Quantum of Solace

If you only watch the opening minutes of the latest Bond film, Quantum of Solace, you'd be forgiven for assuming that it's THE GREATEST JAMES BOND FILM OF ALL TIME.

Kicking off mid-way through a breathtaking car chase, which sees Daniel Craig fend off bad-guys and Italian carbinari in a gadget-free Aston Martin, before moving swiftly onto a rooftop chase in Sienna, during their famous palio, it's high octane thrills from the word 'go.'

But while the blistering pace continues from that point on, the quintessential qualities of a James Bond movie dry up - making Quantum of Solace, on the whole, more like a Jason Bourne style spy-thriller than anything resembling the James Bond franchise we've come to know and love.

Director Marc Forster is deliberately trying to steer the Daniel Craig-era movies away from what went before, but he wildly oversteps the mark by shedding some of the staples of the series. Gone are the gunsight opening credits. Bond, despite drinking a large quantity of them, never orders his martini 'shaken, not stirred.' There are no gadgets, barely any witticisms and Bond-girl Olga Kurylenko receives nothing but a rather chaste 'hard kiss on the mouth' in the final scenes.

Don't get me wrong - Quantum of Solace is, as far as action adventure movies go, blisteringly exciting and well made. It's just, instead of being 'all mouth and no trousers,' it's the other way around. There's so much action and so many thrills that the complex plot is pared down to the barest essentials and the exposition ends up being entirely inadequate, leaving us all one step behind Bond's deductions as he tracks the evil 'quantum' organization across the globe.

That got my goat as well - it's all very well to plunder the original Ian Fleming novels for inspiration, but taking such a completely unrelated story and concept and shoehorning the title into the script is pretty clear proof that neither Marc Forster nor producer Michael G. Wilson or even writers Neal Purvis, Robert Wade, Paul Haggis, and Joshua Zetumer really 'get' what Ian Fleming's James Bond is all about.

Only in the final moments of the movie, where James Bond finally tracks down the man he holds responsible for the death of Vesper Lynd, do we see a flash of the character Ian Fleming invented. As Daniel Craig stomps off sullenly, into the snow, he manages to communicate to all of us that we shouldn't worry.

The scriptwriters, producers and directors might not 'get' Bond - but he does. And, at the end of the day, that's what really matters.

Highlights:

• Wrecking an Aston Martin during the opening moments.
• Judi Dench is sublime as a fussy, motherly, but ultimately ruthless 'M'
• Brutally realistic violence
• Indulgent location filming in Sienna, Haiti, Bolivia and beyond
• Daniel Craig, who keeps his 'Bond' persona pitch-perfect, despite script and direction conspiring against him.
  

Lowlights:

• It's simply not a 'Bond' film
• The plot zips from points 'A' to 'B', but bypasses 'C' and rushes straight to' Z' via '27.'
• The fight scenes are great, but the action sequences are totally unbelievable.
• It's all too fast paced - we need longer to take a breath between stylish, stunt-laden set pieces.
• That awful theme, although not as bad in context, still remains a stunningly poor choice.
  

What does Quantum of Solace mean?

"This title is meant to confuse a little. It debates relationships and how they hurt and how people can be hurt. If you are not respecting each other - it's over, and at the end of the last movie Bond doesn't have that because his girlfriend has been killed." Daniel Craig, on the title of the new James Bond movie.

I'm so excited about the new James Bond film.

2006's Casino Royale was pretty awesome - even for a Bond purist like me. Casino Royale was always my favorite James Bond book and director Martin Campbell made a good effort to keep the story as pure as possible, yet simultaneously bring it bang up to date and include enough explosions to keep the plebs happy. [Don't you mean the 'regular cinema-goers'? Editorial Bear]

This year, the next of the 'rebooted' Bonds will hit the cinema screen with the perfectly titled Quantum of Solace.

Quantum of Solace

But what the hell does that title mean, you might ask.

Quantum of Solace is actually the title of a short story included in the James Bond anthology For Your Eyes Only. It was one of Ian Fleming's more avant-garde writing experiments - opening with James Bond at a boring dinner party in Government House, Nassau (back in the days when the Bahamas was still run by Britain.)

Bond is incidental to this story - which is actually the tale of frustrated housewife Rhoda Masters, as told by the Governor himself.

