Geoff Manaugh, author of this blog, has a fun book called "A Burglar's Guide to the City", discussing how city layouts influence the types of crimes committed there.
One example that I remember talks about the differences between Los Angeles and New York City: at one point in the 1990s, LA was the bank robbery capital of the world, averaging over 1 per day for a while, but bank robberies rarely happen in NYC. When you compare their layouts, it makes total sense: LA was built around the car. The pattern of "highway offramp, bank next to the road, highway onramp" was everywhere throughout LA. Robbing a bank in NYC would be just so much harder: parking is more difficult, traffic is slower, way more people around to identify you, etc.
One of the early entries in this "genre" is Ornament and Crime by Adolf Loos, from 1910.
"The evolution of culture marches with the elimination of ornament from useful objects," Loos proclaimed, thus linking the optimistic sense of the linear and upward progress of cultures with the contemporary vogue for applying evolution to cultural contexts. Loos's work was prompted by regulations he encountered when he designed a building without ornamentation opposite a palace. He eventually conceded to requirements by adding window flower boxes.
Loos is very interesting in the current context, as he associated ornamentation with savagery, while many contemporary "civilizationists" (take this label with a massive grain of salt) associate modernism with the International style and a supposed erasure of culture in favor of "globalism" (while also couching their negative views of an encroaching other in much the same language as Loos).
Ironically, you can read it all as a sort of window dressing for a core of xenophobia, as that's the only thing consistent across the two.
The title of the post immediately made me think about that book. (Not a coincident, as it became clear when clicking :))
I found the book too repetitive and cursory, employing pop-culture movie references too much.
The research that went into the book (as it can be seen from the bibliography) is immense, but for me the book was underwhelming for the potential it had based on the immense knowledge the author has accumulated from those sources. It is still worth a read for those interested in the topics of heists or city planning, but has wasted its potential in my eyes.
I see others have drawn parallels to games like Deus Ex, and that one in particular is great at creating the illusion of a Nakatomi Space, but in truth the developers intended all its pathways to be traversed.
I believe to find a true Nakatomi Space in gaming we must look to the world of speedrunning. This is where players move through the game’s spaces in ways almost certainly not intended by the architects - including exploiting every possible trick to accomplish impossible moves. A gamer wishing to emulate John McClane wouldn’t demolish a wall using the rocket launcher that the level designer put in a crate: they would exploit a clipping bug to glitch right through it.
I highly recommend the “Quake Speedruns Explained” channel on YouTube.
> the illusion of a Nakatomi Space, but in truth the developers intended all its pathways to be traversed
I don't think that logic works, because if we turn around and apply it onto Die Hard, we get a bizarre conclusion: The movie's Nakatomi Plaza lacks any of the eponymous Nakatomi Places it supposedly showcases. (Because that protagonist, too, is traveling intended routes that were planned and put there by screenwriters.)
When it comes to works of fiction, what we need to be looking at are the intents and assumptions of the in-universe fictional architects and/or typical users of the space.
Games are unlike films because in a game, players have agency that separates them from the characters they play. In a film, characters interact only with the in-universe architects and can only subvert the intentions of those architects, not those of the author. But in a game, the player is not the character. The player can make out-of-universe choices too, and can subvert the intentions of the architects (developers) of the game.
Uh, yeah, and those are all reasons to reject the conclusion that games (like Deus Ex) merely offer second-rate illusory "Nakatomi Spaces" compared to movies (like Die Hard.)
A player choosing to make their avatar avoid the front door in favor of discovering an unusual route is always going to be a more authentic experience of subverting architecture, compared to passively observing a character doing the same actions in film.
Being able to go further and glitch/hack/mod the game merely raises the ceiling, it does not lower the floor.
That has parallels with Escher’s ‘paradoxical’ image of two hands recursively drawing each-other: it’s not paradoxical once you realise a third hand drew them sequentially in order for them to appear paradoxical.
> When it comes to works of fiction, what we need to be looking at are the intents and assumptions of the in-universe fictional architects and/or typical users of the space.
I agree in the context of films, but this ignores the relationship between creator and player/user in interactive fiction like games.
Your argument is incomplete, everyone agrees differences exist, but you haven't explained how any of those differences make "Nakatomi spaces" in games somehow less legitimate than in movies like Die Hard.
