Bond #24: SPECTRE

since duran duran the only ones i'd put above adele are a-ha, gladys knight, and maybe garbage

was really hoping for more Belluci in this movie

although the Duran Duran one wasn't exactly forgettable

It was outside the 30-year window, boom guess what you're old, Mr Bond. Are your joints aching? Is your drive fading?

Skyfall is the best Adele song.

are you here to mess up this thread like the political one with your weird opinions?

This was shockingly bad, really. Just really hollow and boring and badly acted - Batuista's the single good performance but he doesn't get enough scenes. Highlight was Andrew Scott's Wile E Coyote arm-waving as he suspends in the air before plummeting to his death.

Mostly I was just curious about how Bond escapes the exploding M16 building at the end. So - Blofeld has taken the time to make little photostats of Bond's old buddies but he... leaves a giant net for Bond to jump into and save himself? Why is there a net at the bottom of the building anyway?

This is bad and dumb (and anything good about it the new Mission Impossible did a million times better) but I liked and respected it more than Skyfall. PRobably because it's the most phoned in movie Sam Mendes has ever done, meaning it's less Sam Mendes-y.

anything good about it the new Mission Impossible did a million times better

otm, new MI was really good

It's still too Sam Mendes-y!
If his uniting shtick seems to be "look pretty, don't sweat about massive holes, here's a jerk man for your enjoyment!" that seems to be consistent since American Beauty.

*plot holes

Mendez is utter waste

His best bond is still prob the second one, which had zero highlights and far fewer absolutely stupid holes or do-you-see moments and could have passed for a moore-era frippery as opposed to nolanisation of the franchise

New MI is the absolute balls and shouldve swept the oscars

I like how the M:I movies have elaborate setpieces. The Bond movies just go, "Let's do another motorboat bit," or "We could set it in MEXICO."

This was by favourite bad line/tautology, which apparently someone thought was good enough to use as a PR pullquote:

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CQPtb5wWEAE4CNl.jpg

looks like a magazine ad for an offshore bank

http://youtu.be/v9DmcxIZ_fA

this movie was just so grim. in casino royale everyone seemed to be having so much fun, this one seemed so bored with itself. it wasn't *boring* exactly, there was a lot to like here and there. mexico city tracking shot, bond's quick escape from the 'eyes wide shut' party, lea seydoux, dave bautista...but idk. the fact that everything in the craig movies has to be tied together, and not just tied together but personally related to bond's childhood, and in such a gloomy way. ugh who cares, more international intrigue and less 'the creepy kid i knew when i was a kid grew up into the world's most destructive troll'.

Why is there a net at the bottom of the building anyway?

Because the building was in the process of being demolished and it was presumably there to catch demolition rubble.

I think it was because they were still using the boat dock and there was a giant hole from the prior explosion that stuff kept falling through

source: the beginning where they're in the boat dock and James looks up and says "wow guess I won't get hit by any rocks today huh"

this movie was just so grim. in casino royale everyone seemed to be having so much fun, this one seemed so bored with itself. it wasn't *boring* exactly, there was a lot to like here and there. mexico city tracking shot, bond's quick escape from the 'eyes wide shut' party, lea seydoux, dave bautista...but idk. the fact that everything in the craig movies has to be tied together, and not just tied together but personally related to bond's childhood, and in such a gloomy way. ugh who cares, more international intrigue and less 'the creepy kid i knew when i was a kid grew up into the world's most destructive troll'.

― nomar, Wednesday, October 26, 2016 2:19 PM (twenty-eight minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this has been the problem w/ all the craig bond movies after casino imo

yeah. i've probably said this already itt but Casino Royale saved the franchise from death and the lesson they took was somehow not "make more good Bond movies" but "oh good everyone loves Bond again let's go right back to the shit that drove them away the first time"

Don't really agree with that. While the Craig movies have a lot of flaws (I despise the second and fourth installments), going for a more sad-faced, comic book-like serialized deep backstory was not what the old Bond films had to offer. For better or worse they reflect the time they were made, just like all the other Bond films.

