Your SPECTRE reviews (spoilers)

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Your SPECTRE reviews (spoilers)

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A place your your personal reviews and opinions.
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Re: Your SPECTRE reviews (spoilers)

Post by TROLLY »

Better than Craig's last 3.
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Re: Your SPECTRE reviews (spoilers)

Post by Skywalker »

Due to work and having 2 young children, free time is not a commodity I have much of, so having the opportunity to go to the cinema to watch anything other than a ‘Movie for Juniors’ film is rare. However, with the wife organising a crafts morning, I had a window of opportunity to go and see Spectre which I duly took.

The film started with the Day of the Dead celebrations and the panoramic shots of Mexico City were brilliant. The pre title sequence culminated in a helicopter scene that was visually great but lacked the necessary suspense that a scene like that should generate. This was a running theme for the film in that visually the stunts and actions scenes were impressive, but I never had that edge of the seat feeling that should be the minimum, especially for an all action Bond film.

The best word I can use to describe the film is ‘underwhelming’. Despite a pretty decent back story and build up, the film felt rushed and lacked conviction. Gone was the tension that was so evident in Skyfall. Maybe this explains the initial reluctance of Sam Mendes returning to direct the film due to his busy schedule. What it can’t explain is why the brilliant Monica Bellucci was given just a brief 3 minute cameo when her character was far more interesting than the one portrayed by Léa Seydoux. The on-screen chemistry produced by Bellucci was there for all to see and was far more evident than the awkwardness delivered between Craig and Seydoux. That wasn’t the only thing I found disappointing. The way Bond very quickly demolished Spectre’s lair, with the sort of ease, that single handily removed any credence that this previously undetectable organisation, was the mastermind behind the previous villain’s encountered by Bond and the orchestrators of a new global security alliance. Whilst I like the casting of Christoph Waltz and thought he did well with the script given to him, his impact in the film was almost toothless and not worthy of such a fine actor and prominent character.

In summary, Spectre fails to capitalise on the good work carried out in Skyfall and despite building a good plot doesn’t follow up on it. The ending feels rushed and the whole thing just peters outs.

Whilst the film may break box office records, I don’t think on reflection this will be classed by the majority of Bond fans as a classic.

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Re: Your SPECTRE reviews (spoilers)

Post by John Drake »

A very fair review.
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Re: Your SPECTRE reviews (spoilers)

Post by Blowfeld »

Skywalker wrote: The on-screen chemistry produced by Bellucci was there for all to see and was far more evident than the awkwardness delivered between Craig and Seydoux.
Daniel has always had very awkward relationships with his love interests. Going back to Casino Royale, the Vesper Bond tryst did not feel real, it really made clear how well the other fellows did it.
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Re: Your SPECTRE reviews (spoilers)

Post by CaptainLewis »

The problem with this film is that it's forgettable. Bar the bits that irked me, I can't remember much of the film.

The Mendes films have excellent cinematography, his Bond films are the best looking. However, that is all it has going for it.

Blofeld, one of the most iconic film villains, was underwhelming. I mean, his motivation for killing Bond was "daddy loved you more than me"!! Blofeld's "MUH HA HA!! I WAS BEHIND IT ALL" thing didn't work because it felt so tacked on. It worked in FRWL to DAF because we were always aware of this mysterious, faceless man who operated in the shadows.

Also, giving the scar felt like a needless addition just to please the fan base.
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Re: Your SPECTRE reviews (spoilers)

Post by carl stromberg »

CaptainLewis wrote:
Also, giving the scar felt like a needless addition just to please the fan base.
I thought these Craig fanatics did not want Blofeld because it is too cheesy "like Austin Powers". now they have included a dreadful cheesy Blofeld in a Craig film i suppose they are all praising it. :wink:
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Re: Your SPECTRE reviews (spoilers)

Post by Veronica »

Blowfeld wrote:
Skywalker wrote: The on-screen chemistry produced by Bellucci was there for all to see and was far more evident than the awkwardness delivered between Craig and Seydoux.
Daniel has always had very awkward relationships with his love interests. Going back to Casino Royale, the Vesper Bond tryst did not feel real, it really made clear how well the other fellows did it.

A couple of times I read something about "sizzling" chemistry between Craig and Green and asked if we were talking about the same actors. The love story was so cheesy and painful to listen that I just wonder what chemistry are we talking about here. There was a scene between Craig and Bellucci in the trailer and I found it to be VERY VERY AKWARD AND WOODEN. I yet have to see his chemistry(or lack of) with Seydoux. His "relationships" in QOS and SF are non-important.
As for Caterina Murino,well,she was the best thing about that movie(IMO). She radiated enough heat for both of them(and Craig doesn't sleep with her,WTF?!) Like one friend of mine said:"Caterina Murino with little screen time literally went all over Eva Green that had a face of sad clown the whole time." :lol:
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Re: Your SPECTRE reviews (spoilers)

Post by Goldeneye »

Capt. Sir Dominic Flandry wrote:http://birthmoviesdeath.com/2015/11/04/ ... d-betrayed

The new Bond series has hit its nadir.

By DEVIN FARACI

Spectre isn’t just a bad movie, it’s a betrayal of everything the Bond franchise has accomplished since the series was rebooted in 2006 with Casino Royale. It’s a bewildering mess of a story laced with shitty cliches - the film ends with not one but TWO digital timer countdowns! - and riddled with crummy editing that reduces action scenes to tedium. It’s not funny but it is also not serious and, along the way, it diminishes James Bond and ruins one of his great villains.

