I should have pointed out thats @Silhouette Man 's essay where he discusses the Amis article and related matters, but he quotes the important bit I'm referring to.
Your enemy has an explosive motorbike sidecar ready to launch at your car in case he’s forgotten to kill you for certain and in secret a few minutes before. In case that misses, he has already aloft a helicopter fitted with jets and cannon. Your car is submersible in case you meet such a helicopter while driving on a coast road. In case you submerge your car he has a submarine waiting. In case he has you have underwater rocket-launchers.
I'm sure I've read the full Amis article elsewhere, but cant find it right now! Cuz last time I watched The Spy Who Loved Me I couldnt watch that scene without thinking of what Amis said, and then in this super-serious new film there was another helicopter doing the exact same thing!
Amis also discussed TSWLM in his interview with Raymond Benson:
KA: Well , the last one I saw was an incomplete print of The Spy Who Loved Me. (Grimaces.) I get even more annoyed when I see that people actually think it’s funny!
RB: They’ve gone too far into slapstick, to be sure…
KA: Well, it affects the whole thing. I can’t think of the right film…early on we have a parachute jump on skis, and the parachute opens up to be…
RB: A Union Jack.
KA: (Loud exhale accompanied by a sour grimace.)…And the whole idea that he’s up there, having no idea that there’s an enemy agent within a thousand miles, and of course he’d carry a parachute! And the mothership in whatever it is…
RB: That’s The Spy Who Loved Me.
KA: Is that the same one?
RB: They’re all the same.
KA: Yes. Well, that control room has bullet-proof blinds, but also holes where you can point the guns through. “What are those holes for?” “Oh, well that’s in case we take our people prisoner and they all escape! We can shoot at them through these holes!!”
I look up to Amis a great deal, but he's reacting more like a novelist than a filmmaker. Movies can and should get away with dream logic on occasion. As Amis points out in the Bond Dossier, Fleming himself indulges in dream logic with Dr. No's "mink-lined prison." As Amis observed, it's not plausible that Dr. No would maintain such an institution in case he met a trespasser he didn't wish to immediately kill, but the sequence works anyway. It's what gives the books and films a slight surrealism.
That puts me in mind to the movie Blue, which was nothing more than a screen with the color blue projected on to it. Moviegoers were invited in, sat down, and waited for the movie to begin, not knowing it already had. They engaged in conversations, got up, went to the bathroom, and then, in some cases quite a bit later, eventually grew tired and left. They had emotions. Some were bored. Some angry. Some confused. Some enjoyed the socializing. Of course, what they didn't realize is it was all an art project.
The experience of sitting in front of a blue screen was the point. The movie itself was inconsequential except as the catalyst to their being there, and it essentially applied the postmodern questions of what art really is and how it functions -- is it the product, the vision of the artist, the experience of engaging with the product, the knowledge and experiences of the audience, and so forth, or a combination?
The point is, most people would not want to pay money to go to a theater and sit in from of a blue screen, even if doing so elicits strong emotions. They expect more, and so movies have traditionally supplied more than just emotions and a template upon which the audience may project things. We tend to celebrate the movies that succeed well beyond that point and on multiple levels.
Another, less savory, perhaps, comparison is pornography. Pornographic films in the Golden Age were produced like actual movies, in part to try to escape obscenity laws of the time. They had plots, scripts, characters, and bona fide acting, though the quality is debatable, in addition to the sex. Pornography today has morphed into what is essentially just the sex, with at best a thin veneer of anything else. Yes, even in the old days there were "loops" that focused just on the sex act (and that was the case, too, early in filmmaking, where porn was among the first things moviemakers produced). But loops were the exception, not the rule, and not considered movies. Movie theaters were not showing them, for example.
When porn just shows sex, it's the equivalent of a film out of balance with all the other elements. Yes, audiences get the essential pay off they paid to see, but nothing else. They may experience emotions, but they're pretty much the same base ones, which is a reason why they then turn to other pornographic clips to try to find the same base emotions. There's nothing else to latch onto and keep them satisfied. No one that I know of thinks for hours after about the meaning of the sex scene they just watched. They don't dissect it for its themes or subtext. Chances are, unless there's some prurient element to focus on -- a particular actress they like or a particular sexual technique they found fascinating -- they forget what they saw soon after.
Yet even in all that, there are still a few exceptions to the rule. That is, there are classic porn films that have sold millions of copies and are viewed or even written about today. What do they have in common? Well, for starters, they're actual films. They have more than just the sex. They attempt to varying degrees of success to elicit a broader range of responses than just carnal ones. And in this respect, they illustrate what pretty much any well done film does, which is to say, more than just an emotional response.
I urge anyone who's interested in movies where logic and plot matters far less than cultural status, please watch the trailer for the (fake) movie "Jacques et Florine". Never, ever watch movies like this without making sure people know you watched it! 😂
I absolutely could be wrong -- and I could be right and nobody will openly admit to deconstructing Bond. But this clearly is not the same guy we saw in the first 20 films. He has some traits in common, but he's more like Adam West's Batman to all the other ones.
