New York: Putnam, 1999, pp. 304.
Raymond Benson's High Time to Kill, his third James Bond novel (film novelizations apart), is also the first in a trilogy depicting a multi-volume war between 007 and the international criminal organization known as "the Union."
That war opens with a murder at a dinner party Bond attends, and only narrowly misses stopping, then gets seriously underway when Union agents steal the data from a secret British government technical breakthrough relevant to the development of hypersonic aircraft, "Skin 17." Bond is assigned to recover the microfilm containing the key information, setting in motion an international chase that leads to the plane carrying the Union agent with the goods crashing atop Mount Kangchenjunga, the third highest peak in the world. To enable Bond to continue the pursuit M assigns him to join the mountain-climbing expedition ostensibly going to recover the bodies, as other nations (the Russians, the Chinese) send teams of their own, and a Union agent on Bond's own team contrives to beat him to the punch . . .
As might be expected given that High Time is a Bond novel, it reads rather like a Pierce Brosnan-era film--not least in its opening which gets Bond into an early action sequence that also hints at the stuff of the later plot, its gadget-packed car chase heavy on late '90s digital technology (for better or worse), and Bond's generally less stoic and more flamboyant demeanor (more on which later). There is also considerable use of Fleming's material, including Benson's by this point familiar incorporation of minor Fleming characters into the storyline (the Governor of the Bahamas--now ex-Governor, of course--from "Quantum of Solace" and the shooting range Instructor from Moonraker).
However, less expectedly Benson evokes very strong parallels between the events of this novel, and Fleming's earlier works. The parallel one might suspect between the Union and SPECTRE is played up rather than down, Benson making it explicit when he has Bond himself think that what he saw of the Union recalled to him his battles with SPECTRE early in the novel, while the Union's boss makes a very Blofeld-like initial appearance. (Le Gerant, like Ernst Stavro before him, heads up a meeting of the Union's senior chiefs at which he metes out deadly and exemplary summary punishment of a traitor to the organization.) A key relationship in the story also contains a good deal of Casino Royale . . .
More surprising still is the mid-point turn in the course of the story, from typical Bondian globetrotting heroics to the Kangchenjunga expedition. The insertion of Bond into a group in this manner, his having to be a Team Player (rather than his being attached to a team) is much less Bond movie or Fleming novel than it is John Gardner. The same goes for the emphasis on that team battling the elements in a cold and remote place--as Gardner had it do in his own third book, Icebreaker.1
The mix of elements struck me as problematic. The Union's effectively being SPECTRE II, and the evocation of Vesper Lynd in Bond's central romance ended up weak repetitions of past adventures, rather than resonant echoes of them--and they made an unsatisfactory fit with the newer material. The industrial espionage that is the chase after the vaguely described Skin 17 is a questionable choice of opening battle for Bond to fight with these successors to Blofeld and company. And time and again, the mix of screen Bond with book Bond proves problematic, with the Fleming evocation highlighting this. As in Moonraker, Bond has a scene on the SIS shooting range with the Instructor, a man extremely grudging in his praise who would never let Bond know he is the best shot in the Service--but where Fleming's Bond showed no need for such validation from the man, professionally concerning himself only with his proper business on the range, Benson's Bond, in rather undignified fashion, tries to force him to admit that his performance was in fact pretty good, wasn't it? Wasn't it?
However, perhaps the biggest problem of all is the awkwardness of the fit of the Kangchenjunga episode with the stuff of Bond's adventures. Making the ultra-individualistic Bond--this Bond who wouldn't even let the Instructor's stinginess with praise slide--over into a functional, effective member of a larger team is far from easy. And while the ultra-urbane Bond is an outdoorsman and a sportsman, competent on the slopes and in tropical waters, something seems lost when he doesn't return from them to his fast car to drive to his luxury hotel to enjoy a fine meal at the end of the day. Immersed in a group, doing right by it, especially without the familiar Bondian props, the Team Player in the Wilderness is reduced to a cipher, as Gardner unintentionally demonstrated time and again in the various novels where he pursued such an approach.