This review will contain spoilers about the villain.

With Skyfall completing the table setting for this new Daniel Craig Bond franchise, Spectre should have been a straight out the gate adventure that dove us deep back into the kind of story that defined the character for decades. Instead this film is yet more table setting, an uninspired and lazy attempt to connect the previous three films under the banner of a super secret evil organization that is poorly defined and spectacularly uninteresting. One part Star Trek Into Darkness rehash, one part Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation rehash, one part artless cash-in on Edward Snowden, Spectre sluggishly (and often illogically) trudges from location to location, occasionally stopping to have a poorly edited action sequence and/or have Bond f**k somebody.

Acting on the last wishes of the previous M, Bond has gone rogue in tracking down an international assassin. Meanwhile, changes in the structure of British intelligence sees the new M dealing with the possible shutdown of his Double Oh program, to be replaced by a massive digital information collection system being run by a dude who is so squirrelly he’s quite clearly a bad guy. As Bond tracks this assassin he becomes aware that the man served an overarching evil group, and then a bunch of action scenes happen and at the end of the movie a building blows up.

Spectre operates on rails; characters make logical leaps that astound me (Bond discovers the hierarchy of SPECTRE by letting Q analyze a SPECTRE membership ring and somehow the group’s org chart is encoded in the DNA of the last wearer. What the hell?) and they just walk into scenes that seem to have little connective tissue to the last sequence. The plot itself is a watered down parody of a Bond plot, one where the villain knows everything Bond is doing and, for Bond villain reasons, helps our hero get to his secret hideout at the end. The bad guy even monologues for a bit, the kind of thing that Alan Moore and Dr. Evil made utterly declasse.

There is no sense of discovery or excitement underpinning Spectre, and it’s one of those movies where the film withholds information from the audience for no good reason. When 007 infiltrates a SPECTRE meeting he comes face to face with the group’s leader, who looks at him and says “CUCKOO!!” and then we spend the next 90 minutes unsure what the point of that was. Bond knows, the bad guy knows, the movie just opts to not tell us.

Let’s get this out of the way: that bad guy is Blofeld, the classic archnemesis of James Bond. Except he’s actually Franz Oberhauser, whose dad raised Bond after our hero’s parents died in a climbing accident. Young Franz hated having this cooler kid around (the cuckoo refers to the way cuckoos lay their eggs in other birds’ nests) and so he killed his dad, faked his own death and became Blofeld. There’s a part where Blofeld tells Bond his new name and it has exactly the weight of Khan announcing himself in Star Trek Into Darkness - nobody onscreen has any connection to the name, so they don’t care, and for the audience it’s nothing more than a nostalgic callback. It's made doubly pointlessly nostalgic by the presence of a cat, who shows up only for this scene.

Blofeld being Bond’s foster brother is pointless as the two characters share very little screen time. Christoph Waltz plays Blofeld, and in grand ‘Christoph Waltz when he’s not in a Quentin Tarantino film’ tradition he is utterly wasted and sort of terrible. You get what Waltz is trying to do, and you know what the movie wants him to do, but the script simply doesn’t give him the material with which to work. The movie tries to update the standard Bond death trap stuff (Blofeld ties him to the world’s worst acupuncture chair) but the speech Waltz must deliver is uninspired, and so the soothing delivery that makes him menacing in films like Inglorious Basterds or totally awesome in Django Unchained just makes him sound like a particularly boring dentist.

It’s baffling to me that the film would do so little with the character of Blofeld and even less with his new relationship to Bond. By keeping Blofeld’s identity a secret the film denies Bond any real emotional fallout from the revelation - he sees Oberhauser, he gets chased out of the SPECTRE meeting and he asks Moneypenny to look into whether or not the guy really died. There’s no oomph to it, no sense that this is a betrayal or that the return of Oberhauser impacts Bond in any way at all.

The script - a really dismal piece of work credited to John Logan, Neal Purvis, Robert Wade and Jez Butterworth - tries to lend Blofeld importance by having him be the guy behind all the villains from the last three films. The movie accomplishes this by having Blofeld say he’s the guy behind all the villains from the last three films, which is not only dramatically unsatisfying but also logically implausible. There’s no moment where Blofeld pulls the pieces together and explains the grand plan, the big scheme, the reason for any of these disparate foes coming at Bond at any given time - he just asserts that it was him all along and then moves on to another monologue.

Worst of all, this revelation is treated with a shrug by both Bond and the audience. It comes so late in the picture that you’d have to be brain dead to have not figured out what’s happening, and this foregone conclusion makes the big moment in Blofeld’s secret base have an airless, pointless quality. Here’s the part of the film where we explain everything, and then blow something up after a really, really boring shoot out, the movie says.

Spectre gets back to more of the classical Bond stuff, but maybe that’s a bad thing. Blofeld’s desert base - shades of Quantum of Solace - is fine but the sequence where Bond kills Monica Bellucci’s husband, goes to his funeral, talks to her there and then goes back to her place and f***s her is mind-bogglingly retrograde AND dumb. Nobody in these scenes is acting like a human being or even an archetype, they’re like robots with s**t wiring. The sad part is that Craig and Bellucci make a great couple, but their time together is short and pointless.

This same problem crops up later in the relationship between Bond and Lea Seydoux’s Madeleine Swann. The two of them team up to find SPECTRE for reasons far too boring to get into here, but the big surprise of it all comes at the end of the movie when we learn that the chemistry-free relationship between these two has been a love story! Setting aside the lack of sparks between Seydoux and Craig, the script gives the duo no sequences that even begin to sketch the arc of a relationship.