In terms of Blofeld and the bionic eye, why wouldn't they inspect it carefully? I mean, the movie shows Blofeld in what appears to be the most escape proof form of isolation possible. He's supposed to be the most dangerous criminal in Britain. Exactly why would they go to all that trouble just to let him use whatever prosthetic he wants, especially since among his previous crimes was trying to surveil every person in the UK?
Sorry if my posts of late have had bugs. Mine keep getting locked up because they take so long to compose. I'm working on that, haha.
It's a James Bond movie. We have eccepted a lot of unlikely stuff over the years, why make a big problem out of somebody not inspecting an artificial eye?
The short answer is because it defies the internal workings of the story in order to make a convenient plot point. Blofeld is shown to be in a super duper maximum prison but somehow nobody bothers to check? It would be like if they needed to have an escape scene and just write in that the cell door keys are hanging on the wall and someone left a mop near Blofeld so he could reach them.
For that matter, how is it signals in and out of that prison either aren't being monitored or jammed? MI:6 has smart blood, Nine Eyes, and EMP watches but can’t jam a signal? High schools can jam cell phones these days.
I keep reading about how Craig’s Bond movies are more “realistic.” Doesn’t seem like it here. Diesn’t even seem smart.
I'm willing to look past those problems for the fun, bizzare and very Bondian idea of Blofeld communicating through his artificial eye. If we start picking apart Bond movies like this and getting upset because of it there won't be much fun or fandom left.
Well, I don't think anyone is getting upset, but at the same time, I don't think it's necessary to discount other opinions. It's great if it works for some people, but it's no less meaningful if it doesn't for others. Part of the challenge with the Craig Bonds is they're not the previous iteration, and at the same time, they've walked a sometimes shaky line between embracing some of the of the more fantastic elements of the others while also striving for (or perhaps getting credit for) being more "realistic." That last part by nature then engenders a closer reading of their "realistic" qualities.
The funny thing is offhand I can't think of anything analogous in a Moore movie. Of course, they were set in a different technological time, too.
It's always interesting to me that even when modern films are longer, they somehow seem to have less in them. Part of that is because more time is devoted to action set pieces, but there's also a lot of "posing" filler with the visuals that eats up time that would have been used for story in older movies.
Case in point: The long tracking of Blofeld in his portable cage. I'm sure to people that was considered a visually striking moment because, you know, a guy in a moving metal box is remarkable, but a second or two could have been cut. There are lots of moments like that in No Time to Die.
Imagine if they shaved 30 seconds. That time could be used to show Blofeld being rushed to the prison hospital after apparently carving out his own eye, with a guard saying, "He's gone crazy, but they've got the best surgeon in England working on him" or something and another saying, "Yeah, have to keep this scumbag alive to find out what else he knows." Then, as a surgeon puts on his gloves, we see the prosthetic eye on a tray and the camera cuts to the surgeon's face, who has a knowing, intentional look. He glances at a prison guard, who has the same look.
Maybe that's enough to imply there's some sort of conspiracy going on, with SPECTRE agents having infiltrated the prison.
As it stands, we're supposed to just assume all that, you know, because the previous Bond movies showed how clever the enemy is. But this Bond movie takes place in a technological age where catching a fake eye with a camera and microphone in it would be pretty simple, not to mention stopping any communication it might provide without inside help.
Excellent @Number24 and @Gassy Man , you two are working well together on this special project to explain the plot hole of Blofeld's eye! soon this wont even be a plot hole, this all-original ajb007 produced Theory shall be accepted as conventional wisdom as it is so logical!
Gassy Man said:
Imagine if they shaved 30 seconds. That time could be used to show Blofeld being rushed to the prison hospital after apparently carving out his own eye, with a guard saying, "He's gone crazy, but they've got the best surgeon in England working on him" or something and another saying, "Yeah, have to keep this scumbag alive to find out what else he knows." Then, as a surgeon puts on his gloves, we see the prosthetic eye on a tray and the camera cuts to the surgeon's face, who has a knowing, intentional look. He glances at a prison guard, who has the same look.
Maybe that's enough to imply there's some sort of conspiracy going on, with SPECTRE agents having infiltrated the prison.
I like it, but where would it fit in the film's chronology? not in the same scene because this has happened earlier, presumably long before the story begins again with Bond in Jamaica. But itd be a distraction during the precredits, so has to be somewhere in the main body of the film. I just dont see a place for it to fit without disrupting the flow of the story. Also, it would take rather longer than 30 seconds...
maybe when Amazon start their inevitable Mandalorian style teevee spinoff exploring the expanded Bond universe, this is the kind of thing they could make a one hour episode about, and each episode explains the backstory behind a different seeming plothole in one of the 25 films. Like those chapters Fleming would give us explaining how Red Grant howled at the moon during his early circus days or the rise and fall of Royale-les-Eaux's seaside economy.
Gassy Man said:
The funny thing is offhand I can't think of anything analogous in a Moore movie. Of course, they were set in a different technological time, too.
I cant remember an occasion of a villain being imprisoned in any James Bond film, prior to when? the beginning of of License to Kill?
The cybernetic eye would probably be too scifi for a 70s film but I'm sure a Moore-era villain already in prison would have some equally outlandish way of communicating with his minions on the outside.
