Lucia

de Vernai

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November 17, 2008

In Quantum of Solace, Even James Bond Joins Modern Times

The Cold War is over and the writers of the Bond movies finally got the memo. Quantum of Solace, the latest installment of the 007 saga, explores virgin territory: Bond’s relationships with women (the kind above the waist) and a world threat that cannot be planted by a Soviet degenerate and disarmed by cutting the right wire.

Reality has never been much of a concern for the Bond franchise, and Denise Richards as a nuclear physicist serves as a case in point. But natural resources instead of diamonds, non-state actors pulling strings and the astounding human ability to turn a good cause toward evil that fill the nearly two-hour Quantum give us more to think about than Aston Martin chases.

This may be the appropriate time to warn about a spoiler alert – not because the Bond movies are so hard to predict, but judging by how this 007 adventure strays from the usual, this might as well be top secret. The setting for the film is South America, the villains green entrepreneurs, mirroring the current state of affairs in South America astonishingly well. While unlike the Hollywood version, it’s not creepy businessmen operating out of warehouses that threaten world stability, real-life government officials do little to distinguish themselves. For example take the former president of the Brazilian Development Bank who said that, “The Andes mountain range is certainly beautiful, but it’s a terrible engineering problem.”

Part of the problem may be that out of the 100 largest economies in the world, 51 are corporations and 49 countries. If you want to do business with the big boys, you have to go to the private sector most of the time. That in turn shifts the game away from treaties and trade agreements and into the highest bidder, bottom-line contract territory.

This is not so bad when you live places where there are firm regulations for what those contracts can contain. When Chile tried to get a little something back for its communities for the destruction of their land, the environmental tax proposals got vetoed because they were not opportune for foreign investors. If you are tempted to think, “c’est la vie,” and write it off as another sneaky scheme to save the whales, remember what getting greedy and exploiting people to get resources did in other parts of the world.

The destruction of habitat is a destruction of tradition and lifestyle. So as you stop by Exxon Mobil on your way to Wal-Mart, and think of anything but the Andean llama herders with no water, it may be advisable to think of how people stripped of their resources react. Darfur and Palestine ring a bell . . .

While Quantum of Solace stays true to the Bond fictional roots by casting a Ukrainian model as a Bolivian special agent (I guess those Eastern European accents are too hard to pass up), the threat of an environmental crisis destabilizing governments is far closer to reality than anything Sean Connery ever did on a submarine. Rather than another bout of mindless high-budget action, the political reality presented in Quantum should leave audiences thoughtful, reflective and a little shaken . . . not stirred.

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