James Bond

Same here, with The Nice Guys. Pretty sure I was the only person there under 50, actually (although the audience was admittedly small).

I experienced something similar with both The Force Awakens (there were several older/elderly couples watching the film in my theatres and seemingly enjoying it), and with Captain America: Civil War (there were these two or three older guys who I'm pretty sure were either WWII or Korean War vets who were watching the film from the third row).

And in both cases, said older people caught onto the WWII references/analogies very quickly (perhaps even quicker than the younger audience members).

You know, for a long time I've been getting sick of the overuse of the antagonist always needing to have some familial connection to the hero, or being motivated by Daddy Issues or other family drama, and I think Spectre made me understand why, because it's such an epically bad use of the trope.

The problem is that reducing a Diabolical Mastermind like Blofeld's motivations to some childhood family drama with the hero doesn't make the character deeper or more interesting — it makes him smaller and pettier. As the matter of fact, it makes the entire world of Bond seem small and petty. The original Blofeld had no stated motivation, but in a way that was still more interesting than reducing all of his actions to some freudian retribution for not being paid attention to as a kid. The latter, particularly combined with Waltz's campy performance, makes Blofeld seem outright pathetic rather than threatening.

I'd say something similar for Silva in Skyfall, though it's not as outrageously bad about this.

Well Silva worked, for me anyway, for a number of reasons. 1. He was just more entertaining as a villain overall, and got more screentime. 2. It wasn't about Bond really, it was about M and Bond was kind of incidental to things, and there's something more inherently interesting about that to me. 3. It was related to decisions that M made as head of MI 6 (as opposed to Blofeld being ticked that daddy was nice to Bond when he was a kid), which also makes it more interesting imo. And 4, Silva just works better as a "dark mirror" type of villain because you can see the similarities to how M treated him as compared to Bond, but also the differences (and obviously the outcome was very different).

And Silva was a brand-new character, which works better. They weren't taking an iconic old-school villain like Blofeld and then making him petty in such a lame way. Also you shouldn't try to go to the "petty motives played out over a grand scale" twice in as many movies, because the novelty wears off very quickly.

I have similar thoughts on Alex Trevelayn from Goldeneye though he's more of a "we used to be friends" version. He feels like a character the writers never really put much thought into. He's introduced in the first minutes of the film as Bond's long time friend, supposedly dies, is revealed as the villain behind everything towards the climax and then Bond kills him for real without any remorse. The history and friendship between him and Bond might as well be non-existent given it was never shown in previous films nor is it ever brought up again in future movies, not even The World Is Not Enough or Die Another Day, two movies that had Bond be betrayed by people he thought he could trust. Bond having a friend who betrayed him should be treated like a bigger deal than this.

I don't have a huge problem with Silva's motivations, TBH. It's more his actions that I'm not too wild about — as the movie progresses, the grandness of Silva's plan slowly evaporates until during the climax, in which he's turned into a shivering wreck of Mommy Issues whose only concern seems to be killing M, with his broader plan all but forgotten about. The scope of a Bond movie is sacrificed in favour of intimacy.

I think, for a Bond movie, a better approach for this sort of thing would be more like Alec from Golden Eye, who has personal motivations and wants to get revenge, but is still focused on an appropriately big plan that gets followed through on. The intimacy of his motivations doesn't detract from the grandness of his plans.

Well I'm not a guy who's invested in the notion that every Bond film must have "grand scope." Some sure, but not all. So maybe that's just a difference in taste/philosophy.

The World Is Not Enough, which I think gets too much hate honestly, is interesting because that's another example of this trope working better. I LOVE Elektra King as a villain personally, she's in my top five. And one wonders why it took them so freaking long to figure out "hey a beautiful exotic mysterious woman as the main villain in a Bond film, is a really good idea. Because it's not like those are his Achilles heel or something, right?" And Elektra works because, not only is it more about M than it is about Bond, but she has a grander plan. It's not JUST about getting revenge on M, that is simply one of her goals. But she has other, grander ambitions as well.

edited 21st Jun '16 3:00:46 AM by Punisher286

People hate The World Is Not Enough? I mean, other than Christmas Jones, I thought the movie was well received.

To be sure, there have been some good Bond movies with smaller stakes. The problem with Skyfall IMO is that Silva is set up from the beginning as a guy with a big plan to topple the global intelligence network and kill countless undercover agents, but his plan by the end gets reduced to just wanting to kill M, and then himself. His broader plan just gets swept under the rug.