It could have been worked in at any number of points, even when Bond comes to see him in prison. Maybe Blofeld goads him while he's coming down the track in his little playpen.
Blofeld: You see, James, the truly pitiful thing is you and your organization still have some illusion of control when you couldn't even stop me from getting a bionic eye.
While he's talking, flashback sequence starts where Blofeld is brought in . . . and ends when Blofeld stops before Bond.
Blofeld: Everyone has a price. And a secret. Shall we talk about Dr. Swann's?
I think the general audience accept this kind of thing in Bond movies. Even if they stop thinking of the bionic eye they find a solution not too different from mine and don't feel the need for a scene explaining it.
That’s a problem in general with NTTD — it doesn’t feel the need to provide scenes that show actual story. Instead, it cuts to the outcome, as though the viewer can and will do the work of imagining what the movie doesn’t show. The result is a disjointed story that comes further apart after the first hour or so, where characters behave inconsistently or foolishly to fit the outcome. Why is M so antithetical to how he's been presented before? Guess we’ll just have to imagine something must have happened to change his ethos. Why can’t Bond take a few minutes to investigate Swann’s innocence? Guess we’ll have to imagine his suffering suddenly made him forget all his instincts and training, not to mention just simple human curiosity. Why does Swann still live in the house where so much tragedy occurred? Guess we’ll just have to imagine it fits some psychobabble rationale for her recovery. Why does the British Navy attack an island in someone else’s territorial waters (and rather than the boats bringing the buyers)? Guess we'll just have to imagine there’s some remarkable diplomatic negotiations to smooth things over. Why doesn’t Swann want Bond to know Mathilde is his daughter? Guess we’ll just have to imagine she has her reasons even though shes condemning both Bond and her daughter to a life absent of one another (and orphaning for real but a few days later, which is rather cruel). And on and on. This isn't just clumsy writing, it is lazy.
Asp9mmOver the Hills and Far Away.Posts: 7,535MI6 Agent
Well the RN are destroying the nanobots and tech that’s creating them. Not the buyers. They want that stuff destroyed. Makes perfect sense for me. When you target WMDs, you don’t aim at the people potentially buying them.
I don’t think many mothers would want someone like Bond in their lives after he’d cruelly abandoned them and walked away for five years. They’d only been reacquainted for a few minutes when Mathilde showed up. It’s perfectly natural for Madeleine to lie to him in that short time. He brings violence and hurt into her life again and again.
Today's audiences are pretty sophisticated. You can show someone going into an office building and cut to him walking into the CEO's office, we don't need to see him making an apointment with the company on the phone first, walking the stairs, talking to the secretary etc.
We don't need to know why Dryden keeps a gun in his drawer or show Bond searching his office to find it and then removing the cartridges. We infer it from what we see.
I do agree with your point about M and Heracles. It would be better if the Minister of Defence was behind the project and M was informed, but opposed to it.
@Gassy Man some of these questions have been answered over and over again, we're going round in circles
Why is M so antithetical to how he's been presented before? Guess we’ll just have to imagine something must have happened to change his ethos.
Five years have passed, and I'm not sure we ever learned that much about Fiennes-M to say this is contradictory behaviour. His actions in both SkyFall and SPECTRE were a bit questionable too, just not on this scale.
The real question is how did he keep has job after the events of this new film, in any world where civil servants are responsible for their actions he should not be there for that toast. But maybe he found a patsy to take the fall, which also happens in realworld bureaucracies.
Why can’t Bond take a few minutes to investigate Swann’s innocence? Guess we’ll have to imagine his suffering suddenly made him forget all his instincts and training, not to mention just simple human curiosity.
They are under attack at the moment he accuses her! He's already wasting time dragging out her panic, you want he should also take time to "investigate" rather than simply hitting the accelerator and getting out of there? How do you "investigate" in these circumstances any way, make a call to Moneypenny while the bad guys are firing at you? Thats what happened in the last movie, and the SPECTRE carchase scene was justly criticized for it.
Any proper investigation would have to happen after they were away from there, and at the moment he believes he might have one of the enemy in the passenger seat next to him.
Why does Swann still live in the house where so much tragedy occurred? Guess we’ll just have to imagine it fits some psychobabble rationale for her recovery.
This is a valid question, and I'm also wondering if Mathilde lives there fulltime rather than commuting to London with her mum. is there a nanny? If so, seems strange to leave the child alone in the same house where her own childhood trauma occurred. But if Mathilde travels with Madeleine regularly on the plane to London, that definitely shouldve been noticed by MI6, passenger lists on incoming planes have been scrutinized by state security since 9/11.
I don't get the contempt for "psychobabble rationales". Normal films we expect to see flawed characters with backstories to explain their behaviour, are we instead demanding characters in Bond films be one dimensional cardboard cutouts? Fleming himself regularly devoted chapters just to the backstories of individual characters, and his women in particular often acted rather odd and had biographic reasons that explained why. One entire book explained why Vivienne Michel behaved the way she did, and the best parts of Diamonds are Forever were explaining Tiffany's traumatic origin story and how this affected her.
