Oblivion

‘Oblivion’ is a masterpiece of production design that desperately wants to be a cerebral Tarkovskian study of ravaged landscapes, existential turmoil and questions of identity … but has to, y’know, throw in some hamfisted mainstream narrative tropes in order to justify its budget.

Opening with a slab of voiceover exposition, we learn that an alien antagonist destroyed the moon (causing all manner of natural catastrophe) prior to invading Earth. Someone on Earth authorised the use of something called “the nimbus” (I’m guessing the President of the United States in the first instance and a heavy duty piece of thermo-nuclear kit in the second), effectively “winning the war but losing the planet”. Now there’s a radiation zone, a number of power plants that process Earth’s remaining air and water power to provide energy for off-world space station The Tet, and an atmosphere-straddling platform occupied by Jack (Tom Cruise) and Victoria (Andrea Riseborough), technicians who maintain the power plants and the drones that safeguard them. Oh, we also learn that Jack and Victoria had “memory wipes” in order to protect “the security of their mission” prior to taking the job. I assume this was done before their induction course. As the film begins, Jack is experiencing pre-destruction-of-Earth hallucinations which he assumes are memories, while by-the-book Victoria just wants to dot the i’s and cross the t’s and jet off to Titan (Jupiter’s moon, where the last enclave of humanity are holed up) when their detail ends in a fortnight.

Anyone who hasn’t even hazarded a guess about where this is going by now will probably view ‘Oblivion’ as an entirely original and genre-defining work. The rest of us will happily tick off its many and unsubtly referenced influences while we sit back and bathe in the visuals.

Because that’s the thing. For all that ‘Oblivion’ is a derivate piece of work (particularly in the increasingly hackneyed second half where it becomes a patchwork quilt of ‘Independence Day’, ‘I, Robot’ and ‘Moon’), it’s the most genuinely gorgeous thing I’ve seen on the big screen this year. Jack and Victoria’s cloud-based operations centre is kind of like a two-up-to-down designed by Frank Lloyd Wright complete with helipad and swimming pool. A scene in said swimming pool comes close to a sort of visual poetry. Director Joseph Kosinski and DoP Claudio Miranda conjure eerily effective visions of a dune-covered New York which are a million miles away from the usual post-apocalypse imaginings. The technology is memorably rendered, too: Jack’s scout craft and the drones themselves have a propulsive sense of movement and engineering, while also looking careworn and, despite their sleek profiles, realistically utilitarian in their design. Only the late-in-the-day visualisation of a maleficent supercomputer as a slightly misshapen amplifier covered in sentient mould lets the side down.

Performances vary: Cruise delivers with a likeable everyman persona; Riseborough finds nuances in a character who could have been decidedly one-note; Olga Kurylenko is saddled with a nothing role and does even less with it; Morgan Freeman continues to be one of the coolest blokes on the planet, claiming entire scenes for himself by doing little more than lighting a cigar or wearing a knee-length leather jacket.

The script is anodyne at best, edging into total mess on more than one occasion. Example: Jack gets shot in the shoulder at one point and the wound is never reference, depicted or treated for the rest of the movie. He’s shot and then, oh fuck it, he needs to do some heroic running, jumping and falling down stuff, so let’s all pretend he never took that bullet in the first place, ’kay?

Ordinarily, I’d have marked ‘Oblivion’ down for its failings, consigned it to the file marked “ho hum” and probably not ever bothered writing about it for Agitation. But I keep coming back to how damned good it looks, and to the world-building and attention to detail of its first half as Jack goes through the motions of a routine job in an extraordinary situation; a guy who punches the clock, patches up the drones, patrols the wastelands and somehow isn’t satisfied with the way things are; a guy who’s just starting to think beyond the accepted parameters.

