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- That synopsis kind of ruins the revelation that said environmentalist is looking for water, not oil as everyone had suspected. Fail.
- My ovaries found themselves in familiar territory. “Oh, that must be Daniel Craig on screen,” they said. They’re like the raptors in Jurassic Park: THEY REMEMBER. Christ, I just… FLAIL. I FLAIL. I fucking love him. It’s not that he’s necessarily the most attractive guy in and of himself, but in this role he just becomes something else entirely. I defy everyone, men and women alike, to come out of this movie and not want to have ten thousand of his babies. He’s all strong and intense and BLUNT FORCE TRAUMA but smooth and charming and we spent the whole subway ride home just going “UNGH” in reaction to him. It’s this inate coiled fury that is always lurking and then BAM! it comes out as a collision between his fist and the bad guy’s face. He’s all erratic and a lose cannon but he knows what needs to be done and he gets it done. I want him in my corner, always.
- Olga Kurylenko got to kick some ass up until she was cowering in the fire, but I will chalk that up to flashbacks to her childhood trauma otherwise she would have been able to kick the fire’s ass too.
- The plot in this one is fairly weak, to be honest. We’re left at the end of Casino Royale wondering about the nature of the Faceless Crime Organization (FCO) that MI6 has no idea exists as well as about Vesper’s boyfriend’s involvement with them. At the end of this one, we’re left wondering about the nature of the Faceless Crime Organization that MI6 now knows exists exists as well as about Vesper’s boyfriend’s involvement with them. The movie is kind of disappointing on that level, since if there’s no real advancement of the plot we’re basically left with a movie that was made as an excuse to stage elaborate vehicular chases and fight scenes.
- That said, the car/boat/plane chases were awesome and the action sequences were interesting and filmed differently than how we usually tend to see them.
- I guess this movie is more about bridging the gap between Bond’s character in Casino Royale and Bond as how we see him in all of the other films, i.e. the switch from a man in love to a blunt instrument of death who will never form a lasting bond with a woman (except for M). M continually expresses exasperation about Bond accidentally-on-purpose killing all of the leads they have in figuring out more about the FCO. Like, he can’t stop killing people; the body count he ends up with is pretty high by the end of the movie. But I really like this depiction of Bond still learning the ropes; he doesn’t know everything yet and he still fucks up a lot, but in the end he gets the job done and earns M’s trust. By the end of the movie he’s finally figuring out the Big Picture approach that means letting some bad guys live because of where else they might take you.
I think he’s also got a nice emotional arc going from denial of how he felt about Vesper and how she in turn felt about him, to finally accepting that while those feelings might have been fatal, he can still accept them for what they are. The guy has become an insomniac and we know that’s not because the ease with which he kills weighs heavily on his conscience at night. He sits around drinking not one but six of the cocktail he invented in Casino Royale, i.e. The Vesper, getting drunk and exhausted in his grief. It was heartbreaking, to be completely honest. The guy is absolutely hurting and we never, ever got to see a vulnerable Bond before Craig. As easily as he can put his feelings aside, Craig’s Bond as an emotional Bond is what I really loved about Casino Royale and I’m glad he was still able to bring some of that back into this film.
- Truthfully, I’m really liking the development of Bond’s relationship with M and how she’s the only woman he’ll trust from now on. She’s got the same cantankerous side that all the M’s before her have had but I like the empathy she shows Bond and how she’s really a bit of a marshmallow deep down. There were a couple of scenes where she was running a bath or putting on some sort of face cream that, although Bond wasn’t present and she wasn’t actually talking to him, kind of lent the scenes a weird sense of intimacy and unguardedness of the kind we got with Vesper. It’s a non-sexual intimacy in this case, obviously, since she’s trying to mother him a bit (which, by the way, was the most adorable part in the film when Bond said that), but I’m liking this dynamic.
- In the brief snippets of reviews I’ve caught, people keep comparing the Craig films to the Jason Bourne series and they mostly compare them as if that’s a bad thing because somehow Bond has lost some of his quintessential Bond-ness. I can’t disagree more. I love that the remounting of these movies has made them into more mature action films; the hokey, winking style of a lot of the other films feels really dated and that kind of humour where mildly naughty and incredibly terrible puns are prized above else started in the originaly Casino Royale (I assume, having not seen it) and ran its course with the Austin Powers movies. The new Bond movies are still incredibly stylish and sexy without having to go out of their way to be ironically self-referential or ridiculously campy. It’s unnecessary and I’m glad they’ve cut the crap. The back to basics approach is working, people.