One of Fleming's first professional writing gigs was translating Carl Jung. Fleming didn't have contempt for "psychobabble rationales", and in most discussions the consensus we want to see these films more like Fleming.
Why does the British Navy attack an island in someone else’s territorial waters (and rather than the boats bringing the buyers)? Guess we'll just have to imagine there’s some remarkable diplomatic negotiations to smooth things over.
We've seen attacks within foreign territories in previous films. did the American sub have permission from the Italian government to attack Stromberg's lab? if so that was not shown.
I think @Asp9mm already explained why they targeted the facility currently containing the actual WMD rather than the arriving buyers, that's the kind of thing we usually want Our Side to do in these interventions, the much promised Surgical Strike with minimal collateral damages.
Why doesn’t Swann want Bond to know Mathilde is his daughter? Guess we’ll just have to imagine she has her reasons even though shes condemning both Bond and her daughter to a life absent of one another (and orphaning for real but a few days later, which is rather cruel). And on and on. This isn't just clumsy writing, it is lazy.
This certainly has been explained over and over, and @Asp9mm did so again just now. In addition to the "psychobabble" Madeleine now knows for a fact Bond's enemies will threaten the life of her child, safest thing for the child is if the world never learns Bond is her father.
They have plenty of time to do that if the buyers are destroyed.
This is part of the clumsy writing of NTTD. The only emergency at the end is created by Maxwell Smart -- er, James Bond. who starts the countdown by calling in the very missile strike that he will commit suicide with.
By the point Bond has his, I guess, showdown with Saffin, the guards are dead and the workers have all fled (never mind the story never addresses if anyone in the hundreds of people evacuating carried off any of the nanobots, purposefully or inadvertently).
You're inventing a lot more about Swann than the script supplies -- why are you doing the work the writers are supposed to? That's an indicator of lazy writing. It's also pretty speculative. Swann certainly doesn't behave with any consistency. She's a psychiatrist, but acts like she has no training at all in human relations. Her lack of empathy for Bond's situation -- remember she sent him to Vesper's tomb where he was nearly killed -- calls into serious question her diagnostic abilities, and if she was comfortable enough to have sex with Bond knowing precisely what kind of man he is, her shrinking away and hiding her pregnancy is childish. Remember, this is the woman who still lives in the house where she witnessed her mother's murder, shot Saffin, and nearly died herself. And she's Blofeld's analyst! Psychologically, she's all over the place as a character.
Any of this could -- could -- be better if the script just took some time to develop her character. But it doesn't. It relied on the audience to either accept it without question or to look outside the movie and rationalize things with, "Well, you know there are people like this . . . " Again, lazy writing. It's not about "people like this" but these specific characters, and they're poorly drawn in NTTD.
What? That's not sophistication. That's supposition. If you're going to do that, why bother to show anything. Just show Bond at the beginning with the gun barrel and then cut to the ending with him lying in the rubble. They can figure out the rest.
Asp9mmOver the Hills and Far Away.Posts: 7,535MI6 Agent
I don’t need everything explained to me ad-nauseum. This is typical of todays dumbed down audience that haven’t the ability to understand a film with the minutia being constantly explained to them over and over. We’d have ended up with a five hour film if even tiny things like this have to be explained to people.
Not at all. It's Norman Bates who has the psychotic break, who murders several people (the movie tells us some others in the area have disappeared), and who splits into different personalities, one a fiction of his mother.
You may be going in circles. I'm just sticking to the same points. There are no "questions to answer," as though someone holds the definitive solution, but just opinions on the movie's quality. Mine is this is a lazy and clumsily written script that requires the audience to do most of the work or just shrug and go, "Okay." Some people are comfortable with either, and that's fine. I'm not. And that's fine, too.
I do like the idea the main character of Psycho was Bates' mother, but its true: she's just a figment of Norman's imagination even if others believe she's still alive. I think the last shot of the film is Norman in his prison cell now permanently trapped in the persona of his own mother? So is Norman the main character since he's real within the fictional universe? that does seem strictly logical, especially once we know how the story ends. or is the secretly dead mother just as real until the final reveal? Does the distinction matter, since theyre all fictional characters from our point of view? and remember, Hitchcock did not want the audience to know the shock ending before they started watching, he was the original "no spoilers" guy. We are meant to believe the much discussed mother is just as real as Norman until that shock reveal.
Hitchcock was deliberately messing with traditional story structure in that one, one reason why "who is the main character" is a trick question. Hitchcock also really liked his psychobabble, since we're talking about psychobabble.
Most movies rely on the audience to full in the blanks, the exception being movies like Hitchcock's Rope that shows everything that happens. Audiences understand this. Since not explaining how Blofeld got his bionic eye is such a movie sin, why aren't more people complaining about this? Have you seen any movie critics commention om this as a flaw? Any fan youtubers? I certainly haven't, but I:m curious to know if you have.
Comments
I should have pointed out thats @Silhouette Man 's essay where he discusses the Amis article and related matters, but he quotes the important bit I'm referring to.