If anything, you've got it backwards: The fact that each individual player must notice and choose to exploit alternate paths makes them more authentically unusual and innovative than in movies, rather than less.
> everyone agrees differences exist, but you haven't explained how any of those differences make "Nakatomi spaces" in games somehow less legitimate than in movies like Die Hard.
I meant the opposite - games have an additional layer in which "Nakatomi space" can exist. The misunderstanding seems to be my fault (oops)
> When it comes to works of fiction, what we need to be looking at are the intents and assumptions of the in-universe fictional architects and/or typical users of the space.
I failed to grasp this initially; I agree with you here - but only for films and novels where the reader/viewer/audience lacks agency. This is what OP (jl6) seemed to be driving at:
> in gaming we must look to the world of speedrunning. This is where players move through the game’s spaces in ways almost certainly not intended by the architects
Games contain not just a relationship between fictional architects and fictional entities (with fictional agency), but additionally a relationship between real developers and real players (with real, albeit constrained and often imagined, agency).
> each individual player must notice and choose to exploit alternate paths
If these paths were planned by the developers, they are akin to hallways and stairwells in a skyscraper. In the creator-player context their traversal is within the norm, excluding them from being "Nakatomi space". I agree with OP that glitches/exploits better embody this concept:
> A gamer wishing to emulate John McClane wouldn’t demolish a wall using the rocket launcher that the level designer put in a crate: they would exploit a clipping bug to glitch right through it.
I've had a similar thought about magic in fantasy games. In our world, a person throwing a fireball or teleporting across a chasm would be--at the very just--startling. But in the world of a fantasy game, these things are de rigueur. In extrapolation "what would be a startling display of power", I end up imagining the sorts of exploits that like https://youtu.be/H9nMezJvr-k?si=hWL_JrB0v94RO_91
I'll comment from the architect side. Having made a substantial puzzle game about movement through a very escher-esque space. Sometimes subversive "Nakatomi" solutions are intentional. Sometimes they are accidental but I know about them either by discovering them for myself, or seeing them get discovered during a playtest. Usually I leave it in. If you managed to play by my rules and win in a way I didn't intend, you deserve the victory.
I'll share an anecdote about one of my favorites. So the objective in my puzzle is to collect all the gold orbs spread around the space. Once I saw a player get a gold orb in a way that was suicidal. Under any other circumstances they would have died immediately afterwards and revert to the last check point. But because they saved it for last, they beat the level in mid air just after touching the orb but before touching the lava.
A fun trip in this vein is the speedrun of Control that its developers react to. Speedrunners, of course, scamper through the immaterial areas between levels. However, Control famously features a Brutalist-styled SCP-like office complex whose non-Euclidean spaces shift - even behave - outside the bounds of known reality. Traversal of the meta-architectural spaces therefore melds with traversal of the architectural spaces in a way that is canonically elegant.
This post reminds me a bit of some games, which would normally be called "immersive sims". One of their biggest draws is how they let you interact with the environment in such a variety of ways. A blocked-off entrance isn't a set scripted objective or a tool for the developers to get you to go elsewhere - it's an opportunity for the player to find a creative solution.
Blow up the barrier. Pick a lock. Break a window. Reach through an opening to press a button to open another door. Enter from vents or sewers. Alert an NPC so they open another entrance to check it out. Shut off the power elsewhere. Etc.
It's so much fun to have all those options with how you interact with the environment, instead of it just being static and 1-dimensional.
The "Clockwork Mansion" level of Dishonored II is could be seen as almost a deconstruction of this concept, making you infiltrate and explore a mansion where the walls and floors move and rooms turn into other rooms by means of intricate machinery – turning the very architecture of the house into a puzzle you have to solve. Inevitably, of course, you find your way "behind the scenes", into the access corridors behind the walls and underneath the floors, revealing the complex mechanisms responsible for the transformations. It's a level design masterpiece, and honestly it's a bit crazy that they really went and made everything physically and mechanically plausible.
I enjoyed the new Cyberpunk game, but one thing that did bother me was its lack of "Nakatomi spaces." Most of the city doors are locked and don't lead anywhere, and while the city itself is fun to roam around in, it all feels very on rails and with basically no way to "hack" the local infrastructure and environment – which I would consider almost a fundamental quality of cyberpunk literature.
I think those mostly comes down to resources. Real rooms make more sense to spend time on. Procedural generation could help with some of this. But you still have to spend resources on assets to fill these spaces.
