Bond himself - Decent
Villain - Forgettable
Girl - Forgettable
Action - OK but rather fast
Script - OK
Story - Confusing/Vague
PTS - Poor
Theme Song - A horrendous abomination
Okay, I'll give my own interpretation a try, but add in a few details...
My mini-break down for QOS, including personal "star ratings":
Bond himself - Superb; 4.5 out of 5 stars. I wouldn't watch the movie otherwise. I still liked Craig as Bond better in CR, though. In addition to playing the part, he's well-developed there. I don't think this was his best.
Main Villain - Poor; 1.5 out of 5 stars for his "pitiful" streak since I can see where they were going with that and it had potential, but he was underdeveloped and underexplored.
Secondary Villain - Awful; General Medrano was just a stereotype with no imagination put into him at all. He gets 1 out of 5 stars simply because he manages to show SOME creativity in his banter with Greene.
Henchman - Elvis gets a 0 out of 5 stars. He's arguably the second worst henchman in the series when taken in context. MR Jaws (not TSWLM Jaws) and Vlad are tied for the worst.
Girl - Borderline Poor. Olga Kurylenko's part, to me, wasn't underwritten as I'd previously thought (I watched the movie yet again), but rather OVERwritten. I would say in the entire film, she's the only character that feels like this. They start padding her background with so many angsty things that it becomes nonsenical, to me anyway. I actually thought with the incredible angstiness she had and the whole "kick the dog" theme about her, that she had traits of what's known in literature as an "Anti-Sue" character. She didn't fit the definition, but the fact that it crossed my mind at all send up a red flag. There's just SO much wrong with her life that she becomes impossible to sympathize with; it feels like the writers forced it to make us sympathize with her. I also found her performance rather dull and think the character herself had promise, but they both went overboard and Olga Kurylenko felt to me like she was forcing it at times, even breaking character once or twice (on the plane and in the cave). 2 out of 5 stars for effort on the part of the writers.
Secondary Bond Girl - With the exception of the, umm, oil bath, I thought Gemma Arterton as Strawberry Fields was convincing given her role. 4 out of 5 stars, including an extra half for being easy on the eyes.
Action - Horribly paced but it WAS there. Then again, scenes like the DC-3 vs. Medrano's "air force" seemed pointless. Why not have that dialogue happen in a calmer environment or at least a slightly quieter one without literal engine noise distracting from the script? It would make me pay a lot more attention to the dialogue, for one thing. Because the car chase was so good and the interaction with Mr. White was really good, I'll give this 3.5 out of 5 stars, or above average.
Script - Part of me says "put this with the story", but they are different. I think everyone agrees that the better a script is, the better the accompanying story is. Given the writers' strike, you have to add a star, no matter what, I think. However, the script is too compacted, underexplores things (such as the main villain, Domenic Greene, among other things), feels rushed, certain moments feel oddly changed or wedged in, and you can tell that there was a writers' strike going on. Moreso than the story itself, the script really lets us down, IMO. 1.5 out of 5 stars.
Story AND PLOT - Even without a writers' strike and a poor script, the story was low on the scale for me. Remember the last time the Bond franchise tried adapting a real issue and everyone beat it to death for doing so? That was TWINE. Also, I'm going to get back to that, because I don't really think it's been discussed here, looking at some of the other threads that deal with this.
Even had the script slowed the movie's pacing and another 20 minutes been tacked on, Greene's plan just wasn't that sinister. Still, it might have worked. After all, can a Bond villain get by without THAT much of a sinister plot? Sure they can, just look at Franz Sanchez in LTK. But Sanchez was brilliantly portrayed and came across as a very three-dimensional character. Dalton's Bond slowly turning Sanchez's greatest strength into his greatest weakness helps drive the film. Greene's ruthlessness (with the exception of the IMO poorly-done axe fight at the end) and crimes are mostly implied. Can we have him ordering protesters' deaths, or something, and then showing it? Can we keep him in that weird, surreal mood that he has sometimes, at least? Can we have him ordering Strawberry Fields' murder with that same sense of surrealism about him? Can we even just have him calling his flunkies and telling them what to do? Please? Even if we can't do that, can we give him a real henchman who is genuinely threatening like Red Grant or Necros or even Adam from LALD (the one guy who really played it straight)? This is, to me, a part of the story, not the script. This is about the design of the character and who he chooses to surround himself with, not the lines he gets. This, to me, is a great failing of QoS.
Likewise, and I'm giving this a whole seperate paragraph for emphasis, tackling a real-life issue that ironically backfired WHEN YOU KNEW THAT IT BACKFIRED. When people were writing TWINE, they really didn't know how the BTC pipeline would turn out. As it stands, Azerbaijan has stabilized and Georgia got a serious economic boom thanks to it. But that's looking at it in hindsight. On the other hand, the 2000 water privatization scheme by Bechtel in Bolivia had a mirror operation regarding privatization of natural gas that was actually WAY more violent...but it eventually led the government to go to the opposite extreme with natural gas in 2005 and 2006 by nationalizing everything and hiking the purchase price for private citizens who mostly rely on gas heating/stoves/etc.. Sure it got the terrible Sanchez de Lozada/Mesa regime out of office, but in came one just as bad claiming to represent the opposite end of the political spectrum. President Evo Morales's promises of having deals in place with Brazil turned out to be outright lies. So he had to find a Brazilian company FAST that needed natural gas. He found one in Petrobras and Petrobras demanded an outrageous price because after all, they didn't need it. To "balance out" the law, Morales, a self-proclaimed socialist, ironically privatized the gas miners' pensions! As if that weren't bad enough, he basically told foreign firms to STOP INVESTING IN BOLIVIA. Unsurprisingly enraged, the mining unions turned to violent protests once more. Then four regions of the country declared autonomy from both the central government (i.e. Morales) and the Bolivian Constitution, trying to find some way to get the foreign companies interested while maintaining their own natural gas rights yet at the same time creating constitutional crises in each area. Nobody really won.
