Film / Quantum of Solace

All spoilers for Casino Royale will be unmarked. You Have Been Warned!

♫ Another tricky little gun giving solace to the one that'll never see the sun shine... ♫

"How much do you know about Bond, Camille? Because he's rather a tragic case... His MI6 file says he's difficult to control - a nice way of saying that everything he touches seems to wither and die."

—Dominic Greene

The one where the bad guys' plot is to try to steal a country's water.

Quantum of Solace is the twenty-second James Bond film by Eon Productions, the second to star Daniel Craig. It was directed by Marc Forster and released on October 31, 2008. Jack White and Alicia Keys performed the Title Theme Tune, "Another Way to Die." At one hour and forty-six minutes, it is also the shortest-ever Bond film (beating Dr. No and Goldfinger, which were both one hour and fifty-one minutes).

The story follows on from Casino Royale, making it one of the few Sequel Episodes in the Bond movie franchise. Following the death of Vesper Lynd, Bond is out for revenge against those responsible: an Illuminati-esque crime syndicate known as "Quantum." His rampage eventually leads him to Dominic Greene, a Quantum operative out to overthrow the Bolivian government through a corrupt general named Medrano, and the mysterious Camille, a woman who has unfinished business of her own with the general.

The film's title comes from a 1960 short story by Ian Fleming contained in the anthology book For Your Eyes Only, and means "a small degree of comfort."

Coinciding with the film's release was the video game adaptation, 007: Quantum of Solace, notable for A) being the first Bond game published by Activision, and B) adapting both this film and Casino Royale.

Followed by Skyfall, which went standalone instead of having close ties to this film.

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Quantum of Solace contains examples of:

• Aborted Arc: The film seemed to set up Quantum as the new organization that Bond and MI6 would have to contend with as a Spectre stand-in, since there were many high ranking people in positions of power within Quantum’s organization. However, Skyfall would end up being a more personal assignment, and Spectre would end up revealing that the titular organization is the true muscle behind Quantum, which ended up merely being one of many Spectre fronts.
• Action Film, Quiet Drama Scene: Various; Bond and Mathis, Bond and Leiter at the bar, Camille talking about her past, and Bond getting his eponymous quantum of solace at the end of the film, etc.
• Action Girl: Camille shoots two guards then has a brutal fight against General Medrano. While he has a strength and weight advantage, she wins due to her willingness to fight dirty and use of improvised weapons.
• Actionized Sequel: The film is 40 minutes shorter than Casino Royale, but packs more action, including a faster pace and a high octane Car Chase right at the start. And most of the action was filmed with Jitter Cam.
• Adaptational Name Change:
  • The film gives Camille the last name Montes but the video game, working from an earlier draft of the script, names her "Rivera." Even more confusingly, the official wiki gives her full name as "Camille Montes-Rivero."
  • Likewise, the film gives the traitorous MI6 agent Mitchell the first name Craig but the game calls him "Henry."
• Adaptation Expansion: The film takes one scene from the short story "007 in New York," and no scenes from "Quantum of Solace"!
• Agents Dating: After Bond seduces agent Fields, they attend a party Dominic Greene holds that night. There, she helps Bond escape by causing Dominic's second in command, Elvis, to fall down the stairs.
• Agony of the Feet: During the final fight in the burning hotel, Greene accidentally embeds the fire axe in his own foot.
• All Girls Want Bad Boys: Bond easily seduces Agent Fields and charms an airline booking agent into misdirecting anyone inquiring about him. Averted with Camille, probably because her experience with bad boys has not been good.
• All Is Well That Ends Well: Averted: Mathis was able to use his treatment after falling under suspicion in Casino Royale as leverage to get early retirement, apparently with a rather generous package. On top of that, he's not exactly thrilled to see Bond (who pointed the finger at him in the first place) when he shows up asking for help.
• All There in the Script: Fields' first name is only in the credits of the movie. It's Strawberry.
• Always Save the Girl: At the climax, Bond is faced with a choice between capturing Greene and saving Camille's life; he goes to rescue Camille. Justified by the amount of build-up it's been given about all the other people he's failed to save.
• America Saves the Day: Averted. The official stance of the CIA is to do nothing to stop Medrano and Greene in their attempt to stage a coup of Bolivia, and two of the CIA staff were actually working WITH Greene.
• And the Adventure Continues: At the end of the film, M asks Bond to return to service. He calmly replies that he never left in the first place, before dropping Vesper's necklace in the snow and walking away. This exchange lets us know that Bond is ready for whatever mission comes his way.
• And This Is for...:
  Bond: YOU AND I HAD A MUTUAL FRIEND!
  • There's also him leaving Greene to die in the middle of the desert with only a can of motor oil to drink, undoubtedly a reference to how Fields' was murdered, thus avenging her death.
• Angrish: Dominic Greene, in the climax.
• Artificial Atmospheric Actions: A hilarious (and heavily parodied) example, where a man standing directly behind Mr. Bond had apparently forgotten how to use a broom. Here, at about 25 seconds in.
• Artistic License – Art: The montage of the sequences at the opera house alternates between Bond's action scene and scenes from the Tosca's performance happening in the building at the same time. The latter scenes don't follow the opera's actual chronology but are put together in an anachronistic order intended to reflect the parallel action scene.