Your enemy has an explosive motorbike sidecar ready to launch at your car in case he’s forgotten to kill you for certain and in secret a few minutes before. In case that misses, he has already aloft a helicopter fitted with jets and cannon. Your car is submersible in case you meet such a helicopter while driving on a coast road. In case you submerge your car he has a submarine waiting. In case he has you have underwater rocket-launchers.
I'm sure I've read the full Amis article elsewhere, but cant find it right now! Cuz last time I watched The Spy Who Loved Me I couldnt watch that scene without thinking of what Amis said, and then in this super-serious new film there was another helicopter doing the exact same thing!
Amis also discussed TSWLM in his interview with Raymond Benson:
KA: Well , the last one I saw was an incomplete print of The Spy Who Loved Me. (Grimaces.) I get even more annoyed when I see that people actually think it’s funny!
RB: They’ve gone too far into slapstick, to be sure…
KA: Well, it affects the whole thing. I can’t think of the right film…early on we have a parachute jump on skis, and the parachute opens up to be…
RB: A Union Jack.
KA: (Loud exhale accompanied by a sour grimace.)…And the whole idea that he’s up there, having no idea that there’s an enemy agent within a thousand miles, and of course he’d carry a parachute! And the mothership in whatever it is…
RB: That’s The Spy Who Loved Me.
KA: Is that the same one?
RB: They’re all the same.
KA: Yes. Well, that control room has bullet-proof blinds, but also holes where you can point the guns through. “What are those holes for?” “Oh, well that’s in case we take our people prisoner and they all escape! We can shoot at them through these holes!!”
I look up to Amis a great deal, but he's reacting more like a novelist than a filmmaker. Movies can and should get away with dream logic on occasion. As Amis points out in the Bond Dossier, Fleming himself indulges in dream logic with Dr. No's "mink-lined prison." As Amis observed, it's not plausible that Dr. No would maintain such an institution in case he met a trespasser he didn't wish to immediately kill, but the sequence works anyway. It's what gives the books and films a slight surrealism.
In the 1960s, an experimental film -- which received awards and such -- was
That puts me in mind to the movie Blue, which was nothing more than a screen with the color blue projected on to it. Moviegoers were invited in, sat down, and waited for the movie to begin, not knowing it already had. They engaged in conversations, got up, went to the bathroom, and then, in some cases quite a bit later, eventually grew tired and left. They had emotions. Some were bored. Some angry. Some confused. Some enjoyed the socializing. Of course, what they didn't realize is it was all an art project.
The experience of sitting in front of a blue screen was the point. The movie itself was inconsequential except as the catalyst to their being there, and it essentially applied the postmodern questions of what art really is and how it functions -- is it the product, the vision of the artist, the experience of engaging with the product, the knowledge and experiences of the audience, and so forth, or a combination?
The point is, most people would not want to pay money to go to a theater and sit in from of a blue screen, even if doing so elicits strong emotions. They expect more, and so movies have traditionally supplied more than just emotions and a template upon which the audience may project things. We tend to celebrate the movies that succeed well beyond that point and on multiple levels.
Another, less savory, perhaps, comparison is pornography. Pornographic films in the Golden Age were produced like actual movies, in part to try to escape obscenity laws of the time. They had plots, scripts, characters, and bona fide acting, though the quality is debatable, in addition to the sex. Pornography today has morphed into what is essentially just the sex, with at best a thin veneer of anything else. Yes, even in the old days there were "loops" that focused just on the sex act (and that was the case, too, early in filmmaking, where porn was among the first things moviemakers produced). But loops were the exception, not the rule, and not considered movies. Movie theaters were not showing them, for example.
When porn just shows sex, it's the equivalent of a film out of balance with all the other elements. Yes, audiences get the essential pay off they paid to see, but nothing else. They may experience emotions, but they're pretty much the same base ones, which is a reason why they then turn to other pornographic clips to try to find the same base emotions. There's nothing else to latch onto and keep them satisfied. No one that I know of thinks for hours after about the meaning of the sex scene they just watched. They don't dissect it for its themes or subtext. Chances are, unless there's some prurient element to focus on -- a particular actress they like or a particular sexual technique they found fascinating -- they forget what they saw soon after.
Yet even in all that, there are still a few exceptions to the rule. That is, there are classic porn films that have sold millions of copies and are viewed or even written about today. What do they have in common? Well, for starters, they're actual films. They have more than just the sex. They attempt to varying degrees of success to elicit a broader range of responses than just carnal ones. And in this respect, they illustrate what pretty much any well done film does, which is to say, more than just an emotional response.
I urge anyone who's interested in movies where logic and plot matters far less than cultural status, please watch the trailer for the (fake) movie "Jacques et Florine". Never, ever watch movies like this without making sure people know you watched it! 😂
I absolutely could be wrong -- and I could be right and nobody will openly admit to deconstructing Bond. But this clearly is not the same guy we saw in the first 20 films. He has some traits in common, but he's more like Adam West's Batman to all the other ones.
In terms of Blofeld and the bionic eye, why wouldn't they inspect it carefully? I mean, the movie shows Blofeld in what appears to be the most escape proof form of isolation possible. He's supposed to be the most dangerous criminal in Britain. Exactly why would they go to all that trouble just to let him use whatever prosthetic he wants, especially since among his previous crimes was trying to surveil every person in the UK?
