Question: "What was the biggest ‘Why didn’t he just...?’ moment in the series?"
Andrew's Answer: You Only Live Twice... Bond... Blofeld... gun pointed... there is a noise... Blofeld scurries away. He could have killed Bond in 4/100th of a second, but he didn't? What? Why? How? I'm also wondering why they did the whole Rube Goldberg thing with giving Tiffany Case the diamonds at Circus Circus in Diamonds Are Forever. I guess the CIA gets bored sometimes. Just give her the diamonds.
Scott's Answer: I bet you're expecting an answer involving a villain making a bad choice, but nope! Maybe because it's freshest in my mind but in Skyfall, Bond takes M to his childhood home (the titular Skyfall) in Scotland where they EXPECT the bad guys to find them. Do they bring additional weapons? Vehicles? Troops? Nope. They go all Home Alone, planting booby traps and other such mayhem. So I am forced to ask, "Why didn't he just bring more weapons or call in the Marines?!" (Seriously, Skyfall is an extremely well-shot, well-edited, and well-acted movie, but the script definitely has holes in it.)
Skyfall is probably the most beautifully shot Bond movie. The biggest upside of hiring the director of American Beauty and Road to Perdition.
ReplyDeleteKit, Probably.
ReplyDeleteScott - I think the notion in Skyfall was that the villain was so tuned in that he would have immediately spotted any attempt at back-up. This was setting up as the two super spys going head to head for M's life. Hey, the whole notion of Bond requires for the willing suspension .... That said, I am going to go to my favorite Bond film and villain, From Russia with Love and Red Grant. Grant could have and should have immediately killed Bond in the car, but his greed got the better of him
ReplyDeleteMaybe I'm not recalling something, but why does Goldfinger bother explaining his plan to the mafiosi when he's just going to gas them seconds later? He already has the stuff he needs from them, so the only conceivable purpose is to allow Bond to overhear the plot. And on that note, who builds a model of Fort Knox that you can peer out from beneath?
ReplyDeleteAlso, instead of the pink tie in Diamonds are Forever, why didn't Bond just wear something else?
Jed, Greed always gets us all.:(
ReplyDeletetryanmax, I think the answer is ego, but it's a very good question.
ReplyDeleteAs for the pink tie... yeah, a low, inexplicable moment in Bond indeed.
There are several but the one I can think of is in Goldfinger. He has Bond tied to a table with a powerful LASER slowly creep up toward his crotch. Bond asked, "Do you expect me to talk?" Goldfinger, "No Mr. Bond. I expect you to die."
ReplyDeleteClassic Bond but why the theatrics? Just kill him or at least question him. Reminds me of a scene from The Incredibles were they joke about the villains always monologuing.
Koshcat, That's probably the first time the series really flirted with that kind of thing. And while I hate it throughout the series, I actually think they handle it well in Goldfinger. For one thing, Bond gives him a reason not to kill him. And Goldfinger doesn't actually tell him anything -- he overhears it later. Then Goldfinger even says later that it was smart to save Bond's life when he sees the CIA guys. So all told, I think they handle that really well. But in film after film after that, they run with a caricature of this moment and it always feels stupid.
ReplyDeleteKit -
ReplyDeleteSkyfall was shot by director of photography Roger Deakins who is one of the best DPs in the world. He's also worked on several Coen Brothers movies.
Jed -
ReplyDeleteYou might be right - I've only seen the movie once in its entirety. Time to crank up the Blu-Ray. :-)
Agreed. Even today I think Goldfinger holds up very well as one of the better Bonds. Who can go wrong with Pussy Galore!
ReplyDeleteKoshcat, I agree. It holds up amazingly well.
ReplyDeleteSkyfall - great cinematography, plot as idiotic as A View To A Kill.
ReplyDeleteWhy didn't Q run Silva's laptop program on a virtual machine? Or take any precautions whatsoever? Even connecting it to the internet would have been stupid; connecting it to the high sensitive MI6 computer network was the act of a moron, not an "intelligence officer". Not to mention that Silva's capture was a blatently obvious ruse.
Why did Silva not consider more reliable and well-tested murder weapons than "death by collision with commuter train in collapsing tube tunnel"?
As for the Skyfall sequence, M's last words should have been, "I love it when a plan comes together".