• Artistic License – Geography: The Austrian city of Bregenz doesn't have an airport in Real Life.
• Attempted Rape: General Medrano attempts to rape some hotel waitress, before Camille enters the room and proceeds to send him to Hell. Especially significant due to what happened to Camille's mother and older sister.
• At the Opera Tonight: Bond + Tosca = awesome sauce.
• Awesomeness-Induced Amnesia: Heavily implied as Bond makes his way out of the opera. The entire scene is in black & white, with awkward cuts, jerky and frequently out-of-focus camera work showing the viewer fragmented bits and pieces of 007 going through the organization's security force like paper with an utterly blank expression on his face the entire time.
• Ax-Crazy: Dominic Green becomes this towards the end when James ruins his plans and destroys his entire facility, at which point, he completely snaps and uses an actual axe to try and chop Bond into pieces, all while screaming like a complete lunatic.
• Back Forthe Dead: Mathis. He reluctantly helps Bond... just to be killed a few scenes later.
• Badass Longcoat: Bond wears it at the end.
• Bait-and-Switch Gunshot: Subverted when Camille shoots Medrano. The scene makes it obvious who has the gun and who doesn't, but we just hear the gunshot from Bond's perspective, and both him and Greene are convinced that she was the one who was shot.
  Greene: Looks like you just lost another one!
• Banana Republic: Averted. The film portrays Haiti and Bolivia as highly unstable and corrupt countries that tend to fall under dictatorships every so often.
• Battle Amongst the Flames: The climactic fight between Bond and Greene takes place inside a burning hotel.
• Beauty Is Never Tarnished: Zig-zagged. Camille does have a nasty burn scar from when she was a kid, but it is on her back and thus concealed by clothing for most of the movie. On the other hand, an ongoing theme of the film is psychological scars.
• Big Bad Duumvirate: Dominic Greene and General Medrano. Subverted when Greene basically tells him that he'll be a puppet once they put him in power, and if he doesn't like it, Greene's partners will simply have him killed and put another guy in his place (maybe even his own bodyguard). Medrano is seriously annoyed, but reluctantly concedes.
• Big Bad Wannabe: General Medrano views himself as Dominic Greene's equal partner, but Greene tells Medrano that he'll be nothing more than a figurehead for Quantum once he's put in power as Bolivia's president, and will have him killed if he balks. Medrano has no option but to go along with this, despite his immense frustration.
• Bilingual Bonus:
  • Elvis, Dominic's henchman, is first seen speaking to his mother on the phone in Swiss German, talking about the hot weather in Haiti. The actor playing him and director Marc Forster are both of Swiss descent, and probably thought it quite an amusing in-joke.
  • Mathis repeatedly telling the taxi driver "callate," which is Spanish for "shut up."
• Bittersweet Ending: Bond has saved the day yet again and caught those responsible for Vesper's death. However, he's still brokenhearted and will probably never be the same.
• Black-Tie Infiltration: Bond sneaks in backstage during a performance of Tosca because a group of Nebulous Evil Organization members are using it as cover for a meeting. He smokes them out by intruding on their radio conversation, letting MI6 identify some of their members due to them panicking and moving to leave.
• Blatant Lies: Gregory Beam tells M that the Americans have no interest in Greene. M immediately identifies Greene as a person of extreme interest, since she wouldn't have been instantly transferred to the Section Chief for South America if the CIA weren't tracking him.
• Bloodless Carnage: Downplayed example. Slate and Bond have a brief but brutal fight in Slate's hotel room, and both men sustain minor cuts in the course of the initial brawl. Bond ends the fight by stabbing Slate in the neck and femoral artery, and while there isn't nearly as much blood as there should be, there are some partially obscured pools of blood spreading from Slate's neck and leg.
• Bodyguard Betrayal: Mitchell, an MI6 agent and M's personal bodyguard. He is revealed to be a Quantum plant and aids Mr. White in escaping MI6 custody. He kills another two agents, and injures M before Bond takes him down.
• Bond Gun Barrel: Occurs right at the end of the movie. Originally, it was intended to show Bond gunning down Mr. White, but the idea was tossed out, and the gun barrel scene was left in.
• Bond One-Liner: Lampshaded:
  Bond: Tell her Slate was a dead end.
  Tanner: (to M) Slate was a dead end.
  Radio: Connection terminated.
  M: (immediately reading between the lines) Damn him, he killed him!
• Bond Villain Stupidity: Not quite averted, as while the villains never really have Bond at their mercy the way they usually do at least once a movie, they do, however, leave the oft-imperiled Camille alive way too many times, and she ends up having as much to do with their downfall as 007 does.
• Briefcase Full of Money: The medium of exchange the meeting near the end.
• Brownface: The very-pale-Slavic Ukrainian actress Olga Kurylenko as very-tan-Hispanic-Slavic Bolivian-Russian Camille.
• Cacophony Cover Up: After chasing a man into a bell tower, Bond yanks on the bell rope so the noise of the church bell will cover him running up the stairs, preventing the man from plotting his exact position.
• Car Cushion: This happens to some poor goon. He survives it. Then the occupants of the car kill him.