Not a traditional urban-realism example, but my favorite flexible sim is the new Zelda game, Tears of the Kingdom. Right during the tutorial you're given powers to:
- Telekinetically lift, rotate, and glue together anything that is not alive or nailed down.
- Summon and activate small mechanisms (fans, self-spinning wheels, flamethrowers, hydrants, etc).
- Phase vertically through any ceiling, as long as it's not too far away. This includes mountains, floating platforms, and large enemies.
- Reverse the last ~30 seconds of any object's motion. A falling boulder flies back up, a floating plank goes against the current, a spinning wheel changes direction.
Then you get to apply these powers for transport, combat, and puzzles. And somehow it just works.
I found myself frequently wondering what is the canonical solution to a puzzle, because it sure as hell isn't what I just did. It's a brilliant game.
Not just that but I think half the fun that I had in the prior game, Breath of the Wild, was finding creative ways to navigate using the paraglider together with the amazing climbing mechanic. Climbing a nearby height, letting go, paragliding over an obstacle, etc. And then Tears of the Kingdom cranked that to 11 plus added all the new toys you mentioned.
In many ways, I'm reminded of the Portal games where just figuring out how to creatively move the player character from A to B is a big part of the game loop.
One of my favorites in the previous game, Breath of the Wild, was a ball-in-maze puzzle you're presumably supposed to solve by guiding the ball through the maze with motion controls and have it fall out the exit into a cup; but it is possible to instead use the maze essentially as a paddle and bat the ball into the cup instead.
Excellent point and I think there is a deeper connection here:
I believe a big part of the success of Die Hard is that McClane is such a strong hero. One of the ways the movie viscerally demonstrates his individualist heroism is how we constantly subverts the architecture of Nakatomi Plaza. While most of us would be awed by the expensive and heft of a luxurious skyscraper and feel obligated to follow its rules, McClane gives zero fucks and bends the skyscraper's physical substance to his will.
Likewise, videogames where the world is a pile of static geometry that you can only navigate in ways the game designers decided to allow feel decidedly disempowering. You're essentially a rat in their maze where your only option is to find the cheese in the way they've chosen.
Immersive simulation-like games with emergent gameplay are empowering because they offer an open-ended space to explore with greater agency and creativity. It feels like it is your game and the NPCs are just playing in it.
I first thought of Monaco, a heist game in which one character, The Mole, can dig through walls.
I then thought of Broforce, a retro side-scrolling shooter, where almost all the terrain is destructible, and so if you don't fancy climbing the enemy's walls, or navigating some subterranean passages, you can usually just blast your way straight through. Indeed, there are some levels which i can only complete by digging a tunnel under the entire map, avoiding both the enemies on the surface, and the constant aerial bombardment which is raining down on it.
Not OP, but I do in the form of the original Deus Ex (not to be confused with it's sequels, which are pale imitations with the veneer of being in the same universe).
This particular clip is what convinced me to get into the game (potential spoiler) [0].
You're right, actually. When I first played through MD I did it very linearly, only later did I realize that it was far more open than I originally expected (Because Human Revolution was pretty limited in comparison).
My point for it being a shallow imitation should be reserved only for the plot and themes of the original game, which are far more subversive and interesting than the ones in MD or HR. But I do agree, gameplay wise Mankind Divided is very well done and does fit the Nakatomi Space paradigm.
I wouldn't play with something like that for a first playthrough though. Just play vanilla for a first time around. Deus Ex lends itself well to replayability so I'd get it modded at that point.
The article very much reminded me of Rainbow Six Siege whose defining feature is probably the destructible environment. You can shoot or blow a path through walls floors and ceilings to reach the hostages / bad guys you need to get to. It very much changes the dynamics during play because almost nowhere is safe. To balance things, defenders have the ability to erect a limited number of metal barriers but the end result is that every game feels different and creativity is very much rewarded.
The new Hitman games are the best recent example in that category, IMO. Sadly the final goal still ends up being killing people.
There are few games that fall truly in that genre, which is a shame as (to me at least) it’s the video game genre that is most interesting from an “interactive medium” pov.
Arkane games (Dishonored, Deathloop) have some segments that get close, but at their core the games still have a few privileged paths (and are about killing people).
