Film After 11 Podcast | Quantum of Solace (2008)

The letter “Q” left me in quite a quandary this week, as I struggled to find an appropriate movie to watch with my son for our alphabetical marathon in the Film After 11 podcast. While I quizzically pondered this question, I quickly found that the 2008 James Bond adventure Quantum of Solace would qualify. Thomas gave me no quarrel with this. He likes both James Bond and action movies in general. The only qualm I had about this decision was that Thomas hadn’t seen Casino Royale, which this one follows as a direct sequel requiring knowledge of the first part. Obviously, the only way to quell that queasiness in my gut was to squeeze in time to queue up both movies. Neither of us quibbled about that.

Phew. All right, I’m done with all that quirky quipping. I hope.

Anyway, while Quantum of Solace may not be a quintessential Bond movie… and oh my frikkin’ lord I just did it again! Okay, I need to take a deep breath and clear my head, then we’ll start over and move on… right… now…

Take 2

As only the second James Bond movie starring Daniel Craig, Quantum of Solace took a lot of heat for being a big drop-off from his first. It still does, and is often regarded as the weakest of the actor’s five-film run. I was among the complainers when I watched it in the theater. Close to two decades of time and distance later, I’m not as sour on the film. If not for the annoying shaky-cam action and an unmemorable villain, this would make an effective coda to wrap up the story from Casino Royale (a direct linkage no prior Bond movies had attempted).

Unfortunately, all those shaky-cam, quick-cut (I have no better way of saying that!) action scenes are still really, really frustrating. They’re confusing as hell and offer no sense of spatial continuity whatsoever. They date the film terribly. I’m glad that fad eventually tapered off, but am disappointed one of the Bond movies is saddled with it forever.

On the other hand, the Jack White/Alicia Keys theme song has worn me down a little and I can tolerate it more now than I used to.

Quantum of Solace (2008) - Olga Kurylenko
Title:Quantum of Solace
Year of Release: 2008
Director: Marc Forster
Watched On: 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray
Also Available On: Blu-ray
Various VOD rental and purchase platforms/

The 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray

Quantum of Solace first hit Blu-ray in early 2009, following the movie’s November 2008 theatrical run. I bought it in a SteelBook case that was exclusive to the Best Buy chain at that time.

A 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray release arrived a decade later in 2019, initially only as part of a four-film Daniel Craig Collection set that immediately felt outdated as soon as the actor made a fifth Bond entry. Standalone editions of all four movies were sold separately later. My copy comes from that Craig Collection set, but I took the disc out and have stored it in my Blu-ray SteelBook ever since.

Although photographed primarily in the Super 35 film format, Quantum of Solace was finished on a 2K Digital Intermediate. The 4K version was upscaled from that and very much looks it. The movie has nothing that appears better than a 2K level of detail, and suffers sharpening artifacts, including edge halos, in many scenes. The 2.40:1 image is typically very bright, and has fine colors and contrast. The HDR grade adds a little bit of refinement over the Blu-ray edition, but rarely calls attention to itself. In my opinion, the 4K edition of Casino Royale makes richer and better use of HDR, and while also sourced from a 2K DI, doesn’t look so obvious about it.

Daniel Craig Collection 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray

The DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 soundtrack is unchanged since the Blu-ray, but that’s a fine thing in this case. The track has strong bass action that hits loud and often. (Far too many Atmos remixes suffer watered-down bass.) The surround channels are also highly directional, especially during the plane chase and parachute scenes.

The 4K disc itself contains no bonus features. Content on the regular Blu-ray is mostly insubstantial. When the first item on the menu list is a music video, you should set your expectations pretty low. A half-dozen features (most of them only 2 to 3 minutes each) are taken directly from the film’s Electronic Press Kit. Even the longest of them, a 25-minute making-of piece and about 45 minutes of interviews with the crew, are pretty superficial and promotional. A couple trailers then round out the disc.

Related

Note: Screenshots on this page were taken from the 2009 Blu-ray edition of the film and are used for illustration purposes only.

6 thoughts on “Film After 11 Podcast | Quantum of Solace (2008)”

  1. silly anecdote: during its first weekend, Quantum was #1 around the globe … but not in Belgium, where the local movie ‘The Loft’ was breaking all box office records. 19 years later, its still the highest grossing Belgian movie. Apparently, Bond producers were unhappy with the Belgian Quantum box office, and wanted to know what this Loft was all about (which led to a 2015 American remake that tanked).

    Silly anecdote #2: I seem to recall your pick for worst Bond song evet being Sam Smith’s. If memory serves me well, you described it as ‘it makes my ears bleed’.

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  2. I saw this opening weekend with my buddy because we both loved Casino Royale. After the movie was over, we left quietly – that one’s for you, Josh – trying to figure out what we saw. A minute or so passed, and my friend asked me what I thought of the movie. I said it then, and I still think this way now: The director needed to pull the camera back about 10 feet from the action so you could actually see what the hell was happening.

    The car chase to open the movie is so…compressed; you can’t really see what is going on. There’s that cool shot of the car flying off the road down the side of a cliff, but the rest of it looks like they filmed it on a soundstage because the camera is like 4-5 feet from Craig’s face most of the time.

    The fight and chase scenes are a mess. The editing is ridiculously nuts; I felt like I could develop ADD from watching the movie. I haven’t watched it in a while, but from what I remember, the fight scenes looked like a bunch of random fists, elbows, knees, and feet flying in and out of the frame with a psychotic amount of cuts.

    I think it was my friend who told me later that Martin Campbell was supposed to direct this one, but he wanted three years to make the movie, and the studio wanted to release it in two because there was an anniversary for the franchise coming up. I wonder what it would have looked like if he was allowed to make this movie…it definitely would have been a more consistent experience watching these back to back.

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    1. This style of shaky-cam and machine-gun editing was all the rage for a while after the last couple Jason Bourne movies. It doesn’t hold up well, but I don’t think it’s quite as bad here as this one:

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      1. I thought it was worse than the last couple of Bourne movies, and I saw the third one in the shows. The editing in Quantum would make Michael Bay dizzy…

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      2. You obviously haven’t seen Transformers: The Last Knight yet. At least this one keeps the same aspect ratio from one-second shot to one-second shot 😃

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  3. I gave up after the third one; it was boring until the end battle, and by the time it got there, I was even more bored. It was just a lot of booming noises and flashing lights.

    I have no interest in seeing the ones with Walhburgers.

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