Sorry if my posts of late have had bugs. Mine keep getting locked up because they take so long to compose. I'm working on that, haha.
It's a James Bond movie. We have eccepted a lot of unlikely stuff over the years, why make a big problem out of somebody not inspecting an artificial eye?
The short answer is because it defies the internal workings of the story in order to make a convenient plot point. Blofeld is shown to be in a super duper maximum prison but somehow nobody bothers to check? It would be like if they needed to have an escape scene and just write in that the cell door keys are hanging on the wall and someone left a mop near Blofeld so he could reach them.
For that matter, how is it signals in and out of that prison either aren't being monitored or jammed? MI:6 has smart blood, Nine Eyes, and EMP watches but can’t jam a signal? High schools can jam cell phones these days.
I keep reading about how Craig’s Bond movies are more “realistic.” Doesn’t seem like it here. Diesn’t even seem smart.
I'm willing to look past those problems for the fun, bizzare and very Bondian idea of Blofeld communicating through his artificial eye. If we start picking apart Bond movies like this and getting upset because of it there won't be much fun or fandom left.
Well, I don't think anyone is getting upset, but at the same time, I don't think it's necessary to discount other opinions. It's great if it works for some people, but it's no less meaningful if it doesn't for others. Part of the challenge with the Craig Bonds is they're not the previous iteration, and at the same time, they've walked a sometimes shaky line between embracing some of the of the more fantastic elements of the others while also striving for (or perhaps getting credit for) being more "realistic." That last part by nature then engenders a closer reading of their "realistic" qualities.
Yes, this kind of things is easier to accept in a Roger Moore Bond than in a CraigBond movie.
The funny thing is offhand I can't think of anything analogous in a Moore movie. Of course, they were set in a different technological time, too.
It's always interesting to me that even when modern films are longer, they somehow seem to have less in them. Part of that is because more time is devoted to action set pieces, but there's also a lot of "posing" filler with the visuals that eats up time that would have been used for story in older movies.
Case in point: The long tracking of Blofeld in his portable cage. I'm sure to people that was considered a visually striking moment because, you know, a guy in a moving metal box is remarkable, but a second or two could have been cut. There are lots of moments like that in No Time to Die.
Imagine if they shaved 30 seconds. That time could be used to show Blofeld being rushed to the prison hospital after apparently carving out his own eye, with a guard saying, "He's gone crazy, but they've got the best surgeon in England working on him" or something and another saying, "Yeah, have to keep this scumbag alive to find out what else he knows." Then, as a surgeon puts on his gloves, we see the prosthetic eye on a tray and the camera cuts to the surgeon's face, who has a knowing, intentional look. He glances at a prison guard, who has the same look.
Maybe that's enough to imply there's some sort of conspiracy going on, with SPECTRE agents having infiltrated the prison.
As it stands, we're supposed to just assume all that, you know, because the previous Bond movies showed how clever the enemy is. But this Bond movie takes place in a technological age where catching a fake eye with a camera and microphone in it would be pretty simple, not to mention stopping any communication it might provide without inside help.
Excellent @Number24 and @Gassy Man , you two are working well together on this special project to explain the plot hole of Blofeld's eye! soon this wont even be a plot hole, this all-original ajb007 produced Theory shall be accepted as conventional wisdom as it is so logical!
Gassy Man said:
Imagine if they shaved 30 seconds. That time could be used to show Blofeld being rushed to the prison hospital after apparently carving out his own eye, with a guard saying, "He's gone crazy, but they've got the best surgeon in England working on him" or something and another saying, "Yeah, have to keep this scumbag alive to find out what else he knows." Then, as a surgeon puts on his gloves, we see the prosthetic eye on a tray and the camera cuts to the surgeon's face, who has a knowing, intentional look. He glances at a prison guard, who has the same look.
Maybe that's enough to imply there's some sort of conspiracy going on, with SPECTRE agents having infiltrated the prison.
I like it, but where would it fit in the film's chronology? not in the same scene because this has happened earlier, presumably long before the story begins again with Bond in Jamaica. But itd be a distraction during the precredits, so has to be somewhere in the main body of the film. I just dont see a place for it to fit without disrupting the flow of the story. Also, it would take rather longer than 30 seconds...
maybe when Amazon start their inevitable Mandalorian style teevee spinoff exploring the expanded Bond universe, this is the kind of thing they could make a one hour episode about, and each episode explains the backstory behind a different seeming plothole in one of the 25 films. Like those chapters Fleming would give us explaining how Red Grant howled at the moon during his early circus days or the rise and fall of Royale-les-Eaux's seaside economy.
Gassy Man said:
The funny thing is offhand I can't think of anything analogous in a Moore movie. Of course, they were set in a different technological time, too.
I cant remember an occasion of a villain being imprisoned in any James Bond film, prior to when? the beginning of of License to Kill?
The cybernetic eye would probably be too scifi for a 70s film but I'm sure a Moore-era villain already in prison would have some equally outlandish way of communicating with his minions on the outside.
