Your thoughts on the Zorin Miners Massacre in AVTAK?
Silhouette Man
The last refuge of a scoundrelPosts: 8,845MI6 Agent
What are your thoughts on the Zorin miners massacre from AVTAK where Zorin and Scarpine seemingly just flood the mine and sadistically gun down each and every one of the loyal miners?
Was this simply overkill on the part of the screenwriters/director and what purpose did it even serve in the end-up?
Roger Moore is on record as saying on a number of occasions that he didn't agree with this more violent aspects that came into the James Bond films at the end of his run as Bond.
What are your thoughts on this?
Does it recall Silva's gunning down of the defenceless Severine?
Was this simply overkill on the part of the screenwriters/director and what purpose did it even serve in the end-up?
Roger Moore is on record as saying on a number of occasions that he didn't agree with this more violent aspects that came into the James Bond films at the end of his run as Bond.
What are your thoughts on this?
Does it recall Silva's gunning down of the defenceless Severine?
"The tough man of the world. The Secret Agent. The man who was only a silhouette." - Ian Fleming, Moonraker (1955).
Comments
been seen in almost every 007 film. It's a plot device to show
how truly twisted the antagonist is and make the audience will on more for the
hero to succeed. Conflict generates emotion and that is number one
key thing for any filmmaker to achieve in their movie.
I have no problem with the scene. It makes Zorin a true psychopath and Chris' performance is
outstanding. I think AVTAK is an under appreciated film. I think one of the biggest problems with was Moores age. A slightly darker Dalton version of the film would have been fantastic.
Pretty much what he said....I know that Roger has voiced strong opinions on that scene...he said it didn't belong in a Bond movie...
For me...this scene doesn't recall "Silva's gunning down of the defenceless Severine"...that scene is smartly written and very well acted and delivered...not that the prior one wasn't...I just prefer the writing of the Severine scene...
I can understand why some people might not like it though - especially Roger Moore. Roger was obviously the light bond, but this scene in AVTAK (along with the car scene in FYEO) are IMO the darkest scenes of the entire Moore era.
But as I said, I personally love it!
1 - Moore, 2 - Dalton, 3 - Craig, 4 - Connery, 5 - Brosnan, 6 - Lazenby
On the other hand, the machine gunning of Ourmov and Xenia in the room of operatives at GE station felt wrong, early on in the movie, with ill advised humour in it, a more realistic vibe to the film and not long after Schindler's List, awful. Ditto with the machine gunning of the sailors in the early days of TND, just seemed tasteless, as if to say, hey, we're a nasty film too, we're not here for the nicer things in life.
Roger Moore 1927-2017
I agree with Nap on GE and TND. Unlike AVTAK where it takes place at the height of the film and can be justified by the Zorin character we've come to know, those just feel out of place.
Zorin was a nutbag psychopath, to kill those men was his character, as stated before, it's a scene used to show how crackers he is.
Then people say its too violent etc etc. I'm sorry, but to say its too violent but remain a fan of old jimmy is a tad hypocritical in my book. You're a fan of a guy who is a womaniser, likes to drink and gamble, drive fast and oh yeah, he kills people for a living. And then people get concerned when the bad guy does something bad?
It'd be great wouldn't it if Bond 'turned' the bad guys from a life of crime by sitting them down, having a cuppa and a chat, maybe even throwing in a hug just for good measure?
I personally prefer to see things done the old fashioned way, with a 7.65 planted between the eyes, or a swift boot dispatching baddy off a cliff edge etc.
I suggest if you prefer the softy softy approach you ditch Bond and go watch Willy W@nker or that warbling bitch Andrews in Austria.
Vive le droit à la libre expression! Je suis Charlie!
www.helpforheroes.org.uk
www.cancerresearchuk.org
Will need your help guys. Feel free to add to the list, I'm doing this from memory.