High Time to Kill did not change my mind about this--and unlike in some of Gardner's efforts (Win, Lose or Die notably) the adventure element did not really compensate for this break with the accustomed pattern of the adventures. After all, the climb dominating the second half of the book is rather a glaring plot hole. That a helicopter could have been used to reach the site and recover the microfilm almost immediately is not even mentioned, though in fact the Aerospatiale Lama helicopter developed specifically to meet the requirements of the Indian and Nepalese militaries for helicopters suited for high-altitude operations in the Himalayas, would have been up to the job and not at all difficult to come by. (And its appearance would certainly have been more logical than the use the Union made of a Hind helicopter earlier in the story.)
Additionally, there is the drawn-out, repetitive, stop-and-go nature of high-altitude climbing, to which the book is all too faithful--the team ascending partway, then establishing a Base Camp and acclimatizing before starting the next phase of the climb. This does not help foster a sense of urgency, or flow, instead setting us up for a sequence of disconnected incidents--alas, not very interesting incidents. The rivals to Bond's team are not much of a presence in the book, mentioned more than seen, save in one confrontation that plays more like a prank (not least, on account of its scatological element) than anything else, and the reader easily forgets they are out there for much of the rest of the narrative.
Meanwhile, Benson derives little suspense from Bond's relations with the other members of his own team. This is partly a matter of Bond not getting to be Bond here--but partly also of the characterization of his rival and eventual foe on the team, Roland Marquis. Even while the reader knows that he is a traitor intent on nasty business from the start, he seems more dangerous for his oafishness than his treacherousness, the principal worry for a significant part of the narrative that his stupid one-upsmanship and showing-off (amplified by the altitude sickness to which they are subject) will get them into some kind of trouble—-as when he starts shooting cans and bottles on ground their Sherpa porters consider sacred.
Indeed, it all makes for an at best passable first half, followed by a weak second half. Things pick up somewhat in the characters' final approach to the peak and the microfilm, at which point they get to finally start making their real moves--but these are far from enough to save the adventure. In the end this leaves High Time working as neither a Bond tale of the more grounded type (as DoubleShot does), nor as an over-the-top, blockbuster-movie-crammed-between-covers (at which Never Dream of Dying is far more effective). In fact, it strikes me as the least satisfying of the novels he penned for the series--and it does not surprise me that Benson's subsequent books took different courses.
1. Some of these elements cropped up in many a subsequent Gardner novel--among them Role of Honor, where Bond wound up working a programmer in a video game company (how un-Bondian is that?!); and Win, Lose or Die, where Bond was in the Royal Navy and in charge of a superpower conference's security aboard the HMS Invincible.
For the full listing of the James Bond continuation novels (and the reviews of them available on this blog), click here.
Monday, December 5, 2016
Wednesday, November 30, 2016
The James Bond Films and the R-Rating
In the 1960s the Bond films virtually invented the action movie as we know it. In the decade that followed, however, they lost their earlier, cutting-edge place.
This was in part a matter of new trends, 1970s audiences going for crime-themed, urban action at one end, and science fiction spectaculars at the other, but this was by no means all of it. There was, too, a sense of the Bond films as softer stuff, a function of their getting more parodic and gimmicky, but also of action movies in general getting harder-edged at the same time. Apart from the spectaculars of Lucas and Spielberg, big action was nearly synonymous with the R-rating through the '70s and '80s--the years of Dirty Harry and Death Wish, of Rambo and Schwarzenegger, of Lethal Weapon and Die Hard--while the Bond movies kept the violence, the sex and the language PG.
The Bond films adapted to some extent, in Licence to Kill in fact producing an R-rated film, which was trimmed just enough to get the PG-13 under which it was released (you can check out a comparison of the two versions here), and generally stuck with that rating as the series continued through the '90s--while the genre as a whole went PG-13, the R-rated films largely exiting the market. (Indeed, the last real R-rated action megahit was none other than The Matrix, way back in 1999.1)
In hindsight it seems that this may have had its impact on the reboot. The disappearance of R-rated competition made Bond's moving in a less flamboyant, more brutal direction seem more plausible because in the current market, PG-13 was as "dark and gritty" as a movie needed to get to merit the label.
