Plasma Pool

In November and December of 2008, Darren Franich and Eric Freeman engaged in a ridiculously long email exchange about virtually everything related to Quantum of Solace and the James Bond franchise as a whole. That conversation is now reproduced here.

This back-and-forth is part of Plasma Pool’s “Point-Hyperpoint” series. To view all “Point-Hyperpoint” entries, visit this page. To read all “Point-Hyperpoint” posts on James Bond, please click here.

DARREN

November 21 | 9:00 PM

I’ll structure this response in two parts, although I fear that doing so may lead us into some sort of crossfire pyramid scheme, exponentially increasing the size of our emails — “I’m going to respond to your first point with three different points,” etc.

First, Brosnan-era villains. The Brosnan era, it now seems obvious, is always going to be looked down upon by virtue of predating the Craig era. Even if Craig’s movies somehow manage to get worse and loopier than Moonraker, the mere existence and unfettered grandeur of Casino Royale — how it manages to be both the all-new different Bond and the ultimate Bond — will always cast a retroactive shadow over dross like Tomorrow Never Dies.

Everyone used to agree that Goldeneye was a classic, but it now seems obvious that this consensus was the result of a kind of multimedia mass hallucination — people kept confusing the videogame with the movie. (This is why, when you watch the movie with people of a certain age, they always jump with joy at the start of a new scene — “Holy shit, it’s the tank level!” or “Oh man, Facility! My brother and I used to have epic Slappers Only games on this level.”) I think you’ve nailed pretty much everything wrong with The World Is Not Enough and Tomorrow Never Dies; even the interesting things aspects of Brosnan’s movies (i.e., the half-Cro-Magnon, half-PC treatment of women) have already been much better addressed in Craig’s films.

Die Another Day, however, is some kind of weird action masterwork. There’s just such an incredible amount of excess onscreen, in terms of the action and setting — Bond surfs down a glacier being melted by sun rays! A car chase on the frozen tundra with a leapfrogging invisible Aston Martin! A hovercraft chase! A palace made of ice! Madonna! — but also in terms of the narrative.

It’s helpful to note that the movie is the absolute pinnacle of Brosnanism. The two female characters, Halle Berry and the British chick, are basically extreme versions of the female leads in Tomorrow Never Dies and The World is Not Enough: Halle Berry is Michelle Yeoh with a sex drive, the British chick is a traitor just like the crazy World chick, and the two women face off in a sword duel. The villain, like Alec Trevelyan, is intended to be a mirror image of Bond (before his true background is revealed, he’s said to be an orphan, like Bond and Trevelyan), but whereas Trevelyan merely ends up fighting Bond hand-to-hand, this villain ends up in a Dr. Doom outfit, controlling the path of a gigantic sun laser, and killing his father, to boot!

Obviously one could argue that this is totally nonsensical and that it’s more fun to talk about than watch, but what holds it all together is that Brosnan, who could not in a million years play a scene from Casino Royale, is the perfect nonplussed aging Irishman to float through all of this. Roger Moore played Bond like a walking straight man, Seinfeld with a gun, and reacted to everything with roughly the same grin (or eyes-wide-open double take). Brosnan doesn’t really react to anything, which makes him one of those rare actors (Angelina Jolie is another, as was argued in a recent GQ article by Tom Carson) who are only good and believable in larger-than-life scenarios involving gunplay and the occasional energy explosion.

It also helps that Die Another Day was directed by Lee Tamahori, an exemplary Bond director in that he’s more or less a second-tier director of action films with scarcely any noticeable directorial imprint who somehow discovers his muse directing a Bond film. (This was true years ago, with Guy Hamilton and Terence Young, and was true with Martin Campbell, who made Goldeneye and Casino Royale.) Die Another Day is essentially a superhero film played as straight as superhero film can possibly be played, and that general tone owes a great deal to how a blankly professional director deals with material that, if played just a little bit straighter or a little bit goofier, would be Moonraker 3D!

Second, on Greene’s scheme in QoS: the more I think about it, the more I like it. The fact that it’s simultaneously a Chinatown reference and an incredibly topical nod towards environmentalism and the world food crisis is nifty; and as you say, it speaks far more volumes about the ‘00s than “fear of the media” or “fear of Robert Carlyle” did in the ‘90s.

One thing that makes the “conspiracy” angle a bummer is that, honestly, it seems like kind of a cheat. The greatest criminal stories of this decade have really been stories of comically bumbling fools: the Bush Administration, Enron, the Republican congress as led by Tom DeLay. Okay, you could argue that we don’t know everything, that sure Bush was stupid but the rest of his staff were devious geniuses, but I think that line of thinking inevitably leads you towards 9/11-conspiracy-theory-style modes of thinking. My basic fear is that the Quantum plotline will devolve into this.

