Quantum of Solace

I Too Refused To See 'Australia' This Weekend

It's the new Bond movie! How can I refuse?

This is the power of a franchise movie. It carries the legacy of former films into the new film's marketing. If there are 22 films and you liked 6-7 of them previously, then you're going to feel a strong pull to see that instead of the latest film about... Australia. Well, I live here so I can't get too excited about that, can I? Or should I? I'll find out next week when I'll attempt to go see it.

In the mean time, the eternal allure of a Bond movie is action, glamour, gorgeous women, bad villains who get their comeuppance, a Walther PPK and an Aston Martin. The world's the stage, the fun should be stratospheric. At least that's always the promise.

What's Good About It

It's like going to a wedding. The same things happen at each wedding but the actors change each time you go to a wedding. A Bond movie is a little like that. It satisfies the essential ritualistic plot requirements nicely: car chase, fist fight, foot race, shoot'em up, sneaking around, bedding lovely ladies, and a building goes up in flames in the climax. Aren't these staples of Bond movies?

They're all there. What's missing? 'Q' and gadgets, and you don't really miss them. There's even a dogfight in the air where Bond pilots a DC3 in this one. It's pretty 'out there'. Otherwise, the requisite content of mayhem takes place as if ticking boxes. It was missing a ski-chase, but it did have a sky-dive. It was missing submarines, satellites and snorkels and sharks but it had a love-interest from Russia.

There's a feeling that the MI6 in the current Bond Movies with Judy Dench as M has been brought up to date in their daily operations. Gone are the stuffy offices from previous Bond movies, and they sport fashionable metallic grey columns and contemporary modern architecture everywhere. I don't know if this is great, but it's good that there's a desire to bring the MI6 aspect into the films. With it comes a plethora of organisational demands on the character of Bond. These are all interesting, as they impact on his decision making.

What's Bad About It

The directing of action. It's godawful.

It's a recent trend where action sequences simply cut to the moment, but in doing so a lot of these actions don't make much spatial sense. One of the first sequences where Bond and an enemy agent Mitchell fall through a glass ceiling and end up hanging from scaffolds is an example, where you actually can't figure out where the fulcrum of the lever sits in the room. As a consequence, it looks like Bond suddenly grabs the gun in the nick of time (which you don't see) and shoots the guy while hanging upside down, without actually seeing the bad guy's action.

It seems to be a new trend where action directors simply abdicate their responsibility as directors and just ignore the basics in order to make it 'look' more exciting by adding confusion. It's a terrible ploy because it makes the action not only incomprehensible, but inscrutable to analysis - because there probably isn't any content. Left to right, right to left, up, down, it's all a jumble in most of these sequences. Some times you can't tell who Bond is punching or shooting.

Put it this way, the plot made sense, the action didn't. If the plot doesn't make sense, you can pin that on the writer, but if the action doesn't make sense, then you can pin that on the director. This film was borderline incoherent towards the end and pretty irrational and idiotic in parts - but that's par for the course for a Bond movie. Complaining about those is a bit like complaining that there's too much sugar in candy.

Now there's an idea. Diet Candy.

What's Interesting About It


It's one of the problems of movies about Superheroes that the first film that explains how they came to be who they are is less interesting than the sequels. So, 'Superman 2' is more interesting than 'Superman 1'; 'Dark Knight' is more interesting than 'Batman Begins'; 'Spiderman 2' is more interesting than 'Spiderman 1'; and the only exception is the Hulk franchise where both Hulk films are just oddly tedious.

Having said that, in each incarnation of Bond, the franchise simply just got to the action at hand. The only time it vaguely addressed the creation of Bond so to speak was the recent 'Casino Royale'. In this instance, the second film achieves nowhere near the intrigue of the first. Olga Kurylenko's Camille Montes is attractive, cool yet sassy, and very athletic, she is nowhere near as interesting as Vesper from the previous film. Rightfully, Vesper was the one woman Bond loved. In this film, we're just working through the process and progress of his revenge.

If Bond has a greater character arc, then I can't imagine there are more than 3-5 films they can make with Daniel Craig as Bond in this incarnation. That story is needing to be paid off. If the previous sins of the Bond franchise was the endless pilgrimage of mayhem with no character resolution, we're finding out the consequences of actually having a real character arc.

Pretty soon, Craig's Bond is going to have to uncover who these 'Quantum' villains are and find the equivalent of Blofeld and visit righteous vengeance upon their sorry posteriors. And that's it. beyond it remains the endless pilgrimage of mayhem as normal - i.e. it would be back to business of Bond. In a sense the Bond movies with Daniel Craig can't get slack on the character arc because they would lose their meaning. We know why Bond moves in a 'brutally efficient' way. He has to pay off that big motivation across the next couple of movies. After which, we'll ask, "then what?" Hopefully it will be a different world by then.

The Spy Genre Today

We keep seeing movies with spies in them, creating some sort of havoc or another. John LeCarre once described the perfect spy as little grey men with little charisma. Yet we keep seeing charismatic actors hurl themselves across adventures with reckless abandon as bullets fly everywhere and explosions colour the background as they do their charismatic stuff.It reminds me of the mid to late 1980s where you suddenly saw a resurgence of what can only be described as Pro-Military films, which culminated in the the Gulf War experience of 1991 where news reporters inserted themselves into the story as they reported 'live from Baghdad'. Pretty weird to think about, even today.

So here's my question: Do you think you're being recruited? Do you feel like you've been recruited to be James Bond for your cause, all these years?

I wonder how effective a real spy can be today, given that the conflict has split out of one racial hegemony. Part of the reason why spy fiction doesn't grow in say, Japan is because it's really hard to write how a Japanese agent might function in the West when it's easy to spot that your main character is Asian. It's hard enough for them to work in China. This is why they have ninja fiction instead, set in a time without westerners wandering around. The hegemony of culture allows the ninja to play the subterfuge.

Conversely it's hard to operate a James Bond in say, Japan without taking into account that the race+language+culture+custom gap puts him on the outer. In 'You Only Live Twice', Connery's Bond essentially gets around Japan with the help of Testuro Tamba's Tiger Tanaka as local guide.

The essence of the spy is to get closer to the object through subterfuge and appearing to be trustworthy. You sort of wonder how close a blonde James Bond (or even Leo DiCaprio's character in 'Body of Lies') could get to Osama bin Laden, ensconced deep in north Pakistan.

Yet, in a time when Europe and North America seems to have overcome its own inner turmoil - they're all allies now, the need for spies within the same hegemony must have diminished somewhat. That means they need spies to operate outside of the hegemony, and one wonders how effective this could really be, and if there really can be a film about spies going on into the future which feature hyper-caucasian dudes and dudettes at the centre of action.

It's not surprising Bond's current enemies seem to be some kind of Euro Terror mob.

What Are the Russian Communists Complaining About Olga For?

I just couldn't see it. Those people just want to complain until they die. Look, USSR is dead. Get over it. Olga's going where the money is. You want to make movies with Olga kicking bad capitalist American and English posteriors, you can fund your own movies and see how far you go. Knowing the Commies, they'll create a funding body with criteria that resembles what we have in Australia, and proceed to produce a string of money-losing, ideologically sound movies.

What a pack of chumps.