Friday, November 07, 2008

Quantum of Solace - Not as good as it sounds

There's plenty of action in the New Bond film but the camera work was chaotic so the fights and chases were hard to follow. Really, I figured in the LOTR movies that the quick cuts and moving camera work in fight scenes was to avoid Asian Martial Arts style exchanges -which would have been weird in a quintessentially English movie - or to hide weak fighting skills on the part of the actors. Is that the case with QoS?

And if the action scenes don't thrill, there isn't much to a Bond film.

Perhaps the film had fractal significance; the plot was as confusing as the action. Bond travelled hither and thither wildly; I guess he had to to follow the bad guys but why did they take those trips? Stuff had to have been cut out: there is a female agent who I only remembered as 'Fields', but reviews give her name as Strawberry Fields - is that part of Bond lore that I should have or is her full name on the cutting room floor?

Hidden spoilers below.

I will type my spoilers - or more correctly, my confusion about the plot, which must contain spoilers below in white character. If you want to read further, highlight the area below this point to find the invisible message.

Bond is trying to stop an international cartel intent on controlling the water resources of Bolivia? Bad news for the Bolivians, but squeezing them doesn't wring out much money (is the water metaphor confusing in a discussion of water? Sorry.) and water isn't all that portable. Controlling the water feeds to New York City would be dastardly, but, and I apologize to any Bolivian readers, who cares?

Don't look at the comments if you are concerned about spoilers, but do comment otherwise, please.

2 comments:

PAKA said...

haven't seen it. but they were doing an "at the movies" promo for it today on cnn (so i knew what the plot was about). so it looks like they didn't do a good job with all the elements that bond encounters (air, land, fire, etc...) and constant local changes (as mentioned) on cnn. so not as good as casino royale huh? anyway, will probably still watch it (for olga...i've never seen an olga look so HOT!).

Anonymous said...

I saw it and thought it was pretty good but wish I would have rewatched Casino Royale again before seeing this one since the plots linked together so much.

I did find it interesting that the bad guy environmentalist looked a lot like Al Gore.