Quantum of Solace

Marc Forster’s 2008 entry is a handover rather than a sequel. It opens inside a car chase with the prisoner from the end of the previous film in the boot, and never says who anyone is, so a newcomer spends twenty minutes working out the cast. The script was caught by the 2007 writers’ strike. The rules barred hiring a writer but let an actor and a director work on scenes together, and Daniel Craig has described himself rewriting scenes while saying that a writer he is not. One sequence carries the film: the Tosca passage on the floating lake stage at Bregenz in Austria, which needed 1,500 extras. Sound design replaces gunfire, the villains talking through earpieces until Bond joins their channel. The chases do the reverse and hide your sense of place. The desert hotel is real outside, the astronomers’ residence at an observatory in the Atacama in Chile. Its interior was rebuilt on a stage in England and wired with over fifty explosive charges. Two stunt performers were seriously hurt in production. A good fit if you will sit through the rest for the opera sequence and can treat lost spatial sense as style. Not for you if you want a Bond film that stands alone, since this one opens mid scene from the last.