Movies in General

Chevalier said:

Know your place, coloured people; white anglos, especially zionist israelis have immunity from the ICC.

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This is the 'rules based order', ladies and gentlemen. A racial caste system, a feudal hierarchy where white european jews are at the top and all else are 'human animals' to be used at will, and it's true because it said so from a bronze age school shooter's diary and later fanfic aficionados decided they were part of this lost tribe from Atlantis.

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One other thing: Western Atlanticists wonder why the global south are ignoring them; if your own institutions are selective in its dealings, if the rule of law, that 'Magna Carta' that anglos love to rave on about, if that rule of law does not apply to the powerful, then why should any nation listen to the diktat of anglo western initiated organisation? Why should the global south listen to the world bank or the IMF?

Lethe said:

A point of detail: No western powers were involved in the villain's plot, which was orchestrated between General Chang of the PLA and Elliot Carver of the Carver Media Group. Chang and Carver intended to forment war between China and the UK, ending with the decapitation of China's leadership via an apparently British missile strike. Chang would assume control and secure his position by successfully defusing the conflict that he and Carver had orchestrated, while Carver would be rewarded for his efforts with exclusive broadcast and press rights within China.

I thought Tomorrow Never Dies was ahead of its time in noting and dramatizing the power of the media to shape reality. The film was clearly inspired by Britain's anxiety about its position in the world in the context of the rise of China and the impending return of Hong Kong to Chinese control, but it does not suggest that Britain's forces are superior to China's, nor does it portray China as the enemy. Michelle Yeoh's character, Wai Lin, of the "Chinese People's External Security Force", is probably the closest the franchise has ever come to depicting a female character as Bond's equal.

Tomorrow Never Dies is also notable for its depiction of GPS technology and also Carver's stealth ship, which was clearly inspired by the US Navy's Sea Shadow project made public just a few years earlier. Germany is a secondary location for the film, which clearly reflects the commercial and cultural buoyancy that nation enjoyed in the years following reunification. The prominence of BMW cars and motorcycles in the Brosnan-era films is related both to that and BMW's strengthening presence in the British market, punctuated by its acquisition of British brands Mini and Rolls-Royce in the same period.

(All films can be mined for meaning, but the unusually consistent formula and unusual length of the 007 franchise (1962-2021) makes doing so particularly rewarding. Starting from the basic formula of James Bond as a vehicle for the exploration of a particularly British masculinity as an agent and expression of a formerly powerful nation that must now find its way in the presence of greater powers, one can track the evolution over time of the franchise's villains, cars, gadgets, settings, music, cinematography, women, even the depiction of Bond himself.)

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Excellent film analysis; though it ought to be in the TV/Films thread. I would expand on your point though: the 007 franchise is an extension and expression of the British ruling class via its depiction of villains eg the Assange type Javier Bardem villain and its allies eg the homosexual weapons quartermaster 'Q' as a reflection of the LGBT ideology of the anglo american ruling class and the black female 007 of the last film. It's apparent that sometime around the 2010s, the factional elite that rose to Atlanticist power were evidently homosexual and treated their homosexuality as a core part of their identity, hence the weird fixation that the US State Department has with lgbt.


Look at the state of mind of the western elites; here they are salivating over war in east Asia, they are practically drooling at the prospect of genociding Asians again. None of them got drafted in vietnam so getting other men's children to go to war is easy for them.


How desperate must the anglo america be if they are making such demands of the europoors?

Picking up on this conversation from a couple weeks back. I've left it here because taking the quotes across to the movie thread sounds suspiciously like work, but I'm happy for a mod to move it as appropriate...

Chevalier said:

Excellent film analysis; though it ought to be in the TV/Films thread. I would expand on your point though: the 007 franchise is an extension and expression of the British ruling class via its depiction of villains eg the Assange type Javier Bardem villain and its allies eg the homosexual weapons quartermaster 'Q' as a reflection of the LGBT ideology of the anglo american ruling class and the black female 007 of the last film. It's apparent that sometime around the 2010s, the factional elite that rose to Atlanticist power were evidently homosexual and treated their homosexuality as a core part of their identity, hence the weird fixation that the US State Department has with lgbt.

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I haven't seen the two most recent films so I can't speak about them, but one of the things I liked about Skyfall (2012) is how it positioned Daniel Craig's Bond as the archetype of a traditional masculinity that appears increasingly inadequate and ill-suited to the modern world, with Q, Mallory and Raoul Silva serving as points of contrast. The scene where Bond, our infallible hero, misses the glass set atop Severine's head and so condemns her to death is so rich in symbolism. All of 007's strength, stoicism, skill and dress sense count for nothing, and she dies. It's not just Bond who is ageing, but the entire mode of being that he represents. The rest of the film asks us to consider what's left, as our hero waits silently with a simple rifle in a simple cottage as an enormous helicopter carrying dozens of troops and armed with a minigun bears down upon him, and in the end we find that 007's traditional masculine virtues have their uses after all.