BOND-A-THON: Quantum of Solace

‘Casino Royale’ maintained fidelity to its source novel in many ways, not least in presenting Bond’s card table duel with underworld accountant Le Chiffre as his first mission following his promotion to Double-O status. I wonder if, for even the briefest moment, the producers considered reapproaching the other novels, this time in sequence, and reconfiguring them for a contemporary audience. Just as ‘Casino Royale’ replicated the mechanics and setting of Fleming’s novel but with a framing narrative centered around terrorism and high-level financial chicanery, did anyone consider the possibility of ‘Live and Let Die’ with Mr Big revealed as the man behind Le Chiffre (there isn’t a single Bond novel where “SMERSH” can’t easily be recast as “shadowy terrorist organization”) and Solitaire’s gift of prognostication an enigmatic and possibly genuine preternatural talent rather than the silly plot device of the Roger Moore film; or ‘Moonraker’ as a properly earth-bound adaptation but focusing on drones and stealth technology rather than Drax’s phallocentric rocket; ‘Diamonds Are Forever’ without the oil rig and concentrating on the greed/death/emptiness of riches subtext of the novel and with Tiffany Case as a proper romantic heroine despite her personal agenda – a sort of Vesper Lynd but without the coercion; or ‘From Russia With Love’ brought up to date with the Russian Mafia and prostitution rings; ‘Dr No’ as an acidly satirical comment on environmentalism (something the film under consideration today tries to achieve) with the guano mine retained but its claw-handed villain striving for a source of clean energy only with a dirty use in mind; or ‘Goldfinger’ played out against the worsening global financial crisis; ‘Thunderball’ updated in any way you see fit – as long as there are weapons of mass destruction, the basic plot remains timely; ‘The Spy Who Loved Me’ with the events of the last half of the novel compressed into a punchily effective pre- and immediately post-credits bit of action, the hoods at the motel setting Bond on the trail of a more high-ranking villain; a less lachrymose adaptation of ‘On Her Majesty’s Secret Service’ with subliminal messaging as a tool of media control instead of the daft hypnosis/sabotaged crops malarkey of both the novel and the Lazenby film; and perhaps collapsing ‘You Only Live Twice’ (retaining Dr Shatterhand’s grotesque and disturbing garden of death) and ‘The Man with the Golden Gun’ (retaining the brainwashing, M’s dichotomy and the redemptive suicide mission) into a single taut, angry and challenging narrative?

I’m guessing nobody did, but fuck me it would have been one hell of a direction to go with the newly revivified franchise!

This is what the producers did instead: in mid-2006, with ‘Casino Royale’ in post-production, the powers that be an EON Productions decided the follow-up would be a linear sequel, thus building on the Bond-Vesper relationship and channeling the theme of betrayal into a hard-as-nails revenge thriller. The story was based on an original idea by producer Michael G. Wilson and shifted the focus of the villain/nemesis from terrorist funds (the plot dynamic of 'Casino Royale') to environmentalism and water supplies. Roger Michell was approached to direct but with no script available refused to commit. ‘Casino Royale’ scripters Neal Purvis and Robert Wade (Paul Haggis did some work on the denouement) were re-engaged to work up Wilson's concept. With ‘Casino Royale’ proving a commercial and critical success, the heat was on to get its still-untitled successor into production. The impending writers' strike further redacted the production schedule. Purvis and Wade essentially wrote the first draft under the gun. Forster came on board as director, citing that although he wasn’t a Bond fan he’d been impressed enough by ‘Casino Royale’ to agree. Nonetheless, he felt that film was overlong and wanted ‘Quantum of Solace’ - the title now having publically been confirmed, although having bugger all to do with the eponymous Fleming short story - to be shorter, tighter and faster. Forster, Wilson and Haggis heavily reworked Purvis and Wade’s script. Anyone sensing a too many cooks/spoiled broth ratio here? It gets worse: during filming, Forster engaged Joshua Zetumer (a writer of spec scripts who, at this point, had yet to see any of his work put into production) to undertake rewrites on a day-to-day basis depending on however Forster and the actors’ ideas on any given scene may have changed. A casualty of this approach was that Felix Leiter (Jeffrey Wright) had his timely and intriguing subplot reduced, a damned shame given that Wright's performance in ‘Casino Royale’ revivified Leiter in much the same way as Craig made the character of Bond his own.