One fun indie game that uses a voxel engine effectively for open ended gameplay is Teardown (and it’s not about killing people!). The maps are quite small though. It’ll be exciting in a decade or so when we can run such engines at much higher dimensions.
There aren't a lot of them these days. Hitman probably the only one still going strong.
I would recommend Streets of Rogue from the indie sphere. It doesn't have vents you can crawl through but you can poison the ventilation system, bribe the police, hack security robots, hire people as bodyguard or to cause a ruckus. Surprisng amount of options for a top down roguelike.
I've just vouched your comment. Not sure why it was removed, because you're right, games that are primarily immersive sims aren't being made as much by AAA studios now. Some mechanics are integrated into open world games to varying degrees (you could argue that BotW/TotK take so much inspiration from them that they might count, but to many people a replayable mission-based format is an essential part that is missing in them). There are some indies in this space but they're rare since the concept is difficult to develop around in the first place, given how you have to account for so many different edge cases and routes that the player can take.
Immersive sims have always been something of a niche genre, because they tend to have a negative difficulty curve: the player is very weak and lacks powers at the start, but becomes more resilient and more capable as the game goes on, often at a much sharper curve the game's difficulty. The result is that new players tend to be turned off and give up relatively quickly.
Right but you could, and it didn't really penalize you for it compared to later games, whereas my recollection of 3 is that you get near instagibbed by everything, so it forced a stealth gameplay loop
I think the possibility of this alternate navigation through cities and buildings is why certain open world games are so popular. For instance, the buildability of Minecraft and destructibility of GTA both enable worlds of exceptions and edge cases, where players can come up with alternate pathways to their goal, and where the latent environmental possibilities can even shape the player’s goals.
In ill-designed sandbox games without sufficient storyline (or other meaning-making mechanisms), if I run up against the edge of a map, or can’t pick up whatever decorative object, there’s a certain disappointment - that the world is limiting, but there isn’t sufficient purpose/meaning to balance those limitations.
In real life, there’s a reason we don’t indiscriminately blast holes through walls (other than perhaps lack of appropriate tool) - we care about the people on the other side, the asset comprised by the wall material, etc. But the material possibility of such hole-blasting always remains.
This is a rambling comment with unfinished thoughts, but what I’m getting at is: there’s a relationship between potential interactions w/ our environment and the “amount” of meaning that we ascribe and extract from it.
I don't think GTA is the best example for "alternate navigation" through "destructibility". Apart from a couple of fences and lampposts, what can you really destroy that gives you new navigation possibilities? There are games that took this way further (e.g. Red Faction)
Yeah GTA doesn't have much in terms of destructibility. Some of the battlefield games do this pretty well though, particularly Bad Company 2. It was very common in that game to use explosives to make different ways in and out of buildings.
When reading this I get echos of Terry Gilliam's "Brazil" when the police storm Buttle's apartment, entering through a big hole they cut directly through the ceiling .
"Brazil" has a lot of interesting things to say about space and movement.
Police goons storming into apartments, yes, but also De Niro's "illegal" repairman flying into apartments to fix stuff. And then there's that depressing moment where you see a car traveling through a highway and the view to either side is entirely blocked by billboards.
If I recall correctly, the view obscured by the billboards in that scene in Brazil was a barren wasteland. That fits even more into the themes of the film where the harsh realities of the world are constantly hidden behind facades. It's almost to say, if you think the artifice is bad then just wait until you see what is behind it.
I think you are misinterpreting the highway scene, but yeah I have always enjoyed the way that both public and private spaces are portrayed in the film. Other good examples include sam's tiny car (Messerschmitt KR200!) and his tiny office with the half-desk. Somehow I wonder if they were making the film today, would Sam live in a tiny apartment too?
Yes, and a more apt comparison to the militarized destruction in the article. He waxes poetic about how the army worked through the city but in Brazil it’s shown as simultaneously dumb brute force and bureaucratic, I feel like he doesn’t mention Brazil because it makes the strategy seem less elegant.
Interesting, it was the scene that sprang into my mind as well. Brazil is very much a flawed movie in my mind, but still enjoyable and one that I highly recommend.
The romance seemed really crammed in there with a paper thin female, IIRC the director and the actress hated each other so that’s part of why she hardly has any lines/scenes.
I always thought that was just because the romance was a figment of Lowry's imagination as he spiraled further into madness, but then again, I remember the version w/ the correct ending
The second is good, but it's mostly the plot of the first one. The third is a good Lethal Weapon movie, but with different cast. And I personally also liked the fourth one. Thankfully there was no fifth movie.