• Chekhov's Gun: A literal one; in the opening car chase, Bond blasts the bad guys with the SMG that he was seen holding rather prominently in the final moments of Casino Royale.
• Chronic Backstabbing Disorder: The film goes full lengths to show this, to near exaggeration. Might have as well called it Chronic Backstabbing Disorder: The Movie.
  • The car chase sequence in the prologue is to prevent Mr. White from being forced into this.
  • From Casino Royale, Vesper betrayed Bond, and all of MI6 (and the UK) by playing reluctant double-agent. Ironically, this happened because she was initially betrayed by her very boyfriend whom she betrayed her organisation for. This kicks off the plot for the film.
  • M is injured by her bodyguard Mitchell, after which she discovers that he was an agent working for Quantum (and by extension, Spectre).
  • Camille uses Dominic Greene to get to Medrano.
    • To do this, she tried to pay off one of his geologists to sell her information, possibly on Medrano's location.
    • And in an almost karmic way, Greene catches wind of this and kills the geologist, and sends a different geologist/mook to intercept Camille and kill her.
    • And on top of that, after Camille survives and Medrano shows up to the pier, Greene offers her to Medrano and all but requests him to rape and kill her.
  • M throughout the film accuses Bond of this, from his failure to bring back suspects alive to getting total innocents killed. She even accuses him of killing Guy Haines' bodyguard (which he didn't) to getting Fields killed (though she isn't entirely wrong about this).
  • Guy Haines works as an advisor to the British PM, yet he saw no problem betraying his country just to get in on the action.
    • His Special Branch bodyguard counts too. He indirectly helps his boss, knowing full well of his affiliations. Too bad Greene doesn't recognise his efforts, or recognise him for that matter, and has him shot for even ''looking'' in his direction.
  • At the party for the upcoming Tierra Project in Bolivia, Mathis is betrayed by his friend Carlos, (the chief-of-police secretly on Quantum's payroll). At some point after conversing with Fields and some other guests, Carlos lures Mathis to the parking lot and has him beaten near-death by his officers. He then shoves Mathis into the trunk of Bond's car and later has his officers shoot Mathis to death, all so they can pin his death on Bond.
  • And just to show how even the most insignificant character can be prone to this, it shows Bond and Camille trading in the car to a lone Bolivian farmer for his cargo plane. While in the air, Bond realizes that the car wasn't exactly enough, and anticipates that the farmer will try to earn himself a healthy sum of money by selling out their location to Quantum. Given that three Quantum mooks show up a mere forty seconds later, it's safe to assume that he did.
• *Click* Hello: Guy Haines' bodyguard pursues Bond to the rooftop of the opera house, only to be surprised by Bond at the side of the door holding a gun at his head.
• Close on Title: Happens right after the above-mentioned Bond Gun Barrel sequence, with said barrel forming the "Q" in the title.
• Coitus Uninterruptus: Bond answers the door naked. Neither he nor Mathis even allude to the fact that he has no trousers on. However in the scene immediately after, it does appear that he has underwear on when going back to Strawberry Fields.
• Colourful Theme Naming: Mr. White's employer is a certain Dominic Greene, and one of Greene's subordinates is a Mr. Slate.
• Collapsing Lair: A hotel. It's a Bond movie, what would you expect?
• Confusion Fu: This is what lets the physically nonthreatening Greene stay alive (temporarily — not a spoiler, it's a Bond film). He flails about so wildly that Bond can't really fight him effectively — that is, until the downside of wild flailing is illustrated, when Greene performs an inadvertent axe-foot interface that is excruciating to watch.
• Continuity Nod: Bond's SMG from the ending of Casino Royale makes an appearance at the end of the pre-credits car chase, Le Chiffre and his operation are namedropped, and Bond drops Vesper's necklace (just like she referenced "letting go" in the previous film) in the snow at the end of the film. As a whole, Quantum is very dependent on themes and elements of Casino Royale, more so than any other previous Bond film.
• Conveniently Empty Roads: Averted in the opening scene, as Bond and his pursuers are forced to weave through traffic.
• Cool and Unusual Punishment: Bond leaves Dominic Greene stranded in the middle of a desert with nothing to drink but a bottle of oil. This is a fitting punishment due to his inflicting the impoverished Bolivians with an artificial drought, combined with how he murdered Fields by drowning her in oil.
• Cop Killer: Bond shoots the crooked cops who shot Mathis. He later kills Carlos, the corrupt Chief of Police who sold Mathis out.
• Corporate Conspiracy: Dominic Greene, the president of Greene Planet, has known links to Quantum and is plotting to seize control of Bolivia's water supply and create an artificial drought by having its government overthrown.
• Cosmopolitan Council: Quantum's members include corrupt French, Japanese, Russian and Israeli businessmen, a British adviser to the Prime Minister, and other unidentified diverse evil people.
• Covert Group with Mundane Front: Finally lampshaded when Bond mocks Felix Leiter for the CIA's evident inability to do this competently.
  You know, you should just answer, 'CIA,' Felix. A taxi driver told me where the office was.
• Crouching Moron, Hidden Badass: Medrano. He just looks like another fat tyrant from a Banana Republic, but he stands his own against Camille.
• Crowd Panic: Happens when an escaping Quantum agent shoots a random girl.
• Cruel and Unusual Death: Agent Strawberry Fields drowned in crude oil.
