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| Daniel Craig as James Bond 007 |
Oscar
winning director Marc Foster has tried and managed to do a movie much simpler
and therefore more real than his high tech predecessors. By using green screen
only where really necessary he created reality instead of humbug gadgetry. With
full support from producer Barbara Broccoli he went back to the sixties’ Bond
to find the imagery for the story.
At the
end of Casino Royale, Bond’s lover Vesper Lynd gave her multi-million pound
poker winnings to the shadowy villain Mr White, conveniently dying before
explaining why. Bond tracked White to a lakeside villa in Italy and shot him in
the leg, setting up the cliff-hanger for the sequel.
As
Quantum of Solace opens, Bond and M are interrogating White to find that the organization that turned Vesper is called Quantum with agents infiltrating the
CIA and the British government. In Siena, Bond chases and corners one of these
rogues linked to a bank in Haiti. This chase starting in the bowels of the
city, crossing the Palio (an ancient horse race dating back to the 14th
century and carried out without saddles) goes on across the rooftops of Siena
ending on top of a bus. It shows all Daniel Craig’s own stunts, so it is well
worth watching. Even though Marc Foster admits that the bit with the bus was
just put in because nobody could figure out any other way to get Bond to
Mitchell, the agent he was chasing.
The
action moves to South America where Bond meets (and sleeps with) Agent Fields. He
gives her, a novice agent, a brush over as well, buying her a Prada dress. The
pictures remind one very much of Breakfast at Tiffany’s one more shot quotation
by Foster.
Together,
Bond and Fields attend a fundraiser for Greene Planet, a supposedly eco-friendly organization headed by the charming Dominic Greene. The scene was shot in the
Old Union Club in Panama City bombed out by the Americans under one pretext or
another. There, Bond also encounters Camille who conducts her own personal vendetta
against Greene. Camille is played by Olga Kurylenko who does most of her own
stunts, too. During filming, she learned how to strip a pistol in 8 seconds,
and to put it back together again in 11.
Bond
later rescues Camille from a kidnapping, widely overstepping his mission
parameters and angering the Foreign Office to the extent of being put on the
capture or kill list of M. This leads to a wild ride on motorcycles and a
spectacular boat race, all supposedly set in Haiti but filmed in Panama.
Illicitly
following Greene to Austria, Bond learns more of his plans – Greene will
finance a bloody coup by an exiled Bolivian General in exchange for a seemingly
worthless plot of land in the desert. The final shot is then done in Chile’s
Atacama Desert where Bond and Camille land still in Opera clothes. The final
scene is a major explosion in a desert hotel, but is filmed actually at the ESO
Paranal Observatory in Chile.
For
Swiss director Marc Foster this film was an adventure. Coming from high art low
budget films, the change into low art high budget venture must have been
stunning. But he manages well to bring art into this purely commercial movie. I
am sure he will not regret to have followed Orson Welles’ advice that he
regretted most in his live never to have made a commercial movie.
Further reading
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