The misbegotten script, sick with cliches and plot gaps, wouldn’t matter if the action were up to the modern standard, but that just isn’t the case. There are some good action sequences, but many of them are bizarrely slack; a sequence with a helicopter doing flips over a Day of the Dead crowd in Mexico City is almost bizarrely humdrum. There’s a bit where Bond has crashed the wings off a plane and is careening down the side of a ski slope towards a thick copse of trees that has all the tension and excitement of waiting for a bus. Again and again the action scenes deflate, and many have issues of slight geographic incoherence that keeps them from really popping.

One action sequence that works is a fight between Bond and Hinx, a SPECTRE assassin played by Dave Bautista. Hinx, with his silver guitar pick thumb nails, is without a doubt the best thing in this movie, and he is in the two best action sequences. One is a fancy sports car chase in Rome and the other is the aforementioned fight, a brutal brawl on a train. Bautista brings all of his wrestling menace and physicality to the role, and he’s a pretty classic henchmen type villain. He is, actually, a better villain than Blofeld because I actually know what Hinx wants to achieve while Blofeld’s plot is amorphous.

Spectre isn’t just dumb and filled with bad action, it’s also unconscionably long, and the climax at Blofeld’s base is followed by another climax or two that feel like they belong in the Pierce Brosnan era of Bond. The climaxes themselves aren’t bad (and the film’s ending isn’t bad, just totally unearned and one that hinges on Bond having a crisis of conscience he has never exhibited before) but they’re set up and shot like scenes from a 90s movie. Maybe that’s the kind of nostalgia we have now.

The ending of Skyfall promised a new Bond that hit the pulp highs of Sean Connery’s reign, but Spectre does not deliver on that. It’s a mid-90s Bond movie without much style or fun or weird scifi. Director Sam Mendes is drowning under the weight of a bad script and a film that has almost no central story but that drags along for two and a half hours anyway. This movie feels like it’s trying to cram in a lot of Bond signifiers, but it’s only able to grasp the cliches - the very cliches that Casino Royale killed. This was supposed to be a different Bond, one more suited to the modern era, but Spectre has turned its back on that Bond. All of the character depth given to the character in previous films has been reduced to - I s**t you not - Bond looking at photocopied pictures of the faces of people he killed/saw die in previous films.

Is this the end of the new Bond franchise? Daniel Craig has one more movie on his contract, but I am no longer particularly excited to see what happens with the character next. The film ends on a note that could rehabilitate the franchise - there’s yet hope - but Spectre feels like Star Trek Into Darkness in that it’s a film that puts a stake through the heart of my interest. All of the goodwill that has been built up has vanished, something even the dismal Quantum of Solace couldn’t accomplish. The next Bond film - and there will be another - needs to course correct something fierce, needs to find a muscular story that has twists and turns, needs to remind Daniel Craig that he can be charming once in a while, needs to find a decent editor. It also needs to leave the hentai tentacle porn out of the opening credits, or otherwise work actual tentacle porn into the movie itself. One or the other.
Capt. Sir Dominic Flandry wrote:http://rogersmovienation.com/2015/11/05 ... w-spectre/

James Bonds, like great athletes, rarely exit the stage gracefully. Bonds always seem to go out on stinkers, like Michael Jordan playing for the Wizards.

“Spectre,” set up to be the Daniel Craig finale as Bond, isn’t a terrible installment in the franchise. It’s the lightest of the Craig Bonds — no sin in that. But like the end of Connery, the exit of Roger Moore and the layoff notice given Pierce Brosnan, it’s a tired, trite “greatest hits” re-packaging of stunts, chases and fights from earlier, better Bonds.

It’s terrible only in that it’s a terrible fall off from “Skyfall.”

The new M (Ralph Fiennes) may not approve of Bond’s epic shoot-out/blow-up/chopper chase in the middle of Mexico City’s Dia de la Muerta (Day of the Dead), one of the most heavily populated set pieces (with a doozy of a long-take tracking shot) in Bond history.

But his old boss, the last M (Judi Dench) would approve. She’s sent him after one last foe, of a conspiracy of foes.

“Kill him,” she says on her video after death. “And don’t miss the funeral.”

That sends Bond after The Pale King, and his daughter (Lea Seydoux), from Rome to Austria, London to Morocco. The context here is “global security,” a vast intelligence gathering collective that will be the end of privacy as we know it.

And since you’ve heard about the casting you know who the villain is — Christoph Waltz, a stretch. You have heard who he plays, and what his character likes in a pet.

Cliches abound, from the “From Russia With Love” heavy (Dave Bautista of “Guardians of the Galaxy”) battled in exactly the same set piece that Sean Connery battled Robert Shaw in that film, to the villain’s Nehru jacket and loafers without socks.

If you’re not laughing at the hero and the “Bond Girl” unpacking their evening wear for dinner on board an overnight train through Morocco, it’s only because you’re not in on the joke.

Waltz is introduced, and disappears for two thirds of the movie. He phones it in when he’s on screen.

Monica Bellucci turns up as the bed-able widow MILF (Moll I”d like to…) Bond entices early on.

Most of the weaker Bond films are the ones that make a little too much use of the quizzically comical Q, played to amusing effect by Ben Whishaw in this series. He doesn’t hurt the movie so much as indicate that six credited screenwriters couldn’t think of anything else for their McQueen-ish tough guy (who wears his suits and vests a size too small) to do.

The best lines are given to peripheral characters, which must have irked Waltz no end.