It's nowhere near as bad as Blofeld in Spectre, mind you, whose motivations are outright laughable.

edited 21st Jun '16 3:09:07 AM by DrDougsh

Elektra rules, yeah. I actually sympathize very strongly with her and can totally understand why she snapped. Abandoned by her own father and surrogate aunt to her kidnappers/probable rapists because "you don't negotiate with terrorists?" Yeowch. I mean, nothing justifies nuking a major city and killing millions but still.

Plus her musical argument as to the virtues of world domination was quite persuasive, no? (yes I know Sophie Marceau does not sing this song; it's still pretty clearly from the character's perspective).

The title credits sequence of The World Is Not Enough is quite possibly my favorite in the entire series (out of the ones I've seen so far, at least) because, apart from them both being fantastic, the song is dripping with subtext and meaning and the visuals are the kind you usually don't see outside of experimental videos from the dawn of computer animation. Spectre's comes close, but it's just a bit too slow and empty at times and the song, while okay and well-suited to the visuals, isn't quite as good.

See I don't have the same hate that so many fans seem to for The Writings on the Wall. It's not a great song by any means, and perhaps not completely suited to Bond, but it's an enjoyable enough one on it's onw I think. And the actual title sequence for Spectre is great imo, the imagery is really quite nice.

And the song, like TWINE, is TRYING to tell a story within the lyrics. But, unlike TWINE, it doesn't really work well because what actually happens in the film doesn't end up lining up with what the song wants us to think that it's about.

If you were to ask me for my Top 5 Bond themes (in no particular order), then they'd be:

-The World is Not Enough. -You Know My Name (from Casino Royale). -Goldeneye. -Skyfall. -Nobody Does It Better (from The Spy Who Loved Me).

edited 21st Jun '16 12:30:42 PM by Punisher286

I'm surprised you don't have a Shirley Bassey song on that list. Everything she sings turns to gold.

EDIT: Pun not intended. >_> (Ironically, I think the Goldfinger theme is the least good of the three Bond themes she sang.)

edited 21st Jun '16 1:01:41 PM by EndlessSea

I tend to like the "Moonraker" theme a lot more nowadays in regards to her 3 songs.

I mostly listen to Diamonds are Forever. It's superbly catchy.

If we went to ten, she'd be on the list for sure. Heck I give her credit for Moonrake just for being able to design an even remotely competent song around the word "Moonraker." That cannot be easy to do.

Well, it was more John Barry's work, since it was recorded at the last minute (after Frank Sinatra was considered at first, Johnny Mathis withdrew and Kate Bush declined) and without a proper promotion. In fact, even Shirley Bassey herself never regarded the song as her own.

edited 21st Jun '16 3:11:42 PM by Quag15

You know, thinking about Elektra a bit more... with a few tweaks (most notably omitting the wants-to-cause-nuclear-genocide thing) I think she'd work pretty well as the protagonist of one of those grindhouse-y revenge fantasy movies. I mean, come on, you know you were going "You go, girl!" at some of the stuff she did in TWINE (heh, twine). She's arguably the actual main character anyway.

Hell, with opinions on government being what they are, Bond might make a good villain if someone wrote him that way.

Well some of the newer movies have been willing to acknowledge that, he's kind of an A-hole in many ways (and he always was, it just wasn't played up that much until the Brosnan and Craig eras).

I think the Dalton movies kind of try to do it as well. The problem is there's only so much of Bond's flaws the films can acknowledge while expecting us to root for him.

Whilst I remain a big book-Bond advocate, he's very much a jerk in the novels too (albeit there is a heart of if not gold then at least maybe copper or something) but with a combination of values dissonance and Bond basically being everything Ian Fleming thought a man should actually be it's not really emphasised how much of a dickwad he can be. The novel version of Thunderball sticks with me in particular for a Bond who strays very close indeed to nominal hero status, by modern standards at any rate.

Spectre is interesting because it's actually a left-leaning Bond film. Its moral seems to be that terrorists are bad, certainly, but people who advocate mass surveillance, drones, and other ways of removing the human element from spy and military work aren't much better.

Oh I hated the political angle of Spectre. Not because I came down on one side or the other. No it because, a, it feels really poorly integrated into the narrative, and b. it's really poorly done in general. I couldn't help but keep thinking "you know, Captain America: The Winter Soldier did essentially this same plot only like a year ago, but did it so much better."

How exactly was it poorly done?