  • Bond leaves Greene in the desert to die what will undoubtedly be an agonising death from exposure, then caps it off by giving him a can of motor oil (getting revenge on Fields' behalf) and taunting him about how long it will be before he's desperate enough to drink it. When his body is found, it turns out that he was shot, but there's still motor oil in his stomach, showing that he did get to that point. Or else it could be that the Quantum operatives who found him force fed the oil.
• Dangerous Clifftop Road: The opening chase finds itself on a sort of cliff (it's a steep but not truly vertical drop, and a road zig-zags down it). Both Bond and his pursuers are skilled enough to navigate the terrain, but the police car following both of them isn't quite as lucky. Bond's pursuers open fire at the cops, and though the officers aren't hit, they duck down for cover. That includes the driver. As a result of this, possibly coupled with damage to the vehicle, the car smashes through the corner of an old building. Cop cars are built to be sturdy (they're probably the only vehicles most people see that are bulletproof), and so the car looks to be in good shape after demolishing part of a building. Unfortunately, still out of control, they go off the cliff. By the time the car tumbles to the road below, it's a wreck.
• Darkened Building Shootout: More than once, including a darkened catacomb.
• Death by Irony:
  • Mathis is apparently killed and his body is left in Bond's trunk for the police to "find". In Casino Royale, this same method was used by Mathis to get Le Chiffre's Dragon out of the picture.
  • Greene deprives people of water and drowns Strawberry Fields in crude oil, so Bond leaves him in the desert with only a can of oil to drink.
• Deconstructed Trope: As per tradition, this film's (secondary) Bond girl, Agent Fields, does have a humorous Punny Name—but she refuses to tell Bond what it is because even she finds it ridiculous. As we learn in the credits, it's "Strawberry."
• Despotism Justifies the Means: General Medrano has no problem with Quantum engineering a drought in his own country if it means that Medrano will be the next dictator of it. He is much more annoyed when he finds out that he'll basically be a puppet and will further have to essentially hand over Bolivia's entire water supply to Quantum, but he decides it's worth the price anyway. Granted, the threat of a bullet to the back of his head probably helped there.
• Deus Ax Machina: Dominic Green attacks Bond with a fire axe during the final battle.
• Died in Your Arms Tonight: Mathis.
• Digital Bikini: In the Australian film release, a woman is sexually assaulted by General Medrano in the ready-to-blow-up hotel. She is thrown on to a bed, showing her pubic mound/outer genitalia in an upskirt shot. On the Region 4 DVD, the woman's bare genitals were digitally covered with some CGI panties.
• Dirty Cop:
  • Guy Haines' bodyguard. He is a member of Special Branch, but given his actions at the Tosca performance he seems more than willing to assist his boss (a member of the British government) in his criminal actions with Quantum.
  • The police chief and his officers in Bolivia. The chief is on Quantum's payroll, and several of his officers are responsible for killing Mathis.
• Disposable Vehicle Section: The film opens with a chase scene, during which a truck collides with Bond's car, ramming a broken fender through Bond's door. Bond elects to dispose of that door to free himself (unfortunately leaving his bulletproof car open to gunfire).
• Disposable Woman: Fields is a classic example, but Bond leaving Green in the desert with only a can of oil to drink indicates that he's avenging her somewhat.^note She was drowned in oil.
• Dodgy Toupee: Dominic's assistant Elvis wears one.
• The Dragon: Elvis, nominally, though he barely does anything other than play assistant and die fast.
  • Greene's silent bodyguard fits the physical aspects of The Dragon better, but he's killed as easily as any mook during the final shootout.
• Drop Dead Gorgeous: Fields is drowned in oil, and her oil-covered body is laid on Bond's bed, a callback to Goldfinger.
• Eagleland:
  • The CIA is willing to look the other way for a bit of oil. Guess what flavour it is?
  • Felix Leiter is a bit closer to the other flavour, although he doesn't really do anything to respond to what his boss is doing until late in the movie (but you can tell he's pissed).
  • It should be noted that the British government (apart from Bond and M) isn't portrayed much better. It's that kind of world.
• Elevator Action Sequence: We get to see what happens when an unarmed, beaten-up and handcuffed Bond enters a lift with three elite British agents carrying guns.
• Embarrassing First Name: Fields' first name is Strawberry. She refuses to tell Bond (or the audience) what it is.
• Every Car Is a Pinto: Averted. During the opening car chase, various vehicles fall or roll down cliffs with nary an explosion in sight. Inverted during the climax. In an effort to get away from Bond, one of the mooks drives backwards, and ends up hitting a wall. The car itself doesn't explode - however, the wall has hydrogen fuel cells behind it and upon impact, those do explode, ultimately causing the building to burn down.
• Evil Is Not a Toy: Quantum turn out to have the backing of the CIA. Felix Leiter is apparently the only agent in the loop about this who realises that it's a terrible idea, and sure enough the company proves to be completely incapable of keeping their deniable pawns from going off-script.
• Evil Plan: Dominic Greene wants to hold the revolutionary government-to-be of Bolivia over a barrel by controlling the majority of the water and not oil through a system of planned underground demolitions.
