Review of Quantum of Solace (2008) by Aaron W — 25 Mar 2017

With a theme song like something out of Sesame Street.

Entertaining, yes. Bond, no.

With CG stunts and set pieces like something out of a mousetrap game, a bad guy whose scariest feature is his bulging eyes, a plot without focus, and a forgettable finale that looks like it was set in a flat, cheap pretend building, this is a recipe for something else, and that thing is not Bond, though it still manages to thrill.

The cinema ticket should be discounted when something has been shot and edited so close and so fast that it is only watchable on a smaller screen. It's fun to be this close to Bond, and it works (on TV only), but I miss the sense of space and found the whole endeavour rather claustrophobic, and the locations felt like a series of film sets and were not properly linked.

Bond is famous for title sequences and here it fails too. If that were not enough, the song is dire, sounding like something from Sesame Street.

Skyfall did rectify almost all these flaws and that's admission of failure if anything is. Also all Bond films should be able to stand alone, and while we like to see Felix, M and Q as regular features, I did not like the way this film used the superior Casino Royale as a crutch, nor did I remember what Vesper did and who she was, so many references were lost on me.

I was taught at film school if you are going to show a knife in the first act, make sure it's used by the end of the film. We call this "cup theory". So when you show huge blockaded water courses and then don't deliver the expected Bond exploding walls of rock and water flooding back through the pipes with a finale a la Total Recall (it's done instead in a vague little aside with M) you have failed to jump through some pretty basic filmmaking hoops.

Did I like anything about the film? Well, I loved many of the shots, but they creamed off too carefully the best parts and this left too many edits, too quick. As others have said, I need to understand the layout of a stunt or set-piece in order to care about what's happening. The rules of filmmaking were again broken with random camera angles that were not thought out, but used for how good they looked, over all else.

I this director should make adverts.