Most confusing plot?

Jarvio

Which bond film has the most confusing plot?

I believe that most people will say QOS... And while I agree that it is pretty confusing, once you ruminate about it afterwards and make sense of it on your own, it will eventually make sense.

Same applies to other 'confusing' bond plots, like TLD and OP.

But what is the most confusing for me then? Without a doubt, it is DAF. The whole smuggling thing is what gets me. The whole wint/kidd hired by blofeld, peter franks smuggling, double crossing morton slumber and shady tree, shady tree getting killed by wint/kidd.... there's so many people involved and it's hard to keep track of who's working for who, and who's double crossing who... And to top it off, bond poses as peter franks, then double crosses slumber.... was peter franks always supposed to do this, or was this bond's doing? Then tiffany case is also involved in the smuggling... Yeah, as I said, too many people involved and I struggle to keep up with that.

chrisisall

Paste. Glass. Where's the real diamonds?

Brosnan_fan

I would say the Bond films with the most confusing plots would be OP, TWINE and TLD.

Oddly enough, I'm not bothered by this, because they are 3 of my most loved Bonds. :x -{

Silhouette Man

Jarvio wrote:

Which bond film has the most confusing plot?

I believe that most people will say QOS... And while I agree that it is pretty confusing, once you ruminate about it afterwards and make sense of it on your own, it will eventually make sense.

Same applies to other 'confusing' bond plots, like TLD and OP.

But what is the most confusing for me then? Without a doubt, it is DAF. The whole smuggling thing is what gets me. The whole wint/kidd hired by blofeld, peter franks smuggling, double crossing morton slumber and shady tree, shady tree getting killed by wint/kidd.... there's so many people involved and it's hard to keep track of who's working for who, and who's double crossing who... And to top it off, bond poses as peter franks, then double crosses slumber.... was peter franks always supposed to do this, or was this bond's doing? Then tiffany case is also involved in the smuggling... Yeah, as I said, too many people involved and I struggle to keep up with that.

Agreed. DAF is the pits in terms of plot etc.

Napoleon Plural

Yet, you could argue its confusion is what it's about, that it's a pipeline operation and no one really knows each other in it beyond their immediate contact.

But for me, the way it moves along and the great one liners and sparkle is what draws me, more than the plot itself.

chrisisall

Silhouette Man wrote:

Agreed. DAF is the pits in terms of plot etc.

Plot?
Oh yeah, DAF *did* kinda have one, didn't it? )
Lets see.... Blofeld is making doubles of himself... to...
uhhh...
for the purpose of...

I'm lost.

Napoleon Plural

They had separate performances of the Rocky Horror Show about the country... )

chrisisall

Napoleon Plural wrote:

But for me, the way it moves along and the great one liners and sparkle is what draws me, more than the plot itself.

Definitely; DAF & TSWLM are my two OTT guilty pleasures.

chrisisall

Napoleon Plural wrote:

They had separate performances of the Rocky Horror Show about the country... )

It's just a clone to the left-! B-)

Mr Beech

I don't remember DAF, but I'll be watching it again soon. Both CR and QoS leave a lot of questions to the viewers' speculation.

"Your friend Mathis," still confuses me to this day.

I think QoS had a pretty understandable plot in most ways, but a few things were totally unexplained there, too.

minigeff

chrisisall wrote:

Napoleon Plural wrote:

They had separate performances of the Rocky Horror Show about the country... )

It's just a clone to the left-! B-)

And a cat to riiight!
Put your hands on... Baha?
Get in the john and shiiiiiiite!

Lets do the DAFt song agaaaaain!!

chrisisall

Silly silly British man.

minigeff

chrisisall wrote:

Silly silly British man.

;% hehehehehehehe

chrisisall

You got the Buffy reference, I take it?

minigeff

Must say though, that although DAF does have a bloody confusing plot, on the flip side it does have one of the best lines in it;

"Willard White for you"

"Oh wow,....... Mr White this really is an honour"

"SHOVE YOUR HONOUR, WHERE'S MY GODDAM STATALITE?!"

) makes me laugh every time.

And here it is!!

http://youtu.be/xt_Kn4DggPg

) ) )

I guess the majority of us have noticed that Klaus Hergerererershimer and a couple others appear in connery's previous outing, YOLT?

jeffch

chrisisall wrote:

Napoleon Plural wrote:

But for me, the way it moves along and the great one liners and sparkle is what draws me, more than the plot itself.

Definitely; DAF & TSWLM are my two OTT guilty pleasures.

I wouldn't call TSWLM a guilty please, its usually regarded as one of the best Bonds of all.

