I still think they should've scrapped the entire London-based fourth act and had a prolonged escape from Blofeld's lair as the finale (they could still have involved MI6 if they really wanted to, from afar - or just have an extra scene with M arresting C).
But that would have been too traditional for Mendes.
Agreed. The lair is a wasted location chance. I don´t know if Mendes had considered a finale set there as too traditional - but he seems to have been hung up on the idea of everything coming full circle.
I do like that idea as well - but it should have been executed with more panache. If they wanted to keep both sequences I would have proposed putting the lair in the middle of the film which sags anyway. Blofeld should have had the clear objective to lure Bond to him, having Hinx take Madeleine as a hostage. In the film Blofeld sends Hinx to kill Bond - but actually he wants to gloat how much Bond was always outsmarted by him, something which would have been impossible if Hinx had succeeded.
I´d rather have Blofeld get Bond to his lair, show his superiority... and have that plan backfire because Bond would escape with Madeleine. Then, trying to stop C´s takeover, everything could have culminated in London.
Spot on!
Taking into account your earlier suggestion about the Rome chase culminating in Bond's capture, would your alternate structure be something like this?
- Mexico PTS
- MI6/C/Bond's pad/Q scenes
- Bond to Austria (in pursuit of the Pale King); meets Madeleine; introduced to Hinx during the plane chase
- Bond follows Hinx to Rome; chase scene; Bond is captured
- Bond wakes up in Blofeld's lair; Madeleine has been captured too
- Exposition scenes, torture scene -> big escape!
- London finale
I also think the finale should've been in Morocco.
SAF hit the nail on the head with each of those problems (I believe I had noticed all of them on first viewing), and ALL of them would have been solved by merely making the climax an old school good guy army vs. SPECTRE army at the Morocco lair.
We haven't had such a battle since TLD really, as more recent films have made Bond a one-man killing machine (yes, even the Craig era). Someone had suggested months ago on these forums that perhaps the conversation in the restaurant should've gone differently: after M insists to Q and MP that they cannot do anything to help Bond as it would just be feeding Denbigh information, the three of them should have decided to call Felix, who could've turned up in Morocco with American special forces to take down the SPECTRE base. The whole sequence could've been extended, and we could have avoided all the problems enumerated by SAF.
London was unnecessary, and by discarding that section we also would have avoided the too-oft repeated trope of Craig's Bond leaving the service, resigning, going rogue, going off the grid, being stripped of his 00-license, etc... And we also would've avoided this weird notion of Madeline somehow being a significant enough Bond girl for Bond to leave the service for (it made sense with Vesper, but I just didn't buy the relationship with Madeline).
Obviously Mendes wanted it to end in London because of the symbolism and, as SAF says, circular nature of it. But what strikes me in particular is that Mendes clearly had a thing for beginning and ending SPECTRE in action scenes that reflect one another. To wit:
PTS: Bond pursues a man on foot onto a helicopter, kills the man, stops chopper from crashing and returns to MI6/London
Finale: Bond pursues a man who is in a helicopter, causes it to crash, deliberately doesn't kill the man and leaves MI6/London
You could argue that this symmetry was only feasible with the London finale. Yet at the end of the Morocco sequence, how does Bond get away? He flies a helicopter. Mendes had the means to end the film in an artsy way without moving it to London!
The only thing the film loses is the symbolism of destroying the Vauxhall building, and standing on the bridge with M and Madeleine representing his choice.