One of the reasons I liked Le Chiffre, who was really most memorable for how perfectly unmemorable he was, was that he was such a believable scumbag. He was gambling money he took from terrorists; it’s truly impossible to be stupider than that. Yet he was also, without question, quite intelligent; whereas villains of the Carlyle ilk were kind of, well, dense. A Bond villain with two whole dimensions? Post-Brosnan, this was bonkers!

It’s funny, I’ve been reading a lot of interviews with Marc Forster, and I find that while I agree with most everything he says, I still think that he severely fucked up with Quantum of Solace. He says he wanted it to be one hour shorter than Casino Royale, a lean mean machine—yeah, that sounds awesome! He says he wanted Mathieu Almaric as the villain because his milquetoastness made him a much more modern villain than a freak like Le Chiffre — hell, I love realism! He wanted Bond to be mourning Vesper the whole movie — man, I love continuity and ongoing storylines!

But somehow, taken together, these three decisions made the film feel less like a sequel, less like a complete movie, than a series of awesome ideas for Bond without a movie behind them. Greene is an interesting character, but his introduction, his motivations, his interaction with the other characters — all of these are a mess. (That scene on the docks still haunts me — everything about Greene’s introduction is so difficult and awkward.) Bond’s mourning of Vesper gives the film some compelling moments (i.e., Bond stabbing the guy in the artery and then waiting, almost bored, for him to die), but after a while, his inability to deal with it properly gives the entire movie a gigantic aura of denial. Like, at the end of the film, as the camera lingers on Vesper’s necklace, there were some people in the theater who moaned as if to say “Wait, so this is what the whole movie was about? Bond acknowledging what we all already knew?”

This film, much more so than Casino, has a severe case of Bourne envy, and so it doesn’t help that, across two movies, Bourne only ever references his lost love a couple of times, and then totally obliquely. We got it, and we didn’t need it spelled out — He Wanted Vengeance.

It also doesn’t help that Forster cannot film a halfway decent action sequence. That first car chase is misery (again, I love the idea — “We start right in the action!”  — but hate the execution.) It’s almost as though in trying to hard to recapture the grittiness of Casino Royale, Forster totally missed the sheer epic grandeur of that movie, the longest Bond ever. I mean, that first action sequence in Casino Royale, the chase through the construction yard, was like something that Buster Keaton would have conceived during a long night of conspiratizing with Vincente Minnelli — the More, More, Moreness of it, the moment-to-moment thrills … this was the Absolute Idea of James Bond, the man who does not stop. (Robert Rodriguez has been trying to film this sequence, or something like it, his whole career.) By comparison, the rooftop chase in Quantum is nifty; but it’s ruinously nonsensical, far more so than the cutting in Casino or in the Bournes. For some reason, the cumulative effect is less “one-thing-on-top-of-another” and more “this happens, then this, then this, and then boom!”

Conversely, the opera sequence is awesome. Have you seen Stay, Forster’s movie with Ewan McGregor and Naomi Watts? It’s awful — the end is basically Jacob’s Ladder without any movie leading up to it — but the visual style of it, weirdly formalist and geometrical, like art deco by way of Antonioni, is very reminiscent of Quantum of Solace. Forster exemplifies a particular kind of postmodern Hollywood director: he has an amazing eye for visuals, but he is absolutely terrible at capturing movement and action. (Darren Aronofsky and, at times, Wes Anderson are other, better directors who exemplify this.) What I mean is that there are some shots where you just have to say, “Jesus, that’s awesome!” — but they’re usually wordless still shots, like the scene in the opera, or the scene of Bond and Olga Kurylenko walking through the village, or the shot of the dead girl covered in oil. All of this makes Quantum of Solace an interesting architectural riff on the Bond mythos. But it’s not a very fun motion picture.

***

ERIC

November 21 | 9:52 PM

One day, people will watch Die Another Day outside of the context of Bond movies and raise it up to the so-bad-it’s-good pantheon. It’s a great movie to watch while drinking beer with friends, but it is also an utter piece of shit, not of typical Bond caliber. I would probably feel much differently about it if it weren’t a Bond movie. (I also see every Bond movie with my dad, so I probably hate it deep down in my heart because it fucked up some crucial father-son bonding time.) By the way, you forgot to mention that Bond spends a year as a POW in North Korea, which luckily allowed Pierce Brosnan to reuse the beard he wore for his made-for-TV Robinson Crusoe.

I will forever argue for the greatness of Goldeneye, both the movie and the game, because Onatopp is just an incredible character in every way. Here we have a Bond girl who actually kills by fucking, which is both a great twist on Bond girls in general and the kind of bizarre trait that most Bond girls don’t have — as beautiful as they are, they’re almost always safe. The plot is also a nice segue out of the Cold War, even if it’s simplistic and obvious.