But for me OP is the most confusing. I've seen it countless times now, and I'm honestly still not sure what making fake jewelry had to do with setting off a warhead on an military base.

chrisisall

Most of the dialogue in the movie is golden! -{

minigeff

Edited me previous post btw

chrisisall

jeffch wrote:

But for me OP is the most confusing. I've seen it countless times now, and I'm honestly still not sure what making fake jewelry had to do with setting off a warhead on an military base.

I don't find it complicated, but at the moment I can't recall the details. ?:)
Been meaning to watch it again soon anyway...

Dalkowski110

jeffch wrote:

But for me OP is the most confusing. I've seen it countless times now, and I'm honestly still not sure what making fake jewelry had to do with setting off a warhead on an military base.

Well, Orlov is trying to obtain a nuclear bomb presumably via bribery, which means he'd need a steady source of currency (expertly faked jewelry; remember, the guy in the Kremlin Art Repository is faking it). He'd be an idiot not to have a cover operation, and in one of the plot's most poorly-aging points, you're told that Kamal Khan is an "exiled Afghan prince". When the movie was made, the Soviets had access to the files of just about every malcontent in the country, including someone of Kamal's stature. Orlov would thus have immediate access to Kamal to use as a fence (probably made him an offer he couldn't refuse...for all the power Kamal supposedly has, Orlov would have had Spetsnaz GRU attached to his command in keeping with standard Soviet Army protocol...), realizing Kamal's mixing in real jewelry and having a partner uninvolved would hide him.

We're given hints that Orlov masterminded it, but that's one of the film's problems for me: Louis Jourdan's performance as Kamal had to be matched by an equally calm and sinister actor playing Orlov (although one could allow for a passive-aggressive psychosis). Otherwise, with Steven Berkoff's over-the-top portrayal, it really blunts the impact.

chrisisall

Ummm, yeah, what Dalk said! )

chrisisall

Someone at another site posited the idea that ALL the Blofelds we see in DAF are doubles, and that the next time we see the actual Blofeld is in the FYEO pts.
I kinda like that.

StraightUpWithATwist

DAF definitely has the most confusing plot overall. QOS is confusing just based on the editing and not so much because of the story. Had the editing been toned down by about 5 SECONDS then maybe it would've been easier to understand QOS's plot. But DAF is all over the place. Bond's going after a diamond smuggling ring that kills each courier, finds out that it's Willard Whyte except it's not really Willard Whyte and that it's really Blofeld, and instead of selling the diamonds Blofeld is using them to create a giant space laser to do hee-haw with. Huh?

AlphaOmegaSin

I would say DAF has the most confusing Plot. The whole part where Blofeld is making copies of himself always went over my Head.

Colonel Shatner

DAF had lots of weird ideas stirred together not particularly well.

I think even Brosnan was "baffled" by the plotting in TWINE.

Silhouette Man

Most confusing plots:

DAF
OP
TLD
LTK (some parts only)
TWINE
QoS

Dalkowski110

Silhouette Man wrote:

Most confusing plots:

DAF
OP
TLD
LTK (some parts only)
TWINE
QoS

You got me thinking about the reasons why...

-DAF's plot is confusing largely thanks to its mood and the inclusion of too many subplots that are included "for the heck of it". The base idea of "rolling up the smuggling pipeline" is one I'm convinced would work if the film was 1) serious and 2) getting rid of some of the downright bizarre subplots (the multiple Blofelds, especially).

A film's plot CAN be temporarily buried by its MacGuffin and get away with it, and it was done so absolutely brilliantly in my single favorite film proto-noir of all time: The Maltese Falcon (and Dashiell Hammett's book is pretty darn good, too). It's also done pretty well in The ODESSA File, both in the novel by Frederick Forsyth and the film. But unlike Bogey making quite clear at the end of the former great film that the point was not the black bird, but about solving the murder of Miles Archer or in the latter instance, Peter, who grew up idolizing his father, telling Roschmann that the incident at the Riga dockyard was the reason he was there, DAF never explicitly makes the point about how important the diamonds are or even something that could be solved with A SINGLE PARAGRAPH from Blofeld...

"Mr. Bond, I don't think you've caught on, have you? Those diamonds weren't for money; they were for power. The fools doing the smuggling work had to be kept in the dark for security reasons. But now you're wondering why I sent Mr. Wint and Mr. Kidd after them. When they stop getting diamonds, which by now you've deduced correctly are something I no longer need, they're going to ask questions. In my organization, Mr. Bond, the fewer questions you ask, the more likely you are to live a relatively long life."

