So Bond bounded back this week in the new Quantum Solace movie with a villain which many are calling not as exciting as the villains past. The critics might be saying that Dominic Greene isn’t the most memorable Bond villain that 007 has ever faced, which is not saying much considering the average intelligence of Bond’s usual villains.
Let’s face it, your average Hollywood evil overlord may be considered a genius by other characters in the movie but for most clear-thinking movie goers with an ounce of common sense they’re one step away from the people who ran Enron into the ground. Hell, there was even a sketch on Saturday Night Live in the 1990’s, where several Bond villains were promoting a book “What Not To Do If You Capture James Bond”, the inspiration and result of which can be seen in the online list ” The Top 100 Things I’d Do If I Ever Became An Evil Overlord”
In fact, just a cursory look back at the James Bond movie series throws up several instances where common sense and just a simple series of electronics would have helped out the bad guy. In their field of operation some spy surveillance equipment like GPS jammers, pinhole cameras, cell phone blocking bags and faraday cages must have been available so the question remains to be asked…
Why didn’t the villain use them? So how could have those valiant and hard-working supervillains snuffed out 007’s life, ending the plans of nefarious media companies like MGM and 20th Century Fox? The ongoing plan to steal money from our pockets while distracting us with unlikely action sequences and unnecessary gadget and cleavage shots.
Goldfinger Needed Security Cameras. Very few people would need a plot synopsis of Goldfinger, the movie which resulted not only in the now-famous quote ‘no Mr Bond I expect you to die’ but in one of the most disturbing joke names of the franchise. In fact it’s better if you don’t think too hard about the name of the main love interest ‘Pussy Galore’ without some serious medication sitting close by… yeesh.
If Auric Goldfinger had put just a little bit of faith into training up his lower-level underlings or installing some basic security the Bond franchise might have ended there. We all know what spy surveillance cameras are, they’re the little device which sits at the top of the cell and let people know what’s going on in a cell without putting them through the inconvenience of actually going in there.
So why weren’t the cells in Auric Goldfinger’s US ranch set up with such spy surveillance equipment, especially considering he had high tech equipment like lasers, nuclear bombs and cars made out of solid gold?
They wouldn’t need to be big, and in fact the smaller they were the lesser chance that the hero would find them and disable them in a bid to get the guards to enter the room. At the very least Goldfinger should have told guards to get 10 guards with big machine guns to investigate when a prisoner suddenly ‘disappeared’ from the cell.