The Quantum conspiracy is certainly in danger of lapsing into the sort of ridiculous scheme you mention. The opera scene portrays Quantum interestingly, but from that depiction it’s difficult to see why they would need moles in M’s inner circle. The conspirators are already titans of industry with influence over ineffectual politicians, so the We Are Everywhere system just isn’t necessary. It’s much scarier for Quantum to exist because there’s no reason for it not to exist. If that’s the case, then worldwide conspiracies are the result of broken systems rather than garden-variety evildoers.

I think I agree that Quantum of Solace is pretty weak on its own, but I liked it quite a bit because it retroactively improved a lot of my least favorite parts of Casino Royale. For instance, I didn’t much like Le Chiffre at first; I didn’t find the idea of an arms dealer supervillain particularly interesting, and his role in Quantum wasn’t defined enough to be particularly compelling. Now, though, I think the weakness of Le Chiffre is actually pretty genius, particularly because he was hardly mentioned in the ostensible sequel to Casino Royale.

Similarly, I loved that Dominic Greene was so awful at fighting when he attacks Bond in the climax. He was shrieking like someone who’s never been in a fight before, and he loses by axing himself in the foot. At no point is there any indication that Bond is defeating ultimate evil. In the past, the implication has always been that one supervillain replaces the next one — it’s essentially zero-sum. Now we have a smattering of slightly effective bad guys of indeterminate number who are nebulously interconnected. How do you stop that?

But yes, the Vesper plot in Quantum of Solace is pretty uninteresting; and as a standalone movie I think it’s merely average. I won’t touch the action scenes because I really don’t want to get into a discussion about shaky-cam action sequences. That has been done enough in the past few years.

***

DARREN

November 23 | 5:53 PM

That’s interesting that you see every Bond movie with your pa. Bond for me was a fraternal tradition — my older brother and I rented the movies from our local Blockbuster (which, in an era when it was impossible to find any Hitchcock or post-Kane Welles or Kurosawa sans samurai, had a full shelf of everything from Dr. No through License to Kill — even Never Say Never Again). When my brother was in high school and I was in junior high and we basically had nothing substantive in common, we’d both go apeshit every November when TBS would have “7 Days of 007,” which invariably lasted two months. I’m convinced that almost everyone in the Western World has some kind of Bond tradition within their family.

Anyhow, I maintain that you’re both way underrating Die Another Day and way overrating Goldeneye. I’m not going to argue that Die Another Day isn’t completely lunatic — albino Koreans, Brosnan’s prison beard, invisible cars, the ice palace, the ice palace, the ice palace—but, in terms of its storyline, its visual scheme, its pure aesthetic, it feels like it exists at the crosspoint of post-Matrix CGI decadence and post-Bourne grit — which, six years later, when both visual aesthetics are starting to feel quite tired, gives the movie kind of an ageless quality. The thing is stupidly propulsive — like both of the Craigs and one of the Daltons, it’s a “Bond Goes Rogue” movie, but unlike those other films (which are all fine), Bond-on-the-run has a blast and basically does all the cool things we always imagine he would do on holiday — go to Cuba, fence with billionaires in London, hook up with Halle Berry and pour diamonds all over her naked body, etc.

Die Another Day was the twentieth film, and so put in all these little homages to the earlier movies — Halle Berry’s Dr. No bikini being the most prominent. This is yet another reason why I think Die Another Day is best appreciated alongside the modern brand of superhero movies, all of which exist as vaguely postmodern reenactments of well-known mythology (when Captain Gordon becomes Commissioner Gordon in Dark Knight, you aren’t excited because it’s surprising, you’re excited because you knew it was going to happen). Die Another Day and Casino Royale form a kind of crescendo/decrescendo, yin/yang two-act play about James Bond, with Die Another Day as the beautiful decadent excess that Casino Royale would basically implode.

I’m realizing that all of this is total hyperbole that’s avoiding the coolest thing about the movie — it is fucking spicy, zesty, juicy, vivid fun. At least half of this is due to Halle Berry, who is, I believe, the only actress to win an Oscar and then be a Bond girl. It’s funny to think that she still hasn’t had a single film worth watching in the six years since Die Another Day came out, but she’s a total force in this movie. The first three Brosnans tried to make the women sexy but also smart but also fun but also sad, and for the most part churned out female characters with even fewer dimensions than Holly Goodhead and Pussy Galore. So it’s pretty amazing how Die Another Day just allows Halle Berry to be herself (she’s a great interviewee, which may explain why she’s not a very good actress). There’s more fun to be had from Die Another Day; I would yet again point you to the sequence on a plane where the evil secret-Korean Bond clone is fighting Bond while in the next room two women are having a sword fight — and then the plane flies into a death ray. Awesome.