If that's intended as a commentary on the fifth movie I agree with it, but in case it's an actual misapprehension, sadly there was one [1]. It's more part of Bruce Willis' output during his cognitive decline than part of the Die Hard series, really.
The third film is fantastic, including in ways relevant to the article, playing with similar abuse-of-infrastructure ideas at city- rather than building-level.
It's actually a better city-level example of the first film's architectural ideas than the Nablus raid the article brings up. The Israeli forces' (horrifying, from the account in the article) "reconfiguration" of Nablus was a massively forceful one, blasting through wall after (residential) wall throughout the entire city *. In Die Hard (1 and 3) the protagonists' interactions with the civil infrastructure were far more involuntary and far less forceful, with the characters often being imperilled by those hostile spaces. Blasting through them like a Terminator wouldn't have been at all in keeping with the movies and the article does the first one a disservice by describing it in those terms.
The second one isn't great but I've always rather enjoyed it too. Far from diarrhoea, anyway.
* I should say, I know absolutely nothing about Nablus besides what's described in the article, and have no idea how accurate it is.
Completely agree! The antagonists also dig tunnels and otherwise subvert city infrastructure. I feel like it was a perfect example of what the author talked about.
This blog post also reminded me of the Red Faction[1] game franchise. I remember it specifically taught players to take alternate paths or unlock doors by blasting out walls and/or anything else in the entire environment (with some exceptions).
It feels like the blog is trying to force a more significant connection here than there actually is. Many movies involve doing/using things "improperly" to intelligently get an advantage because it's novel and keeps people entertained. It would be really cool to see a movie that fleshed out some strategic dynamics of urban combat of busting through walls etc, but it feels like accessing less-used mechanical spaces isn't that. Elevator shafts, ventilation ducts, and the outsides of highrise buildings are pretty common tropes.
Cop City in Atlanta is being built to train American police forces to engage in urban warfare in the exact same way the IDF engages in Gaza. The Palestinian experience is coming our way:
> Is it possible to even begin to imagine the horror experienced by a five-year-old child as four, six, eight, twelve soldiers, their faces painted black, submachine guns pointed everywhere, antennas protruding from their backpacks, making them look like giant alien bugs, blast their way through that wall?
The US is preparing to scale up enforcement generally both on the southern border and within its segregated cities. It's how the current regime intends to handle climate-induced desperation, cost inflation, and migration.
He does use them, in fact this is one of the pictures in the article!
The villains catch up to his use of vents though.
I think Die Hard is fair use of this trope, because it popularized or codified it. Back when Die Hard opened, a lot of these tropes were far less common; in fact they've become common because of the movie. Many later action thrillers owe a lot to John McClane.
That’s definitely a missing aspect of the TVtropes dataset - what is the influence timeline of the trope? Which instances are referencing other instances? When did it transition into cliche? When was its tropiness punctured to make it into something that could be parodied or lampshaded?
While I’d agree post-Die-Hard vent spelunking is likely to nod to the Die-Hardness of the situation, the trope had a long life before Nakatomi.
And nearly got killed because of it. On of the bad guys heard him going thru them and ran a line of bullets thru it. The movie was great on tension. At any moment he could die, and die hard.
I once heard a British comedian talk about hiring a hypnotherapist to help him watch the first Harry Potter movie again as if it was his first time. I personally don’t think such precision or efficacy is possible in hypnotherapy, but it’s a fun idea.
This was a bit of the appeal of "level design" when I was dabbling with game development. Having these hidden areas and passageways, then seeing if a creative enough actor could then create their own passageways.
Neat post. It bent my mind in surprising ways. I guess I take the "permanent" structures as scripture and it would not occur to me to break through a wall, literally, when a situation would require it.
At the same time, this is exactly what I practice, and expect my teams to practice, when we build software. Each one of us has certain analogous "walls" in our minds, which define the way we can move when looking for solutions. Often, they're arbitrary and can be bypassed with relative ease - no blasting required. All we have to do is to realize that we can. It's a fun moment when we realize this and get outsized outcomes just because we step right through a preconceived and arbitrary limit which no one actually imposed.