To me, it is severely problematic for any film and enters the realm of being outright pretentious when you know for a fact (since all this happened before 2008) the alternative is just as bad as what you're portraying. What's the point of doing a story whose point is corporatism is bad when ironically, when the government stepped in, things were equally bad? I believe that's what known as a Broken Aesop. Instead of lifting the story out of a real life situation where "Bechtel" simply became "the Bolivian Government" ("different name, same friendly service!") where both options were terrible, why not just make up a new scenario? When you point out "oh, but it really happened!" you get a very sharp double-edged sword in this case in which the Bolivian government's corruption throughout was the obvious underlying cause of the problem. You CANNOT blame this on the writers' strike because this was before the strike happened. The story gets a 0.5 of 5 from me.
PTS - I loved it! Great car chase! The only 5 out of 5 on here!
Theme Song - It was okay. Not great, not below average, not really average, either. I'll give it a 3.5 out of 5 since I thought it was better than average.
Main Villain - Poor; 1.5 out of 5 stars for his "pitiful" streak since I can see where they were going with that and it had potential, but he was underdeveloped and underexplored.
Henchman - Elvis gets a 0 out of 5 stars. He's arguably the second worst henchman in the series when taken in context. MR Jaws (not TSWLM Jaws) and Vlad are tied for the worst.
There are other reasons why Dominic Greene is seen as poor/weak. He's a player, but not the head of Quantum. Greene is small in stature so does not present a physical threat to Bond. This is not compensated for with a physical imposing henchman, Elvis makes him look weaker. Memorable henchmen like Red Grant, Oddjob and Jaws appear to be a thing of the past, in the Daniel Craig era henchmen have become pretty much anonymous.
Moore Not Less 4371 posts (2002 - 2007) Moore Than (2012 - 2016)
Silhouette ManThe last refuge of a scoundrelPosts: 8,845MI6 Agent
edited January 2020
Yes, but I think that QoS had a TLD approach to villainy - realism as opposed to the metal teeth, pincer arms or steel hands of the so-called "classic James Bond film". Dominic Greene was of course a slimy Frenchman mixed who was also "Tony Blair mixed with Sarkozy". Many people seem to miss the point with QoS - it's meant to reflect our modern times - where corruption and back room deals have replaced SPECTRE and SMERSH as the type of villains James Bond comes up against. Bond villains are much more subtle in this complex world that we inhabit nowadays. Political wheeler-dealing is the name of the game - the control of the water utilities to control a whole contry. Quantum here becomes a rent-a-leadership organisation.
QoS reflects so much better the grey poetry that is the true world of espionage post-Cold War. The CIA, the British Prime Minister and MI6 themselves are all seen to contain Quatum infiltrators/infiltration. As the poster above says, anonymity and the banality of much of modern evil is the name of the game nowadays. As Fleming himself wrote, the cowboys and Red Indians seem to keep changing sides. This is the direction that the James Bond films seem to be going in nowadays - but just check out the recent Skyfall for an example of a return to the very best of classic Bond villainy in the form of Raoul Silva, a real throwback to AVTAK's Max Zorin, if ever there was one, so don't write off the Craig era in this regard just yet...
Plus, mark my words, the confusion regarding Quantum and the plot in QoS will become clear in Bond 24 where many of these mysteries will be unveiled when James Bond once again confronts Quantum - you just have to give it time. It's like SPECTRE in the 1960s - two films (DN and FRWL) followed by the non-SPECTRE Goldfinger and then back with Thunderball. As Shirely Bassey once sang, it's just a case of history repeating itself! Hopefully in time this view will be vindicated...
"The tough man of the world. The Secret Agent. The man who was only a silhouette." - Ian Fleming, Moonraker (1955).
Even if we can't do that, can we give him a real henchman who is genuinely threatening like Red Grant or Necros or even Adam from LALD (the one guy who really played it straight)?
Silhouette Man, how do these guys in particular exactly conflict with what you refer to as "realism as opposed to the metal teeth, pincer arms or steel hands"? Red Grant and Necros were muscular. Adam had no physical abnormalities at all and was a good driver who had a not-unreasonable familiarity with boats.
Many people seem to miss the pont with QoS - it's meant to reflect our modern times - where corruption and back room deals have replaced SPECTRE and SMERSH as the type of villains James Bond comes up against.[...]Political wheeler-dealing is the name of the game - the control of the water utilities to control a whole contry.
