Todd’s Movie Blog

Finally got to see Quantum of Solace yesterday and it was AWESOME!!!! It was full of chases, fights and a few one liners thrown in.  Many critics; Roger Ebert, James Berardinelli, CNN, etc; hated this movie.  Their reviews list various complaints; emotionally cold, badly edited fight and chase scenes, weak villain, pedestrian  evil plan by the villain, no super cool villain lair, no characters with odd names, no gadgets and pithy witticisms in the midst of the action (though there was a funny moment when Bond is asked about a suspect he was supposed to question but ended up killing in a knife fight, he pops off that the man was a dead end).

Some complaints are justified.  Bond is emotionally cold, but that has to do with his working his way through the events of the last film.  The fight and chase scenes are full of quick cuts that make it hard to follow at times, just like it would be in the real world.  As for the others listed, what it comes down to is that this is not the Bond of old.  Restarting the series, they have decided to take a more realistic view of Bond and his world.  And that is a good thing, Mike Myers’ dead on skewering of secret agent films has laid waste to every cliche that Bond used.  If they tried to do a Bond film with a maniacal villain in a volcano lair planning to destroy the world while Bond utilized laser beam wrist watches and fountain pin rocket launchers, it would come off looking like a self parody.

So the film makers went back to the basics, back to more down to Earth plots like in From Russia With Love and For Your Eyes Only.  The plot is actually interesting, with Bond tracking down the organization called Quantum that lead to Vesper’s death in the previous film while he comes to terms with what it is he is doing, seeking revenge or seeking justice.  An interesting aspect of the plot is how the villain works his scheme.  Using  an ecological  non profit organization as a front, he diverts a  South American  country’s water supply to underground pools in a desert area he controls and then sets up an utility company to sell it back at a huge profit, implied but never stated is that this is the first step in taking over other countries in a similar manner.  He disguises this by making it look like he has found oil and is keeping it a secret, causing the U. S. and British governments  to fall all over themselves in placating him so they can get access to the non-existent oil, one British politician tells M at one point in the film that if they didn’t make deals with bad guys they would have no one to deal with (talk about an escapist film with real world relevance).

I think what is bothering many critics is that the first film implied at the end that the character was now the James Bond of movies after having gone through that first adventure, by saying the famous “Bond, James Bond” line right before the credits.  But he still isn’t that guy yet.  This film, like The Dark Knight, is the bookend for the set up in the previous film, he has to work out just who he is before he can become Bond, which he does at the end and the last image we see on the screen is the famous gun barrel shot that usually opens Bond movies and we hear the famous theme music play over the ending credits (which reveal that a character referred to as just Fields throughout the movie was actually named Strawberry Fields, so there you get the funny name thing too).