Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Quantum of Solace
2008 · Marc Forster · Quantum of Solace on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 4 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Count the shots in the opening car chase. (cutting)
Matt Chesse and Richard Pearson assemble the action in very short pieces with rapid cross-cutting. Dan Bradley, who ran second unit on the Bourne films, staged it. You often cannot say where anyone is.
Payoff: The cutting chases impact rather than geography, which is the trade the franchise made to sound contemporary in 2008. In the reading: post-continuity. The reading calls this post-continuity: shots stop chaining into legible space and deliver speed and sensation instead.
Count how few lines Craig speaks in a scene. (performance)
He plays Bond coiled and nearly mute, reduced to forward motion and rage he is barely governing. Judi Dench's M does most of the talking at him, and the two of them become the real relationship.
Payoff: A character built on wit is stripped of it. What is left moves fast and says almost nothing.
Count how often M tells Bond to stop making it personal. (structure)
The espionage plot concerns a water grab in Bolivia behind an environmental charity. It keeps getting pushed aside by grief. The through-line is Vesper, not the scheme.
Payoff: The usual machinery of a mission driving a hero is running with the hero indifferent to it. In the reading: action-image, large form. The reading calls the Bond formula a large-form action-image: a big situation presses until one man's decisive act resets the world.
Notice the ochre and dust in the Bolivian and Italian scenes. (light)
Roberto Schaefer works in high contrast and sun-bleached color, with the cool blue of the Austrian opera house as the one break. The camera goes handheld and close whenever anything happens.
Payoff: The series drops its polish. Nothing in the image is burnished the way a Bond film usually is.
Notice the brutalist hotel and the cold MI6 rooms. (staging)
Dennis Gassner builds the film out of institutional modernism and harsh landscape rather than opulence. Forster organized the four big sequences around earth, water, air and fire.
Payoff: There is a design scheme underneath even when the cutting hides the space. The luxury the franchise runs on has been removed on purpose.
The 4 rewatch keys open on this page when you choose "Seen it?".
Carry this in: Watch Craig's face between the set pieces. Forster lets the action go quiet around it.