The result of all this malarkey is that ‘Quantum of Solace’ is a complete mishmash. It weighs in with some intriguing concepts and possibly the most overt political imperative of any Bond movie. It flirts with exploring the Bond/M relationship in greater detail, but never quite finds a dynamic. It gives us the first Bond girl – Camille (Olga Kurylenko) whose relationship with 007 isn’t defined sexually – but arbitrarily throws Bond into bed with fellow spook Agent Fields (Gemma Arterton) only to kill her off in a manner that explicitly homages Shirley Eaton’s demise in ‘Goldfinger’, thus reminding us how casually disposable the franchise’s attitude to women is. It gives us a sequence of dusty, dirty, grubby and determinedly unromantic locations, as if Forster wanted to declare with every frame a commitment to moving away from the fantasy and lifestyle porn of the previous films, but renders each location title card in drastically different, almost comedic, lettering so that the film is riddled with establishing shots that look like something out of a spoof film.

But the worst problem with ‘Quantum of Solace’ is its action scenes. This is a James Bond film, y’all, so action scenes are kind of important. Forster makes the monumentally awful decision to steer it into Jason Bourne territory, but whereas the Paul Greengrass contributions to that franchise are shot through with pounding, hyper-kinetic action scenes, ‘Quantum of Solace’ just looks like it’s been edited by a speed-freak who’s been washing down amphetamines with quadruple espressos. Either that or the editing is a 102-minute exercise in trying to disguise Forster’s lack of facility in staging action. Whatever salvageable grace notes ‘Quantum of Solace’ might offer in other respects, it nosedives towards Shitsville every time it delivers an action scene.

It also makes the fundamental mistake of throwing the majority of its actions scenes at the viewer in the first half before struggling to marshal a mélange of disparate elements into something approach a plot as the hour-mark approaches. After which the pace slows to the point of tedium. 102 minutes – the shortest Bond movie – and yet its last 40 minutes are truly interminable. Approaching ‘Quantum of Solace’ for this review – it was only the second time I’ve watched the film – I wondered if it would improve (a) on a second viewing, and (b) shortly after watching ‘Casino Royale’ (my rationale: appraise the two films as a unified whole and see if the narrative peregrinations of the latter get ironed out). But I’m left with no change of opinion from when I originally reviewed it over two years ago. And exactly the same thing happened while I was watching it: round about the halfway mark, boredom set in and I simply didn’t give a crap what happened.

Martin Campbell, directing ‘Casino Royale’, was savvy enough to know which elements of the franchise still worked and which needed pruning back or doing away with entirely. Forster simply shitcans everything that makes a Bond movie a Bond movie. Somebody should have given him the Bourne reboot instead and enticed Campbell to continue the story he’d so brilliantly envisage in ‘Casino Royale’.

Only one thing emerges as solid gold in ‘Quantum of Solace’: Daniel Craig’s total commitment to his personification of Bond and his innate ability to take the character seriously. I ended my original review with the observation that “it’s a given … that James Bond will return. This time around, though, I have no expectations.” Since then, and with each of the various trailers and publicity stills I’ve seen, I have developed expectations. Said expectations have evolved from tentative anticipation to borderline pant-wetting excitement. ‘Skyfall’ doesn’t have to do much more than be edited properly and have a coherent script to emerge as infinitely better than its predecessor. But, please EON, please please please, after a four year wait and with only a finite amount of times the now 44-year old Craig can reprise the role, please let ‘Skyfall’ be awesome.

