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Bond 25: No Time To Die

Rhom

By Rhom,
in Entertainment

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Rhom Council Member

Rhom

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7 minutes ago, RumHam said:

I was wondering, has the main villain ever been a woman? I can think of Xena and Mayday but they were both working for someone else. 

The gal in The World Is Not Enough was the main villain.

The dude who kept getting stronger and more pain tolerant because he got shot in the head a couple decades earlier was her henchman.  :lol:

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Zorral Council Member

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Due to this topic, and because some of the later Bonds -- the 90's Bonds with Pierce Brosnan went up on Netflix, and I am desperate for escape -- I've been watching these, which I've previously not seen.  I stopped watching sometime during Sean Connery I think, and never resumed until Daniel Craig.

These 90's Bonds are fascinating from a historical perspective, both politically and culturally. So far, they also seem prescient, though not having seen them when they came out, I don't know as I'd have noticed -- but maybe others did?

I watched Golden Eye last week (1995), the first Brosnan, which, due to when it was made, the USA was riding so gloatingly high over the now vanished Soviet Union, and disaffected previous Soviet nabobs have resurrected -- like Putin -- to join up with another resurrection -- of Cossacks (or something). So riding high did we think we were, that Russians get clobbered in Cuba -- where, of course, by then, they no longer were, and we sure were not either, nor are we now, nor did they shoot there -- Puerto Rico, ironically today, stood in yesterday for Cuba (usually it was the Dominican Republic the Cuba stand-in).

. and now I'm half way through Tomorrow Never Dies (1997) -- in which we see Bond no longer smokes. 

The goofy very bad repartee and repostes remain as goofy and very bad as before.  But the technology seems still up to the minute.  I love that in this 1997 Bond the Really Big Bad is a media mogul who has started what seems exactly like Faux Noose, broadcasting television globally.

Anyway, I think ... maybe ... slowly o so slowly . . . Bond is being rebooted already, even as a male super hero?  As it is, there still seem nothing in cinema to rival the feats of prolonged super action slickness that fill the Bond films's screen.  So slick, so beautifully, elegantly choreographed and filmed.

One wonders if the coming (and final) Craig Bond grapples with BREXIT and 2016 US elections and how the world has so drastically changed since 1995 -- even if a Putin was rather predicted in Golden Eye? Or will it have to be the one after that?  Which then would really make sense to reboot as female.  This is not the Bond of the 1960's, not even remotely.  The sheer innocent, supercilious joy and delight in the toys, due to "our" place in the scheme of the world cannot be replicated now that the entire world sees US, UK and Europe too, all sliding down from the apex in an avalanche filmed in slow motion.

 

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Zorral Council Member

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The Bond tropes: infinitely prolonged dives through air, only a single umbicllus attaching him to life; THE SUPER CAR, etc., and endless chases in which numberless fireballs of destruction are unleashed.  Ay-up, shaken, not stirred, back in the house!  But, let's face it, the face is showing evidence, finally, of the relentless shaking.

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I've now begun the final Brosnan Bond, Die Another Day (2002).  Woo, the progression in the Bond changes through his Bonds is fascinating.  One of the constants of the Bonds is the opening theme, in which we may see something significant. In Die Another Day we see Bond imprisoned and tortured.  Bond NOT immaculate, he whose clothes and hair and skin are avoided by all injuries and dirty.  He has filthy long hair and beard, and prison rags.  Interestingly, in connection with this, close to the end of The World Is Not Enough, he's actually kept from death by a rescue, even though his rescuer dies in the process -- and M is in the location and subject to the action too. 

Was North Korea, safer to take on in a global entertainment franchise, then (2002), than the 'stans and the Middle East?

In Goldeneye (1995) it was purloined satellite death star tech; Tomorrow Never Dies (1997) it's global domination via media; The World Is Not Not Enough (1999) it's domination of the 'stans' of, Turkey and oil pipelines to the west; Die Another Day (2002), as said, hasn't shown up yet, coz I just began to watch this one. 

The World Is Not Enough (1999) was weaker than the previous two, particularly plotting, I thought.

Yah, I've gotten kinda obsessed this week, after not giving a thought to James Bond in decades!  

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1 hour ago, Clueless Northman said:

Die Another Day is most probably the worst Bond since Moonraker. Sorry to disappoint you. You'll see soon enough.

I assume also that, just like with that silly Homefront video game, picking North Korea as the Big Bad is a political and commercial decision, because we surely don't want to piss off China.

Don't forget the ridiculous Cuba stuff.

It did start off really well, and then ... then ... what? diamonds? I dunno.  Only half way through, and had to stop for the night.

But it does seem looking at these four films, from when they are made, make some sort of statement about this side of the world's growing confusion, beginning with, in this one, Bond walking across the bridge between North and South Korean, a bridge hopefully to be made, says a N Korean general, if I sent my son to the decadent west, walking across in a fog, to meet ... one of his nemisises in this one? ... while on the other side M throws him into 'psychriatic' prison or something.  The 'New World Order' in which nobody knows where they are? Not even Bond.  Though once he gets his clothes back, so is he.  Sort of.  That's pretty much as far as I've gotten.

