I find it curious that until the 00´s (no pun intended) cinema owners dreaded films with long running times since it limited the amount of showings per day. That´s one reason why the 140 minutes of OHMSS cut into its box office revenues. (By the way, OHMSS earns its epic feel.)
These days, everything has become bloated - and the cinemas just keep charging more for films that run longer, just as they charge for 3D which only a fraction of moviegoers actually want.
For me the question is: does a Bond film need to be an epic? Only if the story needs it. OHMSS actually told one big enough. SPECTRE could have told one big enough. But the actual story - Bond finds his enemy is his stepbrother - was sidestepped, always aluded to it but never really went for it. Instead many scenes felt substituted for other scenes that could have been more important.
Yes, sorry, I have the time and somehow the urge to do this - so I try to explain what I meant in more detail:
- The PTS is still on track, Bond follows M´s clues, stops a terrorist attack from happening, a big action scene in an interesting scenery, well filmed - wonderful.
- Then the Mi6-sequence already feels troubled. Apart from Bond being again forced out and going rogue, the introduction of C opens up a subplot that never really shines. If the plot needs C as Blofeld´s associate, why doesn´t it ever show them together or at least conversing? And - yes, they did in an earlier draft. So, things were cut, even out of the script before filming, and this leaves a hole in the whole story.
- The rome sequence works fine, although the car chase feels truncated and not as spectacular as it should have been (Rome at night is beautiful - but the scarceness of traffic points to streets that have been closed down without enough stunt drivers filling them).
- The Austrian sequence - yeah, fine as well, although Bond finding Mr. White could have been more eventful, with Hinx already appearing and fighting Bond. Then the meeting with Madeleine, good dialogue between them both, but the Q meets Bond at the bar... again, if you put Q in the field, give him more to do than this and definitely don´t try to raise tension by idiot goons who can be outsmarted so fast. A much bigger sequence was in the script - and Q was captured as it should have been.
- Morocco. What´s the purpose of this sequence? Bond and Madeleine growing more accustomed to each other and finding a clue to where Blofeld might be. Yes, there is some nice aspect to a big blockbuster basically stopping and having leisure time. But this is not working at all. Madeleine could have given Bond a clue already in Austria - and they could easily have cut to the train sequence which would have accomplished the Bond bonding with Madeleine as well.
- Then the "oh, let´s wait for an oldtimer to pick us up"-scene. Whoever came up with that idea? Bond acting with basically no real idea what to do? Oh, he did presume that even a little lobotomy would not keep him from gunning down everybody? - There´s no different scene in the script - but it should have been conceived. Something clever for Bond and Madeleine so that they could have approached the base by themselves and then maybe taken prisoner while trying to get in?
- The whole Bond meets Oberhauser/Blofeld-scene. It is not as painful as it could have been. But again, I prefer the script which at this point offers not only a more psychological duel between Bond and his step-brother/archenemy (which is the whole point of the film!) but also sets up a much more interesting (visually and actionwise) finale in London, with Blofeld taking Madeleine to London as a hostage. Also there is a certain Irma Bunt who adds to the henchmen-threat immensely.
To sum things up: the whole film seems to have started (or have been developed during the later stages of writing) as something much more interesting. But take something away here and there, substitute it with less impressive scenes... and we get what we got.