Goldfinger- Goldfinger gases gangsters, leaves Oddjob and other man locked in vault
Thunderball- Largo throws his man into shark pool.
YOLT- Blofeld drops men in piranha pool
TSWLM- Stromberg blows up scientist in helicopter and drops woman in shark pool.
Moonraker- Drax sets the dogs on the woman
Goldeneye- Xenia and the general gun down staff
There's also Blofeld ordering Morzeny to kill Kronsteen in FRWL, and Blofeld shooting Osatto in YOLT. And then there's Sanchez shooting truman lodge in LTK. And Kananga killing Rosie Carver in LALD. These killings were due to the incompetence and 'failure' of the employees though (although I don't know about the truman lodge one).
1 - Moore, 2 - Dalton, 3 - Craig, 4 - Connery, 5 - Brosnan, 6 - Lazenby
Vive le droit à la libre expression! Je suis Charlie!
www.helpforheroes.org.uk
www.cancerresearchuk.org
Spot on. If this was in Skyfall it would seem tame.
Xenia Onatopp from GE and Stamper from TND are pretty much completely different. Still, I would argue that both serve a point. Without the massacre, you would probably get the feeling that Xenia is just a run-of-the-mill sexual sadist rather than someone who actually gets pleasure from killing people. Rewatching the massacre scene, watch Ourumov, whose objective is basically to establish the Soviet Union with himself as (as M puts it) "the next Iron Man of Russia". He gets no pleasure from it all and is clearly sickened, despite being a hardened bad guy who is literally willing to kill his own people (shooting the Soviet Army private who fires at the gas tanks). When Xenia delivers her one-liner about having to ventilate someone, he goes cold. Even someone with no compassion for human life whatsoever in Ourumov is basically appalled, although to him, the ends justify the means. One wonders how long he and Alec Trevleyan would have kept her alive had Bond failed.
Stamper massacreing the sailors in TND is likewise to establish character...but then he just kinda falls out of it. Had he not had this scene, he would have probably remained "informed evil" until the very end on the stealth boat. However, as mentioned, Stamper seems to drop his completely ruthless persona not long afterward. He certainly doesn't show signs of being that coldly evil until the very end of the film. And yes, I know about the torture thing, but that was once again "informed evil".
With the exception of Kananga in LALD (and only then because he has a huge amount of henchmen, plus the scene where he beats the daylights out of Solitaire; even partially off-camera, it's obvious...), informed evil doesn't really work in the villains and henchmen we've seen it in.
Stamper (despite coming across as a more humerous take on the blonde haired and muscular Teutonic/Slavic heavy) was a real sadist all the way through TND, apart from machine gunning helpless sailors in the water, before that he was making light of the Royal Navy ship getting punctured by the sea drill and sinking (with many dozens already dying horribly before he was rubbing things in by firing Chinese ammo into the water). And in the finale after the rest of the stealth boat's crew had died or fled, after Carver got caught on the wrong side of the sea drill, he was still going through with nuking Beijing.
I would agree, but as can be seen from his being promoted from Colonel to Colonel General (yes, that's a rank in the Russian Army) in nine years, he was likely power hungry and ambitious as well. Being a coward doesn't preclude him from being a power-hungry and psychopathically-patriotic maniac. I also found his dialogue with Mishkin (especially a very genuine "Do you even know who the enemy is!?" practically fuming while he's saying the line), plus M's briefing Bond on him, and finally (perhaps especially) learning Alec Trevelyan was a Lienz Cossack to the point of second-guessing him and outright asking him if it was true (the Soviets were NOT big on being friends with Cossacks of any Head, as the Cossacks had overwhelmingly helped the Tsar and of course famously fought as mounted cavalry for the Germans in WWII) all very telling. His outlook was likely one of "Alec, you can keep running criminal operations in Russia given the underworld; heck, you can have the entire world for all I care, so long as I'm in charge of Russia."
