bond" to discuss Bond films that could/should be-re-made. Here it is:
I found their thoughts about Moonraker especially interesting. Maybe Bond26 could be a version of Moonraker that's closer to the novel. These days we actually have super-rich people who develop their own space rockets. We also see Europe needing desperately lang-range missiles and Anti-air missiles. Russia tested the Burevestnik cruise missile (NATO name : Skyfall!) a couple of days ago. It's a nuclear-capable weapon Moscow says can pierce any defense shield. What if not-Elon Musk developed a missile like that on his own dollar and just gifted it to the UK?
The villain could be a modern version of Hugo Drax. He's a Iraqi scientist who was the lone survived and explosion during a British raid on one of Sadam's rocket research facilities in the . His face got burnt and he was miss-identified at the hospital as one of the British soldiers. His face was burnt so plastic surgery was used to repair his face and he claims amnesia. Later he builds a business empire and becomes one of the richest men in the world. Like in the novel he plans to use the missile to nuke London and they can finally use Gala Brand as the Bond girl. Much of the rest of the plot needs to be changed and expanded upon, but it would still be closer to the novel. I don't think they should use the title again.
As the headline says, Italy is investigating reports that very wealthy people paid to go on "sniper safaris" to Sarajevo in Bosnia to kill civilians for fun. Absolutely horrible! however I think something along these line could be a good background for a villain.
Jesus, that's horrendous. I think anything like that might be too dark for a Bond movie. I guess it could be part of a villain's backstory perhaps.
Although I've always thought that the manhunt/safari set piece in Octopussy could have been really effective if they'd gone a bit more tense with it. I can actually imagine Fleming writing it.
I agree that it would've been completely wrong to show it on screen, but as a backstory it could work very well. Maybe it gets mentioned in a briefing? Even better: the villain belives he's just like James Bond and tells the story story to him as "proof".
I guess they could do something similar to The Man With The Golden Gun. A excellent marksman, lets just call him Francisco, invites other marksman to compete with each other in duels. Or you can compete with Francisco. Live ammunition is used all the time. Francisco just needs a bigger threat. The gun play is what he does for sport. But what can be his villain plan?
I think that would be to close to TMWTGG. In my mind the villain isn't an assassin or even a sharpshooter. He's simply a billionaire who doesn't care about laws or people, he just wants to entertain himself.
Too close to reality?