“You’re a kite dancing in a hurricane, Mr. Bond.”

Director Sam Mendes cut corners on sound effects, which kills the joy of an Aston Martin DB-10 being chased by a Jaguar C-X75 through the empty streets of Rome, two hulking behemoths tearing through narrow alleys in near silence.

At least the ingrate Craig, rightfully dismissing this role in some recent interviews, learned to drive a stick shift doing this.

A brawl that ends with the damsel in distress asking, “What do we do NOW?” may be the biggest howler in the script. Epic explosions that aren’t (epic), big set-pieces that don’t dazzle and attempts at wrapping this entire series into one neat, limp package aren’t assets.

Even the Sam whathisname theme song just hangs there over the arty/erotic opening credits, instantly forgettable.

You can’t say that about the Craig-Bond years. The action amped up, and the tough-guy seriousness worked, even if he never quite had the Connery-Brosnan blend of sadism-plus-silly that makes the character work.

But “Spectre” doesn’t make us long for Craig taking another shot at Bond, or puzzle over who might get the World’s Greatest Secret Agent Role next. It just makes you wish you had those last two and a half hours back, so you could watch “Thunderball” and “Live and Let Die” and “Goldeneye” again, and at least enjoy the theme song.
Capt. Sir Dominic Flandry wrote:http://touch.latimes.com/#section/-1/ar ... -84929521/

It's been 53 years since the first James Bond film, "Dr. No," arrived in theaters, and so many have followed in its wake that if you watched all of them back to back without a break, it would take two full days of your life. So if "Spectre," the 24th and latest Bond extravaganza, comes off as exhausted and uninspired — and it does — it's not without cause.

The Bond films' canny masterminds at Eon Productions are well aware that this kind of burnout is a possibility with a series this venerable, which is why there are frequent changes of both star (the current Bond, Daniel Craig, is the sixth they've hired) and director.

But like a baseball team leaving its starting pitcher in a World Series game too long (no names, please), the folks at Eon went to the well once too often with both Craig ("Spectre" is his fourth Bond) and director Sam Mendes, doing his second.

Not even the addition of another writer (Jez Butterworth) to the team of John Logan plus Neal Purvis and Robert Wade, which wrote the previous, stronger "Skyfall," can shake the lassitude that hangs over a production with a budget that's been estimated in the $250-million to $300-million range.

Yes, some of the individual stunts and action set pieces temporarily hold our interest — at that cost, they'd better — but the story itself is not convincing on its own terms, playing like a series of boxes (Bond asking for a martini shaken not stirred) that need to be checked off and forgotten.

Part of the problem is that Craig, a potent actor whose resume includes Steven Spielberg's "Munich" and playing the poet Ted Hughes in "Sylvia," seems to be feeling increasingly strait-jacketed as Bond. When an actor tells a journalist, as Craig told Time Out London, that he'd rather "break this glass and slash my wrists" than play Bond one more time, that is not a good sign.

When Craig took on the role in 2006's "Casino Royale," his rougher-edged, less-flippant Bond felt like a breath of fresh air, but almost a decade later it's gone stale. Craig's expression is so unchanging it might as well be chiseled out of stone, and his emotionally uninvolved performance is similarly lacking in nuance.

In theory, director Mendes, whose previous films include the Oscar-winning "American Beauty," could have done something about this, but he may have been too busy worrying about the fearsome logistics of an enormous production that went to Mexico City, Rome, Austria and Morocco as well as London to be able expend much time on anything else.

Mexico City is where "Spectre" opens, on a Day of the Dead celebration so elaborate that it took 3 1/2 hours every shooting day to get the crowd of more than 1,500 extras prepared.

Though he turns out to be there unofficially, Bond is busy in Mexico City, stopping a terrorist plot, avoiding getting crushed by a collapsing building, commandeering a careening helicopter and, most important, getting hold of an important ring.

That metal band, with a symbol of a malignant-looking octopus on it, turns out to be the key to the rest of the plot. It's the symbol for Spectre, an organization that simply reeks of evil and must be stopped if humanity has any chance to survive and prosper.

Back home in London, Bond has other problems to deal with. His boss, M (Ralph Fiennes), is irked at his Mexican adventure ("I was taking some overdue holiday" is the agent's cheeky reply), and M's new boss, Max Denbigh (Andrew Scott), the head of the Center for National Security and a worshiper at the altar of 24/7 surveillance, has the temerity to suggest that the double-0 program may be obsolete.

Nothing daunted, Bond calls on the help of old comrades Moneypenny (Naomie Harris) and Q (Ben Whishaw), who, using the inevitable "cutting edge nano-technology," injects Agent 007 with "smart blood" that means he can be tracked down anywhere should he get into trouble, which is likely.

Thus empowered on his quest to stop Spectre, Bond encounters a number of folks, including a not-so-grieving widow (Monica Bellucci), a fellow assassin (Jesper Christensen) and Franz Oberhauser (Christoph Waltz), a mysterious individual with unexpected links to Bond's past.

Bond also meets up with the assassin's stunning daughter, Madeleine Swann (fine French actress Lea Seydoux). Though actual chemistry between the two actors is hard to see, "Spectre" insists they fall madly in love. It's very much that kind of a film.
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Re: Your SPECTRE reviews (spoilers)

Post by shaken not stirred »

Irony is spectre suggests bond and seydoux fall madly in love because the plot says so, same thing happened in casino royale, no sodding chemistry in either and yet people praise craig and the other one in that film when that romance was so poorly done, so cheesy it felt like it was parodying that episode of blackadder where blackadder falls in love with his man servant bob (who's really female which was the running joke in the episode).