Although the obvious intention was to come across as a sadistic nutbag all the way through, IMO, he unfortunately only carries it off during the Devonshire incident (as in, both the sinking and killing the survivors) as well as at the very end. The whole torture thing just didn't cut the mustard. Instead of being stronger when he feels pain as we finally realize in the end of the film, he more or less just seems to shrug it off. I often suspect that it slipped beneath so many people's radars that that's why they chose to emphasize pain not mattering at all to Renard in TWINE.
Well being a ringleader in the Janus conspiracy for a decade helped his career when the Soviet Union collapsed into virtual anarchy by the mid 1990s, many opponents may have got humilitated or outright killed by Janus, and he was needed to gain access to the GoldenEye keys held in a remote outpost protected with sophisticated security (it's curious how the Janus syndicate had the wealth and power to run a elaborate command facility that was a twin to the Severnaya outpost, but didn't seem to have the means to replicate the gold activation keys and the computer disc with the amber lense, but then again the theft of the keys and the detonation of Petya over Severnaya was also needed to completely cut Moscow's links with the GoldenEye satellites and bring them secretly under the control of Janus; heck Mishkin didn't even know a second satellite existed).
I also have a pet theory that the Arkengelsk chemical weapons facility was what made Janus into the biggest player in Russia's criminal underworld in the first place. Janus links with the Saddam regime were cited by Bond (who liked their chemicals), so Ourumov and his men could've been stockpiling chemical weapons in secret locations, without their Soviet bosses knowing, with Alec Trevelyan's staged shooting and the following destruction of the weapons plant being a means to cover the tracks of the early Janus syndicate (and even after the chemical weapons factory blew up, Ourumov and Trevelyan could've illegally sold off the weapons and military hardware belonging to the small garrison guarding the chemical weapons factory).
The action scene afterwards always seemed to bother me; Bond was protecting Natalya and he was forced by Janus into a kill or be killed situation, but he was mowing down Russian Federation officers who appeared to be duped and perhaps not genuine mooks (unlike the Soviet soldiers in the PTS guarding a illicit chemical weapons facility and possibly playing along with Trevelyan's ruse with blank rounds or Janus' private army of mercenaries guarding the dish complex in Cuba).
Imagine Craig Bond being sent to a American embassy as a captive, then have his CIA interrogators shot by a crooked US Air Force officer in league with Quantum and to escape he had to grab a MI6 rifle to mow down a dozen CIA and Marine guards.
Orumov didn't seem to take that revelation well and his inner emotional conflict made him too distracted to survive Bond. He also didn't seem to take the news of Natalya surviving the Severnaya incident well either and it showed up too visibly on his ugly face, making minister Mishkin suspicious enough to gatecrash the GoldenEye investigation.
What about Stamper running through a Chinese fisherman with a harpoon gun? He was more flamboyant and memorable than the wet Renard.
It's implied that MI6 thought he worked his way up; I've always had my theories about him being involved with black ops if he was head of military space projects and Alec Trevelyan using that to his advantage/being able to form the Janus Syndicate using Ourumov's political and military clout.
Given that even the Russian Military (i.e., whose machinery Ourumov had access to) was unable to replicate some of its own projects during the Soviet era in real life, I actually don't find this hard to believe at all, given when it took place.
I've thought of this as a threefer: get the keys so you can deny Moscow access to them, eliminate Moscow's notions of a second satellite (or at the very least their ability to respond), and get the keys for yourself.
The chemical weapons plant clearly meant SOMETHING to Alec, since he wasn't afraid to talk about "6 minutes" in front of everyone and their uncle (and openly told Bond that he was considering...presumably AFTER the "6 minutes" incident...of even inviting Bond into his scheme). Also, the Soviets could probably care less about Ourumov arming the Iraqis during the Iran-Iraq War (1980-1988; so Bond could simply be carrying out a fairly routine mission). But even if Ourumov continued arming the Iraqis with conventional weapons, he'd just be continuing Soviet policy with the same regime in place (even under Gorbachev!) and there would be enough hardliners post-September 1988 to support him, even openly. After all, it got hard currency for the Glorious Soviet Motherland, didn't it? It's not as if Ourumov's troops would spend it outside the Comecon. However, I quite frankly think its destruction was a severe setback and that arming insurgents in practically every country involved in a civil war was the result of the immediate aftermath.
