The Quantum of Solace

For those of you interested in reading some comments about the new James Bond flick, read ahead. WARNING!!! SPOILERS AND CRITICAL COMMENTARY ABOUND!

So, a week ago Angela and I went on a date to see the new James Bond: The Quantum of Solace. We were both very excited to go to a theater to see a movie (this was the first time we've done that since arriving in Argentina), especially since we loved the last Bond, Casino Royale, so much. We were kind of dissppointed for a few moments when we realized that the movie was slotted to be dubbed in Spanish, but we consoled ourselves with the understanding that Bond flicks have never been driven on dialogue (if you watch Casino Royale, you may note that the first chase scene allows for an almost eight-minute window of character silence). *I will gladly agree that the Bond one-liners are a staple of the franchise (for those of you who care, Matt), but dialogue on the whole is not why we watch Bond movies. IN ANY CASE, the movie turned out to be in English, so we didn't need to be consoled after all.

POLITICALLY: This is one of the most political Bonds that I've ever seen, which may or may not be news to those of you reading this. Admittedly, not having lived through the Cold War, the politics of some of the earlier films may not be immediately evident to me, tho I would certainly argue that Pierce Brosnan's tenure as Bond was marked by a distinct absence of realistic political commentary. I'm struck by the reviews of this movie that have negated (NY Times) or completely missed (Rocky Mountain News) the very prescient issues dealt with by this Bond.

*Bolivia: First of all, understand that this is the most unstable country in South America today and the filmakers were apparently working with a crystal ball because one of the film's plot points revolves around a proposed coup against the President, an event which transpired only a few weeks ago. Evo Morales, the Bolivian President, is an aboriginal coca leaf (yes, the root material of cocaine) farmer who has fought hard over the last several years to bring about sweeping social changes to favor the majority of working poor (and mostly indigent) indigenous community. His changes have been met with a lot of resistance by a few rich governors, which forced a very heated and even violent confrontation. While the Bond plot does not treat the issues that Evo has unearthed with any subtlety at all and the Bolivian General who will lead the coup is a stereotypical latin Generalisimo, we have a very real political issue on the screen, which absent an international financial crisis would probably merit more critical comment.

*Water: The villain of the film is a gem: well performed on all counts. Again, I'm surprised that the reviewers missed the very obvious political nature of his presence on the screen. Of course, this may be because the issues important to environmentalists in Northern Argentina may not be a part of every movie reviewers canon. Here in Argentina, Douglas Tompkins, the man responsible for creating the labels NORTH FACE and PATAGONIA, amongst others, has been buying large pieces of territory in the name of ecological reclamation. A majority of the Argentine population believes him to be a thief, even a CIA agent, working against the Argentine Republic by buying up its most important sources of water. There are some more mediated judgments of Tompkins, who has done similar projects in Chile and has created nature preserves that he later returned to state ownership as National Parks. I've been working with groups of people that deal with Tompkins on a regular basis, which is why this Bond villain immediately jumped off the screen. I encourage you to think about the reality that the movie puts forward: is water more valuable than oil? and what are we going to do with water in the future? To make an odd intertextual connection, can you imagine the world of Waterworld in which water is so valuable that it becomes a currency?

STRUCTURALLY: I'll keep this brief, but I just wanted to note that this Bond was beautiful in a lot of its technical aspects. The titles were a nice return to classic Bond symmetries and the Jack White composition (performed with Alicia Keys) proudly introduced cacophony as a theme of the movie: competing interests that unavoilably juxtapose, rearrange and battle for attention. The thing that I most thought about through the film was the way that the film indicted Bond's presence for being an interruption in other activities. The first sequence, for example, is a nice helicopter shot of the Italian coast: the viewer's appreciation of that beauty is constantly disrupted by shots of the car chase. A few minutes later, the altercation in the catacombs interrupts (not entirely), a horse race on the streets above. The questions that we can take from these observations are several: Is Bond (and espionage as we know it) necessary for our world today? If so, should we keep it as isolated as it has been historically? Or, in another vein, is the model broken, producing death instead of justice?

I loved this flick, and the pizza that we ate afterwards. Any thoughts that you may like to share are welcome.