Lazenby atleast with tracy in ohmms you could atleast see this thing called chemistry and they had quite a bit of it, I never saw any of that in craigs films, yeah he comforts vesper in the shower but I still don't feel it period (anyone can comfort someone and usually it means that ie diddly squat), it's not like mulder and scully who bounced off each other well it felt very forced so bad that it made jaws falling in love in moonraker almost look....normal.
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Re: Your SPECTRE reviews (spoilers)

Post by carl stromberg »

LA Times review

The Bond films' canny masterminds at Eon Productions are well aware that this kind of burnout is a possibility with a series this venerable, which is why there are frequent changes of both star (the current Bond, Daniel Craig, is the sixth they've hired) and director.
There are no "frequent changes" anymore as Craig has been Bond for 10 years and 4 films and will no doubt be back for the "Blofeld kills his girlfriend" story in 4 years time.
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Re: Your SPECTRE reviews (spoilers)

Post by The Saint 007 »

carl stromberg wrote:
LA Times review

The Bond films' canny masterminds at Eon Productions are well aware that this kind of burnout is a possibility with a series this venerable, which is why there are frequent changes of both star (the current Bond, Daniel Craig, is the sixth they've hired) and director.
There are no "frequent changes" anymore as Craig has been Bond for 10 years and 4 films and will no doubt be back for the "Blofeld kills his girlfriend" story in 4 years time.
That's unfortunately what looks to be the case if Craig returns for a fifth Bond film. Another personal revenge plot, oh joy. :roll:
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Re: Your SPECTRE reviews (spoilers)

Post by dirtybenny »

The Saint 007 wrote:
carl stromberg wrote:
LA Times review

The Bond films' canny masterminds at Eon Productions are well aware that this kind of burnout is a possibility with a series this venerable, which is why there are frequent changes of both star (the current Bond, Daniel Craig, is the sixth they've hired) and director.
There are no "frequent changes" anymore as Craig has been Bond for 10 years and 4 films and will no doubt be back for the "Blofeld kills his girlfriend" story in 4 years time.
That's unfortunately what looks to be the case if Craig returns for a fifth Bond film. Another personal revenge plot, oh joy. :roll:
Yup I can confirm that's exactly where this is going! And after Babzy claimed the reboot wouldn't open the door to remakes.
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Re: Your SPECTRE reviews (spoilers)

Post by carl stromberg »


kater wrote

Sorry, y'all but....
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I.Loved. It. I'm with Sweeney on the helicopter chase(one-I loved the one in the pre credits sequence) would have been sufficient. You also could see where they were going with C. a mile off(poor Andrew Scott..he's gonna keep getting cast as villains if he isn't careful..oh wait..)Lea Seydoux didn't completely work for me.

The big shocker was that the Blofeld reveal?not NEARLY as cheesy as it could have been..I don't wonder if they read some of the fanboy boards and so were aware of what a fustercluck it would be if they went for a completely true to the books imagining of Blofeld.I liked that they had him in a hole in the ground instead of the hollowed-out volcano cr@p.

My favorite bit?The pre-credits scene in Mexico. I am very familiar with The Day Of The Dead(I live in an area where it's a big deal).
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Re: Your SPECTRE reviews (spoilers)

Post by carl stromberg »


The Sweeney wrote

Just saw it last night at the Gibraltar premier, and I thought it was superb. Not as good as Casino Royale (at the moment), but much better than Quantum and Skyfall.

Craig's best performance yet. He oozes cool in just about every scene, looking more McQueen than ever, and we finally have a Bond film which combines the gritty serious elements, plus the traditional gadget and humour elements successfully. This performance by Craig is on par with Connery in Thunderball.

Swann is by far the best Bond girl in a long time, and the love story is actually very convincing.

Soundtrack blew me away, the train fight has to be one of the best in the series, and loved the car chase. The torture scene was fairly horrific too, maybe worse than CR.

The only thing I'm not sure on is the ending (not the Aston bit, which was good), but the Thames helicopter chase. I need to see it again to decide on that one.

Overall, this is Craig meets Moore, and the most traditional Bond film from the Craig era.
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Re: Your SPECTRE reviews (spoilers)

Post by carl stromberg »


Dirty Benny wrote

Rant 34: Specturd: The Rise of BROfeld

As I’ve said earlier I’ve been holding back awhile in anticipation of this “film” and believe me I’ll be letting it all out now, there’ll be no holding back from here on out! So a note about spoilers, if you’re lurking around ClassicBond.com a subsidy of DanielCraigisnotBond.com the anti-Craig Bond fan site, and are trying to avoid spoilers maybe you should be perusing a different site!

The leaked script that EON claimed was an older draft… that was the entire shooting script for this movie, they didn’t change a thing!

First let me get right to it and address the 400lb gorilla riding the elephant in the room, BLOFELD IS NOW BOND’S FOSTER BROTHER! Yes that Blofeld, the head of SPECTRE who lives in volcano lairs, and strokes a white Persian cat, complete with face scar by the end of the film!!!! After using Austin Powers as an excuse to wipe away 40 years of tradition, they turn around and remake AP3! This is an absolute disgrace! An inexcusable sin that extinguishes any light the rest of the movie may have! The rest of the film could be the second coming of Goldfinger (which it isn’t) and due to this little screen gem the entire film and the franchise itself is torn asunder! If this is Craig’s last (and god I hope it is) it really is one last F.U. to the Bond traditionalists from the infernal Craig era. The funny thing about this is, thanks to the leaks, EON was given a preview of fan reaction to this little morsel, which even caused fanboys to stop, take notice, and give pause. They should have gone the whole soap opera route and had Craig play both Bond and Blofeld as an evil twin complete with goatee. The EON production offices must have been thick with the smoke of a thousand bongs and crack pipes being consumed by the best of yes men for this to have been green lit! No one raised their hand and said hey Babzy maybe this is a bad idea?

