New Ground, New Space

Rating: Null/10 (20 November 2006)

We have a new level in cinematic motion.
This movie is in three parts, each part engineered excellently, much more so than the norm.
In this case, the Hollywood system really did give us something cinematic and newly artistic in its way.
The first part consists of an introduction to the world we will inhabit for two and a half hours. It's a few moments in grainy black and white. In any movie, the filmmaker has a challenge in letting us know where to snap our cinematic imaginations to. They have to do that in the first few moments, using cues and shorthand. Its a special challenge for a Bond film because we have come to expect a certain sex as humor, adventure as gadget stance. A certain notion of open space and global movement with cartoonish, bloodless intrigue.
These filmmakers had to overcome that in a few moments, and they did. You immediately know where you need to place your mind with this strong reference to noir plus the notion that it will be diluted. This is followed by the title sequence which has more realistic components overlain on iconic cartoons. The theme is guns shooting hearts, spades and so on. The message is concise: fate, chance, human intervention. This isn't the most amazing introduction I've seen, but you can see that they understood the problem and addressed it with a very clean and direct engineering of the cinematic world.
Part 3 is the main movie. Its good enough, as Bond works up the levels of the organization and escapes many times. I liked the fact that its nor flavored in the sense that a man is pitted against what seems the way the way the world is put together. The one glaring flaw in this part was Eva Green. She was miraculously perfect in "The Dreamers," where her job was to represent the embodiment of desire in the context of counter-culture as adolescent, sex as movie. Allure is a relatively simple act.
Here she has to be a powerful person, intriguing, intense. Willing to deeply go together but with knowledge of her own way. She is supposed to be every bit the equal of Bond and in half of the universe his better. She isn't. In fact, I cannot think of any actress alive that could have pulled this off and still fit within the constraints of the "Bond girl" which implies certain appearance.
But forget all that. The reason to see this is because of the second part. The Bond formula is to have an exciting chase scene at the very beginning. It need have little to do with the main plot, and is there to circumnavigate expectations. If the movie will be heavily dependent on amazing gadgets, you need to display some in this section. In the past, these have been adventurous and clever.
This time they have done something so well I want to send you to the theater just for it. They've broken new ground cinematically I think in how they have put this together. Its a chase sequence, Bond chasing a guy that is a suspected bomber. No cars, airplanes, skis, purely a footrace except for one use of a bulldozer. The action itself is remarkable, with these guys moving in space with such grace. And they readily move in three dimensions, up and through cranes and a building skeleton. Naturally there are explosions and objects moving dangerously. But that by itself is not the magic.
The magic is in how the camera places us, our eyes. The characters move and we move with them, more energetically. Some of the eye positions we find ourselves in are where cameras would ordinarily be: at eye level with a steadycam or jiggly hand-held; in a helicopter, swooping over a crane. Other eye positions have us confabulated in the action, tangled in legs or the swirl of a fight. Yet others are familiar from animated adventures, those few new camera swoops that must be preprogrammed into compositing software. And then there are some new positions that seem to have been selected only because of their oddity. Plus we have mistakes, the eye getting too excited and looking in the wrong place, as if we were pushing ourselves in the chase and occasionally looking about or getting our situation wrong.
And it isn't just where we are, its the pacing of how these are interrelated. We don't have time to shift position, so we are carried along in ALL positions, us in a way being the whole space that they rush through. Us as space. Our eye not as simple sensor of a world but our whole selves redefined as what we can see and blended in a say, 60 foot diameter snake chasing these two guys as mongeese, containing them and threatening them.
Its new space, new territory. I wish it were a whole project that had more purpose than collecting our coins by giving us a rush. But there you are.
Ted's Evaluation -- 3 of 3: Worth watching.