-Regarding OP, I basically did summarize the plot (which I surpsingly understood well upon viewing the movie the first time!). However, to compact that explanation a bit, they committed two offenses that you do not do in any movie: you assume that your audience is going to believe something is timeless when it's not and you're focusing on the wrong villain. The latter is very simple; Orlov masterminded the whole thing but was badly underutilized (in some ways, GE's General Ourumov seemed to be an updated but corrected version of Orlov) and because Louis Jourdan was a much better actor than Steven Berkoff, they chose to focus on him. The problem is that you're not spending time on the guy who is technically the main villain. But I did mention something about timelessness in there, didn't I?

When OP was filmed, Afghanistan was in the news in a very different way than it is today. The Soviets invaded it and for a while managed to control the government they deemed legitimate. Soviet general officers, even those stationed in Europe, would have had easy access to files on people who had not only caused the communist government problems, but also Mohammed Zahir Shah's government. That was relatively well-known at the time of release. When Vijay Armitraj utters forth three words..."Exiled Afghan prince"...we immediately know that the latter government (a monarchy on good terms with India) kicked him out since the communist government was known to shoot its prisoners. It's made clear that Orlov needs funds for a nuclear bomb, but it's implied that he went to Kamal after looking at his file and thinking "oh hey, look, this guy smuggles high value jewelry...that means currency for a bomb!". That sat well with some well-informed 1980's audiences but aged terribly thanks to the focus quickly being shifted to the Soviets alone (vs. the government they were propping up *and* the Mujahadeen replacing the royalists as the guys most likely to beat the Soviets), literally almost immediately after the film was released. With a currently-happening geopolitical event in a farflung place that's very volatile, you can't assume it's going to be timeless. Look at some of the movies made about Afghanistan and Iraq in just the past decade! Still, it was a combination of refusing to focus on a guy who was technically the main bad guy and assuming the geopolitical climate in Afghanistan was going to stay the same/allow it to be self-explanatory.

-Regarding TLD, the refusal to outright say that Koskov wanted control of the KGB (he does after all want Pushkin shot and then wants to get back to the Soviet Union unharmed...what other motive does he have?) was one of the things that really hurt the film to me. If you have an explanatory scene like you do with Whittaker where his motives are made extremely clear, then okay, but what's the point of keeping everyone guessing about Koskov? I get it, you need suspense and it's all about trust, but you risk losing some of the audience by doing so (including my father, who praised Dalton's performance but thought the plot, while understandable, was an outright mess when it came to Koskov).

-Regarding LTK, the overall plot is very straight forward and Franz Sanchez ranks among the best Bond villains. But you could argue that a few of the plotholes (such as the mercenary and the "what was that?" inclusion of the MI6 agent who gets killed, but also wants to bring Bond back...) are so badly confusing that they detract from the movie.

-Regarding TWINE, there's a reason why the original cut was so long. It adequately explained everything and tied up all the loose ends. But almost an hour of it wound up on the cutting room floor, so we really don't know certain things about certain subplots that seem to go nowhere. I think this teaches another lesson: if you've got a nice, long story to tell, then do it or remove all references to subplots that can't be included. Don't just keep them in there to fill up the running time. Short films can be good, too.

-Regarding QoS, I give you the anti-TWINE. "Okay, let's make this really, really fast-paced and streamlined." At the expense of the plot, no less. I imagine the writer's strike severely hurt QoS, but would someone explain why they chose to keep in all these action scenes (the overly-long dogfight comes to mind) as opposed to scenes exposing the plot? I mean, it's only 107 minutes long. I remember the very first thing when the film ended the first time I viewed it was NOT related to the plot. It was "WOW, was that ever quick!" Even 15-20 more minutes would presumably give us a much-better-developed plot and villain.

chrisisall

Dalk, I'm really lovin' your posts. -{

Silhouette Man

Yes, thanks, Dalk, very lucid and very interesting - you've touched on some things I'd not even considered before!

Dalkowski110

chrisisall wrote:

Dalk, I'm really lovin' your posts. -{

::Gets up and takes a bow:: )

But seriously, thanks very much! {[]

Silhouette Man wrote:

Yes, thanks, Dalk, very lucid and very interesting - you've touched on some things I'd not even considered before!

Thanks very much once more! Either of you guys ever wander out my way to Bloomington, IN, I'm buying the beers! {[]

chrisisall

Dalkowski110 wrote:

Either of you guys ever wander out my way to Bloomington, IN, I'm buying the beers! {[]

We called the dog Indiana.
) Sorry, I couldn't resist.
I'd love it, mate!