Quantum of Solace

I blogged a short review of 'Casino Royale' on The Agitation of the Mind a couple years ago. Not one of my more in-depth pieces. I didn't tread any new critical ground in focusing on how Martin Campbell achieved his second re-boot of the franchise following Pierce Brosnan's first (and best) outing, 'Goldeneye'. I trod even more foot-worn critical ground in praising the stripping away of cliches (no gadgets, absolute minimum of smart-arse one-liners) and Daniel Craig's performance as getting back to the Bond of the novels, a Bond who acts rashly and makes mistakes. I concluded:

'Casino Royale' put the series right back on track in fine style, the ending pointing towards the next film ... which has been saddled not only with an unwieldy title ('Quantum of Solace') but Marc Forster as director.

Oh bollocks.

When I wrote that, I had yet to see a Marc Forster film that was anything more than average. In particular, I'd found 'Monster's Ball' and 'Finding Neverland' hugely overrated and deeply flawed in their execution. The signs were not good. Hence that "oh bollocks". (For the record, I have still yet to see a Marc Forster film that is anything more than average.)

'Quantum of Solace' hit the cinemas on a tsunami of hype and I did what I generally tend to do when a film has been hyped beyond all reasonable expectations: I stayed away. Reviews were mixed. And not in a some-people-loved-it-some-people-hated-it way. They were mixed in a some-people-hated-it-some-people-were-totally-indifferent way. The general consensus was that it lost the ground 'Casino Royale' had gained.

I picked up the DVD for a song a month ago, but even then I felt no compunction to watch it immediately. The Christmas and New Year holidays came and went. It remained unwatched. Then I came across an article on the net last week speculating whether Sam Mendes was on board to direct the next Bond film or just as a consultant and I groaned inwardly. Don't get me wrong: 'American Beauty' - belter; 'Road to Perdition' - handsomely mounted; 'Jarhead' - moments of brilliance. But nothing in the filmography that says "hey, you know what, that Sam Mendes bloke has got Bond movie director written all over him". I shook my head and thought, Great, first Marc Forster and now Sam Mendes ... and then I realised that I hadn't yet given Forster the benefit of the doubt.

On 'Quantum of Solace' went.

Full disclosure: this review is based on one viewing and I will freely own up that I made the mistake of not double-billing it with 'Casino Royale'. 'Quantum of Solace' is the only Bond film thus far which functions as a direct linear sequel, quite literally kicking off minutes after the iconic final scene of 'Casino Royale'. And herein lies the key to my problems with the film. 'Casino Royale' was directed by a man who understood what makes the Bond movies popular; a man who knew which elements still worked and which had ceased to appeal. Thus in 'Casino Royale', no Q (let's face it, for all that the last Brosnan outing set up John Cleese as Q Version 2.0, no-one could replace Desmond Llewellyn) or Moneypenny (the character was rejuvenated in 'Goldeneye', her almost-relationship with Bond taking on a spikier undertone, only to regress to embarrassing lovelorn simpering by the time 'Die Another Day' limped onto the screen); no gadgets; a blunt and gritty pre-credits sequence (in black and white, to boot!); and the obligatory vodka martini (shaken, not stirred) ordered not as a matter of course but as a delaying tactic while Bond assesses his opponents in a baccarat game. However, Campbell still delivered the cars, the girls and the action scenes, but brought all of them up to date: the current Aston Martin looks cooler than even the DB5 that weakened the knees of petrol-heads everywhere in 'Goldfinger'; Eva Green walked away with the honours of Best Bond Girl Since Honor Blackman, her characterisation of Vesper Lynd being just that - a characterisation - and not mere set decoration (moreover, the script gave Bond and Vesper a genuine romantic connection rather than the default womanising of so many other 007 outings); and the action scenes were all that we expected of the franchise, but ramped up by the inclusion of an exhilarating free-running sequence.

