Topic: Never Say Never Again - The Conservative Cut
So, as most of you have learned by now, I'm an avowed NSNA fan and will defend it against most fans who feel like EON needs defending or something. However, I wouldn't be honest if I didn't admit I had problems with it. The narrative issues I can forgive, actually, since they had little choice but to stick with the book and film. But the aeshetic choice of no gunbarrel, and no title sequence and the ruination of the opening action sequence by adding the title song over it... its just ugly. I mean, I suppose no gunbarrel could be acceptable - three of the recent Bonds didn't have them. But with the exception of CR, I missed the gunbarrel in every one of them. As I did here.
And lets not get into the lack of the Bond theme.
So I decided to do a conservative cut of the film. Its basically the same film, for all intents and purposes, with almost no scenes cut but with the gunbarrel present and a title sequence (and, for one, not the same as Thunderball's!). The pre-title I used was from Pegasus, but I redid the gunbarrel from another one (can't remember the name) and edited the music of the gunbarrel to both Legrand's intended track and Norman's Bond theme. The title sequence uses Phylis Hyman's version of the song, the true intended song for the film, and its such a better song for it, too.
Then, I simply added variations of the Bond theme throughout. The original theme in the motorbike sequence, the variation of the theme as heard in the Blofeld Must Die track from DAF when Bond enters the casino, as well as the 007 theme heard in that same track after Bond begins his attempt to disturb SPECTRE's plans in the Tears of Allah hidebout, and the variation of the Bond theme as heard in the final action scene in Kamal Khan's palace in OP when Bond and Leiter are surveing the area near the Tears of Allah hideout. I may have left out one or two more touches, but those are the most of them, score-wise.
Beyond that, what I always wanted to have done is remove Blofeld. Which was surprisingly, well, easy. Firstly I cut the scenes featuring him, and secondly, I dubbed over some of Sydow's as they refered to SPECTRE, and replaced the organization with QUANTUM, making this the organization retroactive first appearence in the franchise (they were always a knock-off anyway), and pitching the overall voice performance lower so its indistinguishable from the original. The domino effect (no pun intended, though it is fun to make) that this has is that Largo is the de-factor leader of the whole film, and the ambiguity of the voice heard in the NATO assembly leaves the implication still open as to whether that is someone speaking for Largo or if he's the leader of QUANTUM, and also the story is firmly from Bond's perspective, the events unfolding as they do for Bond and us, as well.
Beyond all of the above, I didn't change a thing. There are a few more audios edits I wish I did - like changing Moneypenny to Penelope Smallbone (basically have Bond call her Penelope and not Moneypenny in their two scenes), Largo to Argo (or Iago, my prefered choice) and hardest of all, Domino to someone else. My main goal with ALL of those changes, is to make this less obviously comparitive to TB, because otherwise I find the film largely enjoyable as is.
Just thought I'd share this here.
