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.
Once you have seen it
Watch the opera stage, the killers and Bond in one sequence. (cutting)
A giant blue eye hangs over the floating stage at Bregenz. Forster crosscuts a staged murder in Tosca, real assassinations being arranged, and Bond standing in the crowd with an earpiece, listening.
Payoff: For a few minutes the most efficient action hero in cinema is only a spectator, and the film is at its best there. In the reading: attraction-image. The reading calls this an attraction-image: the staging figures a meaning instead of acting one out, a painted murder exposing the real killers.
Listen for the signature Bond music being held back. (sound)
David Arnold's fifth and final Bond score carries the Vesper theme over from Casino Royale and keeps working toward the Monty Norman theme the reboot had withheld. Jack White and Alicia Keys sing the first duet title song in the series.
Payoff: The music tracks how much of the old Bond this character has earned back, and it withholds most of it.
Watch what Bond does in the last scene instead of shooting. (structure)
He confronts the man who took Vesper from him and declines. The revenge that had driven every chase turns out not to be the thing that closes the wound, and the film simply stops moving.
Payoff: The decisive act the whole form depends on is refused. He endures rather than conquers.
Watch how the film pairs Camille with Bond and never romances her. (performance)
Olga Kurylenko plays a woman hunting the man who destroyed her family. The screenplay lines her mission up against his and then declines the franchise's usual reflex to put them in bed.
Payoff: She is the mirror rather than the prize, which is the clearest sign of what this entry was trying to be.
Carry this in: Watch the Tosca sequence. For a few minutes Bond stops acting and only listens, and the film finds its center.