But above all, 'Casino Royale' succeeded through a bold stroke of legerdemain on the part of all concerned: it wiped the board of the twenty movies that had preceded it and played out as an origin story. Bond's predilection for the Aston Martins, the genesis of the vodka martini (shaken, not stirred), the reason behind his cold and ruthlessly emotionless facade - all are contained in 'Casino Royale'. A bold move, one that paid off spectacularly. Box office tills rang the world over, the naysayers were silenced (remember the anti-Craig sentiment that was all over the net before the 'Casino Royale' had even finished filming?) and Bond was back.

Then came 'Quantum of Solace'. Forster, by his own admission when he accepted directing duties, was not a fan of the franchise. From the off, he had very definite ideas about making a considerably different Bond movie. This in itself might not have been a necessarily bad thing. But, as mentioned earlier, 'Quantum of Solace' is a direct linear sequel. As a stand-alone film, it fails. Every element - Bond's desire for revenge, the elusive Mr White (Jesper Christensen), the vast and web-like series of interconnection and collusion and conspiracy financed by Le Chiffre's culling of funds via high-stakes gaming - inextricably leads back to 'Casino Royale'. In fact, calling 'Quantum of Solace' a sequel is perhaps an understatement: it's a continuation of 'Casino Royale', maybe even a feature-length coda. Therefore it would make sense that the tone and style of the piece be in keeping with 'Casino Royale'. (It would, in my humble opinion, have made a whole frickin' lot of sense to have got Martin Campbell back in the director's chair and not fucked with a winning formula.)

Before I get into a discussion of what Forster does differently, and which of his decisions do and don't work (in the interests of fairness, I have to say that there are some interesting things going on in 'Quantum of Solace'), it's worth pausing to look at the film's development. If you're one of large majority who consider 'Quantum of Solace' flawed, this might go some way towards explaining why:

It's mid-2006 and 'Casino Royale' is in post-production. The powers that be an EON Productions decide the follow-up will be a sequel, thus building on the Bond-Vesper relationship, the theme of betrayal and leaving the path open for the next production to be a hard-as-nails revenge thriller. The story is based on an original idea by producer Michael G. Wilson and shifts the focus of the villain/nemesis from terrorist funds (the plot dynamic of 'Casino Royale') to environmentalism and water supplies. Roger Michell was approached to direct but with no script available refused to commit. The 'Casino Royale' screenplay was by Neal Purvis and Robert Wade (with a bit of polishing courtesy of Paul Haggis). Purvis and Wade were re-engaged to work up Wilson's concept. With 'Casino Royale' proving a commercial and critical success, the heat was on to get its still-untitled successor into production. The impending writers' strike further redacted the production schedule. Purvis and Wade essentially wrote the first draft under the gun. Forster came on board as director, citing that he'd been impressed enough by 'Casino Royale' to agree. Nonetheless, he felt that film was overlong and wanted 'Quantum of Solace' - the title now having publically been confirmed - to be shorter, tighter and faster. Forster, Wilson and Haggis heavily reworked Purvis and Wade's script. Anyone sensing a too many cooks/spoiled broth ratio here? It gets worse: during filming, Forster engaged Joshua Zetumer (a writer of spec scripts who, at this point, had yet to see any of his work put into production) to undertake rewrites on a day-to-day basis depending on however Forster and the actors' ideas on any given scene may have changed. (A casualty of this approach was that Felix Leiter [Jeffrey Wright] had his timely and intriguing subplot reduced, a damned shame given that Wright's performance in 'Casino Royale' revivified Leiter in much the same way as Craig made the character of Bond his own.)

Alfred Hitchcock once said that to make a good film you need three things: a great script, a great script and a great script. Forster and co. fucked around with the script way too much. Guess what the result was? Award yourself ten points if you reverse-engineering your answer from Uncle Alfred's dictum.

So: let's get down to 'Quantum of Solace' (the title, incidentally, is from a short story in Fleming's 'For Your Eyes Only' collection, one of only a handful of titles not yet co-opted for films - the others being 'Risico', 'The Property of a Lady' and 'Agent 007 in New York').