In that case, I guess I'm getting the point TOO much rather than missing it. Because I can see it trying to do that and in my opinion failing spectacularly. QoS suddenly loses its realism once you realize that they're lifting it directly off something that wound up hitting the Bolivian populace, the Bolivian government, and quite frankly the foreign companies right back in different, equally bad way. How many people died as a result of the Bechtel water scheme? One. Yep, one guy got hit in the eye with a teargas cartridge. However, there have been at least 80 that were gunned down over the natural gas situation. FOR PROTESTERS ON BOTH SIDES. In other words, not just the "evil corporatists", but Evo Morales's government guys claiming to be "for the people".
You may answer "but that's natural gas!" Well, Bechtel controlled both operations and then the Bolivian government came in under Morales...who could handle water, but not natural gas (and that is rather understating it).
This isn't realistic to me. It almost seems to hide under a veneer of realism. The constant pointing out that "this could really happen!" was never accompanied by the mention of the STILL-ONGOING Bolivian natural gas and constitutional crises. If it were realistic, Bolivia would be shown falling apart as Evo Morales (or an expy thereof...heck, why not give Quantum an entire country by having them back a socialist candidate in a country disillusioned with near-constant right-wing leadership? That'd be pretty cool, since it basically sums Bolivia up in a nutshell.) lied his way into the presidency and then four parts of the country basically seceeded in all but name.
TWINE gets beaten up considerably for using the BTC pipeline as a plot point. Yet, in its defense, despite ranking just one slot higher than QoS on my personal list, TWINE's screenwriters actually had a point that was fairly valid on paper about nobody knowing if the BTC pipeline would or could work while Azerbaijan and Armenia were in a state of war that just happened to openly threaten the pipeline and its workers (plus the demolition of some ethnic Armenian villages that got in the way). It didn't turn out that way, but the REAL BTC pipeline wasn't finished. There was no benefit of hindsight.
Here, the screenwriters HAD the benefit of hindsight and pushed it as "real" anyway. The Gas Wars were in full swing, Bechtel had pulled out quite a while before, Carlos Mesa was gone for nearly three years, Evo Morales's wholesale destruction of the Bolivian economy was going on, the miners were violently protesting against the self-proclaimed socialist in the exact same way they'd protested against the self-proclaimed center-right guys, and the Bolivian Constitutional Crisis had already begun. In other words, the writers knew and pushed forward anyway.
Okay, so what? So I see threads pointing out the problems of TWINE using the BTC pipeline as being pretentious/preachy/hokey/whatever while using QoS's Bechtel water privatization as "much more realistic" and even suggesting it could be a real danger. But it wasn't more realistic. If anything, thanks to knowing what actually happened, it was less realistic. The Bolivian Government itself ruined Bolivia, not Bechtel. They were simply a symptom of a problem that was already festering from within.
I guess my point is that sure, it's fine to adapt real life stories in a Bond film (after reading this so far, you might be surprised to know I think that), but don't have the promoters start going around saying "hey this could really happen!" and billing it as true to life when it's not really what happened and the obvious culprit was BOTH sides of an incredibly corrupt, spiraling out of control Bolivian Government that was willing to do anything to tick off the other side of the political aisle while not giving a darn about Bolivia's populace. Rather than being the fault of one side, the Gas Wars (of which the 2000 Water Privatization Deal is generally considered a part of or at least extremely closely linked) are basically a textbook example of how both sides got it horribly wrong to the now-possibly-irreprable detriment to the country (with the politicians on the political right being willing to basically sell the country and the politicians on the political left being willing to basically destroy the country).
Bottom line: don't tell me the story is "realistic" or that it really happened. It's not and it didn't.
By the way, are you gonna eat that?
Silhouette ManThe last refuge of a scoundrelPosts: 8,845MI6 Agent
Just for the sake of clarity I wasn't referring to your post specifically on the henchman point. It was just something that came to mind as I was writing.
On the whole Bolivia backstory, I don't really know enough about that to comment on it at the moment, but I will get back to you on it. -{
"The tough man of the world. The Secret Agent. The man who was only a silhouette." - Ian Fleming, Moonraker (1955).
Just for the sake of clarity I wasn't referring to your post specifically on the henchman point. It was just something that came to mind as I was writing.
Sorry! ;%
On the whole Bolivia backstory, I don't really know enough about that to comment on it at the moment, but I will get back to you on it.
Foreign Policy magazine did a great writeup of it a while back if you're going for the most centrist point of view I've personally seen without attacking the heck out of one side and downplaying the actions of the other.
By the way, are you gonna eat that?
Silhouette ManThe last refuge of a scoundrelPosts: 8,845MI6 Agent
edited January 2020
I only really learned of all of this background stuff through QoS's Wikpedia page. One could write a great critique of QoS - I intend to do this once I've read everything of relevance, of course. Do you have any other sources on the QoS Bolivia backstory that you'd like to share with us, Dalk? I find this all to be another fascnating subject area of the James Bond phenomenon - yet also strangely largely overlooked.
"The tough man of the world. The Secret Agent. The man who was only a silhouette." - Ian Fleming, Moonraker (1955).
I really enjoyed that will watch your other reviews, I take your points and you make some observant and intelligent ones, it does however, have some redeeming features, I thought the scene at the opera was done very well, and I think Craig plays the coolest, most brutal Bond Ever even more so than Connery, Moore, Dalton and Brosnan not counting Lazenby.
