Ok, one quick derail: for those who hated Quantum, I'd have to watch it again to come up with some good arguments, but I def. thought the movie continued the recent quest to explore Bond's emotional pallette. In fact, it was the first time we see Bond cry, actually protect a vulnerable woman without taking advantage, and still maintain his brutal edge. If you watch it while looking out for the emotional subtext, the movie makes a lot more sense.
Now back to the sad news about Bond.
that stuff I got and mostly enjoyed. I thought the villain was pretty lackluster, and the throwaway girl for the "Hey, remember Goldfinger?! Wasn't that cool?!" scene was generally, well, disposable. I saw Bond as mostly shut down in that film, emotionally. He's just being ruthless. which made sense, coming from the last film.
My problem was the action sequences, of which there were plenty, and how irritatingly incoherent they were with cuts every 0.5 seconds. I mean, when the Bourne films did that, they did it for artistic effect, to show the chaos of a fistfight. When hand held shaky cam was first REALLY used to good effect (in Saving Pvt. Ryan and many movies since), it also worked well, again, because it conveyed the frantic nature of combat.
But Quantum just took it to a ridiculous extreme to where I literally could not tell who was hitting who or even what the hell was happening at any given moment. the opening sequence in the car, there's some point where his car gets hit, I think on the door or something? As I was watching it I honestly couldn't tell where the car was hit, what hit it, and the degree of damage. It was just....loudnoise!cut!carsomething!cut!bondreaction!cut! and then more cuts.
Quantum had real potential but it squandered it for two reasons: (1) it's a 'middle chapter' that doesn't advance teh story all that much, and (2) the action was totally incoherent.
