Spoiler Warning: If you have not yet seen the latest James Bond film, Spectre, you may want to hold off on reading this until after you’ve done so. I would argue the spoiler is minimal and possibly inconsequential. But if you want to go in fresh, come back and see us later. (Or please check out our review of the movie.) We’ll still be here.
When Christoph Waltz was cast as the villain in the next James Bond movie approximately a year ago, there was immediate speculation that he would play 007’s greatest adversary. Longtime fans of the secret agent know that Ernst Stavro Blofeld appeared in seven Bond films and was the bad guy in three of Ian Fleming’s original novels. Blofeld was also the head of the global terrorist organization SPECTRE. So if the next Bond movie was titled Spectre, who else was the villain going to be?
Yet Waltz insisted his character’s name was Franz Oberhauser, not Blofeld. Yep, different guy. Not the bald guy with a scar over his right eye who likes to pet cats. Nope. When the film was announced, director Sam Mendes cheekily said he couldn’t comment on whether Blofeld was in the film, but acknowledged “Those of you who have some knowledge of the Bond franchise and the legend of Bond will probably have some idea what that refers to.”
So why essentially insult those fans by insisting that Waltz wasn’t playing Blofeld? I understand wanting to preserve any surprises a film wants to reveal, especially in this era when spoilers are prevalent online and threaten to ruin the integrity of a story and the moviegoing experience. But there’s a difference between wanting to keep a plot twist hidden from the audience — for example, the true motivations of Amy Dunne in Gone Girl — and revealing the identity of a character when that ultimately doesn’t factor into the outcome of a story. Such deception just looks silly when it turns out to be insignificant.
Trying to keep a character’s identity secret is even more senseless when the general audience probably doesn’t even care. Yes, longtime Bond fans care if Blofeld is in the movie and being played by an acclaimed actor like Waltz. But how much meaning does that really carry for a wider audience that either doesn’t remember the previous Bond films or has chosen to go along with the new continuity for 007 that was created when the character was rebooted with Craig? It’s a point that just doesn’t have much significance, except as a reference to diehard fans who can maybe turn to each other with a knowing nod at the theater or fist-pump to themselves with satisfaction.
If you haven’t yet seen Spectre, well, there was a spoiler warning at the beginning of this post. But you also likely saw where this was going. If you have seen Spectre, you know that Waltz is, in fact, playing Ernst Stavro Blofeld. Well, sort of. See, he wasn’t lying when he told reporters that his character’s name was Franz Oberhauser. That’s who he is, and Bond knows that right away upon seeing him for the first time in the film. Even though we as viewers have no idea why that name has any significance when Bond asks Moneypenny (Naomie Harris) to check his record.
But later in the film, Oberhauser says that he now goes by the name Ernst Stavro Blofeld, which is taken from his mother’s side of the family. We learn that Oberhauser’s father took in the orphaned James Bond and raised him along with Franz. But Oberhauser gave up his father’s name after killing him, apparently jealous that he favored James over his real son, his actual blood. So apparently, this global terrorist organization was created, along with battling spy agencies like MI6, was spawned from a brotherly feud of which only one brother was aware.
The problem is that this is sold as some grand revelation for viewers, the culmination of this four-film saga starring Craig as Bond, beginning with 2006’s Casino Royale. But there is nothing in the previous three films that hints toward where the story is going, Oberhauser’s identity, Bond’s brother, or the name Blofeld. Of course, there must have been someone pulling the strings behind villains such as Le Chiffre in Casino Royale, Dominic Greene in Quantum of Solace and Raoul Silva from Skyfall, but that’s not really laid out in the other films. There’s no grand mythology established.
The only reason those stories and characters tie into Spectre is because Blofeld tells Bond that’s the case. It’s a classic criticism of writing: Show, don’t tell. Yet that’s exactly what’s happened here. And by the way, the villain having to explain his elaborate scheme, how he was the author behind all of Bond’s pain, is a big reason why Spectre is relatively boring. The movie has to stop for these explanations that have to fill in everything that was supposedly going on in these four Bond films, but is never really shown to the audience. It’s just bad storytelling.
Unfortunately, the final result doesn’t leave anyone satisfied. The filmmakers look foolish for working so hard to conceal a secret that was ultimately meaningless. The longtime devoted fanbase is insulted because they were deceived. And newer fans or an audience that simply doesn’t care about such details is left to wonder why this holds any significance. It simply draws a shrug. That can’t have been the desired reaction.
The immediate comparison to draw, one which surely occurred to viewers as they watched Spectre and has been made by other critics writing about the film afterwards, is the use of Khan in 2013’s Star Trek Into Darkness. Director J.J. Abrams, along with writers and producers on the film, contorted themselves into pretzels trying to explain that Benedict Cumberbatch wasn’t playing one of Star Trek mythology’s most enduring villains, portrayed memorably by Ricardo Montalban in the original 1960s TV series and 1982’s Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. Nope, Cumberbatch was playing John Harrison.
Never mind that Latin actors such as Benicio Del Toro and Edgar Ramirez were attached to the role at certain points, which would certainly seem to draw a connection or comparison to Montalban. Once the British Cumberbatch was officially cast, that seemed to reinforce whatever Abrams and crew were trying to say about their character. See, he’s not even Latin like Montalban was, so how can he be Khan? Nope, he’s John Harrison a name that means nothing to Star Trek fans, so we’re creating something new!
https://youtu.be/gnZJjNjMg98
But as you know if you saw Star Trek Into Darkness, or watched the scene embedded above, Cumberbatch’s character was indeed Khan (or Khan Noonien Singh). Harrison was an alias, meant to throw Starfleet investigators off his trail. But there was no reason to name the character “John Harrison” in the story, other than to conceal his identity from an audience that generally didn’t care whether his identity was Harrison or Khan. The name Khan only means something to longtime Star Trek fans, not to the wider audience that went to see the film.
When Cumberbatch reveals his actual name, I remember there being no reaction among the people in the theater with me. OK, one guy said “Ooooh!” So it meant something to him. And not everyone reads everything about movies online, so maybe that really was a surprise to some moviegoers, as was the revealation of Waltz being Blofeld in Spectre. But for the most part, this response to this grand twist, this supposedly major plot development, was virtually no reaction at all. It was a shrug. So what?
These character points and plot twists were held up as these major spoilers and plot twists, yet turned out to be irrelevant to the larger story at hand. So what was the point of trying so hard to maintain secrecy, to keep everything in a “mystery box,” as Abrams put it? Again, storytellers should be allowed to tell the story they intend to. And this is certainly due, at least in part, to our current culture of trying to discover secrets, keep those clicks coming and feed the Internet movie website machine. But trying to deny that culture exists is an exercise in futility.
By now, filmmakers should know that viewers themselves can withhold such information from themselves if preferred. (Yes, of course, there are some assholes who want to ruin the fun for everyone. Going online carries such risks.) So let them do that. Or let them learn presumed spoilers if they choose to. Don’t insult fans and viewers in the process. Don’t give something more meaning than it actually has, just because there might be some significance to a portion of the fanbase.
Better yet, do a better job of setting up those revelations earlier in the story, such as previous films, to give those revelations some dramatic weight. Otherwise, you’re just relying on prior fan knowledge, the same audience you’re trying to run away from or push away. Are you trying to serve fans or not? Abrams and Mendes, along with the writers who worked on Spectre and Star Trek Into Darkness, can’t have it both ways. Trying to do so just results in disappointment for everyone involved.