Things that work in 'Quantum of Solace':

• The opening car chase - there were those who carped that the editing renders the sequence difficult to follow, but - really - where's the difficulty in man-in-Aston-Martin is being chased/men-in-other-cars are doing the chasing? Cutting it together as jarringly and viscerally as he did is, for me, one of Forster's better decisions.
  
• M (Judi Dench) in a more prominent role. Forster has said that Bond and M's relationship is possibly the most interesting, M being the only woman in his life with whom there isn't a sexual element. (Besides, anything that gives us more of the magnificent Dame Judi is to be celebrated.)
  Leiter's morally compromised presence, his superior facilitating a shady agreement between the CIA and a tin-pot dictator, resulting in Leiter being faced with a decision that is potentially antithetical to his relationship with Bond.
  
• The idea of villain Dominic Greene (Matthieu Almeric) being just as much a puppet as Le Chiffre in 'Casino Royale', the real powerbrokers of the sinister Quantum organisation still shadowily out of reach.
  
• A Bond girl - Camille (Olga Kurylenko) - as driven and determined as Bond himself, who fulfills a role beyond set dressing or romantic interest.
  

Things that don't work in 'Quantum of Solace':

• Bond as little more than a British-accented Jason Bourne. He's presented as a brutally efficient, coldy unhesitating killing machine, with none of the suaveness or ironic detachment that defines the character.
• At least two hand-to-hand fight scenes that have Bond and his antagonist similarly clad, shaky compositions and blink-and-you'll-miss-it editing not helping in identifying exactly who is beating up on who at any given moment.
  
• The perfunctory introduction and borderline insultingly writing out of Agent Fields, the eminently likeable Gemma Arterton denied any real opportunity to develop what could have been a highly memorably character.
  
• The entire narrative is centred around Bond's pursuit of revenge, but his showdowns with Greene and, in the moribund coda, the man who betrayed Vesper are singularly lacking in catharsis or finality.
  
• "I've answered your questions about Quantum," an at-Bond's-mercy Greene blubbers near the end. What questions? Did a scene get cut? Are EON merely playing coy until they've worked out the plot points of the next movie? Fuck's sake, give us something!
  
• Forster's curious decision, given how down and dirty he's tried to make this installment, to render each location title card in drastically different, almost comic, lettering so that the film is riddled with establishing shots that come across as parodic.

For all his re-envisioning of Bond, Forster ultimately strives to emulate Campbell - ie. striking a balance between what Bond fans expect and jettisoning what has become passe. But whereas Campbell creates alchemy, in Forster's hands the results are disparity and awkwardness. In Camille, Forster gives us the first Bond girl not to get between the sheets with the ol' stud muffin himself (a brilliant and laudable decision) and yet he channels Bond-as-sex-magnet cliche in 007's perfunctory bedding of Agent Fields, a scene so redundant and out of context that it's blatantly a concession.

Likewise, Forster's morose determination to make 'Quantum of Solace' as un-Bond-like as possible (no suave or debonair moments, no gadgets, no banter, even Bond's steadfast ally Leiter depicted as politically and morally compromised) seems at odds with his explicit referencing of 'Goldfinger' and 'Casino Royale' in scenes that could be considered homages if they weren't such shot-for-shot steals.

At best, Forster tries too hard. The first half hour of 'Quantum of Solace' comprises a checklist of action series - some edited pulsatingly, some confusingly - after which a very convoluted and disjointed narrative is introduced and the pace slows badly. The shortest of the Bond movies at 102 minutes, it seems longer. The finale, ironically, is rushed.

Maybe I'll warm to 'Quantum of Solace' a little more on a second viewing. Maybe watching it straight after 'Casino Royale' will help in corralling the peregrinations of its narrative. Or maybe it'll just throw the directorial approaches of Campbell and Forster into even harsher relief. Whatever; the fact remains that it proved one of the most theatrically successful 007 movies. So it's a given - as borne out by the current slew of Sam Mendes speculation - that James Bond will return. This time around, though, I have no expectations.