1. The Expendables franchise, by contrast, has been a success on a much smaller scale, and anyway, sold on nostalgia.
This was in part a matter of new trends, 1970s audiences going for crime-themed, urban action at one end, and science fiction spectaculars at the other, but this was by no means all of it. There was, too, a sense of the Bond films as softer stuff, a function of their getting more parodic and gimmicky, but also of action movies in general getting harder-edged at the same time. Apart from the spectaculars of Lucas and Spielberg, big action was nearly synonymous with the R-rating through the '70s and '80s--the years of Dirty Harry and Death Wish, of Rambo and Schwarzenegger, of Lethal Weapon and Die Hard--while the Bond movies kept the violence, the sex and the language PG.
The Bond films adapted to some extent, in Licence to Kill in fact producing an R-rated film, which was trimmed just enough to get the PG-13 under which it was released (you can check out a comparison of the two versions here), and generally stuck with that rating as the series continued through the '90s--while the genre as a whole went PG-13, the R-rated films largely exiting the market. (Indeed, the last real R-rated action megahit was none other than The Matrix, way back in 1999.1)
In hindsight it seems that this may have had its impact on the reboot. The disappearance of R-rated competition made Bond's moving in a less flamboyant, more brutal direction seem more plausible because in the current market, PG-13 was as "dark and gritty" as a movie needed to get to merit the label.
1. The Expendables franchise, by contrast, has been a success on a much smaller scale, and anyway, sold on nostalgia.
Saturday, November 26, 2016
Rethinking Jupiter Ascending
That the Wachowski siblings' Jupiter Ascending would get anything but a brutal reception was a long shot.
After all, it has long been fashionable to bash these particular filmmakers. Disappointment with the Matrix sequels (some of it reasonable, some of it not), the predictable reaction to a Hollywood version of Speed Racer, the reception of Cloud Atlas did anything but assure a warm welcome for the movie.
That Jupiter Ascending is a space opera did anything but help--the genre being notoriously high-risk. Star Wars may have become a Marvel-style movie machine, with Episode VII a $2 billion grosser and the prospects for Rogue One looking bright--but audiences are much less likely to go for them than films with a milder science fiction touch (like superheroes), and the negative response to the great majority that don't win them over is often wildly exaggerated. Perhaps the only non-Star Wars, non-Trek film to score an undisputed success of this type has been 2014's Guardians of the Galaxy--the beneficiary of a summer of weak competition, the Marvel brand name, and even its own slightness and overfamiliarity. Anything "weirder" or more ambitious--and this was indeed the case with Jupiter--is that much more likely to suffer for being so (as Jupiter did).
All the same, this is far from the full explanation for the hostility. The film too obviously repeated much that was in the Matrix trilogy. Once again, an ordinary person of our time--perhaps even less than ordinary--experiences unusual goings-on culminating in a meeting with a mystery man who makes very clear to them that, unbeknownst to all of us we are really being farmed by an exploitative, monstrous power for its own sustenance; and that they may be the key to humanity's salvation from this fate. Chases and fights ensue, culminating in the hero's choosing to undertake a mission of rescue in which they confront and defeat an enemy, achieve a partial victory, and then after contemplating its meaning, soar into the sky above a modern metropolis in what seems a sure prelude to further adventures.
All this is not to deny that there were differences. The handling of the material is bolder in respects--particularly the political themes. It is easy to mistake The Matrix for just another Frankenstein complex story about out-of-control AI (especially if one just focuses on the first film). However, that this is a case of humans exploiting other humans through a brutal, hierarchical system of high-technology and elaborate deception, with a tiny, hyper-privileged, colossally cynical and arrogant and utterly repugnant elite at the top literally stealing the lives of those at the bottom is unmistakable in Jupiter. The movie also manages to not look like a pale imitation of The Matrix, satisfactorily trading cyberpunk imagery for the space operatic kind. And of course, there is much difference in the plot structure--as our heroine Jupiter successively confronts each of the Abrasax siblings in turn.