I take the point from all the reply's to my original question and can see its not a great film and is severely flawed, but I still like it, and will watch it again, and bizarrely as this sounds I think Skyfall is a bigger disappointment to me than QOS.
Do you have any other sorces on the QoS Bolivia backstory that you'd like to share with us, Dalk. I find this all to be another fascnating subject area of the James Bond phenomenon - yet also strangely largely overlooked.
Certainly! I can recall reading a very good piece a while back on CNN International where they dealt with Evo Morales's election. It was a bit pro-Morales/really anti-Carlos Mesa, but it did do a good job of outlining two things: Mesa's problems as well as Morales's promises (most of which never came true). You can also find much more current stuff translated from Spanish (the most balanced best stuff tends to come from Chile, which was the only truly neutral country that bordered Bolivia during the problems under Sanchez de Lozado, Mesa, AND Morales) or Portuguese (Brazilian, obviously). Watch out for both the international socialist movement and interviews with South American reps of the petroleum industry; NEITHER will be accurate/both very biased (unfortunately, most of the English-language websites that focus on the Gas War are the former; radical socialist and even self-proclaimed Marxist*). The only thing you'll get out of those two groups will likely be blaming each other as well as loads of fraudulent claims. The Times of India (of all things; quite possibly because they had no dog in that fight) actually used to have a good article summing up the gas wars in a nutshell, but that's been taken down.
*For example, I managed to find this headline on an International Socialist site: "Bolivia: Right-wing Bolivian secessionists use gas conflict to destabilize the Morales government". Factual problem: the secessionists were virtually all left-wing socialists (some actually considerably to the left of Morales!); where they differed was that they feared that Morales's outright bizarre claim of no foreign investment in Bolivia, which they knew would TOTALLY ruin the country's economy (which it did...you don't have to be an economist to figure that one out).
The BBC has a solid timeline up online, but it's very simplistic (I'm not sure if they have individual articles up; if they do, they would certainly be worth checking out)...
Although a ton of REALLY BAD stuff happened under Morales in 2009 (and some recent really awful stuff), to be fair to the writers of QoS, they couldn't have known about that. If you look at 2006-2008, though, it's fairly obvious that either bad things or harbingers of bad things are happening.
One of the things I think those of us in North America, Europe, and Asia fail to understand about South America is that there is no clear-cut concept of "the left" or "the right", which was a HUGE mistake that the moviemakers REALLY missed (in which a clear-cut left wing government is replaced by a clear-cut right-wing military government), but is well-outlined here. In real life South America, you basically have populism vs. totalitarianism with nationalism manifesting itself as a SHARED TRAIT* (unlike what you might think), and both South American populism and South American totalitarianism can come in right-wing and left-wing forms alike.
Evo Morales signed a trade pact with the Venezuelans/Hugo Chavez, but immediately must have realized that cutting himself off from anywhere else would have given Chavez significant muscle to just hike the prices on him/give Chavez a monopoly and the ability to do anything he wanted with Bolivian imports and exports to Boliva. The reason he had to find a BRAZILIAN firm was so that he wouldn't be stuck in a monopoly (since he hates the Chileans, and from the newspaper articles you read in Chile and even Brazil, you often get the sense of "Uh, Evo, it's not 1883 anymore, you can stop hating us; would you mind coming to the table so we can give you a deal where you can actually benefit?"), but he capitulated almost immediately to Petrobras's terms and contrary to his campaign promises, there wasn't a deal in place, which led to the huge price hikes.
*From nationalism manifesting itself as a shared trait on the "right" and "left", there's this BBC article on the drafting of the new Bolivian Constitution by Evo Morales (he himself is usually described as an indigenous nationalist)...which expressly favors indigenous Bolivians (i.e. the Indian tribes) over people deemed "non-indigenous". The problem with that law was that many people who were not indigenous wound up getting favored simply because they were native to the general area in South America BUT NOT BOLIVIA, and many people who were there prior to South American indigenous groups migrating there got screwed over...which led to Santa Cruz province (which you see mentioned in the article) declaring autonomy from Bolivia's new constitution and creating another constitutional crisis...by the way, the Gas War is generally agreed upon by all as to what allowed Morales to push his new constitution in the first place...
Well I love it! As I've said before, I have unconditional love for all things Bond rather like a parent does for a child!
Recently bought the DC trilogy box set for my Mom because she always said that he just didn't seem like Bond to her. Remember she's a child of the 60s, saw Bondmania the first time round and was the one who introduced me to 007. Her verdict...she loved QOS, thought CR was majestic and that Skyfall is the best of all.
Silhouette ManThe last refuge of a scoundrelPosts: 8,845MI6 Agent
Thanks for all of the additional material on the background to QoS, Dalkowski110 - all grist to the mill. I may write an article on all of this at some point.
"The tough man of the world. The Secret Agent. The man who was only a silhouette." - Ian Fleming, Moonraker (1955).
Thanks for all of the additional material on the background to QoS, Dalkowski110 - all grist to the mill. I may write an article on all of this at some point.
Glad I could oblige and that would be nice! South American politics (and even then, mostly just south of Central America and excluding the Caribbean that's often grouped in there) has always interested me simply because it's so atypical and different when contrasted to European, North American, Asian, and African politics.
Thanks for all of the additional material on the background to QoS, Dalkowski110 - all grist to the mill. I may write an article on all of this at some point.