It's not a plot hole, though. There's nothing about Blofeld's bionic eye that contradicts the logic of the story. It's just crappy storytelling.
Maybe the scene Gassy Man suggested could make up the title sequence, DAD style? That would've been stricking and memorable! 😲🤣
It could have been worked in at any number of points, even when Bond comes to see him in prison. Maybe Blofeld goads him while he's coming down the track in his little playpen.
Blofeld: You see, James, the truly pitiful thing is you and your organization still have some illusion of control when you couldn't even stop me from getting a bionic eye.
While he's talking, flashback sequence starts where Blofeld is brought in . . . and ends when Blofeld stops before Bond.
Blofeld: Everyone has a price. And a secret. Shall we talk about Dr. Swann's?
Villains being imprisoned- Silva (albeit briefly), Koskov (arguably, he may have been killed).
I think the general audience accept this kind of thing in Bond movies. Even if they stop thinking of the bionic eye they find a solution not too different from mine and don't feel the need for a scene explaining it.
That’s a problem in general with NTTD — it doesn’t feel the need to provide scenes that show actual story. Instead, it cuts to the outcome, as though the viewer can and will do the work of imagining what the movie doesn’t show. The result is a disjointed story that comes further apart after the first hour or so, where characters behave inconsistently or foolishly to fit the outcome. Why is M so antithetical to how he's been presented before? Guess we’ll just have to imagine something must have happened to change his ethos. Why can’t Bond take a few minutes to investigate Swann’s innocence? Guess we’ll have to imagine his suffering suddenly made him forget all his instincts and training, not to mention just simple human curiosity. Why does Swann still live in the house where so much tragedy occurred? Guess we’ll just have to imagine it fits some psychobabble rationale for her recovery. Why does the British Navy attack an island in someone else’s territorial waters (and rather than the boats bringing the buyers)? Guess we'll just have to imagine there’s some remarkable diplomatic negotiations to smooth things over. Why doesn’t Swann want Bond to know Mathilde is his daughter? Guess we’ll just have to imagine she has her reasons even though shes condemning both Bond and her daughter to a life absent of one another (and orphaning for real but a few days later, which is rather cruel). And on and on. This isn't just clumsy writing, it is lazy.
Well the RN are destroying the nanobots and tech that’s creating them. Not the buyers. They want that stuff destroyed. Makes perfect sense for me. When you target WMDs, you don’t aim at the people potentially buying them.
I don’t think many mothers would want someone like Bond in their lives after he’d cruelly abandoned them and walked away for five years. They’d only been reacquainted for a few minutes when Mathilde showed up. It’s perfectly natural for Madeleine to lie to him in that short time. He brings violence and hurt into her life again and again.
Today's audiences are pretty sophisticated. You can show someone going into an office building and cut to him walking into the CEO's office, we don't need to see him making an apointment with the company on the phone first, walking the stairs, talking to the secretary etc.
We don't need to know why Dryden keeps a gun in his drawer or show Bond searching his office to find it and then removing the cartridges. We infer it from what we see.
I do agree with your point about M and Heracles. It would be better if the Minister of Defence was behind the project and M was informed, but opposed to it.
To be accurate, the main character in Psycho was Norman Bates's mother.
@Gassy Man some of these questions have been answered over and over again, we're going round in circles
Why is M so antithetical to how he's been presented before? Guess we’ll just have to imagine something must have happened to change his ethos.
Five years have passed, and I'm not sure we ever learned that much about Fiennes-M to say this is contradictory behaviour. His actions in both SkyFall and SPECTRE were a bit questionable too, just not on this scale.
The real question is how did he keep has job after the events of this new film, in any world where civil servants are responsible for their actions he should not be there for that toast. But maybe he found a patsy to take the fall, which also happens in realworld bureaucracies.
Why can’t Bond take a few minutes to investigate Swann’s innocence? Guess we’ll have to imagine his suffering suddenly made him forget all his instincts and training, not to mention just simple human curiosity.
They are under attack at the moment he accuses her! He's already wasting time dragging out her panic, you want he should also take time to "investigate" rather than simply hitting the accelerator and getting out of there? How do you "investigate" in these circumstances any way, make a call to Moneypenny while the bad guys are firing at you? Thats what happened in the last movie, and the SPECTRE carchase scene was justly criticized for it.
Any proper investigation would have to happen after they were away from there, and at the moment he believes he might have one of the enemy in the passenger seat next to him.
Why does Swann still live in the house where so much tragedy occurred? Guess we’ll just have to imagine it fits some psychobabble rationale for her recovery.
This is a valid question, and I'm also wondering if Mathilde lives there fulltime rather than commuting to London with her mum. is there a nanny? If so, seems strange to leave the child alone in the same house where her own childhood trauma occurred. But if Mathilde travels with Madeleine regularly on the plane to London, that definitely shouldve been noticed by MI6, passenger lists on incoming planes have been scrutinized by state security since 9/11.