This film should have been called Quantum Fan Service as it reaches beyond DAD levels of “call backs” and “homages” to earlier Bond movies. This is distracting in two ways: First you spend the whole film wishing you were watching those far superior films, and second, you spend the whole movie playing “spot the reference”. Why did they bother? This isn’t even an anniversary year! The one concession I could give SF is that despite being the 50th anniversary the self-reference was kept to a minimum. This film tries extremely hard to be a Bond film but never accomplishes that goal, whereas real Bond films are confident to just be what they are. The Moore era gets a lot of flak for “becoming pastiche” but this debacle blows that notion right out of the water!

Any way the film starts in Mexico during the Day of the Dead Festival. We begin by following two masked individuals who are making their way to a hotel room. This is done in one long tracking shot which is more masturbatory than masterful. It’s long unfulfilling and boring. Just like the rest of the film.

Bond and cardboard cutout woman number one reach the room; she flops on the bed then utters her one momentous line: “Where are you going?” As Bond scuttles off on the ledge. That’s girl power for you, we don’t even know if she was helping him in his task, or if she just had a room which Bond felt gave him good roof access. If the later why not just take the stairs?

Bond over hears some nonsense about a bomb plot. Or should I say reads some, there is a nauseating amount of unnecessary subtitles in this film. The bomb goes off for god knows why, destroying half a city block yet somehow Mr. BadGuy who was just outside the room where the earth shattering explosion occurs, survives unscathed and makes for the town square where despite literally dozens of cops line the street he and Bond run through a parade and a helicopter lands in the middle of said square which is full of people who for some reason clear a path for the chopper to land. Any way a shaky cam fight ensues for an excruciating amount of time, encompassing every aerial Bond trope known to man, from FYEO to QOS to DAD before BadGuy dies and the titles start.

The song with the oh so apropos title of “Writings on the Wall” is just as bad set to the titles as it is standing on its own. As to those titles they are truly a disturbing visual, featuring a nude Craig and some honest to god tentacle porn! The less said about them the better I still need to sleep tonight!

We find our hero in M’s office getting a blowing up from his boss and going full 80’s cop movie with the bad attitude and snappy come back.

M as Precinct Capt.:“Where do you get off blowing up half a block in Mexico 007?!”

Bond as Det. BadAss: “Just taking some much overdue vacation, sir!”

Waa, waa, it, like everything else in this film falls with a thud.

Andrew Scott shows up and might as well be playing his Moriarity character, because it’s exactly the same! Some more stilted dialogue, Moneypenny stops by Bond’s flat, he shows her a 10 second film of Dench as M telling him to kill the guy in Mexico, and then attend the funeral. It’s never explained when it was made or why she made it, or how she knew about this guy, or what Bond was supposed to do when he got there, find Brofeld,seduce the widow, simply say a hail Mary? Guess like every other aspect of this plot, it doesn't matter.

At the funeral which reminded me of some Miami Vice out takes, Bond sees Brofeld from the back, old Brofeld is supposedly a recluse who lives in the shadows, yet comes out to go to an underling’s funeral, what is he super catholic? Bond tries to “seduce” the widow with lines so bad he just as well have asked her to help him find the stationary! She rightfully declines and goes home.

At home some men try to kill the widow, Bond kills them, tries to seduce again, gets rejected again, gets angry throws down some champagne glasses then throws her up against a wall. After their not so consensual encounter Bond makes it up to her by telling her his friend “Felix” (Some Leiter fan service) will protect her. So after all the buildup Monica Bellucci gets 3 minutes of screen time where she has sex thrust upon her and is rescued off screen. The “sexist” Connery years never treated women so bad!

Bond goes to the SPECTRE meeting Bellucci tells him about (probably just to get him to climb off her) and when challenged at the door, identifies himself as Mickey Mouse! Ugh!

Bond witnesses an extremely stereotypical SPECTRE meeting, complete, with I kid you not, an exact replica of Frau Farbissina from Austin Powers! Anyway the big Bro shows up and begins to speak like an effeminate New York taxi driver with a lisp, nowhere is that more conspicuous than later in the film when he utters his infamous line “Jamesss, I’m the aauthor of aall yaa paain”. Thing is, why? Waltz is Austrian, so is Oberhauser, what effect a crummy American accent? Bro looks up at Bond and intones “cuckooooo” causing Bond to run off along with whatever shred of credibility I had left for this picture!

Anyway blah, blah, blah, a car chase ensues, an obvious “wink” at DAD as a supped up Jaguar chases Bond’s supped up Aston. The chase is obviously low speed dressed as fast paced on absolutely empty streets! The great car chases are done around traffic to illustrate the speed and intensify the danger! During all this we see the controls for Bond’s “gadgets”, I kid you not it consists of four toggle switches pasted to a cheap bit of sheet metal, with those cheap 1978 plastic punch labels, a 6 year old could do better with bits from radio shack! The hilarious thing is these cheap analogue switches control a modern LCD display!