Glad I could oblige and that would be nice! South American politics (and even then, mostly just south of Central America and excluding the Caribbean that's often grouped in there) has always interested me simply because it's so atypical and different when contrasted to European, North American, Asian, and African politics.
Yes, a most interesting area. I too am interested in politics and am involved with a political party, being a Secretary at their AGM. I will digest this information for an article/review on QoS at some point. Thanks again.
"The tough man of the world. The Secret Agent. The man who was only a silhouette." - Ian Fleming, Moonraker (1955).
Just an average guy who takes politics as a hobby here (although I do have strong political views and have done volunteer work for one of the two primary US political parties; you don't register with a party to vote in Indiana), though a fascinating one.
With all that said, my Dad is planning on a rather extensive project concerning Quantum of Solace. He disliked the movie even more than I did. For him, it's literally 22nd; one removed from dead last (that being DAD on his sometimes-changing list). His point is that, to use his exact words, "A Fleming Bond does not automatically make a true-to-Fleming movie". However, he plans on justifying this by writing a review of the interplay between Casino Royale (the book), Live and Let Die (the book), and Moonraker (the book), THEN contrasting Bond's development over that timeframe with CR the film (which he really does like) and QoS. Regardless of what you may think of his views, I think that's quite an undertaking on his part.
By the way, are you gonna eat that?
Silhouette ManThe last refuge of a scoundrelPosts: 8,845MI6 Agent
Just an average guy who takes politics as a hobby here (although I do have strong political views and have done volunteer work for one of the two primary US political parties; you don't register with a party to vote in Indiana), though a fascinating one.
With all that said, my Dad is planning on a rather extensive project concerning Quantum of Solace. He disliked the movie even more than I did. For him, it's literally 22nd; one removed from dead last (that being DAD on his sometimes-changing list). His point is that, to use his exact words, "A Fleming Bond does not automatically make a true-to-Fleming movie". However, he plans on justifying this by writing a review of the interplay between Casino Royale (the book), Live and Let Die (the book), and Moonraker (the book), THEN contrasting Bond's development over that timeframe with CR the film (which he really does like) and QoS. Regardless of what you may think of his views, I think that's quite an undertaking on his part.
Yes, sounds fascinating. I'm planning a three-way review of CR, QoS and SF for my blog at some point and all of this background material may come in very useful for all of this.
"The tough man of the world. The Secret Agent. The man who was only a silhouette." - Ian Fleming, Moonraker (1955).
Comments
cos it deserves it!
Camille was ok I guess, but I only call her 'forgettable' compared to many other bond girls. But she was ok I suppose, just nothing brilliant.
As for the song... yeah, I really hate it I'm afraid
1 - Moore, 2 - Dalton, 3 - Craig, 4 - Connery, 5 - Brosnan, 6 - Lazenby
#1.TLD/LTK 2.TND 3.GF 4.GE 5.DN 6.FYEO 7.FRWL 8.TMWTGG 9.TWINE 10.YOLT/QOS
Okay, I'll give my own interpretation a try, but add in a few details...
My mini-break down for QOS, including personal "star ratings":
Bond himself - Superb; 4.5 out of 5 stars. I wouldn't watch the movie otherwise. I still liked Craig as Bond better in CR, though. In addition to playing the part, he's well-developed there. I don't think this was his best.
Main Villain - Poor; 1.5 out of 5 stars for his "pitiful" streak since I can see where they were going with that and it had potential, but he was underdeveloped and underexplored.
Secondary Villain - Awful; General Medrano was just a stereotype with no imagination put into him at all. He gets 1 out of 5 stars simply because he manages to show SOME creativity in his banter with Greene.
Henchman - Elvis gets a 0 out of 5 stars. He's arguably the second worst henchman in the series when taken in context. MR Jaws (not TSWLM Jaws) and Vlad are tied for the worst.
Girl - Borderline Poor. Olga Kurylenko's part, to me, wasn't underwritten as I'd previously thought (I watched the movie yet again), but rather OVERwritten. I would say in the entire film, she's the only character that feels like this. They start padding her background with so many angsty things that it becomes nonsenical, to me anyway. I actually thought with the incredible angstiness she had and the whole "kick the dog" theme about her, that she had traits of what's known in literature as an "Anti-Sue" character. She didn't fit the definition, but the fact that it crossed my mind at all send up a red flag. There's just SO much wrong with her life that she becomes impossible to sympathize with; it feels like the writers forced it to make us sympathize with her. I also found her performance rather dull and think the character herself had promise, but they both went overboard and Olga Kurylenko felt to me like she was forcing it at times, even breaking character once or twice (on the plane and in the cave). 2 out of 5 stars for effort on the part of the writers.
Secondary Bond Girl - With the exception of the, umm, oil bath, I thought Gemma Arterton as Strawberry Fields was convincing given her role. 4 out of 5 stars, including an extra half for being easy on the eyes.
Action - Horribly paced but it WAS there. Then again, scenes like the DC-3 vs. Medrano's "air force" seemed pointless. Why not have that dialogue happen in a calmer environment or at least a slightly quieter one without literal engine noise distracting from the script? It would make me pay a lot more attention to the dialogue, for one thing. Because the car chase was so good and the interaction with Mr. White was really good, I'll give this 3.5 out of 5 stars, or above average.