Maikeru said:

The Brosnan Bond movies were the last 'traditional' Bonds before Austin Powers parodied the various tropes into absurdity. The Bond franchise had to rethink dramatically in order to survive - which led to the lager-drinking "thug in a Savile Row suit" of the Daniel Craig era. Gone were the vodka martinis (shaken not stirred), the tie-adjustments whilst underwater in a jet boat and the ridiculous stunts like surfing away from a collapsing ice shelf whilst chased by North Koreans in a plane with a solar ray. And of course the smutty innuendos in the girls' names. Which is as good an excuse as any to post a gratuitous picture of Famke Jansenn as Xenia Onnatop:

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I agree that Daniel Craig's portrayal of Bond from the mid-00s was a shift compared to Brosnan, but the franchise has always been evolving. Brosnan himself inaugurated the era of the "Sensitive, New Age Bond". Goldeneye (1995) is my favourite 007 film not only because it has an awesome theme song and score, Isabella Scorupco as the delightful Natalya, and inspired a video game that I played for hundreds of hours as a kid, but because it is such a self-aware film that, with the ending of the Cold War, grapples with the legacy of the franchise and its place in the modern world. A few examples:

When M derides 007 as a "sexist dinosaur, a relic of the Cold War", she's not only talking to the man in front of her, but to the audience, addressing and acknowledging the notion that the franchise is a relic of a bygone era. When Natalya's colleague, Anna, scornfully observes that Boris "wouldn't recognise a woman if one came up and sat on his head", she's not only talking about Boris but about the franchise's depiction of women. When Zhukovsky relates Trevelyn's background, he's not only conveying a personal dossier, but one that undermines the clear divide between good (the West) and evil (the USSR) that is a foundational assumption of the franchise. With the Cold War safely over, more nuance can be entertained in this regard, akin to how Anglo folks started feeling uncomfortable about their treatment of indigenous peoples only after they had been safely exterminated or rendered non-threatening. When Trevelyn asks Bond if all the vodka martinis silence the screams of all the men he has killed, or if Bond finds forgiveness in the arms of all those willing women, for all the dead ones he's failed to protect, it encourages us to consider the absurdity and implications of these two body counts across decades of films, similar to how Nathan Drake's endlessly cheerful mass murder in the Uncharted games became the poster child for "ludonarrative dissonance" in video games.

The new Alien movie looks pretty sweet. I've only watched both the AVP movies and some clips of the Aliens series, never any full movie but this looks pretty good.

Aniah said:

The new Alien movie looks pretty sweet. I've only watched both the AVP movies and some clips of the Aliens series, never any full movie but this looks pretty good.

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Alien (1979) and Aliens (1986) are both classic works of science-fiction cinema, but interestingly they are quite different films: Alien is a horror film, while Aliens is more of an action-adventure film. Sequels often struggle to recapture the magic of the original, and Aliens is an interesting case study. How do you improve upon the perfection of Alien? You change the rules of the game. James Cameron (director of Aliens) did something similar in going from Terminator to Terminator 2 also: instead of trying to find someone who could out-muscle Arnold Schwarzenegger as the imposing villain from the original film, he flipped the script and had Schwarzenegger return as the hero, this time confronting a villain far less physically imposing but altogether more menacing. Both Alien and particularly Aliens have also been very influential in the world of videogames, with Alien and Ellen Ripley inspiring Samus Aran in Nintendo's Metroid games, to StarCraft lifting both dialogue and visual motifs directly from Aliens.

That said, Aliens' twist on Alien only works because it is so very, very good. None of the subsequent films (Alien 3 (1992), Alien: Resurrection (1997), Prometheus (2012) and Alien Covenant (2017)) have reached the heights of the first two films, though Alien 3 and Prometheus are at least intriguing in what they were trying to accomplish, and admittedly I have not seen Alien: Covenant. This latest film, Romulus, is being billed as a revival of Alien's roots in pure horror. I have mixed feelings about the trailer. On the one hand, it does the typical trailer thing of lots of rapid-fire cuts that really strains against the slow, deliberate atmosphere of Alien. But that could just be a trailer thing and not representative of the film. The audio white-out effect toward the end of the trailer does give me some hope that the filmmakers know what they are doing, but I will keep my expectations low and hope to be presently surprised.

