I went to see Spectre, the latest James Bond movie. The opening scene is well worth the price of admission, even before the aerobatic Bo-105 helicopter comes on screen. The feeling of immersion in a Day of the Dead festival in Mexico city is a tremendous artistic achievement. How did they make it look as though the helicopter were doing maneuvers over the heads of the crowd? According to this article, they did it by… flying maneuvers over the heads of the crowd (maybe not the loops and rolls, though!).
I have to love any movie that starts and ends with helicopters. Consistent with other Bond movies, checklists and laborious starting procedures are not featured. Maybe in a FADEC world we will get to see Bond actually start a helicopter! Airplane pilots will appreciate seeing the Britten-Norman Islander used to chase cars.
My companions for the film were two adult friends and their 12-year-old son. The father said afterwards that he thought that the 12-year-old shouldn’t have been allowed to see the movie, partly due to the fact that it suggested that James Bond would have sex with women he had only recently met. Discussing this the next day at lunch, the assembled group of adults concluded that we would be conducting a natural experiment: If a few years from now the boy says that he wants to have sex with an attractive young woman, we will know that it is because he watched the movie. This observation did not cheer up the father.
Separately, a friend emailed this on the same weekend:
“You know, those are just lines of code, not actual people.”
— [10-year-old] responding to his friend’s comment about the dead bodies/skeletons in a multiplayer game they are playing on Xbox live
Dumb question for readers… (spoiler alert!): Why was there value to Spectre in gathering electronic surveillance data? Our own government agencies can’t do that much with the data streams, apparently; how could criminals use surveillance data to make money? Steal credentials for transferring funds?
Related:
- Stream of consciousness commentary on the movie San Andreas
- a comparison of the potential profitability of a sexual encounter with James Bond in different international jurisdictions (considering all of the movies together, most of Bond’s intimate activities with women seem to occur in Civil Law countries where child support revenue tends to be capped, rather than in England (Common Law), where profits from a one-night encounter are potentially unlimited; in the U.S., Bond seems to favor Nevada)
Helicopters are sexy. I am sure you have women throwing themselves at you every time you start the machine up, right? Otherwise, what was the point in buying it?
“The opening scene is well worth the price of admission”. This applies to the last Mission Impossible movie as well. Indeed, the opening scene was just about the only thing the movie had going for it. But it was a great scene.
“Just lines of code.” Check out this near-future take on video gaming:
I’m not getting anything for the plug, but I thought it was brilliant.
Action Boi: “What was the point in buying it?” That’s a question that every aircraft owner wonders about a few years after the purchase…
It all depends on what are the current limitations on the current agencies. “Bad guys” could do much more. Two come to mind: elaborate takes on insider trading and market movements, persistent blackmailing of high net worth individuals.
I think the best send-up of Spectre (as a concept) is the scene in the original Austin Powers where it comes to light that the organization has been doing much better in every way during its decades long, non-evil hiatus, having established a strong, very profitable presence in the volatile chemical and cable television industries.
It stands to reason that if one were able to build a comprehensive, worldwide electronic information-gathering apparatus, the U.S. government would be more than happy to pay you a princely sum to build and run it. (There a a few throwaway lines about running some human trafficking lines of business; can that possible be as lucrative as running a large government IT firm?)
If we take the movie at face value, Spectre seems to be a politically-connected criminal syndicate organized around a combination of sadism and the desire for unaccountable power. Blofeld claims to be a visionary (ideologue?) but it’s not clear what his ideology is.
Apparently they couldn’t film the entire scene in Mexico city because of the altitude. http://sploid.gizmodo.com/1748013344 has a short behind-the-scenes video about the stunt.