Also, Skyfall is great. But we've been over this countless times. I hardly doubt it drove anyone away, though, it was an insane success on every level, right? Spectre was disappointing though.

skyfall is kinda bollocks but goddamn it looks amazing

basically the problem is that sam mendes is terrible and should be locked in a dungeon for the rest of his life

Well, mostly you're right, but he did make Skyfall, so he's not entirely terrible.

he's great at hiring cinematographers!

Watched Casino Royale recently - it's actually way more cheerful and cheesey than I remembered - much closer Goldeneye than Skyfall. Wish they'd stayed on that course.

Re: the cinematography - the only other Bond film with great art direction is OHMSS - that's a great looking film. Skyfall looks more like... semi-professional Instagram. And the opening sequence to Spectre is so ugly and incoherent.

i think you've got the direction of influence backwards with 'semi-professional Instagram' - the extent that skyfall looks like instagram (which i'd argue is... not much) is more of a reflection of the influence of roger deakins on the art of photography than the other way round

I guess I'm using Instagram as shorthand for "pretty but affectless". That works for Barton Fink but I'm not sure it's the right choice for a Bond movie - and then the sumptuousness just ends up highlighting how pedestrian the script is.

Anyway - it's a fun film until Bardem shows up.

okay, i see where you're coming from - the script is pretty dire but i can't knock deakins for putting together some beautiful-looking sequences. i'd say all sam mendes' films are 'pretty but affectless' to greater or lesser degrees, and the 'pretty' part is kinda mostly down to working with great cinematographers.

The script gets out of the way and allows the images and the scenery to tell the story. I love how the hunt for Bardem goes. Bond takes out bullets from shoulder 'oh, only three guys in the world uses this kind of bullet and one of them is in Shanghai -> Amazing but kinda pointless action sequence in Shanghai, at the end of which Bond finds a casino chip 'oh, this chip comes from a casino in Macao' -> Cool but kinda pointless action sequence in Macao, at the end of which Bond just jumps on a boat that takes him to Bardem... It's effective as hell and makes no sense at all. But who cares about making sense when you got neon?

Also, it's not just pretty pictures. Skyfall is about anxieties of empire, it's no coincidence that Bond travels to the east-west hotspots Shanghai and Macao, and then goes to an island Japan managed to fuck up on it's own.

i think the golden age bonds are about the anxieties of empire; skyfall was about the anxieties of making a bond movie after bourne and batman

also about showcasing premium products with attractive people in exotic locales

another thing that bothered me, maybe not in another Bond film but in this one, was that he was told to stand down and then decides the best way to exercise caution and keep a low profile is to drive a stolen prototype car to Italy. from england!

man the Brosnan bonds where they had to shoehorn in bullshit Ford-era Jaguars were some awkward product placements

That one Dalton installment where he was munching on Cool Ranch Doritos in every other shot and riffing endlessly on AT&T's low long distance rates during a fight scene was particularly distracting.

who uses a sony cell phone? james bond, that's who

Finally watched this. Better than some are saying but I do agree with most of the criticisms. Feels like it was all worked out backwards from wanting Waltz as Blofeld and wanting that to feel like a BIG DEAL which is tough to do when film #2 is largely forgotten and film #3 avoided trying to build up to anything. Telling that it was originally conceived as a two-parter - MAYbe that would have given space to really build up to Waltz and Craig confronting each other. And surely, one imagines, Bellucci would have had more than three minutes onscreen before being packed off to an (unseen) Felix. I don't want two-part Bond films, or continuity in Bond films at all, but you can see how it might have sort of worked.

Instead they try to make up for lost BIG DEAL by loading Blofeld up with a chilhood connection to Bond which barely makes sense (how old is Craig? He'd have been an adult twenty years ago, surely?) and puts us in the VERY bad position of reading Bond from without, as a man with a secret, whose motives drive the plot but aren't known to us until very near the end. Bond is an escapist fantasy, not a character, and the worst choices in Skyfall and this have to do with loading him up with a character's backstory. Well, that and their handling of the female characters which is pretty awful if less out of step with the series's roots. Meantime Waltz just doesn't get enough screen time or ham time to come into focus as a villain in his own right or an ''iconic Bond foe'' or anything - just another Blofeld, better than Gray, worse than Pleasance.