Conversely, Goldeneye has seriously not aged well. Onatopp is a great character, but she’s in much less of the movie than you remember; she has less screen time than Natalya Simonova, the first Brosnan Girl who’s basically a unidimensional Non-Slut-Independent-Woman until she suddenly decides to sleep with Bond apropos of nothing. There’s a whole lot of Alan Cumming and Robbie Coltrane mugging in fake Russian accents, and a hidden fortress whose location is stolen directly from You Only Live Twice, and a really cool villain (Trevelyan) with nothing to do. “Really Cool with Nothing To Do” is kind of the M.O. for Goldeneye, which is probably why the video game was so cool — it took all the elements of the movie and added in a plot. There are also quite a few action-movie tics that haven’t aged well: all the Russians speak English to each other, one of the villains is the kind of hotshot computer programmer who has only ever existed in early-‘90s movies. I don’t want to rag too hard on Goldeneye, since it was definitely a total gamechanger for the series, but most of the good stuff in this movie was either blown up to lunatic fun proportion in Die Another Day or was further deconstructed in Casino Royale.

I agree that it’s pretty cool that Dominic Greene was realistically awful at fighting Bond at the end, but here, I think you’re falling into Marc Forster’s notion that realism by itself is interesting. Yes, I think it’s nifty that Greene is realistically clumsy, that he’s realistically plain-looking, that he’s realistically uninteresting — but none of that makes him any more interesting. If the purpose of Forster’s treatment of “evil” in Quantum of Solace was the reveal the banality of evil, then doesn’t the material deserve a considerably more complicated touch? Like, The Wire was all about the Banality of Evil, which made the show more of a comedy than a drama — in every scene involving powerful people, the ongoing joke is that they have no idea what they’re doing and everything they do results in terrible circumstances for everyone less powerful than they are. (This is not entirely true of Marlo Stanfield, who’s really almost a real-life Bond villain, but that’s another conversation.)

What I like about the opera scene is that, even if it’s kind of ridiculous, it at least seems to encapsulate what the movie is trying to say about Quantum — they’re everywhere, they’re mysterious, their actions reverberate throughout the world. It’s literally operatic, and so it’s a relentless bummer that the rest of the time, our “villain” is a French version of Kenneth Lay. (It also doesn’t help matters that his only onscreen relationship — with Kurylenko — is confusing. So, they’re sleeping together, and he hires someone to kill her, but she survives and goes back to him, and then he tries to kill her again, but then she follows him to Bolivia. And then she’s actually a secret agent….)

Based on where this film leaves off, I do think it’s interesting that the Craig Bond films seem to be shaping up for some larger story arc, and so it actually makes sense to me that Quantum of Solace is a sort of bridge movie between an awesome standalone, Casino Royale, and a genuine saga. In some of the greatest comic-book series of the last decade, after a long storyline comes to a close there will sometimes be a standalone issue, this very small little character story that provides some closure on what just past while also setting up what’s next. That’s kind of what Quantum of Solace feels like to me. I imagine I’d like it much more if it were about an hour shorter (maybe beginning with the Opera sequence and going forward from there).

That said, I’m curious to know where all your Casino Royale hatred is coming from. To me, that was the Bond movie that had it all, so I’ll have a difficult time believing anything you say until you can convince me that it wasn’t the best Bond movie ever.

On the new Bond girls: I must admit that I was skeptical when I first heard about them. Eva Green seemed like exactly the right kind of actress that Bond required: an indie film sweetheart who only takes off her clothes for Bernardo Bertolucci, one with an incredibly expressive face and a great body that has so little in common with the gym-rat Hollywood sporty-chic physique of Brosnan gals like Denise Richards and Halle Berry — alien scientists would almost believe that she came from a different planet. I always think along these lines about Megan Fox, who looks so crazily pre-fetishized in every picture ever taken of her that she simultaneously looks too hot for words and yummy like a slab of uncooked red meat.

So when Olga Kurylenko showed up, I was kind of like, “Jesus, we’re back to Christmas Jones.” Then came the docks sequence, about which the less is said the better. But I have to say, once she and Bond really started hanging out in the second half, I came to dig her character. To a certain extent, she and Bond together finally formed a full character, or at least brought the films’ themes of regret, denial, and vengeance out into the open. It helped matters that, unlike previous female Bonds, their relationship didn’t feel remotely forced. It was kind of just fun watching them hang out on screen. I’m not sure that Kurylenko is even close to being a good actress, but her minimal take on the character perfectly matches Craig. That last kiss was haunting, too. Has any woman ever refused Bond before?