But so far as I've gotten, the first part when Bond is Back, I did get a kick out of the call backs to Dr. No. Especially in "Cuba" when he's driving a 57 or 50 Ford, when way back in the day, I was told by an older cousin when she and her boyfriend went to see the film, that the entire theater of farm boys rose up in a shout about "What's a 59 something dashboard doing in a 57 something??????" something like that!  They'd done a major screwup in that film with cars, and these guys knew it.

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Heartofice Council Member

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11 hours ago, Clueless Northman said:

Die Another Day is most probably the worst Bond since Moonraker. Sorry to disappoint you. You'll see soon enough.

I assume also that, just like with that silly Homefront video game, picking North Korea as the Big Bad is a political and commercial decision, because we surely don't want to piss off China.

I think it's the worst Bond of all time. Even Moonraker has a sort of campy charm (which I can appreciate years after the fact), but Die Another Day is beyond awful. I guess it could compete with Never Say Never Again and Connery's wig for the worst of all time though.

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Rhom Council Member

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21 minutes ago, Heartofice said:

I think it's the worst Bond of all time. Even Moonraker has a sort of campy charm (which I can appreciate years after the fact), but Die Another Day is beyond awful. I guess it could compete with Never Say Never Again and Connery's wig for the worst of all time though.

I don't count the non MGM/UA films when ranking my Bond movies.  So I stay away from the Thunderball remake and the American Casino Royale and such.  I think I've gone through a ranking of Bond movies before on this site I think.  Its been a while and I haven't watched any of the Bond movies for a while.   I've only seen SPECTRE the one time.  This might be interesting for me as I thought exercise my way through it.

1.  From Russia With Love
2.  Goldeneye
3.  Casino Royale
4.  Goldfinger
5.  The Living Daylights
6.  The Man With the Golden Gun
7.  You Only Live Twice
8.  Live and Let Die
9.  Skyfall
10. On Her Majesty's Secret Service
11. Tomorrow Never Dies
12. Thunderball
13. For Your Eyes Only
14. Diamonds are Forever
15. The Spy Who Loved Me
16. The World is Not Enough
17. Octopussy
18. License to Kill
19. SPECTRE
20. Quantum of Solace
21. Dr. No
22. A View to a Kill
23. Die Another Day
24. Moonraker

Shew... that was tough.  Maybe I should have put the movies into broad tiers rather than trying to break it down in an exact list.  If I were to do that, I think it would be something like this.

The Great
FRWL, Goldeneye, CR, and Goldfinger

The Good
From my list I'd go from TLD through Thunderball

The Fair, but Flawed
FYEO to LtK

The "These should be good but really aren't"
QoS and SPECTRE

The Really Bad
AVtaK, DAD, Moonraker

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30 minutes ago, Rhom said:

The Good
From my list I'd go from TLD through Thunderball

That seems really high for Thunderball. Have you watched it recently? That movie is beyond boring. I get that they were really excited about their underwater cameras, but those scenes drag on forever. It's not the worst Bond movie, there's been some real duds over the years, but I'd easily place it in the bottom third.

I think my list goes (bearing in mind that somehow I've never seen the two Timothy Dalton movies):

  1. From Russia With Love
  2. Goldeneye
  3. Casino Royale
  4. You Only Live Twice
  5. Goldfinger
  6. Skyfall
  7. Quantum of Solace
  8. The World Is Not Enough
  9. Live and Let Die
  10. Diamonds Are Forever
  11. The Man With the Golden Gun
  12. Tomorrow Never Dies
  13. On Her Majesty's Secret Service
  14. The Spy Who Loved Me
  15. Dr No
  16. SPECTRE
  17. For Your Eyes Only
  18. Moonraker
  19. Octopussy
  20. Thunderball
  21. A View To A Kill
  22. Die Another Day

 

The Masterpiece

From Russia With Love.

In another universe, future Bond movies would've followed this template rather than the Goldfinger template. I don't know if the series would've made it past the mid-70s doing that, but wow would the movies we got have all been amazing.

The Great

Goldeneye, Casino Royale, You Only Live Twice, Goldfinger

The "If Connery Starred In Them They'd Be Called Great"

Skyfall, Quantum of Solace, The World Is Not Enough

The Good

Live and Let Die, Diamonds are Forever, Man With the Golden Gun

The Flawed But Had Good Parts

Tomorrow Never Dies, On Her Majesty's Secret Service, The Spy Who Loved Me, Dr No

Varying Degrees of Bad

All the rest of them, except one..

Beyond Terrible

Die Another Day

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15 minutes ago, Tywin et al. said:

 

You both sicken me.

Dr No gets credit for being the first movie. But it's a slow, plodding movie for the most part. Bond is primarily doing spycraft, which would be great except he's not good at it in the movie. It's missing a lot of the elements that make a good Bond movie; and, unlike From Russia With Love, it doesn't make up for those missing pieces by being absolutely brilliant.

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