Rhoda Masters was an air stewardess who married timid diplomat Philip Masters on a whim. But instead of finding the life of a colonial diplomat's wife luxurious, the flighty young woman soon became bored and began an open affair with a local playboy.

The affair was scandalous because Rhoda was so brazen about it. She and her rich, handsome lover made no effort to hide their passionate romance and Philip was turned into a bit of an island joke - the timid cuckold who 'put up' with his wife's flagrant infidelity.

But the affair tooks it's emotional toll on Philip and soon his work suffered and he faced a nervous breakdown. The Governor saw the devastating results his wife's affair was having on the young diplomat, so he sent Philip off to Washington DC for a lengthy trade negotiation with the Americans.

While he was gone, the philandering Rhoda was told in no uncertain terms to end her affair before her devastated husband returned.

Rhoda acquiesced to the Governor's demands - but the man who returned from Washington weeks later was very different to the timid, loving husband she'd been cheating on.

Something inside Philip Masters had died and when he returned to the Bahamas, he was a shell of his former self. Hard, cold and utterly indifferent to his wife.

Rhoda's affair and cruelty towards her husband crushed that last 'Quantum of Solace' he held within his fractured heart. Now free of any lingering affection, Philip Masters sold up everything and left Rhoda stranded in the Bahamas, divorcing her and returning to England with his former wife left utterly penniless and scorned by the rest of the diplomatic crowd.

Huh?

A quantum is the smallest possible measurable amount of something. The most utterly tiny amount that makes the difference between something 'being something' and not. In scientific terms, it's generally considered to be an atom.

The 'Quantum of Solace' was explained as being that small, practically immeasurable spark of compassion, love or feeling that kept Philip Masters alive inside while his wife was so horrifically callous towards him.

As long as there was that Quantum of Solace, there was something between them. When she finally crushed that tiny spark, Rhoda killed the connection between her and her husband. That's what empowered him to leave his wife utterly penniless in an unfriendly community - practically driving her to prostitution before a rich Canadian rescued her (and it is Rhoda and her second husband that Bond meets at the conclusion of this story.)

Ian Fleming's books are rich with clever catchphrases and concepts, but the Quantum of Solace is one of his finest. The immeasurable speck of affection that keeps a love affair smouldering.

It's often said that the opposite of love isn't hate. In fact, love and hate are separated by the thinnest of lines. Really, the opposite end of the spectrum from love is indifference. It's that Quantum of Solace that keeps somebody caring about another human being - instead of dismissing them as utterly emotionally insignificant.

The Real World

I've only seen the Quantum of Solace flicker a couple of times before - once when I broke up with a girlfriend I was still crazy about. I'd been a terrible boyfriend - and that behaviour had crushed her last Quantum of Solace. So when we broke up, I was still utterly crazy about her, but she couldn't care less. She didn't even have the interest to be angry at me. I'd just become an insignificance and she treated me accordingly.

Another time, I cared about a girl who still held some Quantum of Solace for an ex-boyfriend. He treated her terribly. Cheating, lying and being utterly heartless. But just as that Quantum of Solace threatened to burn to nothing, he'd make some utterly insignificant gesture - like giving her a 'mix tape' of his favourite songs, or inviting her to some family gathering in an act of supposed 'intimacy' and then the Quantum of Solace would flair up again and she'd be as hooked as she ever was.

Bond Is Back

Considering I'm so drawn to the concept, it should be no surprise that I'm excited the new Bond film is called Quantum of Solace. It opens up all sorts of possibilities to explore Daniel Craig's tough, but vulnerable Bond persona.

Part of me is worried it's just from expediency - there are still a few Bond titles that haven't been used yet and they all beat the generic 'Tomorrow Never Dies' and 'Die Another Day' and other meaningless phrases with 'die' in them.

But although the plot apparently stems around foiling a coup d'etat in some South American country - so it seems unlikely that aspects of the original story will be included - I still have hope,

Casino Royale was fresh and exciting and now they've got some momentum behind them, I'm sure the team at EON Productions won't disappoint us with James Bond's next installment.

No matter how bad it's ever got (like the decade gap between Timothy Dalton's last movie and the exciting Goldeneye) I've always held a Quantum of Solace for Monsier Bond.