Bond gets away, calls Moneypenny who finds Mr. White from CR and QOS in 15 seconds in a remote cabin in Austria, this man was a threat to national security 2 movies ago and nobody thought about grabbing this clown in the meantime? If they had they could have saved us over an hour of non-sense. Anyway White tells Bond to find and protect his’s daughter, before killing himself. Why White does this or trusts Bond is left up in the air, but I guess who cares anyway.

Bond makes his way to the clinic where White’s daughter’s Madeline Swan works situated atop an alp for some OHMSS fan service. Blah, blah, blah, stilted dialogue, she’s kidnaped, Bond crashes a plane he pulled out of his rear, in order to chase the baddies, he and Swan get away.

Meanwhile Q has a close call on a tramway, which goes absolutely nowhere. (The scene not the tram) This murders about 3 minutes of my life, with some more OSMSS and FYEO fan service.

Next Morocco, where White had built a secret room in a hotel room! How in the hell did he pull that one off? Did management not notice that the lavatory in room 302 suddenly disappeared? We’ll never know as it’s not explained. On to the world’s most vacant train for a meal in Connery’s white dinner jacket for no other reason than for some GF fan service. As I said no one else is on this train, at least from what I can tell from the empty corridors and dining car so why bother dressing for dinner? A shaky cam fight breaks out between the only three passengers on this train Bond, Swan and Henchman Hinx in the abandoned dining car. Bam, boom, bang, fight’s over and Hinx is overboard. Bond and Swan celebrate by having rough sex back in their compartment and apparently fall in love, why because we said so.

When the train stops and the only two remaining passengers disembark at an abandoned station, a 1948 Rolls Royce, I know is a 1948 because Bond takes the time to explain that, nothing else in this movie is explained, but I know the model year of Bro’s Rolls. Any way it shows up to take them direct to Brofeld.

If the Bro-man was going to give them the red carpet treatment, complete with monologue, why send a henchman to kill them on the train? If the Hench succeeds the Bro is without an audience, if Bro doesn’t need and audience then why not just shoot them upon arrival? I guess if he did that then he couldn’t use his ridiculous remote control dentist chair in his Persian cat room! This is where Oberhauser reveals he killed his father, faked his own death and took his mother’s maiden name of Blofeld! Dun, dun, dun! The whole revelation lands with a deafening thud after 2 hours of hints delivered with head bashing subtly. He also tells Bond that he was behind Le Cheffe, Silva, and was responsible for killing the women in his life Vesper and Momma M, notice how Greene and Strawberry Fields are conspicuously absent from that list, it seems even EON has forgotten about QOS too. All this happens while drilling holes in Bond’s head without leaving any lasting effects! Bond escapes blowing up the entire lair and in the process gives Brofeld his Donald Pleasance era scar. At this point why not just have Waltz put his pinky to his mouth and demand ONE MILLION DOLLARS!

Back to London, where M, Q, and MP all run to a safe house hidden in a derelict shop called Hildenbrand something or other, (literary fan service!) this proves someone at EON at least cracked a Fleming novel at one time so they should know better than to invent this ridiculous back story.

Bond goes to the old MI6 HQ which despite being slated and wired for demolition the basement is a veritable harbor of moored boats! While two simultaneous clocks count down, Bond finds the tied up Swan in old M’s old office and running out of time jumps several stories to a inexplicably placed safety net (did I mention this place was set to be demolished?) where the pair jump in to one of the many waiting boats and give chase to Brofeld as the building falls around them.

Long story short C falls to his death trying to escape M, Bond shoots down Bro’s helicopter with his PPK from his boat (if you know anything about firearms, you know how ridiculous and impossible this is) the chopper crashes and police set up crime scene tape before doing anything else! I mean the chopper is burning, Brofeld is dragging himself down the street and all the cops do is awash the avenue with crime scene tape! M approaches the crash an officer challenges him, and all M need do is tell the officer his name and his word is taken on face value! Bond confronts his Bro, decides not to kill his foe, for love or something and throws his gun away Dirty Harry style, sick of his lifestyle, and ready to abandon it for absolutely no discernable reason.

In the end after consuming all of this I’m left with one conclusion, Barbara Broccoli suffers from mental premature ejaculation. We went 3 films with little to no Bond formula, then BAM she dumps every trope ever conceived in to one film, she gets the rights to Blofeld and BAM shoe horn him in the next film as the main villain, as Bond’s brother no less!

I imagine they already had this Oberhauser story lined up before acquiring the rights to Blofeld. But there were so many better way to do this if they must have Blofeld and Bond’s Brother in this film. Blofeld could have and should have been the unseen shadowy figure from the early Connery days pulling strings and Oberhauser the number 2 if they felt compelled to go down this ridiculous familial road at all. Plus doing it this way gives Blofeld more menace, and makes reveal in the next film or one after more satisfying.

At any rate it’s what I would expect from the nu guard at EON, lots of cheap “emotional exposition”, poorly contrived stunts, and a stone faced Craig trying to act “deep”. All in all this whole travesty boils down to what someone so eloquently described in the “Craig era in two words” thread: NOT CANNON!
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Re: Your SPECTRE reviews (spoilers)

Post by surgcmdr »

Maybe Craig is gay

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Re: Your SPECTRE reviews (spoilers)

Post by Kristatos »

I haven't seen the film yet, and probably won't do so unless it comes on TV in a few years and I have nothing better to do at the time. But based on the script. I'd say that this is Craig's DAD - a decent first half ruined by a second half displaying the worst features of its era. With the Brosnan era, that meant an emphasis on action at the expense of other elements in the Bond formula. In the Craig era, it means a desperate desire for critical respectability, manifested in the form of heavy-handed symbolism and cliched character arcs, all designed primarily to help dim middle-class people feel cleverer than they actually are. Cuckoo!
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Re: Your SPECTRE reviews (spoilers)

Post by dirtybenny »

Kristatos wrote:I haven't seen the film yet, and probably won't do so unless it comes on TV in a few years and I have nothing better to do at the time. But based on the script. I'd say that this is Craig's DAD - a decent first half ruined by a second half displaying the worst features of its era. With the Brosnan era, that meant an emphasis on action at the expense of other elements in the Bond formula. In the Craig era, it means a desperate desire for critical respectability, manifested in the form of heavy-handed symbolism and cliched character arcs, all designed primarily to help dim middle-class people feel cleverer than they actually are. Cuckoo!

