x1000 on the action scenes. I'm sick and tired of this "herky jerky" camera bullshit. Who likes that? You can't tell what's happening on screen.

I liked most of the non-action scenes and the opera sequence was terrific. But Casino Royale is soooo much better.

Wow...this is almost everything I was going to type.

Almost everything about this movie is wrong in relation to James Bond movies. And if you think this is Ian Fleming's version of Bond, you obviously haven't read any of his books.

The action scenes are total shit. All of them. Who the fuck edited this movie? They are all shot so close-up, with the jerky camera and lightning fast cuts that you can't even tell what the fuck is going on. Awful. And this was EVERY action scene. Hell, the Bourne movies pull back some and let you at least see what the fuck is going on. I know they want to "modernize" the franchise but even the Transporter movies let you enjoy the action scenes.

The opening title sequence sucked. Granted the theme song was pure ass but you could have at least thrown a few nekked girls in the background to remind us this is supposed to be a JB film. Craig doing the exact same shadow pose does not a JB title sequence make. One girl made out of sand doesn't cut it. Extremely dull. But again...it could just be the song. It is by far one of the worst in the JB catalog.

Fuck Judi Dench as M. I hated when they originally cast her and hate her even more now. M doesn't go to crime scenes and investigate shit. He sits at his desk and has his people do that crap for him. He doesn't get kidnapped, he doesn't whine. He barks orders and keeps 007 in his place. 007 doesn't need a fucking mommy...he needs his boss back. I am sick of this shit.

The villain is super lame. I know...007 has faced his share of lame villains in the past but I thought they could at least come up with something better than an eco-water-bearing hotel owner??? What the fuck? And why is 007 there in the first place? Is it revenge? Is it to help the girl get revenge? Is it to help get water to the people? Real estate? Who knows with this convoluted plot.

I don't want snappy one-liners every few seconds but Jesus, Connery shits better one-liners in his Depends now than the few written for Craig. And Craig's delivery of the meager few are pretty terrible. He has no sense of timing with them and they just come out flat and show how lame they are. There was only one decent chuckle and it actually came from M regarding the dead-end comment.

The Bond girl. Oh yeah...who cares? Bond doesn't seem to want to fuck her so why should we? Tell me again why she's in the movie?

The bright spots which are few and far between: Craig still makes an excellent Bond but he is being shit on by the writing as Brosnan was. Find a happy medium. You don't have to have invisible cars but at least give us some realistic cool technology that may or may not be real. This one had cell phones and you can also draw pretty pictures of secret intel on the secretary's desk or wall. Holy cow! Impressive!

Use Craig's strengths as a quiet but cool strongman but let the guy have fun too. Say what you want about Roger Moore but the one thing I always liked about his movies was: Pussy first. Bad guys second. Done. And he winked at the camera from time to time to let you know he was having a blast and you were in on the fun. They were fun movies. Not the best all the time but at least fun to watch with fantastic stunts that were filmed far enough back for you to see the action and realize that even though it was a stunt man doing it, it was still a REAL stunt. you kids marvel at that for awhile!

And Bond producers: Use all the money you made on the last several movies to hire some decent screenwriters. I felt like I did when I watched the newest Indiana Jones movie: "All that time and money and this is the best script/story they could come up with? What the hell?"

There really wasn't much good about this movie as it was just your average action flick. This was not a James Bond movie. If you took out the parts where he was called 007, you would have thought you were watching Action Night on Showtime.

The famous James Bond theme was nowhere to be found in the film as well. Yeah, a couple of times it was subtle and barely included but hey, you own it...why not use it? Remember the good old days when talented composers could create new and beautiful music (John Barry...where are you?) that had a heart, was catchy, didn't sound like every other generic action score, and could interweave the theme song and the James Bond theme in new and interesting ways throughout the picture? Oh yeah...you can't because fucking David Arnold has been slowly killing the movies with his bland scores that keep getting worse with every consecutive Bond film he does. Get a new composer, please.

This new Bond already needs a reboot. I am just hoping that they put the barrel shot at the end of the film to say that this is the closing of the chapter of the rough around the edges Bond and that the suave, sophisticated, girl-chasing fun loving Bond will be back in the next series. And maybe it means a new M, composer, writer, editor, and director may be on the horizon. One can dream.

