Quantum of Solace

One of the great dichotomies between myself and many of the people I know lately is that since I am childless, I have all the time in the world to see all the movies I want. It was pleasing therefore to see my brother-in-law be able escape his family's homestead yesterday afternoon with his young son to catch a showing of Quantum of Solace, which he had very much wanted to see. He's an "action movie" kind of guy.

As it happened, I had already seen it three weeks ago, in the Showcase multiplex in Lowell on the day it premiered nationwide. As in the case of Twilight, I knew it would be in theaters for a while, but I wanted to see it right away to "surf the cultural vibe," to understand and digest the buzz in real time.

Also I had been anticipating it for months, not because of the movie itself because of a conversation I had the previous summer, at a party of my friends in Colorado. I was standing around a patio drinking and talking with a few of the men in the group, both of whom, like my brother-in-law, are "action movie" guys. The subject of Bond films came up. They both started started talking enthusiastically about Casino Royale, the 2006 Bond installment with Daniel Craig as the spy hero.

I told them that I thought it was so-so. They exploded with disbelief.

"It has cool opening credits, with the playing cards," I said, offering my sincerest compliment about the film. "Opening credits like that are necessary part of any Bond film."

To them this was utter heresy. They could not process or believe what they were hearing. Simply put, they both asserted unequivocally that Casino Royale was manifestly the greatest Bond film of all time, with no possible rival, or no possibility of debate over the issue.

"Are you serious?" I asked, disbelievingly at first. In fact they were quite serious. They could not comprehend that anyone one else would hold any other opinion than that. It was as if I were telling them that the sun sets in the east.

This kind of extreme situation has become somewhat normal to me---to be considered crazy for not completely buying into a position which I myself find manifestly absurd. See my comments about Religulous for more explanation on that.

"There are no iconographic scenes," I said. "The chase through the construction site is about all that made an impression on me, and that felt like Donkey Kong. And Craig's Bond is so unsophisticated and unappealing, the way he gets nervous during the card game."

In reply, one of them told me that all this was "more realistic." Leaving aside for now the entire question of whether one should look to the Bond series for, ahem, realism, I resisted the temptation to challenge them on their idea of what is "realistic" about it. Did that mean that the movie was, in their personal experiences, much closer to what the "real" MI-6 is like?

As my friend Thor has pointed out to me, when people say "realism" in regard to movies, what they usually mean is verisimilitude.

"So are you going to see Quantum of Solace?" one of them asked me. They were then surprised when I said I was looking forward to it. "Of course I'll give it a viewing," I said. Somehow this mystified them as illogical.

So I drove off to Lowell on the day of the premiere, as I said, and caught an early afternoon matinee before the Friday evening crowds showed up. After three weeks what I remember best about the film is that, well, it has cool opening credits.

Seriously, those planetarium effects with the stars and the celestial latitude and longitude are downright awesome. If I were ranking Bond films by the credit sequences, this one might make easily the top third of the list.

But to me the whole movie was just plain boring, in the same lifeless way as Casino Royale. I guess I have a higher standard for Bond. I want him to be cool.

Everyone loves Sean Connery's Bond, including my two friends. But I can't figure out why they do, since he is so much the opposite of Craig's portrayal of the character. In the third act of Dr. No (1962), one can get a look at why Connery was so powerful. His Bond is the epitome of the classical hero in how he outwits the villain. He uses stealth at first, but once caught, he is absolutely straight with the bad guy, laying his cards on the table. Over the dinner party, he does what any classical hero is supposed to do: he refuses to back down or be intimidated. He simply says, in effect, "You are the bad guy, and no matter how it appears now, I am going to take you down." That kind of upfrontness, so ubiquitous in old heroes, is now almost completely absent in contemporary Hollywood, replaced by long drawn out chase and fight scenes that do nothing to advance the story, but make it seem like the movie makers missed their calling as video game designers. In the old Bond films, fight scenes were brief, because they didn't need to be long in order to advance the story. Now the fight scenes are story. Yawn.

Watching Quantum of Solace, I felt like a hapless woman enduring degrading formulaic foreplay at the hands of a jaded lover. Many previous Bond scenes had iconic chase scenes, so here we get a robotic recapsulation of the complete catalogue action sequences: a car chase, a rooftop foot chase, a boat chase, and an airplane chase. Not one of them had any distinguishing feature that made them an integral and interesting part of the story. The story could have been told in nearly the same way by cutting them down to brief episodes. All we get out of Craig's Bond is that he is a relentless pursuer and a kick-ass fighter, willing to resort to violence as the first option in any situation.

The whole premise of Quantum was cloudy. Was Bond seeking revenge for his girlfriend's death at the end of Casino Royale or was he not? Craig's emotionless portrayal gave us nothing to hang our hat on either way. The movie seems to suggest that he feels no emotion at all. The issue of "revenge" is either a empty distraction or a gimmick.

It wasn't a terrible movie. There were a few cool things, including how they are obviously setting up SPECTRE bit-by-bit as worldwide conspiracy. I definitely liked that part. But it hardly left me hanging on for the next installment. One of the other bright spots: I did very much like Gemma Arterton as Strawberry Fields. She's technically not the "Bond girl" for this movie, but rather the "helper female agent," but she is the one with the best sex appeal.

Yesterday when my brother-in-law returned home, he announced that Quantum of Solace was a "very good" movie, and that Daniel Craig is simply put, a phenomenal Bond, "no question about it." I didn't bother arguing. He liked the movie specifically because it did not have a lot of distractions, but that Bond simply followed one lead to the next until he tracked down the villain, then killed him. It pretty much was exactly the reason I disliked the movie so much.

It's become fashionable in recent years to completely dismiss the Roger Moore films as camp. But during Quantum of Solace, my mind kept drifting to the fun car chase scene involving a Citroen in For Your Eyes Only (1981), which is definitely one of the most boring Bond movies made. By the end, I was fantasizing about watching Moonraker (1979). Now that's a fun Bond movie!