I’ve been marathoning the old movies over the last three days and it becomes more and more obvious that all the supperficial things that people associate with Bond (the Bond girls, the gadgets, the increasingly ridiculous villains) are things that I absolutely did not miss in either Casino Royale or Quantum of Solace. Truth be told, I didn’t even notice the lack of gadgets and whatnot until I started watching the old ones again and went “Oh wait, Bond didn’t get a new watch with a geiger counter / circular saw / giant magnetic field / built-in martini shaker for this film.”
- I think Bond always needs to be shot wearing charming sweaters while sitting in the back of a boat in the Adriatic.
- I really loved the use of typography to indicate a locale change. It was a nice attention to detail that was fun for font geeks like me.
- Ms. Fields was obnoxious and clearly she only existed to facilitate Bond into his era of meaningless one night stands in a post-Vesper world. I’m willing to bet that she wasn’t wearing anything under her trench coat when she met him at the airport. The best part was when they found her dead and covered in oil; I thought it was a nice reference back to Goldfinger.
- Actually, I lie, the best part with Ms. Fields was when she tried to check into a rather cheap and run down hotel in Bolivia because their cover story was that they were teachers on sabattical. Bond is having none of this and so checks them into the most luxurious hotel he can find, telling the people at the front desk with a completely deadpan voice “We’re teachers on sabbatical… and we just won the lottery.” LOL.
- Speaking of which, not enough sex in this movie. There used to be a formula to the movies where the film would start with Bond having just had sex with some random woman who is of little consequence to the film, followed by sex midway through the movie with the female sidekick of the main villain, and then finishing up with sex with the Bond Girl we were supposed to want Bond to (temporarily) end up with. Clearly they’ve eschewed said pattern, which is fine, but if Daniel Craig is your Bond you really need to do more in this regard. I suppose they made up for this by allowing us to objectify him in scenes where there were ass shots for no reason or he took off his shirt for no real reason. The director, he loves his audience.
That’s actually the key thing about these new Bond movies: everyone involved seems to finally understand that Bond is in fact the Bond Girl.
- I liked the increased focus on hand-to-hand combat and Bond does a hell of a lot of running while trying to catch the baddies on foot. I spent a great deal of time afterwards trying to remember if we’ve ever seen Roger Moore run in any of his Bond films. Jump on the backs of crocodiles, sure, but run? Not really, and definitely not like this.
- I loved at the start when they captured Mr. White and brought him to the secret underground interrogation room in Siena, the one that clearly looked like it had been set up five minutes earlier. Apparently in their haste top put the room together, installing a bar so that Mr. Bond could pour hismelf a stiff drink immediately upon arrival was a natural requirement. I also loved when he put Mr. White in the chair and was like “Don’t bleed to death”, hahaha. So dry.
- There’s this part where a bunch of the key players in the FCO are meeting together in public at the opera and using the world’s tiniest headsets they’re able to talk to each other across the auditorium to make plans about their evil doings. I was getting incredibly irate about this because of all the other people in the audience who had paid good money to see Tosca and were having their evening ruined. Bond, who has knocked a guy out in order to get his hands on a headset, tells them all off for being so rude for talking during the performance. Obviously he does this to get them to get up and leave the auditorium so he can figure out who they are, but I still like the idea of James Bond, defender of the arts.
- Vesper’s ex-boyfriend must buy Algerian love knots in bulk at Costco. I loved that the spy he was with was randomly Canadian and that when Bond dismissed her from the scene, she said “Thank you” as a polite Canadian girl would.
- I rather liked the theme song for the movie. I was watching Die Another Day just now and Madonna’s theme for that one completely sucks. There’s a certain sound that all the good themes have (usually the inclusion of a really brassy element) and the Jack White / Alicia Keyes duet had that while still sounding like a White Stripes song.
- The title sequence was decent enough considering they decided to fall back n the whole silhouetted naked women thing they love so much. At least these ones were buried in sand and left a little to the imagination. Still, I’m not sure that anything will ever top the one for Casino Royale.
- It’s nice to enjoy a movie again and I was pleasantly surprised by this one. I still prefer to Casino Royale (which we promptly watched when we got home), but I don’t feel like
Harry Potter and theQuantum of Solace was a let down as a sequel. I can’t wait to see it again.
Quantum of Solace
Bond is back and as virile as ever.
IMDB Plot Synopsis: Seeking revenge for the death of his love, secret agent James Bond sets out to stop an environmentalist from taking control of a country's water supply.
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