John Logan On Writing Bond 24

Maybe Bond could do a bit of cross-country skiing to get to an objective of some kind, like recovering part of a downed satellite (as early rumours of SF suggested). He climbs a frozen waterfall to get to it (taken from the original draft of TND), where he completes his mission, but is caught during his escape. Three henchmen on snowmobiles give chase, but it is not enough. He gets to a frozen lake and a snowed-in boathouse at the top of the waterfall. He gives the henchmen the slip long enough to rig the sails of an ice yacht, and then goes out onto the lake. The chase resumes as Bond sails upstream, trying to escape on the yacht. He takes them out one by one, and cue the title theme.

Yeah, that'd do it.

One of my better ideas, actually. Cross-country skiing would be good for covering long distances with relative ease. A downed satellite works well with the idea of having to travel over land. And the whole thing has an element of randomness to it, so it's not like the villains have some kind of encampment where they have overlooked the boathouse and it's convenient escape route.

Another idea for a sequence, maybe a finale:

The villain has set himself up in an old sea fort in the Caribbean, dating back to the Golden Age of Piracy. Bond has to infiltrate it by swimming out over a coral reef and diving onto the ruins of a Spanish galleon that was sunk by an unusual current running through a labyrinth of underwater caves, which lead up under the fortress. Bond discovers that the fissure leading up into the cave network is not wide enough to fit through, so he is forced to improvise an explosive out of his scuba tanks to blow it open. He then has to free-dive - one of the most dangerous sports in the world - through the caves to approach the fort. He emerges in a cave that the British or Spanish used to construct a discreet entrance into the fort for furtive prisoner transfers. It is then a case of using stealth to enter the fort, locate the villain and thwart his plans. Very LALD.

Yep, the producers/writers are quite fond of finding ways to give 'extreme sports' a platform in the Bond movies (snowboarding/base-jumping in AVTAK, bungee-jumping in GE, HALO jumping in TND, free-running in CR etc) ... so no reason why free-diving couldn't be in there.

So long as it fits within the context of the film, I have no issue with it. It's when entire sections of the film are built around it that it becomes a problem. AVTAK does it quite well and quite poorly at the same time: the base jump is a clever getaway because it allows Mayday to quickly traverse the city without being limited by the geography of the streets or traffic. On the other hand, the scenes in the Eiffel Tower were deliberately put there to make the base jump possible.

Extreme sports almost by definition exist solely as an affectation of some more direct action, fun to watch as a show, probably fun to indulge in person but their intrusion into action sequences rarely makes sense and more often than not removes any sense of urgency or threat by their superficial nature. So it has been with Bond of late and perhaps the only time it really worked for me was in Goldeneye where the brevity of the indulgence becomes a big factor other.

That said I would love to see some snowbound sequence, just as long as its not the dreadful stuff of DaD. I'd much rather see Bond careering around the streets of a frozen city in a straightforward car or foot chase, all of which offer ample scope for excitment, than any number of bouncy flashy extreme sport variations.

We have had enough car and foot chases in recent films. That's why I suggested the alpine skiing/ice climbing/ice yachting sequence, and tried to make it fit into a story of it's own.