Script - Part of me says "put this with the story", but they are different. I think everyone agrees that the better a script is, the better the accompanying story is. Given the writers' strike, you have to add a star, no matter what, I think. However, the script is too compacted, underexplores things (such as the main villain, Domenic Greene, among other things), feels rushed, certain moments feel oddly changed or wedged in, and you can tell that there was a writers' strike going on. Moreso than the story itself, the script really lets us down, IMO. 1.5 out of 5 stars.
Story AND PLOT - Even without a writers' strike and a poor script, the story was low on the scale for me. Remember the last time the Bond franchise tried adapting a real issue and everyone beat it to death for doing so? That was TWINE. Also, I'm going to get back to that, because I don't really think it's been discussed here, looking at some of the other threads that deal with this.
Even had the script slowed the movie's pacing and another 20 minutes been tacked on, Greene's plan just wasn't that sinister. Still, it might have worked. After all, can a Bond villain get by without THAT much of a sinister plot? Sure they can, just look at Franz Sanchez in LTK. But Sanchez was brilliantly portrayed and came across as a very three-dimensional character. Dalton's Bond slowly turning Sanchez's greatest strength into his greatest weakness helps drive the film. Greene's ruthlessness (with the exception of the IMO poorly-done axe fight at the end) and crimes are mostly implied. Can we have him ordering protesters' deaths, or something, and then showing it? Can we keep him in that weird, surreal mood that he has sometimes, at least? Can we have him ordering Strawberry Fields' murder with that same sense of surrealism about him? Can we even just have him calling his flunkies and telling them what to do? Please? Even if we can't do that, can we give him a real henchman who is genuinely threatening like Red Grant or Necros or even Adam from LALD (the one guy who really played it straight)? This is, to me, a part of the story, not the script. This is about the design of the character and who he chooses to surround himself with, not the lines he gets. This, to me, is a great failing of QoS.
Likewise, and I'm giving this a whole seperate paragraph for emphasis, tackling a real-life issue that ironically backfired WHEN YOU KNEW THAT IT BACKFIRED. When people were writing TWINE, they really didn't know how the BTC pipeline would turn out. As it stands, Azerbaijan has stabilized and Georgia got a serious economic boom thanks to it. But that's looking at it in hindsight. On the other hand, the 2000 water privatization scheme by Bechtel in Bolivia had a mirror operation regarding privatization of natural gas that was actually WAY more violent...but it eventually led the government to go to the opposite extreme with natural gas in 2005 and 2006 by nationalizing everything and hiking the purchase price for private citizens who mostly rely on gas heating/stoves/etc.. Sure it got the terrible Sanchez de Lozada/Mesa regime out of office, but in came one just as bad claiming to represent the opposite end of the political spectrum. President Evo Morales's promises of having deals in place with Brazil turned out to be outright lies. So he had to find a Brazilian company FAST that needed natural gas. He found one in Petrobras and Petrobras demanded an outrageous price because after all, they didn't need it. To "balance out" the law, Morales, a self-proclaimed socialist, ironically privatized the gas miners' pensions! As if that weren't bad enough, he basically told foreign firms to STOP INVESTING IN BOLIVIA. Unsurprisingly enraged, the mining unions turned to violent protests once more. Then four regions of the country declared autonomy from both the central government (i.e. Morales) and the Bolivian Constitution, trying to find some way to get the foreign companies interested while maintaining their own natural gas rights yet at the same time creating constitutional crises in each area. Nobody really won.
To me, it is severely problematic for any film and enters the realm of being outright pretentious when you know for a fact (since all this happened before 2008) the alternative is just as bad as what you're portraying. What's the point of doing a story whose point is corporatism is bad when ironically, when the government stepped in, things were equally bad? I believe that's what known as a Broken Aesop. Instead of lifting the story out of a real life situation where "Bechtel" simply became "the Bolivian Government" ("different name, same friendly service!") where both options were terrible, why not just make up a new scenario? When you point out "oh, but it really happened!" you get a very sharp double-edged sword in this case in which the Bolivian government's corruption throughout was the obvious underlying cause of the problem. You CANNOT blame this on the writers' strike because this was before the strike happened. The story gets a 0.5 of 5 from me.
PTS - I loved it! Great car chase! The only 5 out of 5 on here!
Theme Song - It was okay. Not great, not below average, not really average, either. I'll give it a 3.5 out of 5 since I thought it was better than average.
There are other reasons why Dominic Greene is seen as poor/weak. He's a player, but not the head of Quantum. Greene is small in stature so does not present a physical threat to Bond. This is not compensated for with a physical imposing henchman, Elvis makes him look weaker. Memorable henchmen like Red Grant, Oddjob and Jaws appear to be a thing of the past, in the Daniel Craig era henchmen have become pretty much anonymous.
QoS reflects so much better the grey poetry that is the true world of espionage post-Cold War. The CIA, the British Prime Minister and MI6 themselves are all seen to contain Quatum infiltrators/infiltration. As the poster above says, anonymity and the banality of much of modern evil is the name of the game nowadays. As Fleming himself wrote, the cowboys and Red Indians seem to keep changing sides. This is the direction that the James Bond films seem to be going in nowadays - but just check out the recent Skyfall for an example of a return to the very best of classic Bond villainy in the form of Raoul Silva, a real throwback to AVTAK's Max Zorin, if ever there was one, so don't write off the Craig era in this regard just yet...
