Headscratchers / Quantum of Solace

Americans' ID of Bond

• How did Felix's jerkass boss know who Bond was? At the time Bond is still just a relatively new agent and hardly someone who would be brought to the attention of the station chief for South America.
  • He might have known from the fiasco in the embassy from the last movie. I believe Bond's name was all over the media.
  • And yet this slipped past Greene?
  • Greene knew exactly who Bond was. Witness how Greene introduces Bond to Camille — he directly refers to Bond's reputation as 'damaged goods', which is Greene poking fun at Vesper's death.
  • Bond was MI6's man in the poker game, and Felix knew that fact. Perhaps the CIA knew who he was and let Felix know in case they needed to co-ordinate (possibly in a "we lost the game, let's team up and just flat-out kidnap the man" scenario), and Felix's boss either knew who Bond was and it was a test for Felix's commitment, or knew Felix well enough to figure out he was lying and used some quick thinking to piece it together (MI6 just called him asking about a man, who just happens to tell him that he found someone snooping around outside his property, who Felix knows, so how many people working for MI6 does Felix know again?). As for Bond's name being all over the media, all the media reported on was that a British Agent killed a man in an embassy, and the only photos we see are ones taken from behind Bond where his face isn't visible.
  • A bigger question is what was the point of his "test" of Felix. In mixed company, he asks Felix who is in the picture and then after Felix fails to identify Bond, does it himself. If Felix had known his boss recognised Bond, then he just non verbally told him not to tell. If, as Felix thought, his boss didn't know who Bond was, wouldn't it normally be more prudent to not reveal then name of the agent of an ally to a third party if no authorisation had been granted?

Bolivia conspiracy

• How does gouging Bolivia on their utility bills count as a scheme worthy of a transnational conspiracy? Last I checked, Bolivia wasn't exactly the richest country on the block, even by South American standards. Also, starting the massive gouging immediately after getting the last of the land needed to control the bulk of their water supply not only tells the new leader who's responsible, but also what piece of territory he needs to retake to make the gouging end. If they'd slowly jacked up the price over a few years the general wouldn't have known how he'd gotten screwed. The choice of Bolivia is notable in that ten years before the movie was filmed, foreign companies had bought up the nation's water resources to jack up the prices, with the result of causing large scale riots. You'd think Quantum would have remembered that.
  • The new leader knows full well who is responsible for the crisis, as do the old- that's the point. Quantum controlled that land and water and wanted more, and the old government refused, so they are installing a new one. As for the historical unrest, that's probably one of the reasons the new government will be headed by a brutal dictator in the first place- riots matter a lot more in democracies than they do in dictatorships. The reason they are after the water is not to jack up the prices, its because of the freshwater crisis that is predicted to hit the planet in the next few decades or so (there is expected to be a lack of drinkable water somewhere down the line, given the population boom and such like- granted, this isn't really explained in the movie, but it's implied and it was in the news at the time, and many Bond movies base their plots on news stories). Its about long-term power. And bear in mind it's not the only Evil Plan they have in the works; its just the one they are working on now. On it's own controlling the water of Bolivia might not amount to much, but in concert with attempts to monopolise industries and control governments all over the globe, it becomes part of a strong hand.

