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annathepiperSo! Big props to ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
mamishka for giving solarbird and me a chance to go see Quantum of Solace at the Cinerama last night. Let it be said that Meems is as always fabulous, and the remodeled Cinerama is pretty fabulous too. Comfy new seats FTW!
As for the movie itself, my picoreview is this: not as awesome as Casino Royale (although to be fair it would have had to work extremely hard to be as awesome as Casino Royale), mostly still a very solid movie, but has one big, big issue I have a problem with.
And that issue is this:
Please for the love of gods, modern cinema and television, can we quit it already with the good guys torturing people?!
It's not just a question of this iteration of Bond being grittier than his predecessors. It's not just a question of Bond being all darkity dark and vengeful in this movie specifically because of the events in Casino Royale. It's very clearly a standard policy of MI6 in this version of the Bond universe. And you know what, people? That's seriously not cool.
Which for me makes this movie difficult to deal with. I want to like it. A lot. As y'all may remember I adored Casino Royale, and there's still a hell of a lot to like in this movie as well, although it comes across much more like a traditional Bond flick than Casino Royale did. Daniel Craig is grim and tough and gritty, and, yes, vengeful, with just enough touches of inner grief that yeah, I wince for what his Bond is going through. Olga Kurylenko is very solid as the female lead, with an intriguingly gritty character who's a compelling mirror for Bond himself and who wins his sympathy. Gemma Arterton as Bond Girl #2 is on screen only briefly but has some solid moments and also provides an opportunity for an excellent homage to Goldfinger. Judi Dench is as as always crafted entirely from 100% British Awesomeness. There's some neat set design as well with a lot of use of black and white in the color schemes, making this a very cold and efficient movie visually as well as plot-wise, and that worked for me.
And yet, there's this torture thing. It makes me cringe and make me go "wait, I'm supposed to cheer for these guys? What? What?"
In fact, it makes me think of the fact that aspects of the Bond books make me cringe too--all the blatant racism in Live and Let Die, for example. Or all the sexism that is sometimes outright horrifying, such as the line about Bond thinking about the "sweet tang of rape" that's in Casino Royale. (Over which, as a modern reader, I still go "da hell?!")
So while a part of me can almost see an argument that in a way this is a modern way of preserving the darkest aspects of the character and the world he lives in, the rest of me rebels. There's enough crap about torture in real-life politics that I really don't need to see it held up as standard operating procedure for not only someone we're supposed to be calling a hero, but the entire organization he works for as well. I could have barely tolerated it as a plot point involving Bond himself as part of the whole revenge theme of this movie--but when there's an attempt at torture overseen by M herself, no. Just, no.
And when they bring back Mathis from the first movie, and oh hey MI6 and Bond tortured him, but it's okay because he was really innocent so they gave him an Italian villa and everything's all right again? And Bond goes back to this man and is pretty confident he'll get his help and Mathis gives it to him? NO. NO NO NO NO NO.
The fact that there's a torture scene in Casino Royale only underscores this all the more starkly for me, too. I mean, c'mon, people, the reason that the torture scene in the first movie is so brutally effective is because it underscores what a psychotic bastard Le Chiffre is. Le Chiffre was the fucking bad guy. I have no problems with Bond being pushed very close to that razor thin line; let's face it, Bond ain't exactly a poster boy of sweetness and morality and light.
But if Bond and MI6 can so casually torture people, what the hell difference is there between them and Le Chiffre and White and all the other members of Quantum? Hint: the correct answer is NOT "MI6 gives villas to the people they torture who didn't actually do anything wrong."
This movie really should have asked that question, and explored the answer, and have had their willingness to torture come back and bite MI6 in the ass. It didn't. And for that, yeah, I have a big, big problem with it.
So, yeah. I'm not saying don't go see it. There's good stuff in it. But I will say this: if you go and see it, go in with eyes open and realize what it's saying about the guy we're supposed to be cheering for and the government he's working for.
P.S. There will very likely be spoilers in any comments left on this post. Consider yourselves warned.
mamishka for giving solarbird and me a chance to go see Quantum of Solace at the Cinerama last night. Let it be said that Meems is as always fabulous, and the remodeled Cinerama is pretty fabulous too. Comfy new seats FTW!As for the movie itself, my picoreview is this: not as awesome as Casino Royale (although to be fair it would have had to work extremely hard to be as awesome as Casino Royale), mostly still a very solid movie, but has one big, big issue I have a problem with.
And that issue is this:
Please for the love of gods, modern cinema and television, can we quit it already with the good guys torturing people?!
It's not just a question of this iteration of Bond being grittier than his predecessors. It's not just a question of Bond being all darkity dark and vengeful in this movie specifically because of the events in Casino Royale. It's very clearly a standard policy of MI6 in this version of the Bond universe. And you know what, people? That's seriously not cool.