And god, yes, please no more super-hacking. Future installments should either just breeze past the problems that contemporary technology creates for spy stories, or become period pieces because this shit is laaaaame. Also a big misstep to make ''C'' be in on the scheme; imo it'd be more interesting if he was a useful dupe who sincerely believed in his bad scheme due to the latent fascism of Silicon Valley Techno-Libertarianism or whatever. They almost went there but he was so faceless and generic in the end, kinda reminiscent of the Quantum bad guy maybe.

On the other hand, there were some GREAT action set pieces, especially the Alpine chase and the ''From Russia With Love'' train fight. The Rome chase was solid. Mexico City helicopter thing was dumb, but sort of made up for by how slick the preceding sequence was. Seydoux was okay when the script wasn't kicking her to the curb (tho I kept mixing her up with the lead from Toni Erdmann, whose trailer I've now seen like six times).

Veggie shake gag by far the weirdest callback ever - surely someone was thinking of the non-Eon Never Say Never Again, where M is forcing similar things on a skeptical Connery? Shouldn't have bothered if they couldn't have written a better joke around it, or at least had the smoothie get shot out of the bartender's hand or something.

One small, weird complaint: maybe it was just my TV but there were two different shots where it seems like we're supposed to gain important information from written words, but without a closeup reveal shot it remains a blurry mystery. Maybe one of those set up the Bond-Oberhauser connection? As it is he seems to just start talking about someone named Oberhauser and it's like, did I miss him discovering an important clue?

Feels like it was all worked out backwards from wanting Waltz as Blofeld and wanting that to feel like a BIG DEAL which is tough to do when film #2 is largely forgotten and film #3 avoided trying to build up to anything.

this

iirc the movie tries to build up some kind of suspense regarding whether or not blofeld is dead or alive (with all sorts of minor characters being like "no that's impossible!") but it doesn't generate doubt or paranoia or suspense since we saw him on screen and are like, "duh, yeah he's alive!"

imo we knew he was alive because we'd seen a cat and the right clothing but no face scar, so one of his main physical identifiers was missing

oh yeah, but the suspense is not wrt Waltz' character being blofeld, but whether or not Waltz' character exists (which for the audience makes little sense) - the waltz=blofeld "reveal" makes no sense

(this is all from fading memory btw so i might totally be wrong)

he's introduced way too early in the film for it to be a real mystery and Bond is sure from the first face-to-face encounter that it's the guy from his childhood and it's everyone else that needs convincing

that's not even extrapolated as a major plot thread since it's really only Q who's left to follow up on that line of inquiry

- The point, 007, is that Franz Oberhauser is dead. Dead and buried. And unless you come back with me right now, my career and Moneypenny's will go the same way. Do you understand? All hell is breaking loose out there and...
- I saw him.
- You thought you saw him.
- We've been through the records. He died in an avalanche with his father 20 years ago.
- Yes. I know that. But I saw him.

from the audience pov: there is no basis for doubt since we saw him and have no reason to believe a backstory with no exposition abt his death

so yeah, totally agree

so many things were dumb about this.

possibly the worst was that the world's largest international criminal/terrorist organization meets FACE-TO-FACE - IN PERSON - in a city building that you can just walk right into if you have the right spoken password and a ring. gtfo w/ that bullshit

you can't, though. it was a trap!

I mean, they let him in but presumably after they did an actual check they were just going to kill him

i love that bond just wanders into the base with basically no plan and ends up escaping certain death much more by accident than design. great work james, you're the best

(also he is most likely no longer be able to tell faces apart after blofeld drilled away that part of his brain)

blofeld's desert base, i mean, not the super-secret villain hangout

I did like the ambiguousness of whether the minor brain surgery did anything other than give him a headache

tbf that isn't the most precise surgical technique

i wouldn't mind the ambiguousness if one of the outcomes in question wasn't whether the lead of your movie has suffered catastrophic, life-altering brain damage

like, clearly we're supposed to assume that bond is fine but blofeld spends five minutes gloating about what his drill will do to bond's brain, we see bond getting drilled (so to speak) and then he's apparently fine, with no explanation has to how he avoided his certain fate?

maybe we're just supposed to assume that blofeld is a shitty brain surgeon

tbf bond just divides the world into people you take orders from, people you shoot, and people you fuck

idk why he needs to see faces