Bond Spoiler Thread

Movies
1

I went to a midnight showing of this. Maybe it’s because I’m not used to staying up late, but I’m like WTF? I totally got lost on the plot. There are a lot of good things in this Bond, but the plot seems a little silly.

I’m totally grooving on the vibe between Bond and the female lead. I am following the plot all the way up until Bond wins the big poker match. The girl says she has to go help Mathis, who has been an ally. Bond says good-bye but then seconds later stands and says, Mathis! OMG. And Bond starts running after the girl. How does he know Mathis betrayed him? There was an explanation on the beach but I coudln’t hear it.

I don’t get the part about the girl’s motives either. One minute M is telling Bond the bad guys kidnapped her boyfriend so this is why she betrayed Bond. The next minute M is telling Bond that Vesper must have made a deal to save his life back at the ball scratching scene (great scene). I thought she was trying to betray to save her other boyfriend? Did she fall in love with Bond and just decide the boy who was kidnapped was toast?

Why didn’t she just betray the bad guys when it came time to plug the account number into the machine? If she knew she was going to die, what purpose did it serve to Betray Bond? Was this to get the other boyfriend out of jail? If that’s the case, why did she lock herself into the elevator? She didn’t want to live becasue she had betrayed Bond? Seems a might self-indulgent!

I don’t know. I like Bond being a little crazier, but some of this plot seemed like a stretch. Who was Mr White? Who saved Bond and the girl from the ball scratching man? So many questions.

2

This is probably another reason why I didn’t post any plot spoilers in the other thread after I saw the movie on Wednesday afternoon: My first reaction to “Mathis!” and his chasing after Vesper was, “Wait, who’s Mathis, again?” Also remember that in the penultimate conversation, M believes Mathis was in the clear while Bond still has his doubts. I don’t think there was enough evidence presented to the audience for this to be resolved either way.

Same thing with Vesper’s double-cross: At what point was she compromised? Before she was sent by HM Treasury, or some time during the mission? Based on her interaction with Bond, and M’s remark about failing to check on their own people, I’d suppose the former, but we don’t really know.

We (and by we, I’m hoping it’s just you and me, and someone can step in and make sense of this) also don’t know which party struck the initial deal with Vesper. Was she approached by Le Chiffre or by one of his highers-up?

Let me repeat that I enjoyed the movie immensely, but I have not had so much trouble following a story since reading about the fight for the ownership rights to Tetris. Moreso than The Prestige, I may have to watch this again for comprehension.

3

Enduro, I had the exact same reaction in the theater to Mathis. For a minute, I thought he might have been the CIA guy who staked Bond. I was tempted to lean over to a total stranger and ask, WTF? I looked it up on IMDB before I posted so I wouldn’t look like a total doofus. But even with the help of IMDB, I am still a bit lost.

Good point with the timing on Vespers and her double-cross. I was thinking about this earlier this morning. I would assume she was working to save the boyfriend the entire time, but that doesn’t explain why she wouldn’t stake Bond at the card game.

Another thing: Bond killed the two Africans who were after Le Chiffre. I thought that was the whole reason Le Chiffre needed to win at cards? With those two dead, why didn’t Le Chiffre just call it a day? I assume there were other people Le Chiffre was playing, but they weren’t depicted in the opening of the movie, so it was just sort of odd. I think the Africans should have gotten away, or were they just two henchmen and I didn’t notice.

Hopefully some smarty pants can set us both straight.

4

RE: the two Africans who were killed, someone mentioned in the beginning how Le Chiffre was helping invest money for several terrorist organizations and then providing them access to this money anywhere in the world, so I assumed the 106 million he lost when Bond botched the plane incident at the start of the movie belonged to more than one organization. What was retarded was how obvious a paper trail Le Chiffre was leaving by selling enormous stocks of the company that owned the plane one day before it was due to be bombed.

5

by selling enormous stocks of the company

Maybe I don’t understand how shorting works. He got money from the Africans he didn’t have before. He called his broker and the broker said something like, “That stock is only going up!” What the hell was that all about? The call to the broker came right after the deal with the Africans, as if Le Chiffre needed their money to make the deal. How did he lose the money if the stock kept going up?

6

No I think what happened is he sold a lot of the stock before the big plane was showcased because he knew it was going to be blown up and the company’s stock was going to suffer. So he sold his stock before it would plummet, but when the plane didn’t get destroyed the company’s stock went up and he missed out on the extra cash.

7

RE Mathis, Bond says something like “Only Mathis could have tipped Le Chiffre that I was on to his tell, which is how he got all my chips” to Vesper after they’re rescued.

8

Yeah, everyone has a tell. I stick my finger up my ass when I am nervous. I don’t play cards, but I’m always a hit at meetings a few weeks before the milestone is due.

9

Le Chiffre needs to win more money at cards because he has lost money in the stock market. But the money you lose in the situation you describe is potentential money, not actual dollars. How did he end up losing his initial stake?

10

Oh, right. I forgot about this bit. Thing is, at the moment that Le Chiffre turned the tables by fooling Bond, I thought this was simply an because Le Chiffre was a much cleverer, much more observant guy than Bond had thought.