• Expy: Quantum, along with their colour-designated code names are in no way like SPECTRE and their respective number-designated code names. Now seems to be retconned into a bit of foreshadowing of sorts, as of Spectre.
• Extreme Graphical Representation: The MI6 facility is equipped with gigantic multitouch screens on every surface, thus enabling it to completely replicate the functionality of... folders, noticeboards and sheets of paper.
• Fan Disservice: Near the end, that poor waitress at the hotel. Yes, we do get a Panty Shot, but you can't really feel good about it since she's just come within a hair's breadth of being brutally raped by General Medrano.
• Fanservice: It's a Bond movie. Fanservice starts in the opening credits and goes on from there. It is, however, considerably less than most Bond movies.
• Fatal Flaw: Dominic Greene and his recklessness, alongside his tendency to pick the wrong people to side with.
• Fire/Water Juxtaposition: Casino Royale ended with Bond fighting to save Vesper Lynd from the bad guys in a collapsing building in Venice, and ultimately ended with her drowning in the canal. Appropriately enough, this film ends with a shoot-out in a burning building, where 007 actually does manage to save the girl.
• Foreshadowing:
  • When M tells Bond that Vesper kept a lock of her lovers' hair in her apartment, Bond seems surprised, saying she didn't strike him as the sentimental type. M replies "Well we never really know anyone, do we?" Only minutes later, her own bodyguard is revealed to be a Quantum infiltrator, and injures her before leading Bond on a chase through Siena.
  • Once Dominic Greene is brought into the plot, there are a lot of shots that casually include water in the composition.
  • Greene was found with oil in his stomach and two bullets in the back of his head. Bond gave him a can of oil, but didn't give him a gun. Gasp!
• Friendly Address Privileges: When Dominic Greene and James Bond meet:
  Dominic Greene: My friends call me Dominic.
  James Bond: I'm sure they do.
• Fruit Cart: A truck containing a lot of cheap coffins crashes during the Haiti chase. In another scene, during a foot chase, a small dumb-waiter full of tomatoes is knocked to the ground.
• Girl of the Week: Deliberately done differently. It's clear to Bond, Fields and the audience that she's just a quick lay, and all Camille gives Bond is a quick peck before apparently leaving him forever. Deconstructed with Fields, since she's used to show Bond that his cold manipulation of the people around him can actually ruin or end their lives.
• Green Aesop: The CIA is willing to assist the Big Bad in attempts to get oil. The same Big Bad tells Quantum that they must take control of Bolivia because they have the world's most precious resource. Which is water, not oil. Actually a bit of a Subverted Trope, as Quantum's plot essentially seems to be "faking" the effects of Global Warming so Mr. Greene's pseudo-nonprofit, Greene Planet, can gain control of the world's water supply.
• Hate Sink: General Medrano comes off as one, as he has no qualms having the criminal organisation Quantum engineering a drought in his own country, so he'll be the next dictator of it, and even thinks of himself as Dominic Greene's equal partner, but reluctantly concedes when Greene threatens to have him killed if he doesn't back down. It's no secret why Camille is after him, having raped her mother and sister before killing them, and attempts to rape a hotel waitress in the climax. He even tries to do the same thing to Camille, but she puts a bullet in his head.
• Heroic BSoD: Bond spends much of the film in the midst of one following the end of Casino Royale, due to Vesper's death. He doesn't really come out of it until the end of the film, and is back to his normal smugly wisecracking self in time for Skyfall.
• He Who Fights Monsters: Subverted at the end, much to M's surprise.
• Hollywood Fire: The climactic fight in a hotel that's burning down. None of the combatants have any trouble breathing, talking, seeing, or fighting. Bond even runs through flames to rescue Camille, who's having a PTSD episode, and then the two of them run through a burning, collapsing wall. No one gets burned.
• Hollywood Skydiving: The DC-3 sequence. Bond and Camille activate the parachute way way too close to the ground, but they survive anyway.
• Hypocritical Humor:
  • The head of the national police takes a briefcase full of cash from Greene to support Medrano's coup and says "The corruption in the current government can no longer be tolerated."
  • Lampshaded in the conversation between Bond and Felix.
    Bond: You know, I was just wondering what South America would look like if nobody gave a damn about coke or communism. It always impressed me the way you boys carved this place up.
    Leiter: I'll take that as a compliment, coming from a Brit.
• Idiot Ball: When multiple members of Quantum are attending a performance of Tosca Bond taunts them by hacking into their communications. So naturally they promptly get up and leave, giving Bond a perfect opportunity to take photos of them. Mr. White is the only one not to fall for it, discreetly pocketing his earpiece and remaining in his seat.
• I'll Take That as a Compliment: After realising that the U.S. are of the boorish flavour of Eagleland this time around (willing to look the other way for a bit of oil), he makes a quip to Leiter about the U.S.'s interventionism. Leiter responds considering it a compliment, which is a historically well-placed zinger, given Britain's status as a world superpower before the U.S. took its place, and that the end of Britain's role as a superpower was in a botched attempt at interventionism for oil.
  Bond: You know, I was just wondering what South America would look like if nobody gave a damn about coke or communism. It always impressed me the way you boys would carve this place up.
  Leiter: I'll take that as a compliment, coming from a Brit.
• Immediate Sequel: After the last film ended with Bond tracking down Mr. White, this one opens with him transporting him to M.
