![]() Dressing her in stockings is at best a nod back to Teri Hatcher in Tomorrow Never Dies and at worst just lazy fanservice. Instead, she gets five minutes of screen time to look scared, sleep with Bond and then leave. The film has a great opportunity here, casting an older woman with the promise of a deeper relationship. Even if we put Léa Seydoux to one side, that still leaves us with Monicca Bellucci. None of the women in Spectre are given a fair crack of the whip. For all the steps forward that the Daniel Craig era has taken, it still can't resist a damsel in distress. Madeleine Swann is written like two completely different people who have been composited one moment she's being icy cold, compelling and giving Bond a run for his money with a gun, the next she's being captured for the umpteenth time and needing to be rescued. The refusal to even hint at it is too constant a factor for it to be an accident it is as though the whole production threw up their hands, admitted that it was terrible, and then asked us to forget that it ever existed.Ī related problem is that the script for Spectre is deeply conflicted, especially when it comes to the film's female characters. Instead, Quantum of Solace has been practically airbrushed out of history besides the odd mention of Quantum, we get no reference to its plot and Dominic Greene is never seen on camera. You would imagine that any story which seeks to claim that the events of Casino Royale, Quantum of Solace and Skyfall were all an elaborate means to bring us to this point would place an equal weight on each instalment and the events therein. The first such problem is the amount of emphasis given to each of the previous films. Spectre attempts to tie together the events of its predecessors with a story about chickens coming home to roost - and while there is much to applaud about Sam Mendes' film, it is also riddled with problems. Doctor Who, Sherlock and Star Wars have all shown that this is not an easy thing to pull off, and it's harder still to convince an audience that such an undertaking was always intentional. Since the franchise was effectively rebooted with Casino Royale, an approach more becoming of comic books has been employed: different writers and directors come in and somehow try to stitch all the character's actions together into an overarching narrative. While this has kept the Bond series as a whole firmly in the realms of fantasy, it has allowed individual entries in the series to push for something more gritty or realistic if it works, it's embraced and carried forward, and if not the series reverts to type with very few tears. Modern audiences are asked to believe that the character has been the same age for more than 50 years, and the series has bent or tinkered with its conventions ever so slightly as the decades have rolled past in order to stay relevant. ![]() He worked with Eon Productions for a film version of Thunderball, and he allowed them to use SPECTRE and Blofeld, but after his licensing deal with Eon ran out, he wanted to make another film version of Thunderball (he eventually did, as Never Say Never Again, in 1983) and while they were fighting back and forth in court as to whether he was allowed to do so, he threatened Eon over the use of Blofeld and SPECTRE.One of the most obvious characteristics of the Bond series is that each instalment of the franchise can sit on its own. Well, that meant that he had the rights to Blofeld and technically SPECTRE itself. ![]() The problem is that that novel started as a screenplay and through various legal shenanigans (BY Fleming, which is why he ultimately lost big when it went to court and he was forced to settle), Kevin McClory, one of the screenwriters of the initial screenplay, received the film rights to that novel. Each time around, I’ll give you the context behind one such “meta-message.”Īs you may or may not know, Ernst Blofeld and SPECTRE, the terrorist network that he was in charge of, did not actually debut until the ninth book in Ian Fleming’s James Bond series of novels, Thunderball. In Meta-Messages, I explore the context behind (using reader danjack’s term) “meta-messages.” A meta-message is where a creator comments on/references the work of another creator (or sometimes even themselves) in their work. Today, we look at the time that the Bond films killed off Ernst Blofeld just to show that they didn’t need him. ![]()
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