This Week's Debate: Skyfall's familiar elements: Lazy thievery or the work of inspired "magpies"?

Skyfall's familiar elements: Lazy thievery? Homage? The work of inspired "magpies"?

One similarity after another seems to be cropping up at the moment between Skyfall and other Bond films, whether it's the "fake Bond death" thing from FRWL and YOLT, the villain having a list of British agents and killing them (TLD), the stale old car, the Goldfinger line spoken to Q, a handful of re-used locations, the signature gun and about 50 similarities to TWINE highlighted in other threads.

Thus, why? Is it laziness? Is it by now, after 23 films, unavoidable? Or is it an anniversary homage thing like the various past elements scattered through DAD?

Your thoughts?

If done well it doesn't matter to me. Stuff like Bond faking his death is fine by me, given it's not something that's been done in 45 years plus there seems to be more to it this time than it was for FRWL and especially YOLT ("But Bond is dead! It was all over the newspapers!").

The only thing one that list of which I actually find to be lazy rather than a coincidence or a homage is the signature gun.

Aside from that I do no mind the occasional homage (the "You must be joking" line for example).

I think that the "fake Bond death" thing from TB and YOLT is simply a coincidence and looks to be being done very differently with Bond actually being believed to be dead by everyone rather than just the general public. Also, the villain having a list of British agents and killing them I believe to be simply a minor coincidence to TLD which I otherwise probably would not have noticed. Finally, the Aston Martin DB5 (ot 'the stale old car' as you put it) has bee in every five Bond films prior to this already (six if you count the deleted scene in TWINE) so is more like just being Bond's car rather than thievery.

Essentialy there are bound to be coincidences and similarities in any series if it runs for this long a time and I feel that as long as the world is turning, the producers and writers will always e able to find new ideas and scenarios for the Bond films.

I consider the "You must be joking" line a coincidence. It's a common phrase. Bound to crop up a couple of times over the course of 23 films.

I'd imagine it was a deliberate homage, seeing as it's Bond saying it to Q. Also they probably wanted to link old Q and nu-Q with a wink to the fans.

It works well, and I like that it's being used in a different context from GF and DAD which always referred to a gadget, this time it's Bond not taking some kid seriously.

CJB wrote:

I'd imagine it was a deliberate homage, seeing as it's Bond saying it to Q. Also they probably wanted to link old Q and nu-Q with a wink to the fans.

Could be. Then again, Pat Fearing says "You must be joking" to Bond as well. I shudder to think that Bond could be giving young Q the mink glove treatment.

But like I said, it's an extremely common phrase.

Perilagu Khan wrote:

I shudder to think that Bond could be giving young Q the mink glove treatment.

Throw a sloshed M into the mix and you have a typical Friday night at Vauxhall Cross.

Bond faked his own death in FRWL and TB?

I remember a 007 double getting strangled during a SPECTRE exercise, and Jaques Bouvard's coffin being draped with a banner bearing his coincidental initials, but how is that Bond faking his own death?

That's EON giving the audience a momentary jolt of concern.

In YOLT it was a ploy to get SPECTRE off Bond's back while he investigated the Japan lead. In Skyfall it seems to be a case of taking advantage of a public shooting event, and staying out of sight as other agents are subsequently killed, making it possible to return to the job incognito.

Anyway, Bond has been presumed killed on numerous occasions:

"A grave deep enough, I think, to keep even 007 from walking."

"Aw, the sharks have them - make port."

An alligator appeared to get him in India.

"Still alive, I see - and still bungling in the dark."

"He's my new anchorman!"

"You almost killed us!" "I did kill us." "Do you want to put that in English, for those of us who don't speak spy?"

Bond has often taken advantage of a villain's overconfidence during the course of a mission, but his apparent death has only been set up in advance - as a plot point - on that one occasion in '67. So I don't think it's too soon to do it 'again' (it's never happened to CraigBond before, anymore than has finding a dead girl covered in a precious mineral).

I expect we'll see a lot of recycling in the films to come, as EON takes advantage of having started a new timeline. If it's well done and not too frequent I will consider it the work of inspired magpies.

Of course, we each have our own idea of what constitutes 'well done,' 'frequent' and 'inspired,' so I can't see any given degree being satisfactory to all.

Lazenby. wrote:

One similarity after another seems to be cropping up at the moment between Skyfall and other Bond films, whether it's the "fake Bond death" thing from FRWL and YOLT

I hardly think the sequence in SF is going to be anything like YOLT. As has been pointed out, YOLT was a deliberate ploy by MI6 to stage Bond's death.