Mr. White's getaway

• Considering that he's shot in the leg, left pinballing around the trunk of a car for a while, and then shot in the shoulder and left lying motionless on the ground, Mr. White somehow manages to escape an MI6 interrogation room and is in good enough shape later to turn up for the opera scene. It really seems as if he was supposed to be Killed Off for Real but the filmmakers changed their mind after the fact...
  • That Hollywood Healing is some good stuff!
  • A better explanation is that Quantum have the means to both extract him during the confusion of the foot chase and to give him the very best of restorative care to enable him to attend their next important clandestine meeting.
  • Quantum (or another organisation revealed down the line) had a mole in place in the room. It's reasonable to assume there were more men in play to get White away and it wasn't a one man operation. I.e. someone had a car outside that White jumped into. Now good enough shape is easy enough with enough drugs to dull the pain. All he has to do is sit down and enjoy the play.
  • I think it's also safe to assume that Bond wouldn't want to risk White just bleeding out in the back of the car while he drives for some time (it's 9-10 hours from Lake Como to Siena! Also, note that both the ending of Casino Royale and the start of this movie appear to be set right in the middle of the day, implying that Bond may have been driving and doing other stuff such as changing clothes over an even longer period than that, even if he isn't sleeping overnight as the movie also indicates over the rest of the runtime) to meet M, which is quite likely with a leg wound at the best of times. Obviously it's important that he live so he can be questioned. Bond can probably shoot accurately enough to just hit the knee but not an artery (yes yes implausible but he's ex-special forces and god dammit, he's also Bond) and then staunch any resultant bleeding with a tourniquet and other medical supplies he had right on hand to enable that journey.

Mathis torture

• Casino Royale ended with 007 telling M to continue torturing Mathis in case he was also a mole, then heading off to find White. Quantum starts with Bond just having captured White... and Mathis comfortably retired and recovered from his ordeal. How has there been time for Mathis to be tortured, cleared, set up with a villa, and given time to find an Italian girlfriend?
  • Again, Hollywood Healing.
  • And who knows how long it took Bond to find White? As for the girlfriend, I gained the impression that they'd known each other for a while.
  • He probably wasn't tortured in the way Bond was. He was likely given a lengthy interrogation that was more psychological than physical; also, M might have just ignored Bond and decided to let Mathis go. We also don't know how long it took Bond to find White in the first place- it could have been days, weeks or months, or it could have been quick to find his villa but White was away on business and Bond had to wait.

Using Fields

• Why was Fields sent to bring Bond back to Britain? By M's acknowledgement, she wasn't a field agent and Bond's ability to charm the pants off any woman he sets his mind to is well-known by now. What good did M see in sending her after Bond?
  • She was there to pick up a friendly agent; it was supposed to be a milk run. Send Bond a pretty face so he follows the face back to MI6.`
  • She probably recognised it as a mistake in hindsight which is why she took it upon herself to go pick him up with the aid of a team of heavies MI6 (but of course he turned the tables and was able to take the team down by himself whilst handcuffed). Also, this being a rebooted continuity with a freshly-OO Bond, and as other TV Tropes pages regarding that continuity indicate that this is not actually the same M who oversaw Brosnan's Bond, it may be known that he's a womaniser but that doesn't suggest (yet) to the top brass that he can literally get any woman he wants. Fields started off very professionally, threatening to have him brought home in under arrest conditions, but evidently he won her over.

"Her lungs are full of it."

• How does M know Strawberry's lungs are full of oil when clearly no autopsy has been performed? She could easily have made the same point (about there being oil) by just saying "she's covered in it."
  • If a brief observation confirms to the MI6 staff on site that her mouth is overflowing with oil, then it's a simple logical deduction to state that her lungs are, too.

"I didn't shoot the bodyguard"

• Why didn't Bond tell M that he didn't shoot the bodyguard he threw off the roof?
  • I think it's a combination of (subdued) surprise when she tells him what happened ("wow, Quantum have the resources and the balls to off a member of Special Branch and pin it on MI6!"), trying to process the rest of the information during their conversation, and being really bloody sleep deprived. He manages to convince her later that he's really still one of the good guys by telling her to acknowledge Fields' bravery, and it's likely she infers from this that he didn't actually kill an SB member (as opposed to the other men he offs during the film which are subject to his discretion and LTK) or else, he explains off-screen later that he did not in fact murder the guy.

"He'll make much more when he sells us out."