P.S. Aliens has just recently received the 4K HDR Blu-Ray treatment and the detail is amazing:

Lethe said:

Alien (1979) and Aliens (1986) are both classic works of science-fiction cinema, but interestingly they are quite different films: Alien is a horror film, while Aliens is more of an action-adventure film. Sequels often struggle to recapture the magic of the original, and Aliens is an interesting case study. How do you improve upon the perfection of Alien? You change the rules of the game. James Cameron (director of Aliens) did something similar in going from Terminator to Terminator 2 also: instead of trying to find someone who could out-muscle Arnold Schwarzenegger as the imposing villain from the original film, he flipped the script and had Schwarzenegger return as the hero, this time confronting a villain far less physically imposing but altogether more menacing. Both Alien and particularly Aliens have also been very influential in the world of videogames, with Alien and Ellen Ripley inspiring Samus Aran in Nintendo's Metroid games, to StarCraft lifting both dialogue and visual motifs directly from Aliens.

That said, Aliens' twist on Alien only works because it is so very, very good. None of the subsequent films (Alien 3 (1992), Alien: Resurrection (1997), Prometheus (2012) and Alien Covenant (2017)) have reached the heights of the first two films, though Alien 3 and Prometheus are at least intriguing in what they were trying to accomplish, and admittedly I have not seen Alien: Covenant. This latest film, Romulus, is being billed as a revival of Alien's roots in pure horror. I have mixed feelings about the trailer. On the one hand, it does the typical trailer thing of lots of rapid-fire cuts that really strains against the slow, deliberate atmosphere of Alien. But that could just be a trailer thing and not representative of the film. The audio white-out effect toward the end of the trailer does give me some hope that the filmmakers know what they are doing, but I will keep my expectations low and hope to be presently surprised.

P.S. Aliens has just recently received the 4K HDR Blu-Ray treatment and the detail is amazing:

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From the looks of the trailer, it almost seems it's trying to be a remake/reboot of the first alien movie. A single large ship with a couple of crewmen getting stalked by an alien and taken out one by one. However, it seems to have more than one alien this time.

Lethe said:

Alien (1979) and Aliens (1986) are both classic works of science-fiction cinema, but interestingly they are quite different films: Alien is a horror film, while Aliens is more of an action-adventure film. Sequels often struggle to recapture the magic of the original, and Aliens is an interesting case study. How do you improve upon the perfection of Alien? You change the rules of the game. James Cameron (director of Aliens) did something similar in going from Terminator to Terminator 2 also: instead of trying to find someone who could out-muscle Arnold Schwarzenegger as the imposing villain from the original film, he flipped the script and had Schwarzenegger return as the hero, this time confronting a villain far less physically imposing but altogether more menacing. Both Alien and particularly Aliens have also been very influential in the world of videogames, with Alien and Ellen Ripley inspiring Samus Aran in Nintendo's Metroid games, to StarCraft lifting both dialogue and visual motifs directly from Aliens.

That said, Aliens' twist on Alien only works because it is so very, very good. None of the subsequent films (Alien 3 (1992), Alien: Resurrection (1997), Prometheus (2012) and Alien Covenant (2017)) have reached the heights of the first two films, though Alien 3 and Prometheus are at least intriguing in what they were trying to accomplish, and admittedly I have not seen Alien: Covenant. This latest film, Romulus, is being billed as a revival of Alien's roots in pure horror. I have mixed feelings about the trailer. On the one hand, it does the typical trailer thing of lots of rapid-fire cuts that really strains against the slow, deliberate atmosphere of Alien. But that could just be a trailer thing and not representative of the film. The audio white-out effect toward the end of the trailer does give me some hope that the filmmakers know what they are doing, but I will keep my expectations low and hope to be presently surprised.

P.S. Aliens has just recently received the 4K HDR Blu-Ray treatment and the detail is amazing:

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Pop trivia for ten points: The actress who played Marine Vasquez is Aliens also played the foster mother in Terminator 2.

Maikeru said:

Pop trivia for ten points: The actress who played Marine Vasquez is Aliens also played the foster mother in Terminator 2.

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Oh that's cool, I never noticed that. It was sad to read about Bill Paxton passing away a few years ago. I thought his performance as Private Hudson in Aliens was the best of his career, full of bravado that collapses when everything goes to shit, leaving him as this hyper-stressed, histrionic, very human mess: "Game over, man, game over! What the fuck are we gonna do now?"

I just finished watching Netflix's Three Body Problem. I never read the books or watched the Chinese TV adaption. I thought it was going to be this complicated intellectual thing but surprised how it was not which sort of came as a disappointment after the books getting all these praises and awards. So I'm not sure if it follows the books or it was because of the Westernization.

AssassinsMace said:

I just finished watching Netflix's Three Body Problem. I never read the books or watched the Chinese TV adaption. I thought it was going to be this complicated intellectual thing but surprised how it was not which sort of came as a disappointment after the books getting all these praises and awards. So I'm not sure if it follows the books or it was because of the Westernization.

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"Netflix's Three Body Problem ... came as a disappointment .... So I'm not sure if it follows the books or it was because of the Westernization."

Narrator: It was the Westernization.