• In Name Only: In the original short story, Bond is at dinner at an island governor's place. After dinner, the governor tells him the story of an airline stewardess' failed marriage. Bond re-learns that drama and tragedy don't have to involve master villains or gadgets. The End. Now a Major Motion Picture. Many of the Bond films changed major plot and character details from the books, to the point that they sometimes have next-to-nothing to do with their book counterparts at all, but especially in this Quantum of Solace film which is about as far removed from the short story as possible.
• Instant Seduction: "I can't find the... um, the stationery. Will you come and help me look?" He might as well have said, "I'm bored. Wanna screw?"
• Internal Homage: A shot where a crate of fruit is knocked down several stories as Bond is chasing a villain is functionally identical to an earlier shot in Casino Royale. But with girders.
• Interesting Situation Duel: Bond vs. Greene, inside an exploding hotel that's collapsing under their feet.
• It's Always Mardi Gras in New Orleans: The chase in Siena takes place during the Palio.
• It's Personal: Bond's comment to Vesper's ex-boyfriend (while the female intelligence agent he was attempting to compromise and blackmail is watching): "This man and I have some unfinished business."
• Jitter Cam: Much more frequent in this movie than in Casino Royale (or any of the following films).
• Karmic Death: Greene. He drank the bottle of oil Bond provided before Quantum executed him.
• Kill and Replace: After killing Edmund Slate, Bond takes his place. This leads him to Camille, whom Slate was hired by Greene to kill, though Bond didn't know this.
• Kitchen Chase: After the confrontation at the opera.
• Lancer vs. Dragon: Camille fights General Medrano to avenge her family's murder at his hands while Bond fights Medrano's backer from Quantum, Dominic Greene.
• Le Parkour: The Siena chase.
• Malevolent Architecture/Made of Explodium: Whatever engineer thought that placing pressurised hydrogen storage tanks into the parking level and suite walls of a hotel was a good idea should probably not be working with volatile substances.
• The Man Behind the Man: The Quantum Group to Mr. Greene.
• Mercy Kill:
  • Bond prepares to shoot Camille, as they are trapped in the burning hotel with no escape, and she is reliving her childhood trauma of having the General burn her house down over her head. Fortunately, an escape presents itself before it's too late.
  • Quantum's execution of Dominic Greene may have partially been this, along with You Have Failed Me.
• Mobstacle Course: The chase at the Palio is this left and right.
• The Mole:
  • M's bodyguard Craig Mitchell, who reveals himself to be working for Quantum during Mr. White's interrogation. For the rest of the film, M is paranoid about who she trusts with information because of what happened. Later on, Bond comments that the Canadian intelligence agent has a leak in her department before telling her to leave.
  • Guy Haines, a member of Quantum Bond photographs at the Tosca performance, is revealed to be a special envoy to the British Prime Minister.
• Missing Secret: The Wii version of the game is missing the collectible phones you could find in the other "next gen" versions.
• Missing Steps Plan: Greene's associates ask him what his plan is for when the Americans realise he duped them. He doesn't have one, but one of his counterparts says "I'm working on that". Greene ends up being thwarted by Bond before it becomes an issue.
• Mythology Gag:
  • From Russia with Love:
    • Greene introduces himself to Bond by saying "My friends call me Dominic," just as how Bond and Tatiana Romanova did. Bond and Jinx do the same thing in Die Another Day as well.
  • Goldfinger:
    • Fields' death is a homage to that of Jill Masterson.
  • The Spy Who Loved Me
    • A henchman tries to stop falling by grabbing an article of Bond's clothes, like Saundor.
    • Bond and Camille's trek through the desert in all their finery echoes his and Triple XXX's.
  • A View to a Kill
    • Ax Crazy French villain attacking Bond with an axe? Check.
  • Casino Royale
    • Bond drinks his Martini shaken. It is explicitly not described as "shaken, not stirred." This is also a callback to a similar bit in the previous film. ^note Speaking of that, look up Two Decades Behind on the Casino Royale article; it's pretty hard to find Kina Lillet or high-proof Gordon's Gin to make a Vesper cocktail in the 21st century.
    • At one point, Mathis muses on the nature of heroes vs. villains, and how the line between the two blurs as one ages — Bond does something similar in the novel of Casino Royale.
• Nebulous Evil Organisation: Quantum.
  • Nebulous Criminal Conspiracy: Individual members of Quantum each have their own corrupt gig going on. Big Bad Dominic Greene, for instance, is the head of a Greenpeace-style organisation that is actually in business with a lot of shady corporations and criminals.
• Never Gets Drunk: James is so wired that he consumes six Vesper martinis without getting drunk.
• No Name Given:
  • The first name of Fields is only given in the closing credits. Thank goodness, too.
  • Mr. White.
• Not Hyperbole: Quantum really do have people everywhere, as M lampshades in astonishment.
• Not-So-Harmless Villain: Dominic Greene. He has no fighting training whatsoever, and for the most part of the movie he runs away while his henchmen kill enemies for him. Still, he stands his own against Bond. Few other lead villains in the Daniel Craig era can say that.
• Offscreen Karma: Bond leaves Greene in the middle of the desert with a can of motor oil. M later tells him that Greene was found dead with oil in his stomach, implying that Quantum caught up with him and killed him for his failure.