Spoiler:

So nothing in that scene makes sense as Bond's death being staged.

I hate to say it, but it's hard to take these threads seriously when you're blithely ignoring common sense for the sake of attacking the film. Which is a shame, because there are interesting points for discussion in here - but for the past two days, all you have been trying to do is turn the forum on the film.

Prisoner Monkeys wrote:

Based on the SF trailer

I hate to say it, but it's hard to take these threads seriously when you're blithely ignoring common sense for the sake of attacking the film. Which is a shame, because there are interesting points for discussion in here - but for the past two days, all you have been trying to do is turn the forum on the film.

Until we know the exact reasons behind Bond's faked or presumed death in Skyfall, no member here has the upper hand nor right to criticise anybody else for their opinions in this thread. "Based on the Skyfall trailer" is a comment which works both ways, Monkeys. It reduces both your own and Lazenby's opinions to nothing more than speculation based on your own assumptions. Nobody's assumptions can be proved as correct or incorrect until we've seen the film or had the relevant assumptions completely confirmed by Eon.

Bond being presumed dead in a film is not an original idea, which I assume is why Lazenby gave readers of this thread the option to credit Eon as "inspired magpies" rather than just lazy recyclists. Then there's the "undecided" option in the poll to suggest that as yet it's still too unclear to see where Eon are going with Bond's "death". Provoking a page worth of responses in an otherwise dormant debate section by merely seeking responses to a plot element from Skyfall is hardly "ignoring common sense", is it?

"Ignoring common sense" is a quote far more applicable to the continuous baiting of a fellow member of these forums, especially after having been warned by both moderators and myself to cease doing so. You clearly don't agree with Lazenby over Skyfall and, by and large, neither do I. I'm optimistic, you're optimistic. Lazenby isn't, yet he still makes the effort to explain in-depth and provide past evidence of why he's fearful of the film, which is far from the idle "trolling" he's been accused of as a result. People have different opinions, please learn to tolerate them.

I am perfectly tolerant ot Lazenby.'s opinion. I am not trying to make him change it at all. But in the past few days, I have found his posts to be unusually and uncharacteristically aggressive and nowhere near as well thought-out as those he has made in the past. For example, the options in the poll: "lazy theives" or "inspired magpies". Now, I don't know what the term means in England, but here in Australia, "magpie" is only marginally better than "thief", and so when reading that poll for the first time, I felt that neither was really an option, and that the wording of "inspired magpies" was passive-aggressive.

The reason why I say this is because Lazenby. does raise a good point in the theme of the debate, namely the question of how much EON can justifably derive from their own films before it stops being homeage and starts being laziness. And yes, the examples given in the SKYFALL trailer are pertinent to the discussion. But it's the way Lazenby. is going about it that I find to be inflammatory. He's been preaching doom and gloom about it for weeks, redoubled his efforts with the release of the trailer, and then starts a debate using terms that I know to be less than endearing. What am I supposed to think? That it's an intelligent conversation with a side of wordplay? Or that it's another attack, dressed up with unusual language?

I'm not saying that Lazenby. can't have his opinion ... just that maybe he should think about how he presents himself a little. Even if what he posted was never intended as an attack, the fact that someone has interpreted it as such means that something has gone seriously wrong. Maybe that something is me jumping to conclusions. Maybe it's Lazenby.'s presentation, or not being aware that a phrase he finds to be common has another, unintended meaning somewhere else in the world. But either way, it's something for the both of us to work on.

PS - I didn't realise you had already said something when I posted that message. I have since seen it.

Every series ends up having some similarities in stories and characters after running for so long, it can't be helped because there's only so much you can write about. Quantum of Solace had Bond going out of MI6 on his own like in Licence To Kill, Casino Royale had Bond falling in love only to lose his love like in On Her Majestys Secret Service. Skyfall will probably have something that's similar to another Bond film, but by now is it really avoidable? And I won't complain about those trunks coming back

There's still loads of possible plot roads they could have taken to avoid the kind of awful "M's involved and it's personal" sh*te that Skyfall is gonna dump on us.

They're making the most of a character who would usually just be sat behind a desk for a few minutes like in Goldeneye, a waste of a great actress, one of the best in the country. I don't blame them making the most of that.

And after all, M is a person, she's not a robot. If you want to see non-emotional people, then go watching Terminator (even though, as shown in Terminator 2, a machine might have even more sentiments than a person). I'm not critizing Terminator movies, I love them.

Walecs wrote:

And after all, M is a person, she's not a robot.