Plus, mark my words, the confusion regarding Quantum and the plot in QoS will become clear in Bond 24 where many of these mysteries will be unveiled when James Bond once again confronts Quantum - you just have to give it time. It's like SPECTRE in the 1960s - two films (DN and FRWL) followed by the non-SPECTRE Goldfinger and then back with Thunderball. As Shirely Bassey once sang, it's just a case of history repeating itself! Hopefully in time this view will be vindicated...
I actually made this point in my own post a bit later on...
Silhouette Man, how do these guys in particular exactly conflict with what you refer to as "realism as opposed to the metal teeth, pincer arms or steel hands"? Red Grant and Necros were muscular. Adam had no physical abnormalities at all and was a good driver who had a not-unreasonable familiarity with boats.
In that case, I guess I'm getting the point TOO much rather than missing it. Because I can see it trying to do that and in my opinion failing spectacularly. QoS suddenly loses its realism once you realize that they're lifting it directly off something that wound up hitting the Bolivian populace, the Bolivian government, and quite frankly the foreign companies right back in different, equally bad way. How many people died as a result of the Bechtel water scheme? One. Yep, one guy got hit in the eye with a teargas cartridge. However, there have been at least 80 that were gunned down over the natural gas situation. FOR PROTESTERS ON BOTH SIDES. In other words, not just the "evil corporatists", but Evo Morales's government guys claiming to be "for the people".
You may answer "but that's natural gas!" Well, Bechtel controlled both operations and then the Bolivian government came in under Morales...who could handle water, but not natural gas (and that is rather understating it).
This isn't realistic to me. It almost seems to hide under a veneer of realism. The constant pointing out that "this could really happen!" was never accompanied by the mention of the STILL-ONGOING Bolivian natural gas and constitutional crises. If it were realistic, Bolivia would be shown falling apart as Evo Morales (or an expy thereof...heck, why not give Quantum an entire country by having them back a socialist candidate in a country disillusioned with near-constant right-wing leadership? That'd be pretty cool, since it basically sums Bolivia up in a nutshell.) lied his way into the presidency and then four parts of the country basically seceeded in all but name.
TWINE gets beaten up considerably for using the BTC pipeline as a plot point. Yet, in its defense, despite ranking just one slot higher than QoS on my personal list, TWINE's screenwriters actually had a point that was fairly valid on paper about nobody knowing if the BTC pipeline would or could work while Azerbaijan and Armenia were in a state of war that just happened to openly threaten the pipeline and its workers (plus the demolition of some ethnic Armenian villages that got in the way). It didn't turn out that way, but the REAL BTC pipeline wasn't finished. There was no benefit of hindsight.
Here, the screenwriters HAD the benefit of hindsight and pushed it as "real" anyway. The Gas Wars were in full swing, Bechtel had pulled out quite a while before, Carlos Mesa was gone for nearly three years, Evo Morales's wholesale destruction of the Bolivian economy was going on, the miners were violently protesting against the self-proclaimed socialist in the exact same way they'd protested against the self-proclaimed center-right guys, and the Bolivian Constitutional Crisis had already begun. In other words, the writers knew and pushed forward anyway.
Okay, so what? So I see threads pointing out the problems of TWINE using the BTC pipeline as being pretentious/preachy/hokey/whatever while using QoS's Bechtel water privatization as "much more realistic" and even suggesting it could be a real danger. But it wasn't more realistic. If anything, thanks to knowing what actually happened, it was less realistic. The Bolivian Government itself ruined Bolivia, not Bechtel. They were simply a symptom of a problem that was already festering from within.
I guess my point is that sure, it's fine to adapt real life stories in a Bond film (after reading this so far, you might be surprised to know I think that), but don't have the promoters start going around saying "hey this could really happen!" and billing it as true to life when it's not really what happened and the obvious culprit was BOTH sides of an incredibly corrupt, spiraling out of control Bolivian Government that was willing to do anything to tick off the other side of the political aisle while not giving a darn about Bolivia's populace. Rather than being the fault of one side, the Gas Wars (of which the 2000 Water Privatization Deal is generally considered a part of or at least extremely closely linked) are basically a textbook example of how both sides got it horribly wrong to the now-possibly-irreprable detriment to the country (with the politicians on the political right being willing to basically sell the country and the politicians on the political left being willing to basically destroy the country).
Bottom line: don't tell me the story is "realistic" or that it really happened. It's not and it didn't.
On the whole Bolivia backstory, I don't really know enough about that to comment on it at the moment, but I will get back to you on it. -{
Sorry! ;%
Foreign Policy magazine did a great writeup of it a while back if you're going for the most centrist point of view I've personally seen without attacking the heck out of one side and downplaying the actions of the other.
I take the point from all the reply's to my original question and can see its not a great film and is severely flawed, but I still like it, and will watch it again, and bizarrely as this sounds I think Skyfall is a bigger disappointment to me than QOS.
