I finally saw the movie and since it’s been out a while, I think I can add a few spoilers from here onward…..
Well, the movie was pretty good, and perhaps it is because I went in with very low expectactions. Yes, the title sequence was a little flat but I thought that blending the female figures into the sand dunes was very creative. Half the time you thought you were looking at some pattern when there was nothing there. Musically, it was also very forgettable. However, they were brilliant in holding the 007 theme until the very end credits. Part of my brain was in tension awaiting that musical cue, which did not come until the end. This is a fantastic way of bookending what was obviously part II of “Casino Royale” last year. And it signals the start of the Daniel Craig years, which should be good.
The villains keep on referring to “our organization” throughout the film, but they never reveal it to be SPECTRE. In the end, they make a reference to Quantum, but that would be a bad direction for the series to take. If they are going back to the classic Bond years, what is better than SPECTRE?? And the plot of this movie was perfect for the “extortion” part of the organization. Bring back SPECTRE !!!
Good movies steal from the best. This movie has echoes of “Thunderball” in the death of Agent Fields, the comely young British agent that dies while trying to help Bond. And echoes of both “GoldFinger” and “For Your Eyes Only” in the young woman trying to avenge a death in the family. Excellent stuff.
Also, “Quantum” may be the first Bond movie where the ingredients and process to make the vodka martini are explicitly spelled out. There may have been a reference to this unique drink in an earlier film, but I don’t think it was as detailed as here, making a nice counterpoint to the Vesper drink which was featured in “Casino Royale.”
Missed Dearly: Our special armaments agent Q and his gadgets. And some girls in bikinis, this is supposed to be escapist entertainment !!! If the writers can come up with an iconic villain that is not too preposterous in today’s realistic environments that would be great. Maybe a guy with nanobots that transform him into an animal at convenient times1.
- Cybernetic lycanthropy, as Archangel has so succinctly put it [↩]