Which for me makes this movie difficult to deal with. I want to like it. A lot. As y'all may remember I adored Casino Royale, and there's still a hell of a lot to like in this movie as well, although it comes across much more like a traditional Bond flick than Casino Royale did. Daniel Craig is grim and tough and gritty, and, yes, vengeful, with just enough touches of inner grief that yeah, I wince for what his Bond is going through. Olga Kurylenko is very solid as the female lead, with an intriguingly gritty character who's a compelling mirror for Bond himself and who wins his sympathy. Gemma Arterton as Bond Girl #2 is on screen only briefly but has some solid moments and also provides an opportunity for an excellent homage to Goldfinger. Judi Dench is as as always crafted entirely from 100% British Awesomeness. There's some neat set design as well with a lot of use of black and white in the color schemes, making this a very cold and efficient movie visually as well as plot-wise, and that worked for me.
And yet, there's this torture thing. It makes me cringe and make me go "wait, I'm supposed to cheer for these guys? What? What?"
In fact, it makes me think of the fact that aspects of the Bond books make me cringe too--all the blatant racism in Live and Let Die, for example. Or all the sexism that is sometimes outright horrifying, such as the line about Bond thinking about the "sweet tang of rape" that's in Casino Royale. (Over which, as a modern reader, I still go "da hell?!")
So while a part of me can almost see an argument that in a way this is a modern way of preserving the darkest aspects of the character and the world he lives in, the rest of me rebels. There's enough crap about torture in real-life politics that I really don't need to see it held up as standard operating procedure for not only someone we're supposed to be calling a hero, but the entire organization he works for as well. I could have barely tolerated it as a plot point involving Bond himself as part of the whole revenge theme of this movie--but when there's an attempt at torture overseen by M herself, no. Just, no.
And when they bring back Mathis from the first movie, and oh hey MI6 and Bond tortured him, but it's okay because he was really innocent so they gave him an Italian villa and everything's all right again? And Bond goes back to this man and is pretty confident he'll get his help and Mathis gives it to him? NO. NO NO NO NO NO.
The fact that there's a torture scene in Casino Royale only underscores this all the more starkly for me, too. I mean, c'mon, people, the reason that the torture scene in the first movie is so brutally effective is because it underscores what a psychotic bastard Le Chiffre is. Le Chiffre was the fucking bad guy. I have no problems with Bond being pushed very close to that razor thin line; let's face it, Bond ain't exactly a poster boy of sweetness and morality and light.
But if Bond and MI6 can so casually torture people, what the hell difference is there between them and Le Chiffre and White and all the other members of Quantum? Hint: the correct answer is NOT "MI6 gives villas to the people they torture who didn't actually do anything wrong."
This movie really should have asked that question, and explored the answer, and have had their willingness to torture come back and bite MI6 in the ass. It didn't. And for that, yeah, I have a big, big problem with it.
So, yeah. I'm not saying don't go see it. There's good stuff in it. But I will say this: if you go and see it, go in with eyes open and realize what it's saying about the guy we're supposed to be cheering for and the government he's working for.
P.S. There will very likely be spoilers in any comments left on this post. Consider yourselves warned.
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Date: 2008-11-15 04:03 am (UTC)I never got very into Bond. This may be because, before I ever encountered Bond, I was introduced to John Le Carre. I'm told that it is possible, easily, to get Bond first and Le Carre afterwards and love both, but that if you start with le Carre, you can't go backward to Bond and find it anything but two-dimensional. That's about my own experience as well.
But one of the things I dearly loved about Le Carre's spies, is that they are both committed to their work and aware of the ethical implications and dilemmas of it. I haven't read everything he's written, but at least in the Smiley trilogy there are no tortures. There are, however, kidnappings, psychological-pressure interrogations, blackmail using someone's sick daughter's well-being as bait, constant working with extremely shady people, and putting one's relatively innocent allies in positions which directly result in them getting killed. All of this by the good guys.
The thing which makes it brilliant is that the good guys know all of this damn well, and are acutely aware of how much it puts them in the moral shade. "We have crossed each other's frontiers; we are the no-men in this no-man's land," one of them said about himself and his Soviet counterpart, no longer sure which of them could really be said to have right on his side of the current operation. The Little Drummer Girl, which I also love, has even nastier stuff done by the side from whose point of view the story is told, torture included... but it's made extremely clear before the end of the book that just because these are the protagonists doesn't necessarily mean they are the good guys, or even that they think they are the good guys, only that they are doing what they feel they have to in order to survive, with all the horrible ethical implications that can sometimes entail. Who, if anyone, counts as a good guy in that book, is left terribly uncertain by the end, and the characters know that about themselves.