I remember reading this post around the same time as I came across the concept of psychogeography, an interesting way of looking at how the exploration of our environments and how they're made up affects our attitude and emotions. Die Hard is a great example of this, so is The Shining. The deliberate disorientation and spatial impossibility of The Overlook conveys deep unease just by being what it is.
survivor bias coupled with the fact that there were a lot more blogs back then. So with a lot more content, you have more great content as well as more crap content but what survives is the great content.
I came here searching for a similar comment. I don't think it's just survivorship bias.
I think it's a combination of:
1) Social media lowering the barrier to entry so much as to stop new good blogs from coming up (rather than simply posting to social media)
2) Social media favouring first image then short form video content hosted on their own CDN
3) The content farms designed for SEO absolutely obliterating the idea that you could make money from advertising on your blog
It's hard to really understand the tragedy element of tragedy of the commons and enclosure. Like I feel the gross injustice of it all but I never got to experience the loss. But the destruction of the early (capital I) Internet is something that certainly causes me a lot of pain.
I feel like for Zoomers talking to older nerds about the Internet et cetera must be like talking to a Gen Xer about the second Summer of Love or the Boomers about the first, but it was really just that much better.
This article doesn’t call out to me about buildings or games, but rather software.
Part of the underused promise of having the source is the opportunity to “infest it with yourself” as the author describes. I want to rip out useless modules (or at least their interface), plop in new, better structures, etc.
This is a capability that at least is available, if largely unused, to programmers, but should be available to non-programmers too.
The only program I know that is intended to be made form-fit with the user is emacs. Are there others?
I always liked Die Hard way better than its sequels (Die Hard 2 is merely acceptable, and the rest are embarrassing), but I never thought about this use of space and architecture. "Military parkour", as the article calls it.
Also insightful are the comparisons between Jason Bourne and the latest Bond movies; Bond feels sterile, and I find myself in agreement that some of the reasons for this are:
> Jones writes that “there’s no travel in the new Bond”; there are simply “establishing shots of exotic destinations.” By the end of a Bond film, he adds, you simply “feel like you are in the international late-capitalist nonplace,” a geography with neither landmarks nor personal memory.
Whereas
> “Bourne wraps cities, autobahns, ferries and train terminuses around him as the ultimate body-armor.”
Ironically, the Greenglass-directed Bourne films that the quotes refer to are more like Bond than the very first Bourne film (The Bourne Identity, directed by Doug Liman). In that film, Bourne travels by boat to Marseilles, by train to Zurich, and then by impulsively-hired-car-driven-by-sketchy-woman to Paris. (And then by stolen car to someplace in rural France.)
In the second Bourne film (the first one directed by Greenglass), he starts off in Goa, then shows up in an airport in Italy, and later appears (with no indication of how he travels) in Munich, Berlin, Moscow, and New York City.
And, honestly, there wasn't a whole lot of visible "travel" in the "old" Bond, either. Bond is an agent of MI6, often with a cover as some kind of rich businessman or playboy. So of course he travels everywhere by passenger plane. (Unless he's doing some covert infiltration by parachute or surfboard or whatever.) The difference between Bond and (later) Bourne in terms of travel is that Bond has the resources of a wealthy government, while Bourne has... some kind of ninja superpower, I guess. In both cases, they mostly just translate invisibly from place to place.
> In the second Bourne film (the first one directed by Greenglass), he starts off in Goa, then shows up in an airport in Italy, and later appears (with no indication of how he travels) in Munich, Berlin, Moscow, and New York City.
Actually…
• He is shown departing Goa by bus, and arriving in Naples by sea.
• He is shown stealing a car in Naples, and driving it along some picturesque highways to Munich.
• He is shown driving another stolen car out of Munich, and along further highways to Berlin.
• He is shown riding a train to Moscow (later remarked upon by his pursuers).
How he gets to New York is a mystery—though the third film makes the mistake (IMO) of covering this in more detail.
Bond does feel sterile, dated and out of place. I've long argued that its cultural relevance died off after the end of the cold war. Goldeneye took advantage of that setting but subsequent movies did not.
Watching a Bond film feels like the cinematic equivalent of reading a SkyMall catalog. They should shelve the franchise for a decade or two and bring it back recontextualized around whatever geopolitical realities are fresh at that time.