You did see the film Kris!!!! Funny not having saw the film, you put it in perfect perspective!!! :lol: :cheers:
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Re: Your SPECTRE reviews (spoilers)

Post by John Drake »

http://thesupernaughts.com/new-release- ... bury-bond/

I would be lying if I said I was a fan of Daniel Craig’s incarnation of 007. The truth is, I simply don’t like his portrayal of the Martini-drinking womanizer. He looks too rough and acts too straight, like a factory worker doing his best Bond impression. The last 3 films in the ongoing franchise have been aiming for the bleak, gritty, and somewhat realistic version of the british super spy. Yet there is something inherently wrong about that to me. James Bond is, at least in my mind, supposed to be flamboyant, slick, and cool. He needs to whip out one-liners left and right, while overcoming seemingly impossible odds under ridiculous circumstances. The Craig iteration, however, is all too often self-serious, gloomy, and at times boringly clinical in its approach to the source material. That is of course just my opinion. I don’t see Bond when I see Craig. However, I do acknowledge that some people feel differently, and so I always try to measure to which degree the desired target group will enjoy the film. This time, I’m afraid even the purists can’t help but be a tad disappointed.

Spectre opens in Mexico City on el Día de los Muertos (day of the dead). Bond is tracking down terrorists, although we don’t know exactly why. We find out soon enough, though, as it turns out they have connections to a secret intelligence organisation, which seems to have something to do with not only the death of M, but also the criminal activities in the previous instalments. 007 is naturally hellbent on finding out what is going on, and so he sets out on a hectic journey to put an end to the ghosts that have haunted him for so long, before they end him first.

All good things must come to an end, and the same goes for Ian Fleming’s graceful spy character. I’m sorry to say it, but I think this series has run its course. This 24th entry is a steaming mess from start to finish, and I’ll tell you why that is. The tone doesn’t correlate with the ideas. We’ve reached a point where almost everything we’ve come to love about Bond is no longer part of his persona. His fancy gadgets are gone, his wit is starting to dwindle, and quite frankly it feels like Craig is sick and tired of playing him. Imagine a dour version of Die Another Day, and you basically have Spectre. The visuals are so cold and brooding, but the progression of the story is so implausible and cartoonish compared to something like Casino Royale, where at least I can give them credit for sticking to the style they have established. Here it’s just non-stop nonsense. Spinning helicopters, collapsing buildings with no consequences, and torture on the verge of being as cliché as the hero being strapped to a table with a red laser slowly moving up between his legs. Had it been Brosnan or Connery, I would’ve bought into it, because they earned that kind of silliness in their portrayal. This movie is trying so hard to be relevant and poignant, it really took me out of the experience when a guy suddenly caved in someone’s eyes with the sheer force of his thumbs. That’s right!

The main villain’s motive makes absolutely no sense, and at one point during the film, my friend who sat next to me asked in confusion: “Wait… what exactly is he trying to do?”. I couldn’t answer him in an intelligent way, because the evil scheme is so muddled, not to mention laughably bad. I won’t spoil it, but let’s just say that the plot is essentially the same as in Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation, which came out earlier this year. I’m not saying that Sam Mendes and his writers ripped off Christopher McQuarrie, but the two films are very similar in parts. The disobedient agent has caused too much destruction and gets relived from his duty, only to find out that a group of people are plotting against his agency, leading him to go on a rogue mission. The difference is that the former is vibrant, colourful, and exciting. Cruise is charismatic, Craig is not. M:I is briskly paced and suspenseful, Spectre is slow and thrill-less. It lacks charm and personality, and for a character like Bond that is a fatal kiss of death. I want to cheer for this guy, not fight to keep myself awake.

There are a few redeemable things about the film, such as an exhilarating one-take that lasts for about 5 minutes. Léa Seydoux also does a commendable job as the new Bond girl, although her character doesn’t really have a whole lot to do, unlike Vesper Lynd. But the positives are few and far between, constantly being overshadowed by convoluted story-lines involving Bond’s past with Christophe Waltz’ character, which is shoehorned in to create some rather unnecessary drama that doesn’t work at all. 007 is no longer as mysterious and fascinating as he once was. He’s become just another streamline action hero in a long production line of action heroes. The filmmakers got so caught up on trying to tie everything together in a conclusive arc, they completely forgot what makes Bond so compelling in the first place. He’s like Indiana Jones or Ethan Hunt, but more classy and perhaps even smarter in nature. Very little of what he used to be has survived in this dreary, lifeless, and routinary 24th chapter that doesn’t take any risks, settling for loud confusion instead of subtle tension. It’s not fun anymore, and I think maybe we should bury this spy for good. We thank you for your service, but now would be the appropriate time to retire from the field.
Imagine a dour version of Die Another Day, and you basically have Spectre.
Ouch.
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