Certainly! I can recall reading a very good piece a while back on CNN International where they dealt with Evo Morales's election. It was a bit pro-Morales/really anti-Carlos Mesa, but it did do a good job of outlining two things: Mesa's problems as well as Morales's promises (most of which never came true). You can also find much more current stuff translated from Spanish (the most balanced best stuff tends to come from Chile, which was the only truly neutral country that bordered Bolivia during the problems under Sanchez de Lozado, Mesa, AND Morales) or Portuguese (Brazilian, obviously). Watch out for both the international socialist movement and interviews with South American reps of the petroleum industry; NEITHER will be accurate/both very biased (unfortunately, most of the English-language websites that focus on the Gas War are the former; radical socialist and even self-proclaimed Marxist*). The only thing you'll get out of those two groups will likely be blaming each other as well as loads of fraudulent claims. The Times of India (of all things; quite possibly because they had no dog in that fight) actually used to have a good article summing up the gas wars in a nutshell, but that's been taken down.
*For example, I managed to find this headline on an International Socialist site: "Bolivia: Right-wing Bolivian secessionists use gas conflict to destabilize the Morales government". Factual problem: the secessionists were virtually all left-wing socialists (some actually considerably to the left of Morales!); where they differed was that they feared that Morales's outright bizarre claim of no foreign investment in Bolivia, which they knew would TOTALLY ruin the country's economy (which it did...you don't have to be an economist to figure that one out).
The BBC has a solid timeline up online, but it's very simplistic (I'm not sure if they have individual articles up; if they do, they would certainly be worth checking out)...
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/1218814.stm
Although a ton of REALLY BAD stuff happened under Morales in 2009 (and some recent really awful stuff), to be fair to the writers of QoS, they couldn't have known about that. If you look at 2006-2008, though, it's fairly obvious that either bad things or harbingers of bad things are happening.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/4964432.stm
One of the things I think those of us in North America, Europe, and Asia fail to understand about South America is that there is no clear-cut concept of "the left" or "the right", which was a HUGE mistake that the moviemakers REALLY missed (in which a clear-cut left wing government is replaced by a clear-cut right-wing military government), but is well-outlined here. In real life South America, you basically have populism vs. totalitarianism with nationalism manifesting itself as a SHARED TRAIT* (unlike what you might think), and both South American populism and South American totalitarianism can come in right-wing and left-wing forms alike.
Evo Morales signed a trade pact with the Venezuelans/Hugo Chavez, but immediately must have realized that cutting himself off from anywhere else would have given Chavez significant muscle to just hike the prices on him/give Chavez a monopoly and the ability to do anything he wanted with Bolivian imports and exports to Boliva. The reason he had to find a BRAZILIAN firm was so that he wouldn't be stuck in a monopoly (since he hates the Chileans, and from the newspaper articles you read in Chile and even Brazil, you often get the sense of "Uh, Evo, it's not 1883 anymore, you can stop hating us; would you mind coming to the table so we can give you a deal where you can actually benefit?"), but he capitulated almost immediately to Petrobras's terms and contrary to his campaign promises, there wasn't a deal in place, which led to the huge price hikes.
*From nationalism manifesting itself as a shared trait on the "right" and "left", there's this BBC article on the drafting of the new Bolivian Constitution by Evo Morales (he himself is usually described as an indigenous nationalist)...which expressly favors indigenous Bolivians (i.e. the Indian tribes) over people deemed "non-indigenous". The problem with that law was that many people who were not indigenous wound up getting favored simply because they were native to the general area in South America BUT NOT BOLIVIA, and many people who were there prior to South American indigenous groups migrating there got screwed over...which led to Santa Cruz province (which you see mentioned in the article) declaring autonomy from Bolivia's new constitution and creating another constitutional crisis...by the way, the Gas War is generally agreed upon by all as to what allowed Morales to push his new constitution in the first place...
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/5251306.stm
Recently bought the DC trilogy box set for my Mom because she always said that he just didn't seem like Bond to her. Remember she's a child of the 60s, saw Bondmania the first time round and was the one who introduced me to 007. Her verdict...she loved QOS, thought CR was majestic and that Skyfall is the best of all.
QOS is good, there's no doubt in my mind.
#1.TLD/LTK 2.TND 3.GF 4.GE 5.DN 6.FYEO 7.FRWL 8.TMWTGG 9.TWINE 10.YOLT/QOS
Glad I could oblige and that would be nice! South American politics (and even then, mostly just south of Central America and excluding the Caribbean that's often grouped in there) has always interested me simply because it's so atypical and different when contrasted to European, North American, Asian, and African politics.
Yes, a most interesting area. I too am interested in politics and am involved with a political party, being a Secretary at their AGM. I will digest this information for an article/review on QoS at some point. Thanks again.
With all that said, my Dad is planning on a rather extensive project concerning Quantum of Solace. He disliked the movie even more than I did. For him, it's literally 22nd; one removed from dead last (that being DAD on his sometimes-changing list). His point is that, to use his exact words, "A Fleming Bond does not automatically make a true-to-Fleming movie". However, he plans on justifying this by writing a review of the interplay between Casino Royale (the book), Live and Let Die (the book), and Moonraker (the book), THEN contrasting Bond's development over that timeframe with CR the film (which he really does like) and QoS. Regardless of what you may think of his views, I think that's quite an undertaking on his part.
Yes, sounds fascinating. I'm planning a three-way review of CR, QoS and SF for my blog at some point and all of this background material may come in very useful for all of this.