However, the sharper political edge likely did not endear it to many a critic and viewer (likely biasing many the other way, many of whom responded in predictably disingenuous, passive aggressive fashion by getting overcritical); the science fiction imagery, while suitably lavish, and more original than that of so many more successful films (Man of Steel, for example, the opening scenes of which looked as overfamiliar as they did ornate), comes across as less distinctive, sharp or fresh than the first Matrix film's visuals; and the comparative novelty of the plot structure (where a wedding is disrupted by the guy who yells "I object!" long before the closing scene), which I found appealing, may have been off-putting to those more strictly insistent on action-movie formula. The result was, once again, that a genre film that was rather more competently assembled and with a good deal more on its mind than most (and not without its charm) was subjected to an exaggerated and unfortunate hostility.
After all, it has long been fashionable to bash these particular filmmakers. Disappointment with the Matrix sequels (some of it reasonable, some of it not), the predictable reaction to a Hollywood version of Speed Racer, the reception of Cloud Atlas did anything but assure a warm welcome for the movie.
That Jupiter Ascending is a space opera did anything but help--the genre being notoriously high-risk. Star Wars may have become a Marvel-style movie machine, with Episode VII a $2 billion grosser and the prospects for Rogue One looking bright--but audiences are much less likely to go for them than films with a milder science fiction touch (like superheroes), and the negative response to the great majority that don't win them over is often wildly exaggerated. Perhaps the only non-Star Wars, non-Trek film to score an undisputed success of this type has been 2014's Guardians of the Galaxy--the beneficiary of a summer of weak competition, the Marvel brand name, and even its own slightness and overfamiliarity. Anything "weirder" or more ambitious--and this was indeed the case with Jupiter--is that much more likely to suffer for being so (as Jupiter did).
All the same, this is far from the full explanation for the hostility. The film too obviously repeated much that was in the Matrix trilogy. Once again, an ordinary person of our time--perhaps even less than ordinary--experiences unusual goings-on culminating in a meeting with a mystery man who makes very clear to them that, unbeknownst to all of us we are really being farmed by an exploitative, monstrous power for its own sustenance; and that they may be the key to humanity's salvation from this fate. Chases and fights ensue, culminating in the hero's choosing to undertake a mission of rescue in which they confront and defeat an enemy, achieve a partial victory, and then after contemplating its meaning, soar into the sky above a modern metropolis in what seems a sure prelude to further adventures.
All this is not to deny that there were differences. The handling of the material is bolder in respects--particularly the political themes. It is easy to mistake The Matrix for just another Frankenstein complex story about out-of-control AI (especially if one just focuses on the first film). However, that this is a case of humans exploiting other humans through a brutal, hierarchical system of high-technology and elaborate deception, with a tiny, hyper-privileged, colossally cynical and arrogant and utterly repugnant elite at the top literally stealing the lives of those at the bottom is unmistakable in Jupiter. The movie also manages to not look like a pale imitation of The Matrix, satisfactorily trading cyberpunk imagery for the space operatic kind. And of course, there is much difference in the plot structure--as our heroine Jupiter successively confronts each of the Abrasax siblings in turn.
However, the sharper political edge likely did not endear it to many a critic and viewer (likely biasing many the other way, many of whom responded in predictably disingenuous, passive aggressive fashion by getting overcritical); the science fiction imagery, while suitably lavish, and more original than that of so many more successful films (Man of Steel, for example, the opening scenes of which looked as overfamiliar as they did ornate), comes across as less distinctive, sharp or fresh than the first Matrix film's visuals; and the comparative novelty of the plot structure (where a wedding is disrupted by the guy who yells "I object!" long before the closing scene), which I found appealing, may have been off-putting to those more strictly insistent on action-movie formula. The result was, once again, that a genre film that was rather more competently assembled and with a good deal more on its mind than most (and not without its charm) was subjected to an exaggerated and unfortunate hostility.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