My rating: **1/2 out of *****

Craig is an excellent Bond, but he is not THE Bond as envisionned by Fleming, certainly not physically. In fact none of the actors who have played Bond can claim to be the ultimate Bond. Flemming's Bond was portrayed as tough, but human. Someone who made mistakes and who could feel pain. This side of Bond was never really explored until Craig. However, Bond was mean't to be tough, not brutish or animalistic as he was portrayed in Casino Royale. This is evident in the book, when he explains to Mathis how he obtained his '00' credentials.

My favorite Bond is still Connery, but while most Moore Bond films suck, there's one thing he could do better than Connery, and that's deliver one-liners. His timing, as suggested above, was much better than Connery's.

I just hope everyone who complains about the action scene edits are consistent and are equally disgusted with the Bourne movies and Nolan's Batman. Those movies are just as shaky cam quick cuts. If you don't agree, watch them again.

i thought it was incredibly entertaining.

I will have to side with the "disappointed" crowd on QoS. I really like Marc Forster as a director, but he's totally wrong for the Bond franchise. He makes the mistake of amping up the chase scenes, but forgetting that these characters are human beings, not just time-fillers for an uninteresting thread-bare plot. There are quite a few brutal action scenes that need to show us that Bond is still human and not so Terminator-like because once Bond dispatches people, he just never seems to take a deep breath and say to himself "Blimey, I could have been killed..." and just moves on to the next plot point far too efficiently when no one is supposedly around him, it's like Bond is even aware of the camera following his every move, and afraid to not look cold and ruthless. Also, for some odd reason, I just find Daniel Craig's chemistry with practically anyone in the cast to be nill and lacking in charm (save for Agent Fields). Perhaps playing Bond with Terminator-like mannerisms just kills whatever chemistry that could develop between the characters, even though they almost achieve some chemistry between Bond and Mathis, but it was too little too late.

The main villain, Dominic Greene, just isn't quite menacing enough, and far too uninteresting given his end game in the film, as his part in the story development is simply poor and uninvolving. I did like Camile, played by Olga Kurylenko, as she and Bond were simply two ships passing in the night, without the requisite port dockage (probably a first in the Bond franchise). But Camile's own little story never quite meshes well with Bond's own personal vendetta following the events of Casino Royale, and again, story development is rather boring.

I did laugh when I found out Agent Fields' first name in the credits: .

I want Q and the gadgets back in the Bond franchise, I need them. I am not all that enamored with Judi Dench as M, lose her if we have to in the next installment, I won't care. The theme song is at the bottom of the list for me in the Bond franchise as well.

Overall, the 105-minute running time felt like 125 minutes because the film drags when it's not involved with a chase scene, and that's not a good thing for a film attempting to re-vitalize the James Bond films for a new generation.

I give it 2.5 stars, or a grade of C+.

Was the barrel shot intro introduced again?

I'm not going to read this thread (beyond this page and post); I liked the film, as did the friends that I went with.

No need to over think the franchise by reading all y'alls cheers and jeers.

Bring on the next one.

I liked it....not as much as Casino Royale though.

QoS exceeded my expectations, but my expectations were pretty low to begin with.

Marc Forster was the wrong director for this 007 film - he doesn't have a grasp of what a James Bond film should be. As great a departure Casino Royale was from the formula, it remained faithful to the James Bond movie character. Forster is too arrogant, too much of a self-proclaimed auteur to follow the footsteps of a franchise older than he is.

We don't need over-the-top gadgetry and shudder-inducing one-liners, but is it really that difficult to let Daniel Craig say, "Bond, James Bond" just once in the film? Other than the names of the characters, there's simply nothing that makes this distinctly a James Bond film.

And then there's the action sequences. They're all a dreadful mess, especially when the action is spliced with the horse race and the opera performance. It's done for the sake of being artsy-fartsy, and doesn't take the time to truly and meaningfully connect the two concurrent actions. Note to the editor: watch the baptism scene in The Godfather. That's how it's supposed to be done.

I think you're the one who should watch them again. There is a big difference between the editing in the Greengrass Bourne movies and that in the Nolan Batman/QoS films. In both The Dark Knight and QoS, spatial logic is tossed out the window - you simply cannot visualize where everything is taking place; you can only distinguish the what's, how's, and when's of these scenes.

Just because a scene is shot handheld and the edits are quick does not automatically mean there is only one way to sequence the shots in a timeline. The action scenes in TDK and QoS lack the care and attention to detail that went into editing those in the Bourne films. Bourne Ultimatum was well-deserved in winning the Oscar for best editing for that reason, and it's awful when filmmakers come in thinking they can emulate it just by shaking the camera and cutting quickly without an ounce of talent or vision in structuring action.