• Oh, Crap!: Bond and M's reaction when Mr. White is being interrogated, and he reveals that M's personal bodyguard is working for Quantum.
• Paranoia Fuel: In universe; Quantum says they "have people everywhere." Like, in the same room. M is noticeably twitchy and distrustful the rest of the movie, since the traitor in question had been her personal bodyguard for eight years. Exaggerated with Greene's speech to Mendrano:
  Greene: You should know something about me and the people I work with. We deal with the left and the right, dictators or liberators. If the current president had been more agreeable, I wouldn't be talking to you. So if you decide not to sign, you'll wake up with your balls in your mouth and your willing replacement standing over you... if you doubt that, then shoot me, take that money and have a good night's sleep.
• Parental Substitute: Bond tells Camille that (among other things) Greene tried to kill a friend of his — a woman, "but it's not what you think" (it's M). "Your mother?" "She likes to think so."
• Pet the Dog: Bond spends most of the movie cold and emotionless. He is, however, notably angry when Fields is murdered, and then informs M that Fields showed true bravery and he wants that noted in the report.
• Poor Communication Kills: Bond asks a mook at gunpoint who his employers are; the mook tells him to go screw himself. So Bond throws him off a roof. In his subsequent phone call with M, Bond learns the man he killed was a member of Special Branch (British Metropolitan Police, whose duties include bodyguarding non-royal VIPs) guarding the special envoy to the Prime Minister, and therefore on his side, or at least according to appearances (the guy was corrupt by dint of working for a Quantum member).
• Pun-Based Title: Applied retroactively (given the In Name Only nature of the adaptation from the Fleming story) by naming the villainous organisation Quantum.
• Punk in the Trunk:
  • Mr. White at the beginning of the movie.
  • Mathis in Bolivia.
  • Greene at the end of the movie.
• Rape as Drama: Camille, although in her case, it's against her family, not her.
• Reconstruction: On the surface, Quantum of Solace is much more like a typical Bond film than Casino Royale (arguably a Deconstruction as much as an origin story). But this one folds all the elements introduced in Casino Royale into the formula: few gadgets, the Stale Beer elements, Bond's rough-and-tumble approach, the emphasis on characterisation in the script.
• Realpolitik: Both Felix and M's bosses know that Greene is likely a villain, but they're willing to do business with him because he has oil, which they need. They are never portrayed as being wrong for their pragmatism, only for being suckered as Greene doesn't actually have any oil.
• Red Right Hand: Deliberately averted. The actor playing Greene would have been fine with it, but the director demanded that he should not be given any kind of unusual physical features via make-up. He's screwed up on the inside. Just like Bond.
• Relative Button: Camille's family were murdered by General Mendrano.
• Retirony: Mathis, in a variation. He would have been fine if he stayed retired, but agreeing to help Bond on one last job got him killed. Once he left his happy little villa (and hot girlfriend), you knew he wasn't going to get to go back to it.
• Reality Is Unrealistic: The Greene's plot, depriving the Bolivian people of water, and then selling it back to them, seemed silly to some when it was released.
• Revealing Cover-Up: Minor example when M contacts the CIA about Dominic Greene. They claim they are not interested in him in any way.
  M: [hanging up] He's a person of extreme interest.
  Tanner: But he just said that he—
  M: Tanner, I asked about the man and [the secretary] transferred me to the section chief of South America. How would she know to do that if they weren't tracking him?
• Ripped from the Headlines: The movie's a pretty clear reference to the "water wars" in Bolivia in 2000, when water rights were sold to a corporation which sharply increased the price beyond the ability of many Bolivians to pay for it, inciting demonstrations that forced the government to reverse the decision. The US agreement in the movie to support a coup in order to get oil also recalls America's swift support for (and possible involvement with) the attempted coup against Chavez in Venezuela in 2002. Interestingly, the evil plot from the movie is less evil than the real-life one, as the intended price hike is less than the one that really happened.
• Roaring Rampage of Revenge: Possibly Bond, for the entire film, not that he'd admit it to anyone (an alternative explanation is that he just repeatedly screws up at capturing people alive, after Mr. White anyway).
• Sequel Hook: Greene tells Bond everything he knows about Quantum before he's left in the desert with a can of oil. He's later found with two bullets in the back of his head. After sitting out Skyfall, Spectre features the return of Mr. White in order to establish that even he (and by implication, Quantum) fears the power of SPECTRE.
• Shout-Out: To Alfred Hitchcock - the opera house sequence is deliberately edited to resemble a similar sequence in The Man Who Knew Too Much, while Guy Haines was named after one of the main characters in Strangers on a Train.
• Sinister Switchblade: Slate attacks Bond with one of these, only to get stabbed to death with nail scissors.
• Sliding Scale of Idealism Versus Cynicism:
  • Way out on the cynical end; both the British and American governments are happy to let the coup take place as long as they get their oil, and Bond and Camille are both motivated to stop Greene for revenge rather than any higher ideals.
  • Though it's worth noting that Bond, Felix and Camille all express disgust for what Greene and Medrano have planned for Bolivia, even if they're guided by more pragmatic considerations.
