Tuesday, November 04, 2008

Dark, Dark, Dark

The most recent Batman movie was pretty dark, but there was always that hint in the comics that the Caped Crusader was vengeance-driven.

Is it a sign of the times that Quantum of Solace gives us a light-starved Bond outing too? No lectures from Q on gadgets. No Aston Martin. The car (left over from Casino Royale) is wrecked before the opening credits and Bond spends the rest of the movie stealing low-life transport to keep up (although check out how much he resembles Steve McQueen on a motor-bike). We get boat chase, car chase, foot chase and plane chase but no sex scenes apart from a brief post-coital.
This is a Bond hooked on vengeance with saving the world as a sub-plot. We finally learn the recipe for a vodka martini but also discover that Bond is on his seventh.

Lots of Bourne-esque, shaky, hand-camera work on the action shots (same director I gather).

Not over long.

Fine entertainment. Not a load of laughs. Even the trailers were for dark movies.

Could someone turn the world's lights back on please?

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Different director - Quantum of Solace is Marc Forster (Kite Runner, Finding Neverland, Monster's Ball), the last two Bourne's were Paul Greengrass and the first one Doug Liman. I agree about the film though - very good, but not exactly fun or feelgood.

David Keen said...

Same here. Most of the ads in Yeovil were for video games which involved shooting horrible aliens, so you got off lucky.

Not as grim as Batman or stuff like There Will Be Blood, and the couple of things that might have been one-liners got lost on the soundtrack.

Interesting that they relied on the revenge element to drive the plot, rather than a deadline to save the world: no deadline, no global threat, just a water shortage in Bolivia with the connivance of the CIA. Bourne Identity crossed with a Clint Eastwood revenge Western.

Steve Tilley said...

Steve, I meant same stunt director (which I've now checked and is true), not same Director uppercase D.