I'm gonna level with you: in 1995, the Russians were actively supporting the Serbs while NATO fought them, had a number of hardliners still in the government (although their careers were about to get cut short), the Supreme Soviet of the Russian Federation (the last big communist governing body in Russia) survives all the way until October 4, 1993 (!!!), they're not even removed until March 9, 1994 (!!!) and public opinion at the time of filming regarding the Russians was NOT high. You were still seeing many people, and not John Birchers either, using "Soviet" and "Russian" as interchangeable until well into 1996 or thereabouts. I just think this part didn't age particularly well/Russia still had enough communism left in it to, in the filmmakers' eyes, justify this.
Mishkin can be seen as a subversion of this, representing the Yeltsin government, ditto the Militsiya GAI personnel in the tank chase who are literally shown getting out of their cars and physically unharmed 100%.
ANYONE would be more flamboyant than Renard.
And also blowing Severneya's dish would make tracking down Mischa harder to do. For some reason you needed a huge dish to operate the GoldenEye satellites (making it harder for third parties with smaller dishes to illicitly tap in?). The Janus dish in Cuba was likely a decomissioned Soviet complex that was part of the dormant GoldenEye project (the money ran out) but rennovated and made fully operational by Janus. The big underground command centre hinted on how ambitious the GoldenEye project was; maybe in the mid to late 1980s they needed the massive control room for relatively primitive Soviet mainframes to operate 20+ GoldenEye satellites instead of two, with Trevelyan misusing the large floor space for hacking into the Bank of England and other earlier illegal computer stuff (the unwisely placed fuel tanks seemed to be part of the machinery to drain the dish).
Xenia Onatopp perhaps made a name for herself in the ranks of Janus by helping in the purchasing, reconstruction, and hushing up of their dish complex in Cuba (with lots of Russian and Cuban officials involved getting suffocated sexily
Alec's armoured train (or another similar train) was used to smuggle the stolen Tiger helicopter from one end of Russia to the other and a solid explanation why it dropped off the British government's radar for seemingly weeks/months despite their impressive eyes in the sky that spotted it at Severneya (before that it presumably first landed on a Janus operated cargo ship bound for St. Petersberg). Janus' armoured train was likely efficient at transporting lots of weapons to clients (and less risky than that arms bazaar in TND's PTS).
And where was Alec Trevelyan's armoured train initially going to before Bond's stolen tank crashed it? A Janus air base that was flying stuff and staff to their Cuban base ala Drax air freight?
But what if Ourumov and Trevelyan wanted the profits for themselves and nobody else? Ourumov, squirreling away tons of chemical weapons long before Bond's mission, reports the destruction of the chemical weapons plant as an industrial accident (destroying all evidence of shipments; not unlike the GoldenEye scam a decade later) and with his boss (who fooled Western intelligence that he died) goes into business selling off the unaccounted for chemical weapons. :v
Trevelyan could've been planning to recruit his buddy Bond into his already rapidly growing criminal movement from the start (until of course the charges blew three minutes too early and the shower of chemical canisters likely didn't do a prone Alec any good either).
Wade mentioned Janus having many friends in high places in the military and KGB/FSB and Bond's sudden arrest in a remote spot, right on cue, seemed to insinuate a tip off to the people Janus had contact with, even if a less hostile and corrupt Mishkin got to Bond in person before an enraged, panicky Ourumov did. And what about that loyal military driver that Ourumov was with? And GRU in real life have been involved in arms dealing and Viktor Bout was a former GRU officer.
