Personally, I don't see the Bourne connection extending beyond action/editing, Pearson/Bradley. Oh, and the very Bourne like opening with the Bourney music and no gunbarrel. These formalities aside, for me the rest of the film is very much a Guy Hamilton/Lewis Gilbert style Bond movie.
Tim, you completely missed your opportunity.
What "opportunity"??
The opening music (panning across the sea, I assume) is more Batman than Bourne.
I don't disagree with that, but I still found it far more Bourne than Bond, especially as the first thing we see in the movie is a Bourne alumni directed/edited Bourne like car chase. The music in this opening particularly reminded me of all of those kind of plug in motifs and ambience that John Powell uses on the later Bourne films, and not at all like say the thematic John Barry approach that David Arnold usually gives us.
As for the opening lack of gunbarrel... you're not even scraping a barrel now. I'm not sure what you're scraping. You're comparing Bond to Bourne on the basis that Bond didn't have a gunbarrel?? You might as well compare Bond to Casablanca or any episode of RIPTIDE while you're at it. They didn't have one either I don't believe.
Eh, the filmmakers would rather show us a Bourne car chase from the makers of Bourne than a gunbarrel. Nuff said.
I'm not sure if your last statement is sarcasm or not. If it's sarcasm... well, I'm not surprised. Cheap escape tricks is s about all you have left in your arsenal. If you're being serious, I'd love to hear your theories on the comparisons.
"Cheap escape"? From what, exactly?
"Arsenal"? Last I looked this was a Bond forum on the internet. I don't really appreciate the aggressive insult against me.
I have posted my Hamilton/Gilbert comparisons in quite a few threads already, particularly the boat chase one and my own review of QOS. Basically, I'd say Forster has Gilbert's eye for the visuals and humour with Hamilton's varied sense of judgement too (as with Hamilton's films these sometimes excel the film and sometimes fail hugely).
By the way, I totally disagee that QOS's photography is anything like Bourne's. The compositions in QOS are meticulous, elegant, symbolically arranged and built to compliment the very stylised and highly colour coordinated production and costume design. Greengrass' Bourne by contrast is very much trying to emulate a much more real world, naturalistic aesthetic, similar to something you'd see on TV's 24. Greengrass' Bourne is also shot to appear spontaneous, with rack focusing and loose compositions as though they are shooting a documentary (though obviously this is all over the action scenes of QOS, particularly the Bradley moments).
The lighting in QOS is often very old fashioned, hard, high contrast, controlled and stylised, like the best of the older, more visual Bond films (SWLM/YOLT and OHMSS). Bare in mind Roberto Schaefer apparently really wanted to push to shoot on the much more light intensive anamorphic format (like most of the older Bonds), which again is completely against the low light, documentary aesthetic of Bourne. By contrast, Bourne is shot wide open (shallow depth of field) on fast, long lenses in very natural looking soft light, very sourcey with lots of white, blown out windows, and often with "documentary" style dramatic tinges (look at the car tunnel from BOURNE 2, all with that green flourescent monotone spike washing everything out. There's nothing in there even remotely like say the poetic, glowing snow meeting with M at the film's end or the very angular looking compositions from QOS, such as the desert drive with Bond and Camille, the rear view mirror controlled in the foreground ad the depth of the desert way behind then into the distance. Epic.
Edited by tim partridge, 12 December 2008 - 02:19 PM.
This topic is locked
