- Eliza Brownjohn

I’v always enjoyed the Bond film’s title sequences over the years. The most impressive to me were FRWL (it might seem low budget by today’s standards, but one can’t ignore the sheer exotic nature of the credits sliding along a belly dancer’s body; Goldfinger (how could they have shown anything else except the iconic gold painted female?); OHMSS (images of passing time and scenes from previous films). I was disappointed by Binder’s work after that. It seemed to get repetitive and almost lazy. Just dancing or posing or swimming nudes with Bond shooting at off-screen targets (or Bond and or the women jumping around). I think Binder got either stuck in a rut and or the producers kept him from trying anything new. Thank goodness Kleinman was hired. Goldeneye was a beautiful mesh of CGI and the iconic images of the old Soviet Union crumbling along with a nod to Binder’s use of guns and nudes. I didn’t like TND – too much x-ray and computer circuits – seemed to clutter up the whole sequence. Kleinmans idea of using the oil and nudes combo in TWINE was well done, though I though he was over using the nude icons like Binder did. DAD was much better – using the torture scenes and the fire and ice pain images was more creative (too bad they went with Madonna’s out of place disco dance song), but again – to much reliance on the nudes.

I was astonished and delighted by the CR titles. Throw out the nudes and the dancing and jumping and posing. Let’s have Bond fighting baddies! Yay! Let’s fill it with iconic moving images of playing cards and their graphics and roulette wheels and the baddies breaking apart into the different suites! Let’s put an aggressive inyourface jazzrock song to it! My only embarrassement was showing the closeup of Craig. It was a little overdone for me – I think I would have preferred having his figure continue walking towards the viewer in silhouette, raising the gun straight at the camera and firing without showing him. The blast from the barrel would have been a nice transition to the opening scene.

I was very disappointed with MK12 on Quantum. I hope the producers can get Kleinman back. I found those titles too disorienting, unfocused and monochromatic. The nudes were so hidden by close ups and the sand motif they were almost invisible. Then they are shown dancing around some type of weird wireframe art (what was that supposed to be?). I HATED the camera flying around everything..it was like trying to read a book while riding in a rollercoaster! The moving titles were okay, using the old moving bullethole intro motif of the 60′s films.

I would love it if the next film would either not use dozens of nudes and Bond again, or at least just a few times. It would also be nice if the next theme song writer could find a way of writing lyrics without using these words – kill or any variation of it; eyes, eye, target,sights,etc.