Ultimately, I'm giving QoS a 3/5 because there are some pretty stand-out scenes. The opera (pre-chase) was excellent, and there was definitely a glimmer of dramatic possibility when Bond was telling Camille about killing someone for the first time - it felt very Fleming-esque and left me longing for a lengthier monologue.

Just because someone wins an Oscar doesn't make it legit. To try and differentiate between the 3 movies is ridiculous. Greengrass even admitted is amateurish action direction by significantly toning down the shaky cam in the 3rd one, yet it still is over the top. Only a weak director creates chaos in an action sequence via camera work. Bourne movies are amazing...QoS was amazing...Nolan's Batman is amazing...but all 3 are very weak in the action editing department. And to try and separate one or two from the three is laughable. Oscar or not.

I don't mean to derail the thread, but I have to address something here. The last two Bourne films were cut the way they were for a specific purpose. That purpose was to show how fast and talented Bourne is at hand to hand combat. Batman Begins is cut in a similar way for a very different reason: To show how Batman uses misdirection and mystery to psychologically overwhelm his foes, beating them mentally as well as physically. And while they may be edited in a quick cut fashion, Batman does not employ much shaky cam, simply quick cuts of very tight shots. And The Dark Knight doesn't do much of this at all, framing the action in a much more straightforward way.

I will agree that Forster had no clue what he was doing when he cut QoS this way, but Nolan had a very specific purpose for cutting the action in Batman Begins the way he did, and it had nothing to do with emulating the Bourne franchise.

I don't miss Q and the gadgets at all, remember when Bond surfed a 100 ft tidal wave? Or how about when he was driving a invisible car? I love the direction the series is going and this installment was awesome! I still think that I liked Casino Royale better, but this was the sequel and it was a good follow up.

Not necessarily a good thing. Have you actually read Quantum of Solace?

One of my all-time favorite Bond moments ever happens when Connery walks late into the classified MI6 meeting and takes his seat among all of the other agents.

Not The Spy Who Loved Me. Not a chance, and I will defend that to the end.

Shocking.

From Russia With Love is, and will most likely always be, the best James Bond film ever.

Again, this is completely irrelevant.

Have any of you actually read Fleming's terrible writing or am I actually the only one?

Really on the fence about this one. I'm all for showing Bond as having a human side, but I'm just not into this whole 'Bond in Love/Bond wants revenge' story arc that began late in Casino Royale (the worst aspect of that otherwise great movie IMO) and continues here. I didn't believe one second of that love storyline, so to have this film emotionally anchored to it is a negative.

Next, the whole thing is getting played out and is already as much of a spy movie cliche as the gadgets and other things they are actively trying to distance themselves from.

All that said, I didn't think it was a bad film. I enjoyed it, despite its faults. I just hope that one of these days they let Craig's 007 be a real agent with a real assignment and not just some angsty avenger.

Thank you. I would never say the fight scenes in either Nolan Batman film employed what we all now so fondly call shakey-cam. They were simply filmed very tight and for their respective scenes I think they all work quite well. The fight scenes in the Bourne films are also extremely effective, imo.

It's only the Bourne car chases that are overdone and overly preposterous.

M:"Now that we're all here"

You just named two moments from one movie that was one of the worst Bond films ever. You can have cool gadgets and realistic amazing stunts and still be enjoyable. See the first 20 years. Certainly not every Bond film applies during this time but most do. Examples are too numerous to name.

Maybe, just maybe...The Bourne films raised the bar thus the Bond films had to respond. I don't blame Bourne films for the Bond/Bourne comparison. I blame the way Bond films had become over the top silly and less realistic over the years. As I said earlier, I don't mind gadgets but keep them to a minimum and make them realistic.

Back on topic....

I'm very much looking forward to seeing QoS and I have a feeling I'm going to like it a lot.


Craig...
Olga Kurylenko...oh dear gawd

my exact feelings on the film but now I don't have to waste all that time typing it up.

If anything I may give it less that 2 & a half stars. I can't believe the praise this film is getting in this thread so far. I LOVED Casinoe Royale, it deserves all the hype & love it gets, if not more. But I'm sorry, this is NOT a Bond movie, it doesn't feel like a Bond movie. This looks & feels just another modern, post-Bourne wannabe action movie. It doesn't feel like the next chapter in a new updated Bond franchise. And the action is flat out unwatchable. Only made more puzzling, b/c Craig can DO action, it's not a case where you need to use every trick in the book to cover up the fact that you have an actor that can't convincingly fight.

And holy crap do I agree with your hatred of Judi Dench in this role.