They basically ran out of material after moonraker. After which Ian Flemings influence was totally gone. One of them basically was a glorified BMW commercial. Another one the 'gadgets' where whatever was cool tech for sony at the time. Which is why your skymall analogy works decent enough. The only new one that came close to what 'bond' was is Casino Royal which was loosely based on Ian FLemings book. Even Ian Fleming saw the problem with the genre he had basically made up was that you could not always fight the same baddy all the time. So he created SMIRSH to do have a way to plug in new bad guys.
I don't particularly like Bond films, but I did really like Skyfall—it felt like it leaned into the things you mention. Like, the movie was about how dated and out-of-place Bond felt (and made the villain in that film explicitly a mirror of Bond, angry at that fact).
The whole siege of the house is one of the only bits of the daniel craig era, excepting maybe casino royale ( I only saw it once but I remember enjoying it ), of bond I can stand. It's not 'bondian' though, bond movies have kind of always been this way. If anything bond has become somewhat less campy in the recent era.
I think you’ve actually understated the rather precipitous drop off of 007’s campiness. It wasn’t a mistake, the intention was to reboot the series in the same vein as Batman Begins, where he becomes an unbearably gloomy figure who exists as a morally ambiguous antihero brooding among the gritty backdrop of a fully corrupted world.
Don’t get me wrong, I am a fan of both franchises, and enjoy the gritty Bond on its own terms, without tying it to the frequently almost farcical source material. I can easily understand why the “gritty realism” action genre trend didn’t last long, and why some folks do not enjoy it, it quickly becomes somewhat oppressive to endure. I think that’s why Taika Waititi’s Thor movies were so well received, they offered a lot of the fun-for-its-own-sake set pieces that were more common in the late ‘80s-early ‘90s action films.
Patrick H Willems did a really good YouTube video where he talks about “vibe films” [1], where things like plot details and character development are prioritized behind an overall mood and sense of style. Examples cited include Miami Vice, Bond films, and more recently Tenet.
I've never really been a bond fan, but of course the craig era eschews much of the almost 100% of the camp of previous generations. Except (and you'll need to pardon me, i've seen each of these movies at most once and they don't really stick in my brain at all) maybe the villan who's face had been eaten by acid or something, it's not jawz or oddjob levels of camp but it's getting there.
Earlier bonds i've seen a few here and there but missed many. Like I've seen moonraker, but never thunderball, view to a kill but not goldeneye, octopussy but not never say never again. I couldn't tell you what any of the plots were (other than i'm pretty sure they go to a moon base in moonraker) or which villan goes with which film. Bond, to me, has always been kind of a mystery to me, how do these terrible films keep getting made?
I will also say that 'yes' to thor rangnarok, no to 'love and thunder' which i thought got mired in too many plots and had too many inappropriately timed jokes. Like do the Jane arc or do the Gor arc, but if you do either right they don't both fit in the film. So instead they opted to do a half assed version of each.
> Watching a Bond film feels like the cinematic equivalent of reading a SkyMall catalog
Nicely put!
I'm not saying it has no redeeming qualities whatsoever, mind you. It's just generic and empty. There may be exceptions in specific movies of the saga, of course.
It's actually just that Barbara Broccoli hates the main character and ever since she took over as Executive Producer they've been on a mission to destroy the character
But they have no new ideas, and they only make something that feels vaguely like what it was
Bond as a concept is fine, the execution has been trash for over a decade now
I don't entirely disagree with you, but I would argue strongly that the concept is out of place politically right now.
Maybe not for much longer but since the late 90s, surely. There's also just too much info in the public about how real spies operate. It makes the Bond concept pretty nonsensical. The character has to change to overcome the audience's disbelief.
There's a trilogy of movie fight compilations set to music that was on youtube until it was removed for copyright. Your comment about Bourne vs Bond and how they use the scenery is illustrated in some very cool action shots, especially one where a camera follows Bourne as he jumps from a building into a window to catch up with an assailant. The first is now here: https://vimeo.com/68656656
I think action can be made much more interesting by a good visual director moving the viewpoint, balancing the view of the action against quick cuts or angles to serve the needs of the special effects and stunt people. There's a silhouetted scene in Bond's Skyfall where the colours and viewpoint are far more artistic, without detracting from the impact of the fight.
(Die Hard With a Vengeance, the 3rd one, is better than the 2nd, I feel)
> I think action can be made much more interesting by a good visual director moving the viewpoint
Definitely!