Hindsight has not been kind on Yeltsin and with Putin, Russia has seemingly taken one step forward then two steps back.
And GoldenEye seemed to have an odd tone to it by shifting from quite dark, gritty segments one minute and then ramping up the Moore style goofball action the next.
Stamper didn't seem to howl and shriek in total, utter, complete agony when a MULTI-TON NUCLEAR MISSILE crashed onto his foot. If he was precisely like Onatopp (and in a lot of ways he already seemed like a male version of her) he'd get horny.
I also realised that Elliot Carver (like Alec Trevelyan) was closely associated with a military general for really heavy military stuff and had recruited an amusingly arrogant computer hacker for the cyberwarfare end of his mad scheme.
They did, but the Soviet politicians would have benefited anyway. So, their personal mooks and clients come into the USSR. Okay? I think we agree on that. When said mooks and clients go into the USSR, they have to exchange at least some money from their home country for near-valueless rubles. Each time a client or foreign mercenary joins them, it's a cash infusion, if a minor one. The Soviets at the end of the '80's were so desperate for hard currency infusions that they not only would welcome this kinda thing, but they actually DID welcome it.
Even in the early years "The End Always Justifies the Means" could have been the GRU's motto. Just look at their operations (along with those of the NKGB/MGB) during the Xinjiang Wars during the 1930's and the Ili Rebellion during the 1940's.
Unfortunately, I would agree. He got close, but when Putin came along? Guarantee of no cigar. His continual shift of stance on NATO never really helped in the international community, either. One day he was fine with it, the next day it was awful, the day after that it was okay, then the very next day it was the worst thing in the world, etc, etc...come to think of it, I can't even remember what Yeltsin's position on NATO was when he retired!
As for TND...yes, was kind of Goldeneye Revisited, wasn't it? It's one reason I could never really warm to it. For all its faults (and they are MANY), The World is Not Enough at least tried avoiding that sort of a rehashing.
Having recently read through David E. Hoffman's The Dead Hand, I'm given the impression that Gorbachev had little to no knowledge about the Soviet Union's sprawling chemical and biological weapons programmes (neither did Yeltsin), he and his family nearly got killed by his own military when the Soviet Union ended anyway, and I can imagine Janus (amid this confusion) established a firm powerbase by 1990 and seemed to recruit its henchmen mainly from disillusioned former Soviet military people (Janus' most notable foreign mercenary was Alec Trevelyan's British security captain in the climax). Janus as a criminal group seemed more like a omnipotent shadow government as opposed to Zukovsky's homely gang of mobsters operating out of a rundown nightclub.
Either way the dozens of Russian Federation officers (complicit with Janus or not) being killed or wounded in the middle of town by Bond, with tons upon tons of property damage, and Bond being framed for a Russian VIP's assassination would not help relations between London and Moscow.
What about the unnecessary excessive suffering associated with Russia's gangster corporatism in the 1990s, that killed millions indirectly through crime and poverty, alienating post-Soviet Russia enough to set things up for Putin's rise to power?
There's many subtle similarities (the bike chase that was dropped in GE was brought back for TND) and no huge shift in the Brosnan formula established in GE, but I'm still fond of TND and can watch the first two Brosnan movies back to back on DVD, with (IMHO of course) things genuinely going wrong with the bloated, slightly confused TWINE and things getting too silly for modern day Bond in DAD (Die Another Day is the real GoldenEye Revisted, what with the death satellite used to try to take over the world, MI6 crassly blowing up a cladestine military base in a Communist country Britain is not formally at war with, and a youngish criminal mastermind with a mutilated face, who is like an anti-Bond, who comes back from the dead to get his revenge).