I don't get the contempt for "psychobabble rationales". Normal films we expect to see flawed characters with backstories to explain their behaviour, are we instead demanding characters in Bond films be one dimensional cardboard cutouts? Fleming himself regularly devoted chapters just to the backstories of individual characters, and his women in particular often acted rather odd and had biographic reasons that explained why. One entire book explained why Vivienne Michel behaved the way she did, and the best parts of Diamonds are Forever were explaining Tiffany's traumatic origin story and how this affected her.
One of Fleming's first professional writing gigs was translating Carl Jung. Fleming didn't have contempt for "psychobabble rationales", and in most discussions the consensus we want to see these films more like Fleming.
Why does the British Navy attack an island in someone else’s territorial waters (and rather than the boats bringing the buyers)? Guess we'll just have to imagine there’s some remarkable diplomatic negotiations to smooth things over.
We've seen attacks within foreign territories in previous films. did the American sub have permission from the Italian government to attack Stromberg's lab? if so that was not shown.
I think @Asp9mm already explained why they targeted the facility currently containing the actual WMD rather than the arriving buyers, that's the kind of thing we usually want Our Side to do in these interventions, the much promised Surgical Strike with minimal collateral damages.
Why doesn’t Swann want Bond to know Mathilde is his daughter? Guess we’ll just have to imagine she has her reasons even though shes condemning both Bond and her daughter to a life absent of one another (and orphaning for real but a few days later, which is rather cruel). And on and on. This isn't just clumsy writing, it is lazy.
This certainly has been explained over and over, and @Asp9mm did so again just now. In addition to the "psychobabble" Madeleine now knows for a fact Bond's enemies will threaten the life of her child, safest thing for the child is if the world never learns Bond is her father.
They have plenty of time to do that if the buyers are destroyed.
This is part of the clumsy writing of NTTD. The only emergency at the end is created by Maxwell Smart -- er, James Bond. who starts the countdown by calling in the very missile strike that he will commit suicide with.
By the point Bond has his, I guess, showdown with Saffin, the guards are dead and the workers have all fled (never mind the story never addresses if anyone in the hundreds of people evacuating carried off any of the nanobots, purposefully or inadvertently).
You're inventing a lot more about Swann than the script supplies -- why are you doing the work the writers are supposed to? That's an indicator of lazy writing. It's also pretty speculative. Swann certainly doesn't behave with any consistency. She's a psychiatrist, but acts like she has no training at all in human relations. Her lack of empathy for Bond's situation -- remember she sent him to Vesper's tomb where he was nearly killed -- calls into serious question her diagnostic abilities, and if she was comfortable enough to have sex with Bond knowing precisely what kind of man he is, her shrinking away and hiding her pregnancy is childish. Remember, this is the woman who still lives in the house where she witnessed her mother's murder, shot Saffin, and nearly died herself. And she's Blofeld's analyst! Psychologically, she's all over the place as a character.
Any of this could -- could -- be better if the script just took some time to develop her character. But it doesn't. It relied on the audience to either accept it without question or to look outside the movie and rationalize things with, "Well, you know there are people like this . . . " Again, lazy writing. It's not about "people like this" but these specific characters, and they're poorly drawn in NTTD.
What? That's not sophistication. That's supposition. If you're going to do that, why bother to show anything. Just show Bond at the beginning with the gun barrel and then cut to the ending with him lying in the rubble. They can figure out the rest.
I don’t need everything explained to me ad-nauseum. This is typical of todays dumbed down audience that haven’t the ability to understand a film with the minutia being constantly explained to them over and over. We’d have ended up with a five hour film if even tiny things like this have to be explained to people.
Not at all. It's Norman Bates who has the psychotic break, who murders several people (the movie tells us some others in the area have disappeared), and who splits into different personalities, one a fiction of his mother.
You may be going in circles. I'm just sticking to the same points. There are no "questions to answer," as though someone holds the definitive solution, but just opinions on the movie's quality. Mine is this is a lazy and clumsily written script that requires the audience to do most of the work or just shrug and go, "Okay." Some people are comfortable with either, and that's fine. I'm not. And that's fine, too.
I do like the idea the main character of Psycho was Bates' mother, but its true: she's just a figment of Norman's imagination even if others believe she's still alive. I think the last shot of the film is Norman in his prison cell now permanently trapped in the persona of his own mother? So is Norman the main character since he's real within the fictional universe? that does seem strictly logical, especially once we know how the story ends. or is the secretly dead mother just as real until the final reveal? Does the distinction matter, since theyre all fictional characters from our point of view? and remember, Hitchcock did not want the audience to know the shock ending before they started watching, he was the original "no spoilers" guy. We are meant to believe the much discussed mother is just as real as Norman until that shock reveal.
Hitchcock was deliberately messing with traditional story structure in that one, one reason why "who is the main character" is a trick question. Hitchcock also really liked his psychobabble, since we're talking about psychobabble.
Norman Bates's mother is the plot driver, so that makes her the main character.
Now I've learned the word "supposition"!
Most movies rely on the audience to full in the blanks, the exception being movies like Hitchcock's Rope that shows everything that happens. Audiences understand this. Since not explaining how Blofeld got his bionic eye is such a movie sin, why aren't more people complaining about this? Have you seen any movie critics commention om this as a flaw? Any fan youtubers? I certainly haven't, but I:m curious to know if you have.