• Spotting the Thread: M wants to know if the CIA is interested in Dominic Greene, so she calls their head office and asks about it. She's routed to the CIA section chief for South America, who denies having any interests in him. M immediately concludes that he's lying because they automatically knew the part of the world Greene was in, which they would only know if they were tracking him.
• Stay with Me Until I Die: Mathis requests this of Bond as he bleeds out in the street. Bond respectfully obliges, exchanging some touching banter with him, and then once he dies Bond discards his body in a dumpster and takes all the money out of his wallet (note that Bond's bank cards have been cancelled by MI6 because at this point in time they believe he's gone rogue, so he certainly needs the cash). 'He wouldn't care'.
• The Stoic: Bond. Though when White starts talking about Vesper, the camera cuts to Bond and you can see just one muscle working in his cheek. There's also a barely visible Single Tear when Mathis dies.
• Storming the Castle: Bond and Camille to Greene's mansion.
• Super Cell Reception: Bond's phone is able to transmit tons of high-res, multi-angle head-shots from the Austrian Opera theatre to London MI6 almost instantaneously.
• The Syndicate: Quantum.
• Theme Tune: "Another Way To Die," the first duet in the history of Bond movies, done by Jack White (one half of The White Stripes) and Alicia Keys. Does not include the word "Quantum" in the lyrics, but does have "solace" and "of" in there.
• Thirsty Desert: Bond leaves Greene stranded in the Atacama Desert with only a can of engine oil. Later, M tells Bond that Greene was found dead in the middle of the desert, shot twice and with engine oil in his stomach.
• Torture Always Works: M, although she doesn't get the chance. "You will eventually tell us everything about the people you work with, and the longer it takes, the more painful we'll make it."
• Tragic Keepsake: Vesper's necklace, discarded at the end of the film. This is a touching callback to Casino Royale, where Vesper takes off the necklace because (as she put it) sometimes you have to let the past go.
• Two Decades Behind: See also the entry in Casino Royale. Lillet stopped making Kina Lillet in 1986, but it is mentioned by name yet again in this movie as Bond is boozing it up on Vespers in the plane. ^note Cocchi Americano makes a nice substitute for Kina Lillet.
• Unusual User Interface: MI6's magical touchscreens. One could say that they were running on a Q OS.
  • Viewer-Friendly Interface: Sort of. Said touchscreens do nothing that couldn't be accomplished with papers and a regular computer. In the tie-in game, they definitely qualify, running some strange combination of DOS and that weird GUI. So intelligent is this interface that when Bond describes Greene's surname as having a 'double-E', the computer inserts a W before he's finished saying the combined word, then replaces it with the two Es. Why such a feature is in place is completely unknown, especially when one factors in that Bond should have been using the phonetic alphabet anyway.
• Unwitting Pawn: Poor Vesper. Her boyfriend was a Quantum agent who was using her to get information, then faked his own kidnapping to force her to betray her country.
• Vapor Wear: We're not shown what, if anything, Fields is wearing under her coat.
• Villainous Breakdown: Greene at the end.
• Waif-Fu: Notably averted with Camille. No jump kicks, just Combat Pragmatism.
• Water Supply Tampering: This turns out to be what Dominic Greene is up to in Bolivia, using dynamite to create dams and creating an immense drought in the process.
• We Are Everywhere: Like M said, "When someone says, 'We've got people everywhere', you expect it to be hyperbole. Lots of people say that, florists use that expression." It doesn't mean that they've got somebody working for them inside the bloody room, like M's bodyguard.
• We Have Ways of Making You Talk: M promises Mr. White that they will draw out an interrogation to make him give up more info about Quantum, and that the longer it takes, the more the pain will be forthcoming.
• What the Hell, Hero?:
  • M calls Bond out on killing every lead he finds (to the point that he's blamed for the death of a henchman who was killed by The Dragon, not Bond). At the end of the film, Bond finally shows some restraint when he leaves Vesper's boyfriend alive to be interrogated.
  • Camille drops this on Bond when he throws Mathis' body into a dumpster, having just cradled him during his dying moments.
  • M also calls Bond out on indirectly killing Fields due to his actions, and orders him handcuffed and escorted away by MI6 agents. Not that it stops him from escaping, though.
• What Happened to the Mouse?: After the opera sequence, the film all but drops the larger Quantum plotline, including the fates of Mr. White and Guy Haines, and they're nowhere to be seen or heard come the following movie. It eventually saw some resolution with Spectre, though Haines' fate is still up in the air.
• Who Names Their Kid "Dude"?: Agent Fields' first same is Strawberry. She's so embarrassed of it, even she finds it idiotic and never reveals it. Her parents apparently didn't think it through of just how harmful their small joke can be in the long run.
• Wicked Cultured: Quantum higher-ups love their opera. Though Mr. White appears to be the only one to stick around for the whole thing. Seeing his companions leave in droves (and thus get caught on camera), he quips "Tosca isn't for everyone."
• Word Salad Title: Subverted. Even though the title seems meaningless, it actually means "A (very) little bit of comfort" (possibly referring to Bond's movie-length Roaring Rampage of Revenge, followed by his sense of closure at the end) as well as making it a Pun-Based Title.
• You Must Be Cold: After Bond and Camille crash in the desert.

---

M: Bond... I need you back.
Bond: I never left.