Thanks for sharing that video, I'll go watch it :)
There are also many YouTube analyses of why Michael Bay's action scenes are like disposable junk food: thrilling while watching them, but oddly unsatisfying. The most convincing I've seen is that Michael Bay lacks a sense of space or direction; his action scenes are flashy but there are no visual cues of where everyone is placed within the scene, how the location is positioned, etc.
If you are going to mention Skyfall, I have to bring up the opening sequence of Casino Royale (my favorite of the Daniel Craig Bond movies). The fight scene is pretty brutal:
Nice to see the Matt Jones post on Jason Bourne vs James Bond linked here. Very appropriate, on Bond as a well equipped foreigner wandering through fancy action sequences & villains lairs, while Bourne is equipped with a sharp recall of the local train timetables & ability to steal cars and parkour his way through complex urbam settings.
I could have sworn the pieces was like 4x as long!
I'm on mobile so it's not easy to see post times, but I assume the discussion here lead to The Bourne Infrastructure getting submitted. Thanks all. This is wild stuff.
I wonder how this will work in regards to Gaza. Apparently the IDF knows where many of the tunnels are, and presumably they can just blast into the middle of the tunnel system without having to force their way through a presumably fortified or hidden entrance.
Pompous and not very original IMHO, but I did love this passage:
"An alternative-history plot for a much better Die Hard 2 could thus perhaps include a scene in which the rescuing squad of John McClane-led police officers does not even know what building they are in, a suitably bewildering encapsulation of this method of moving undetected through the city."
Infuriating to see how Israeli soldiers are criticized for their self-defense tactics in the face of fundamentalist terrorists. The author's expectation seems to be that soldiers travel the streets, exposing themselves to militant fire from within the buildings. How woke.
The author seemed to offer no particular criticism of the invading Israelis, as far as I can tell. In fact, they almost seemed to praise their tactics for their unconventional nature.
What an amazing example of this common knee-jerk playing-the-victim reaction to anything that discusses Israel without fawning. The article was describing the IDF doing something novel and clever, yet you're "infuriated" by what? It not repeating some mantra about how the action was definitely certainly most positively justified?
Lest you misunderstand where I'm coming from - brutally attacking and slaughtering a civilian music festival is unequivocally evil. And Israel readily turning off civilian water and power infrastructure for collective punishment is also evil. There is no shortage of evils on both sides, and whitewashing this for either side ultimately just helps perpetuate the whole terrible situation.
well, it look like some of the most armed and prepared armies in the world are seeking assistance and more innovative strategies directed towards causing harm to a large number of innocent and defenseless individuals.
The defenseless individuals of Gaza are being taken advantage of by the terrorists who have no regard for their (civilians) life. In fact, IDF has more regard for Gaza civilians’ life than Hamas has. Check who uses civilians as human shields, it is broadly documented. Check which terrorist organization seeks genocide based on religion and which country lacks faith-based persecution.
The responsibility falls on both parties. Hamas is responsible for a heinous crime which provokes this retaliation. But all aspects of the retaliation is still Israel’s responsibility.
Sending rockets from Gaza strip’s hospitals and schools in years past is broadly documented. If terrorists attack civilians using own civilians as human shields, having destruction of Israel as their stated goal[0], then the choice for Israel seems to be between responding with possible civilian casualties in Gaza or accepting the blame for deaths of its own people if Israel’s defense system malfunctions (which happens even these years). It’s a fun trolley problem no one asked for.
In fact, I believe Hamas has been spraying rockets with depressing regularity, and I believe Israel was not retaliating in kind for a long time in recent years. It’s baffling how many people consider this state of affairs normal: militant group openly attempting to kill civilians in your country, and your country doing not much in terms of response lest it causes deaths of civilians camping near that militant group.
It’s only less baffling if we remember that antisemitism is still quite common, just less public.
[0] That said, we should remember that converting every other faith or non-faith to Sunni Islam is the end goal of jihad in practice.
One example that I remember talks about the differences between Los Angeles and New York City: at one point in the 1990s, LA was the bank robbery capital of the world, averaging over 1 per day for a while, but bank robberies rarely happen in NYC. When you compare their layouts, it makes total sense: LA was built around the car. The pattern of "highway offramp, bank next to the road, highway onramp" was everywhere throughout LA. Robbing a bank in NYC would be just so much harder: parking is more difficult, traffic is slower, way more people around to identify you, etc.
It's a good read.