There's a difference between just being human being with feelings and a poorly written, post-menstrual, incompetent, schizoid, senile old bag who acts like a 19th century caricature of womankind's irrational nature.

Since when did Benard Lee's M go on about his "instincts as a father" or bitch slap Hugo Drax?

Undecided - It all depends on the context, although I criticise P&W's scripts the ideas are usually interesting and have potential its the execution that fails miserably. Likewise homages are fine if they are integrated and logical, Lazenby's clearing of his desk draw in OHMSS is great, a wander through Q's lab and seeing older stuff hanging about likewise so its all down to the delivery.

Modern films are pretty much all thievery, simply by virtue of the volume of films going before and the inevitable desire to use what is proven, so it all comes down to the presentation and mix on the screen - cut them some slack and go in prepared to be entertained....if the film prevents you from retaining that perspective its failed if you maintain it to the end and leave entertained then its all ok in my book.

Lets face it TSWLM is pretty much the most blatant piece of thievery in cinema, but even knowing that I still feel it works pretty well (certainly more than its two immediate and more 'original' predecessors) and was ultimately worthwhile.

Yeah, SPY is wholly derivative of YOLT (as is MR, but perhaps not so specific), but I usually think of SPY as a pastiche, not as a Bond movie. It is so schizophrenic, veering from the general good humor (which I think is often wrongheaded in the Moore films) to the insanely in appropriate over the top moment of Bond pumping four bullets into Stromberg, which just feels spliced in from a whole different movie and subgenre.

It has taken me decades to even get to the point where I can enjoy SPY or MR, because so many moments are 'ohGEEZUS!' (and in fact, I only own them because I love the Ken Adam and Derek Meddings work -- which may also explain why I don't own L&LD and GOLDEN GUN, even though I'd consider GOLDEN GUN marginally ... VERY marginally better as a Bond movie.)

I often consider Logan someting of a a pastiche writer, based on his genre efforts like BATS and STAR TREK NEMESIS (the latter very much typifies the 'let's try to make WRATH OF KHAN again' thinking that sparked a lot of the movies onto paths that did NOT result in anything like KHAN), so it wouldn't surprise me if he loaded the script with things like the Bond/Q exchange. Could be they got throttled back by Mendes. Even the only picture he has probably fully written that I enjoy, RANGO, runs off of movie cliches. (I'm not even considering GLADIATOR or THE AVIATOR his, since he only did the Commodus stuff in the former and his draft of the latter was turned in something like six years before the movie got shot, suggesting an awful lot of the final product has nothing to do with him. Also I've never seen more than 5min of AVIATOR, just because I didn't like the casting.)

My longwinded point being that Logan probably knows the old films as well as Wilson, so they could just kneejerk back to an older film's solution (or gag line ... reusing the "you're full of it" GOLDEN GUN line in TLD is one of the most annoying bits in the latter, just like Dalton murdering 'bon appetit' in LTK, not that he could have ever delivered it as well as Connery in YOLT.)

It could well be that when you break SKYFALL down, it is the Peter Morgan gimmick, processed into Bond by P&W, and then mainstreamed by Logan.

As for Patrick Marber ... maybe he did a dialog polish? I don't know when he came on, but I'd figure improving dialog would be his strong suite, and he could definitely up the game from Logan.

Largo's Shark wrote:

Walecs wrote:

And after all, M is a person, she's not a robot.

There's a difference between just being human being with feelings and a poorly written, post-menstrual, incompetent, schizoid, senile old bag who acts like a 19th century caricature of womankind's irrational nature.

Since when did Benard Lee's M go on about his "instincts as a father" or bitch slap Hugo Drax?

OK, Shark has sold me. I voted lazy thievery by magpies

I reckon the 'recycled' things cropping up in Skyfall are deliberate 50th anniversary homages.

Also ... 'lazy thievery'? Considering EON made all those previous Bond flicks, does that mean they're stealing from themselves? :scratch:

Blunt Instrument wrote:

Also ... 'lazy thievery'? Considering EON made all those previous Bond flicks, does that mean they're stealing from themselves? :scratch:

It sure works for James Horner. And like Eon lifting from trendsetting movies, he steals from others as well, sometimes note for note.

Please. Only Bond fans spot this stuff anyway, and half of them enjoy doing so. The general audience won't give two effs, and any reminder of previous films registering on a subconscious level just helps the longetivity of the franchise.

I stand by my thesis that 90% of the Bond franchise's lasting appeal lies in comparing and contrasting. Stuff like this is good for that.