007 - Quantum of Solace

Quantum of Solace opens with a shot that suggests a heat-seeking missile tracking in on its mark. We collide with Bond mid-mission, 007 attempting to spirit away a high-value target while the world around him breaks and explodes. Marc Forster's film is cut to the bone, a terse image assault that constantly and continuously stresses hostility. Matt Cheese and Rick Pearson's editing is incredibly confrontational, shots are ordered in either brief, functional reports or elegiac drifts.

Connery era editor (and On Her Majesty's Secret Service director) Peter R Hunt provided a template for communicating Bond's dilemma. Data streamed in from every conceivable direction, sometimes at odds with the preceding image. Quantum marks a supercharged return to that blueprint, emboldened by Christopher Rouse and Rick Pearson's hyperactive work on the Bourne films. This obsessive drive at functionality works perfectly for Quantum, Forster's film arranged to reflect the headspace of Daniel Craig's assailed, venomous hero.

Following Vesper's suicide Bond has, basically, stopped being human. He doesn't eat, he certainly doesn't sleep. 007's inflated musculature is gone too, replaced by the kind of snapping sinew you'd expect of some prowling, predatory lizard. Even his face is different, held in a pained, lopsided scowl that suggests Clint Eastwood staring at the sun. Casino Royale gave us a striver, fine-tuned to evoke understanding and sympathy. Quantum has no such aspiration, this is James Bond as pure machinery.

Quantum of Solace is Bond stripped of all the pretension and lies. An adventure completely outside of the structural formula that keeps much of the series feeling used up on arrival. It doesn't even pass the two-hour mark. Thanks to an aggressive release schedule and the 2007-08 Writers' Strike, Quantum wasn't worked and reworked to fit Eon's template. It's a mutant, a lone voice in a long, self-satisfied string of films that, for once, doesn't care about gadgets or holiday destinations. In their place we have a piece about a phantom that cannot find peace, the revenge mission that Diamonds Are Forever denied, Point Blank in a tuxedo. What higher praise is there?

Quantum of Solace (Video Game)

The title's a misnomer; this interact adapt is far more concerned with leading players through unseen action brackets in the Casino Royale storyline than allow play-act insight into Quantum of Solace's murky revenge narrative. Upfront, you get a few bare Quantum paths, before the game delves deep into flashback territory. On release, expectation for Quantum of Solace: The Video Game was unusually high. Bond has a fair video game pedigree, mainly thanks to the N64's peerless GoldenEye, and developers Treyarch had Infinity Ward's Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare engine to mess about with. The imagination brimmed with ideas of a polished spy-kit shooter, perhaps informed by the black-ops patter that made Modern Warfare sing.

The result, no doubt thanks to inflexible licence paymaster and a satirically short production window, is more like a product push redraft of Namco's on-rails shooter Time Crisis, with Daniel Craig's 007 as the aspiration item. Perspective shifts constantly. First person is used for iron-sighting, and third person for defence snaps. Jab buttons near the ubiquitous cover, and context drifts outside the eyeline, allowing the player to gaze upon Craig, and his relationship to surroundings. The mechanic ticks two boxes: Gears of War's land seizure gameplay is referenced for the magpies, and Craig becomes visible without excessively compromising the point and blast genre stylings. Shame it's such an uninspired affair.

A simulacra of Craig's Bond drifts aimlessly along preordained paths mucking in on sequences that bare no relation to on-screen action. Break stealth and the boring backroom levels swarm with faceless, arcade bold suicide shooters. Time to bog yourself down in cover and fire blind. A neat summation of this game's flaws would be the trailing of the Alex Dimitrios character. In the film Bond weaves in and out of Gunther von Hagens' Body Worlds, the raw exhibit figures providing a garishly fragile contrast to 007's blue-lit machine movement. Were Treyarch inclined to just import a poise shredding shoot-out into this situation, you'd have a startling centrepiece. Instead, action shifts to a nondescript science centre, full of barely breakable techno-nothings.

Quantum of Solace Trailer

"I think you're so blinded by inconsolable rage that you don't care who you hurt."

Unlikely it'll be based on the Fleming short story of the same title - Bond, stranded at boring socialite party, is told the brutal tale of a civil servent and his unfaithful trophy wife - instead, Quantum of Solace appears to be an all-out mecha-man revenge mission against the SPECTRE alike secret society teased in Casino Royale. Excellent! We are also promised more gadgets. Oh well, you can't have everything.