• Bond figures that the guy who provides the cargo plane to them will alert them to Quantum (or maybe the Bolivian Air Force, or rogue elements of it aligned with General Medrano anyway). Would it not be worth killing the guy in that case, or at least knocking him out or tying him up to give them time to do their reconnaissance without the acknowledged threat of getting attacked by fighter aircraft and a helicopter in an unarmed cargo plane?
  • Bond isn't a monster. He's not going to kill people on a hunch, even a good one.

Greene's overdone death

• Before Bond abandoned Greene in the middle of the desert, he threw him a can of motor oil, which would make us believe that the latter would choose to drink it to avoid a Fate Worse than Death. However, in the final scene in Russia, M tells Bond that Greene's body was found with "two bullets in the back of his skull and motor oil in his stomach". Did Greene not drink the motor oil, as that would have almost certainly killed him? Was he dead when his people found him, in which case they decided to put the bullets in his head just for laughs? And if he was still alive, did his people force-feed him with oil, and then shoot him? Or did they shoot him first, and then feed his corpse the oil For the Evulz? Either way, There's No Kill like Overkill.
  • Bond predicts that Greene will walk 20 miles before he resorts to drinking the oil. It's quite possible that Quantum finally bore down on him just as, or slightly after he took the drink, meaning if they hadn't summarily executed him, the oil would have soon done the job anyway (disclaimer: I'm not a medical professional, so we'll have to wait to hear how quickly that volume of motor oil would have killed a heavily dehydrated man with several axe injuries or how long he could keep walking or rather limping after drinking it). They probably wouldn't have been petty enough to apply both of the cause-of-death injuries if one alone would have done the trick; and if they knew about him ingesting oil, they wouldn't have bothered with the shots (but probably would gleefully wait to see him painfully expire from the oil's toxicity). If the bullets were shot in the back of his skull, they likely didn't wait to have a cordial chat first, completely averting Why Don't Ya Just Shoot Him?.
  • It's left to interpretation. He could have drank the oil, died from it, and then shot after the fact, or he was found alive, force fed the oil, and then shot (whether still alive or after dying). Two bullets in the back of the head imply an execution-style killing, which would send a strong message to anyone who found the body.

The other seduced female agents

• Yusef had apparently seduced other female agents before Vesper. Assuming these went successfully, what happened to these women after they delivered the ransom for his "kidnapping"? Best case scenario were they left shocked when their boyfriend never showed up again? Or were they subsequently eliminated by Quantum (maybe by Yusef himself) as potential liabilities after they became of no use to the organisation?
  • Earlier in the film they discover that the body of Yusef had supposedly washed up on the beach, but the DNA didn't match. My assumption was that Quantum's strategy was to fake the death of Yusef anyway once they'd gotten what they wanted.
  • Right. Because if they actually took the out-of-bounds step of killing those agents, it would draw too much heat upon them, and despite their resources, layers of concealment and consolidated power, they do not want to risk that. Note how Mr. White finds it hilarious that, despite them always worrying that MI6, the CIA and other top flight intelligence agencies may have actually something on Quantum, M and Bond make it clear that he's really the first Quantum operative they're truly onto (as in, they are using him as the first step of unravelling the organised conspiracy, as opposed to stumbling upon individual cogs in the system such as Le Chiffre's group in the previous film). They were in the dark before, and for good reason (from Quantum's perspective). Based on that alone, yeah, they wouldn't want to take a risk by doing something as meaningless to their goals as unnecessarily killing those agents, when all they desired was the ransoms and lines of intelligence via their Honey Pot assets, and the fake body strategy (and also bribing the right people, etc) is enough to throw the agencies off the trail at least until the present time of the movie. Then, they only risk dealing lethally with Bond because he's a very persistent, annoying and deadly threat to their operations.

Can you really operate like that after who knows how much sleep deprivation and alcohol?

