Last night we went to see Bond 22 – Quantum of Solace. I’ll hide any spoilers behind the ‘break’.
If your memory of ‘Casino Royale’ is a little vague, it’s not critical but you’d benefit from watching it just before heading to the cinema…
… as this film picks up moments from where Casino Royale finished.
We learn, very early, that there is a big shadowy organisation – with people everywhere. Bond goes off hunting for them (and in the process goes a little ‘rogue’, but with ‘M’ turning a bit of a blind eye whilst making all the moves to bring him back).
The organisation has a plan to control the water supplies of Bolivia. In the process they seem happy to double cross the CIA – which is a bit odd. Whilst controlling the water supply of a country is a ‘nice little earner’, it is quite a long term payback – and you can’t afford to have the CIA unhappy with you!
Also, for such a shadowy and all pervasive organisation, it seemed a little…. small.
That’s not too big a problem though, as this does leave scope for Bond 23.
Though I did enjoy the film, I think it got a bit messy in the middle with the environmental rally, the big underground dams of water and so on – it seemed like there were several drafts and when an edit was made the older version wasn’t completely excised.
That didn’t stop it being great fun, and I really like that Bond films are becoming more ‘interdependent’ – that one film leads into the next.
The film was a great ride, and I’m really enjoying the new direction with Daniel Craig – Bond should not be all about gadgetry. They tried to go in this direction with Tim Dalton, but at the time it was too big a change after Roger Moore – and they reverted to gadgetry with Pierce Brosnan (invisible cars? puh-lease!)
There was one area which, if allowed to go unchecked, could lead back to gadgetry and unbelievable situations – that is that the hotel in the desert had hydrogen piped through all it’s walls. A fuel cell installation would use wires and have the fuel cells in one area of the building. As soon as this was mentioned I thought ‘that’s blowing up’ – and then one chap said ‘sounds a bit unstable’. Yep. Definitely.
Some may object to the rather unneccessary touch sensitive tabletop, but these already exist.
What I’d like to see in Bond 23 is the ‘Big Reveal’ of this organisation (SPECTRE? Can’t be SMERSH!) and the grand scheme they have for the world (of which Bolivia was just a small part).
2 Comments
I’m a fuel-cell-literate industry analyst, and you’ve nailed this pretty well Murk. Firstly, the last thing the oft-maligned fuel cell industry needs is perveted bad publicity like this. Not only do current FC CHP (combined heat and power) commercial and residential instalations fit your description, i.e. one fuel cell producing power for the building which is of course transmitted by wires, but hydrogen is just about the least explosive and certainly the most volatile of combustible gases. Natrural gas lines have been installed in buildings for 150 years with only the occasional ‘incident’ as our local gas company calls thems, and it is far more dangerous than hydrogen as is gasoline and its heavier-than-air vapor. Hydrogen, if it it does leak, rises and dissipates quickly and therefore might burn on its way out, but it would be almost impossible to create an explosion. This ‘Quantum’ scene plays into two popular misconceptions: 1. The Hindeburg was the result of its hydrogen exploding – The blimp was coated with a form of rocket fuel to help contain the volatile gas, and that caught fire, burned and crashed while the hydrogen, burning or not, quickly rose into the atmosphere, and 2. Hydrogen energy from combustion or fuel cells (which involve no burning) has nothing to do with the hydrogen bomb or the sun’s energy, the energy from both of which is produced by fusion under extreme heat and pressure. Not only have there been no major safety incidents concerning the 10′s of thousands of fuel cell installations around the world (from toys to the coming new Freedom Tower being built at Ground Zero), but there have been no major safety problems with our liquid hydrogen fuelled space shuttle rockets since the early seventies.
it will be easy to make spoofs based on Quantum of Solace… so much breaking glass, so many chase scenes, plus almost every plot twist from the last movie was recycled