One has to imagine at least a few politicians involved with the military knew about it (since a few really have stepped forward with all kinds of knowledge relating to Soviet chem/bio/nuke programs) and welcomed it or at least were willing to turn a blind eye on the criminal aspect. Also, you have to figure the Janus Syndicate were dealing conventional weapons to nominal allies as well (be they established East Bloc and other Comecon countries, countries like Iraq since they were technically a Soviet ally, and communist rebel groups in Central and South America) using Ourumov as a figurehead, something which Gorbachev certainly would have had no objections since, for one reason, he wouldn't be in much of a position to object, especially if Ourumov was selling them sub-par weaponry (he after all had no objections in real life to conventional arms sales to the Iraqis, Syrians, and PLO so long as what they were getting wasn't top-of-the-line stuff). If Ourumov was doing this as was heavily implied during the briefing, it would deflect attention away from the REALLY nasty stuff, especially if he had a few friendly politicians (along the same lines, how else does one explain the Cuban installation?).
It certainly wouldn't. All I was doing was agreeing with you that the GRU often used all kinds of unscrupulous methods (by ANYONE's standards, even those of rival intelligence agencies, and I include the KGB in that...) to complete its tasks during the Soviet era. And sometimes it failed spectacularly. Stocking the Chinese General Staff in the northwest long before the Sino-Soviet Split with spies (Fotii Leskin [defected back to the USSR in 1954 after his cover was blown, but actually did live to a ripe old age] and Margub Iskhakov [fled the country in 1960 because he felt he was being given too much power for his own good/would have to start dictating actual policy decisions in Xinjiang] come to mind) ultimately started breaking down Sino-Soviet military relations (if not political ones) before Stalin was even dead.
I'd throw in "de-fanging the Militsiya in all departments to such an extreme that it became either corrupt or ineffectual with the exception of OMON and VAI units." It wasn't all gangster corporatism. There was a definitive reason the Militsiya PPS, DPS, and GAI/GIBBD could be bribed so easily. Failure to even make an effort to enforce the laws and not only refusing funds but also slashing pay to Militsiya commissioned officers who saw this coming a mile away in the VERY early days played a big part, too. For gangsterism to fester, you need a lack of law and order and the ability to enforce it to begin with. It was much the same with Al Capone in Chicago.
I think you may have misunderstood because I failed to make myself clear. DAD (ugh...) is GE Revisited, yes, but it breaks GE's formula. TND was almost character for character GE's formula, save the main villain and the Bond girl being "Bond's equal" instead of Bond's foil.
Up to a point, but Janus was doing much more than just shipping crates of old AKs and was willing to attack fellow Russians.
I have a feeling that the Arkhangelsk complex needed to be destroyed (why else would Janus' founder and kingpin participate in the sabotage mission?) to cover up the shipment of particularly nasty experimental chemical WMDs and not just cover the tracks for Janus' leader.
Janus was throwing a lot of political/economic weight around in Russia and hid a lot from Western intelligence, so establishing a secret fortress in Cuba would be easy for them.
But don't forget the legitimate Russian state had put up two nuclear bombs into space (a big no no in treaties) and had a high ranking military officer (and likely more like him) who was a main ringleader for the most powerful criminal movement in the world that was going to badly cripple the West. Two very nasty scandals that MI6 would threaten to tell the world about if the Russian government pursued them about the St. Petersburg incidents.
I see what you mean now.
Blowing up, drowning, electrocuting, and shooting all the miners is dozens of people less to pay, there would just be Zorin and his two best buddies knowing about the real truth behind San Francisco getting flooded. That's still crazy but crazy with a reason (no matter how twisted).
EDIT: There's something especially selfish about Zorin if he killed off his miners to seal up his wacky scheme. At least with Carver, King, and Trevelyan you get an impression that their small armies of mercenaries would make a lot of money from the evil schemes (like Carver's stealthboat crew planning on having big shares in the Chinese subsidiaries of the Carver Media Group Network, etc). And Stromberg and Drax were planning on building new civilisations from the ground up, with their jumpsuited minions being founding members of their worlds. Zorin was more cynical.