I’m curious. Does the film retain any of the original Bond short story (which is good, but entirely unsuited to becoming a Bond action flick)?

Heh, they stopped being bond movies a while back, now its just mindless action in Bourne ripoff mode.

The lack of gadgets is actually a pretty big change to the series. I was a little dissapointed in it.

It’s a change sure, but at least it gets rid of the frankly ridiculous idea that Q could always provide *exactly* the right tools needed, in advance, no matter how random the gadgets. I wouldn’t have any problem with Bond being provided some gizmo to achieve a specific task if that was a known or likely objective, but let’s leave the rest of the more fanciful tech back in the Moore-Brosnan era, please!

Now I may be old-school here, but I’m perfectly ok with shots being longer than 4 seconds.

I was timing it. Seriously. there were maybe 3 times where I counted a shot going over than that.

And if you ARE going to have that shot of a shot average, at LEAST have the guys fighting wear different colour shirts!

Frankly, I felt the shot length was spastic at best. The opening sequence and the sewer chase were nearly impossible to sort out. Other than that, I did enjoy the movie, but this whole Bourne Identity style editing has to go away. Watch some Hitchcock and learn how to create a scene with long, detailed shots.

But the story was good. They are trying get a bit more in Bond’s head. Which is a little tough for movies to do, since he isn’t one to really vocalize much of what he is thinking. But the particular arc about the baddies, that was happily much smaller than the silly orbital-space-lasers of old (back in the ridiculous-joke-Bond era), and yet still showed Quantum to be wonderfully insidious.

As for all the bitching and moaning I’ve seen elsewhere about lack of gadgets or, of all the stupid things to complain about, the fonts for various locations… I think the change in Bond style with these last two movies has been almost entirely for the better. So, if they want to play with some fonts, sure, why not. Adds a bit of whimsy where it does no harm. Lack of gadgets was a plus in this one. It let us see him as the destructive maelstrom taking from around him and pushing his goal forward with whatever he is given.

At one point he is sharing his coat with a cold lady and I couldn’t help but remember that he freaking stole that coat and the whole suit from some poor schmuck that couldn’t imagine what it had been through since.

I was timing it. Seriously. there were maybe 3 times where I counted a shot going over than that.

And if you ARE going to have that shot of a shot average, at LEAST have the guys fighting wear different colour shirts!

____________________
Check out Chad’s News

I’m curious. Does the film retain any of the original Bond short story (which is good, but entirely unsuited to becoming a Bond action flick)?

Not according to the IMDB trivia. I haven’t read it myself to be sure.