Review for Quantum of Solace

Introduction

This is the one James Bond movie that I have taken pains to avoid to this point. That’s the result of all those reviews that accompanied its release, with many proclaiming it to be the worst James Bond movie of the lot, citing the impact of a writers’ strike on its script. Having seen Dire Another Day, that put the fear of Blofeld in me; a film worse than Brosnan’s last outing needed to be avoided at all costs. But now that I’ve bitten the bullet and collected them all, I have to get around to Quantum of Solace for the sake of my OCD. I don’t expect this to go well.


Picking up from where Casino Royale ends, Bond has captured Mr White, giving MI6 the opportunity to interrogate him and uncover the nature of the organisation he represents. That organisation turns out to have its claws everywhere, including moles in MI6 itself. Now Bond has another reason to seek vengeance on top of what happened with Vesper Lynd, something that M calls him out on, especially as his propensity to leave carnage behind him makes him more of a liability than an asset. But the leads and the corpses point Bond to philanthropist businessman Dominic Greene, a man whose ecological credentials mask his membership of the Quantum group, an organisation intent on destabilising nations. Bond learns that he isn’t the only one seeking revenge...

The Disc

Quantum of Solace gets a 2.40:1 widescreen 1080p transfer, with the choice between DTS-HD MA 5.1 Surround English, DTS 5.1 Surround German, Spanish, Italian, and DD 5.1 Surround English Audio Descriptive with subtitles in these languages and Danish, Finnish, Norwegian, and Swedish. It’s a great presentation of a film contemporary with the release format. The image is clear and sharp, and offers excellent detail, while the audio is immersive and impactful, presenting the action to great effect. Issues then will only really be in the source material, so the film is colour graded to within an inch of its life (go the extra inch and you have In a Scanner Darkly, probably), and the action is presented with a whole lot of fast cuts and shaky cam. Quantum of Solace might get the worst Bond theme song ever, but the music in the film is nice and evocative of the rest of the franchise without blatantly cribbing from the old song sheets. There are also a couple of scenes where the action overpowers the dialogue, but it’s not too bad.

Extras

You get one disc in a BD Amaray case. Dating from 2009, it lacks consistency with most of the rest of the franchise on BD when it comes to cover art and menu design, as well as the extra features. The disc does boot to an animated menu, which takes its look from a bit of tech in the film.

The disc autoplays trailers for Valkyrie, The Day the Earth Stood Still, and Australia before you get to that point though. The following extras are on the disc.


Music Video “Another Way to Die” (4:30)
Bond on Location (24:45)
Start of Shooting (2:54)
On Location (3:14)
Olga Kurylenko and the Boat Chase (2:14)
Director Marc Forster (2:45)
The Music (2:36)
Crew Files x34 (45:30)
Theatrical Teaser Trailer (1:51)
Theatrical Trailer (2:23)


Other than the Bond on Location featurette, these are all sound-bite ephemera, utterly disposable. Even the Crew Files, 45 minutes of them, consist of mayfly video blogs that are wholly forgettable.

Conclusion

I’m shooting myself in the foot with a double-barrelled shotgun here, but you shouldn’t trust reviews. I listened to everyone trashing Quantum of Solace and avoided it like the plague. But now that I’ve finally seen it, I enjoyed it quite a lot. I actually liked it a smidge more than Casino Royale, to which it’s a direct sequel, and I’ll even go as far as saying it’s one of the better Bond movies. It’s an adrenaline fuelled, action packed thrill ride from beginning to end. It also has a compelling emotional arc to it that makes sense in the context of the story.


I can’t deny that Quantum of Solace has its issues, which do justify the opinion of its detractors. The writers’ strike did indeed do for the film’s story. The narrative is thin, thin enough to make this one of the shortest James Bond movies at just 1¾ hours. The story is underdeveloped, motivations are thin, and characters are ephemeral. If you have the time to contemplate the story, you’ll find plenty of holes, not that the pace of the film gives you the time. There is also the issue that Quantum of Solace is a continuation of Casino Royale, and doesn’t really stand alone without it.


Where Quantum of Solace really excels is the way it distils the story down to the essence of a Bond movie. It makes the decision, through necessity no doubt given that writers’ strike, to have a laser focus on the main character and his journey, realising that the nature of the villains, what they are trying to do doesn’t matter as much as Bond’s search for revenge. It also realises that much of what people want from a Bond movie boils down to the stunts and action, and the travelogue.


It’s all about vengeance, although as the film begins, Bond certainly isn’t admitting that fact to M, and may not even be admitting it to himself. His mission is to track down the organisation of which White is a part, and which has even infiltrated MI6. It’s just that his methods leave much to be desired, leaving a trail of carnage in his wake. When he meets Camille, a woman involved with the film’s villain, Dominic Greene, he finds someone on a similar path. Typically this is usually the wake-up call that brings the protagonist back down to Earth, refocuses them on a mission, as happened with Bond in Licence to Kill. But here he finds a soul-mate of sorts, someone that affirms his vendetta.


The weakness in the film is that the Quantum group is underdeveloped, their geopolitical manoeuvrings never quite stand out clearly enough, and the idea that they have their claws into the world’s various governments and intelligence services not adequately developed.


But really, they don’t need to be if you see this film as an exercise in character development for James Bond. If Casino Royale was his first mission, then Quantum of Solace is the crucible that forged him into the agent that he would subsequently remain. In some ways this film is like the pre-credits sequence of Diamonds are Forever writ large. That ten minutes followed Bond on his brutal and relentless hunt for Blofeld, and the entirety of Quantum of Solace proceeds with that intensity and brutality as Bond seeks to avenge Vesper. In retrospect it’s disappointing that Skyfall came next, as while the first two films explore the secret agent being formed, the next catch up with Bond seemingly at the end of his career, and a couple of movies in-between might have been desirable.


Quantum of Solace isn’t your typical Bond movie, but it is a decent film. The presentation on this Blu-ray disc is up to the usual standards, even if the extra features aren’t up to much.