• Part of Bond's depression and Screw the Rules, I'm Doing What's Right! edginess/pseudo-rogue agent aspects in this movie is manifested as him being unable to sleep since Vesper's death, and yet he manages to do complex tasks like hand-to-hand fighting, shooting, various vehicular operations, stealth infiltration, foot chases, cogent speech, etc. On top of that, during downtime he is clearly drinking heavily, which likewise doesn't make him tired or inhibit his ability to function. Now I know that real life special forces operatives (Bond is ex-SBS) are trained, and expected to function at high performance levels for potentially days on end with little or zero hours of sleep. But I'm wondering if any experts know how plausible this is as depicted in the movie? Hell, let's guesstimate how long he may have had to perform like this with rough assumptions. It may have been around 24 hours between the start of Casino Royale and the opening of this movie up to the end of the footchase (see the note in the "Mr. White's getaway" folder). Then add around 12 for Bond to go to London, debrief with M and off to the Haiti segment (chartered flight, of course). Another 12 or so for another charter to Austria and for Bond to then humiliate Quantum at the opera. 9, between finding his cards are cancelled and having to drive to find Mathis in Italy. 2 hours from Talmone to Rome (maybe he took some kind of rest by asking Mathis to drive!), then 13.5 to La Paz, Bolivia (they probably couldn't do a charter considering his frozen finances but let's just pretend for the sake of this that that was still a direct flight, which in reality is not an actual route). They arrive sometime in the afternoon and Bond seduces Agent Fields, attends the Greene Planet event in the evening and eventually drives through to another part of the country with Camille (she probably slept in the car mind you) when it's daytime- another 16 hours, say. 24 more between discovering the secret Quantum dam, escaping MI6 custody, meeting Felix and the final showdown at the hydrogen hotel. Finally, as an epilogue, Bond needs to travel another say 12 hours (from the desert to the airport), then another 17 to fly to Kazan, Russia (again assuming a direct/chartered route in the Bond universe) and let's assume he immediately found Yusef based on intelligence extracted from Greene. That is a sum total of 141.5 hours, or slightly short of six days, at a conservative estimate. It seems honestly impossible to go that long (and functioning as Bond does) without passing out or just dying from exhaustion, right? Also, we don't even know how long it may have taken him to track Mr. White down from Vesper's text message at the end of the previous film. When considering this, let's also just, for simplicity sake, set aside how all of the major characters (not least of all Bond) don't have to adjust to Bolivia's extreme altitude and can function just as well as they are shown to in any other country. Oh and what about jetlag as well, a consideration which on the other hand should certainly be added on top? Perhaps he was delirious at times and didn't realise when he had actually fallen asleep (out of pure, desperate biological necessity) on the flights.
  • Where was it ever stated that he was completely unable to sleep? He looks drowsy on the plane with Mathis because he’s trashed on Vesper martinis, but nowhere is he ever even alluded to be suffering from total insomnia. Considering Mathis had time to be let go from MI6 custody, retire from his agency, get a villa to himself, along with an Italian girlfriend, it definitely took longer than 12 hours after the main ending of Casino Royale. There’s plenty of time in all that traveling where Bond definitely could have gotten a nap at least, if not a full 8 hours. This whole question is based off a lot of assumptions about things that didn’t actually happen in the movie.
  • Quite a few fans online have claimed that it is in fact total insomnia and he can't sleep at all until he makes peace with the memory of Vesper, as crazy as it sounds in a biological sense. It's not quite just Fan Wank, as M also wonders at the start of the movie when Bond last slept. I would say the filmmakers didn't make it sufficiently clear as to the extent of his insomnia, given we're having this debate. Which makes sense given the Troubled Production of the film. As for your point about Mathis' release, well, near the end of Casino Royale Bond asks M to keep interrogating Mathis, and then he looks at the phone which initiates his investigation of Mr. White. In the next (and final) scene of the movie, he captures White. Maybe the intervening period is when Mathis is set free and does everything else you mention... and for whatever reason, Bond's insomnia is at it's worst from then until his catharsis at the end of Quantum of Solace.