Friday, November 6, 2015

What A Twist!: Spectre Spoiler Discussion

Welcome to a new recurring feature entitled What A Twist! Here, I'll briefly discuss spoilery aspects of certain movies as well as provide a place for our awesome Solute readers to discuss spoilers in the comments section.



At one point during Spectre, James Bond is knocked out by villainous henchmen. When he awakens in a dazed state, one of the first things he sees is a white Persian cat. Once that feline appeared, a scowl emerged on my face as I thought "Well, here we go. He's Blofeld." Yep folks, it turns out that the character played by Christoph Waltz, John Harrison, er, Franz Oberhauser, is really that o'l Bond mainstay Ernst Stavro Blofeld. Him having this identity has no effect on the plot, it's just there for nostalgia pandering. Yippee. He even gets those famous scars on his face by the end of the film, because, y'know, that's what Blofeld had in the old movies.

But even that obvious identity switcharoo fares better than the reason for Blofeld hating Bond. You see, his family adopted Bond when he was a child, leaving him to feel neglected by his parents. As revenge for being ignored, he then killed his dad during(?) in an avalanche. It feels like we as the audience are missing a step in this characters transition from jealous sibling to psychopathic villain. Plus, yet another element of the film presenting ideas without ever actually doing anything with said ideas crops up in the form of Blofeld having a hand in the deaths of people Bond grew close to, like Judi Dench's M. All this does is convoluted the mythology and adds nothing to the plot of Spectre, instead becoming another puzzling part of its story that's at once labyrinthine in structure yet aggravatingly simplistic when it comes to the characters.

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