In a short sell, you sell shares you don’t own, in anticipation of a drop in prices. By “shares you don’t own,” I mean you’re borrowing the shares from another party, usually your broker. Let’s say BigPlaneCo’s stock was selling for $50/share while Bond was hanging out on the beach and Le Chiffre gave his order to short. If everything had gone to plan and BigPlaneCo value had plummeted to, say, $20/share, Le Chiffre would have pocketed $30, since he sold at the pre-disaster price and “bought in” at $20. So it could have been the broker who sent the goons after Le Chiffre!

Another question I had: How the heck did Le Chiffre and his girl manage to escape from the Africans unscathed? Every time blondie walked into the casino with a slinky dress, I was half-expecting the camera to pan down and reveal a stump (a la Aimee Mann’s toe in The Big Lebowski).

11

Yeah, this is what I thought. But then Le Chiffre does the tell again and I was utterly confused. This whole plot point didn’t work that well for me.

Thanks for the explanation of how a short sale works. It’s odd that LeChiffre didn’t pull the trigger on the short sale until after he made the deal with the Africans. I thought he needed their money to make the deal, but he apparently didn’t need any money until the plane didn’t blow up. Then he needed money.

12

Mr. White saved Bond from the ball-scratching man.

13

They didn’t end up chopping her arm off. They were just making fun of Le Chiffre, when he brought the blade near her arm and he didn’t say anything he told the girl to get a new boyfriend and then left the room. It was just an intimidation thing.

14

Why’d Mr. White text message Vesper’s phone, giving Bond an easy way to track him?

I was really into the movie until the point where the romance started up. You know the plot is poor when M has to say “and obviously, Vesper made a deal so that she could save your life, etc etc” (paraphrased).

15

And Bond shoots Mr. White in the leg for his trouble!

16

I could be wrong, but I’m not sure that was a text message from Mr. White. I believe it was a note on the phone from Vesper. It’s title was To James:, a sort of in-case-things-don’t-work-out message from the grave. Again, could be wrong but that’s the way I took it.

17

That’s how I took it too.

As to the whole Mathis thing - I knew who Mathis was (because I paid attention) but I also didn’t get exactly why Bond came to suspect Mathis. Thinking about it now, maybe it just dawned on him that Mathis must have been the one that told Le Chiffre that Bond had identified his tell? It’s a weak point of storytelling either way.

18

I was 100% convinced that Bond was imagining everything after his torture started, that eventually he was going to wake up on a table somewhere and that people had been pumping him with drugs and saying things to him to get him to reveal the password. (And he’d been imagining that horribly sappy dialog on the beach.) I figured he’d snap out of it as he was typing the password into the machine, though at that point, I was already past the, “Man, this is one long hallucination.”

Why did I think this? I could have sworn the guy that shot Le Bloody Tears was Bond’s second kill from the opening scene. Since that made no sense, I figured he was passing out from ballsack pain.

Though it seems dumb to complain about the plot of a Bond movie, I think it fizzled a bit in the second half. The first half was awesome, though.

19

I really enjoyed the movie, but wish it had ended right after the poker match. The rest seemed tacked on and not very clear about who was doing what for what reason.

20

Several points that I’ve seen mentioned (just got back from the movie):

Somebody already explained what short selling is, so I won’t go into that, except to point out that when you sell short, you are essentially borrowing stock to sell that you HAVE to buy back when margin is called (i.e. at the end of the selling period). That’s why Chiffre had to have the money by a particular point in time.

Bond only told two people about Chiffre’s tell: Mathis and Vesper. Since he implicitly trusted Vesper, that left Mathis being the only one who could have sold him out. Later on, when M found out that Vesper had betrayed Bond, she offered an alternative explanation that would have absolved Mathis, but by that point Bond is in no mood to trust anyone at all, which is why he recommends continued interrogation of Mathis.

No explanation for why White doesn’t kill Bond. M’s explanation is probably as close as anything reasonable.

Looked to me like Vesper was planning to steal the money from the beginning, given that she was wearing the necklace from the beginning. But that detail really is the worst piece of the movie, it is just tossed in there to add drama and to kill off a character it would be inconvenient to leave alive toward sequels. I don’t understand why they just didn’t do her in the same way as she is in the book.

As for the text message, I assumed that 1) Vesper was leaving Bond once she bailed her boyfriend out, and so 2) she left that message on her Blackberry and left it BEHIND–when before she always had it with her–as an obvious clue/apology to him,l so he could find resolution.

As for the whole “tell” thing, the whole point of a tell is that it is unconscious. Chiffre was doing it without realizing it, Bond picked up on it. After Chiffre was warned, he did it on purpose to throw Bond off, but then, a day or even more later, he was back to unconscious behaviour again. Those sorts of things are REALLY hard to break yourself of.

I think that covers everything. For myself, I enjoyed the film, and I think Craig can make a fine Bond. The worst part for me was the first big chase scene, which just looked too choreographed. The scarred guy was way way too graceful, and made lots of moves that showed no hesitation, ducking through windows and cracks that presumably he would have had no knowledge of, so how did he always know they led somewhere? Not a bad scene to watch, but just way too “practiced.”