There are only two things wrong with Quantum of Solace in my view. I’ll hide the spoilers here:
Summary
The fall from the plane into the huge crevice in the desert. Not only does it strains credulity even by Bond standards, but the visual effect of it looked like it belonged to the early Brosnan era.
Summary
The death of agent Fields. Not that she died, that in-and-of-itself was not my problem. These movies are Bond’s stories and every single other character is expendable. That wasn’t my problem; my problem is how soon she died. She really seemed interesting and seemed like she had more to her that I thought they would let us see either through the movie toward the end, or perhaps even partway into the next movie, and then they kill her off. I just felt it was too soon, like she hadn’t had a chance to serve her full purpose to the story yet.
Those are the only two issues I had with it, it is ultimately my favorite film of the Craig Era, although admittedly it and Casino Royale are the only ones I’ve watched more than once, some of the others may rank higher after more viewings.
Most likely because “Skinhead” is both a term used for a subset of punkish rock listeners and also a term for Nazis and white supremacists who appropriated the look.
I really wouldn’t call this a piece of product placement, since it features nor the logo, price, or a suspiciously perfect product review of Ikea’s products. (The table falls to pieces with the simple slam of a fist)
It’s simply a joke, playing on a normal, real-world object being mistaken for a fictional indestructible object. The Ikea is to make a relatable real-world “Oh ha ha that’s so true” meta punchline.
And I feel no subliminal urge to go to the Swedish store and buy furniture after watching that.
sorry, man, but that’s not how it works. while you’re right that it adds verisimilitude to the scene (which is often why the filmmakers do it), that doesn’t offer any insight as to why the brand agreed to be mentioned.
product placement can be as little as a reference to a product, as it is here, or as big as the plot hinging on it. it doesn’t have to have a logo or a review or a price point; simply mentioning the name or having the product somewhere in view (like having a presenter, character or actor on the red carpet dress in a particular fashion brand) constitutes embedded advertising.
the idea isn’t to subliminally urge you to go out and buy the product. That doesn’t work. it’s more about headspace: raising awareness and positive opinions towards their brand. these kinds of ads demonstrably increase the amount people search and talk about the product/brand online.
guess we’re doing the latter?
that you don’t think of this as product placement shows how truly effective it is (that isn’t a dig btw; they do this stuff because they know it works. i’m certainly not immune to it). people are vehemently turned off by aggressive product placement and will spread that negative view among their social circles, so subtlety with embedded ads is of paramount importance.
i only know this shit because i worked in marketing for 12 horrendous years.
I thought product placement implied a financial arrangement between the featured company and the studio producing the film? So unless IKEA paid Disney for their furniture to be mocked, it’s not product placement.
IKEA also paid for their furniture to be blown up in Fight Club. People don’t care about what happens on the screen if they have already decided the furniture looks good, even if the film insults you for liking it.
well, i wouldn’t say the butt of the joke was the furniture there, rather the dude doing the smashing. if ikea felt this scene gave them a bad rep, it would be withdrawn due to potential litigation.
regardless, that’s another common misconception. it doesn’t have to be paid for to constitute as embedded advertising; you can have free prop supply too. in fact, i think it is more common not to pay producers for placement
According to the research company PQ Media, global paid product placements were valued at $3.07 Billion in 2006 with global unpaid product placements valued at about $6 Billion in 2005 and $7.45 Billion in 2006.
There’s a difference between paid-for product placement and unpaid prop placement. The latter is a necessary part of TV and movie production, and most brands very happily provide free products for the purpose of set dressing, everything from gadgets, clothes, food, cars, you name it. Companies such as Budweiser will even happily turn up and build you a free bar interior if you need one.
they don’t do that out of the kindness of their cold black corporate hearts. filmmakers get their authenticity (and often a supply of said product), the brand gets their awareness/recall, they both skirt any weirdly worded regulations.
paid or unpaid, it’s still product placement. having your brand name spoken by a character (which is demonstrably the most effective kind of product placement)? that’s undoubtedly paid for.
“Further, the research suggests that verbal product placements may be more prominent than visual ones because they require higher plot integration with the actor saying a brand’s name versus the brand appearing in the background.”
Alright then, I guess it’s just not as blatant or clearly meant to boost promotion of it to me, so I’m not fazed by it.
It’s just a namedrop, which is the most minimal type of product placement I can think of, and meant to ground the dialogue and world into something realistic.
Next would be a specific type of product, shown off and meant to tie into a character, that seems more incidental detail than planned and forced through marketing. Peter Quill’s Walkman cassette player comes to mind for that.
I find that unless it’s something that’s blatantly shown off because it was paid for, or gets so much focus it removes the suspension of disbelief, it’s unnoticeable or tolerable.
I think of Alan Wake’s Verizon and Energizer ads, or the entirety of Disney’s Wreck it Ralph 2, a film whose predecessor began with quaint product placement of video games and tied a story around it, but the sequel became a vehicle for Ebay, Amazon, and nearly every website on the planet (even an entire subplot about the Disney Monopoly) that goes so far beyond the quasi-fictional fourth wall that it implodes on whatever storytelling is meant to be on display instead.
Anyway, Marvel Studios has been doing this since 2008 with Iron Man wanting a Burger King meal
TLDR: it’s just the word Ikea I’m okay with it. They’ve done this before.
fair enough. bear in mind that it’s also the most effective.
again, totally fair. just worth remembering that’s kind of the point of it; to be innocuous. the ramping up of product placement is a direct reaction to tv streaming and catch-up services allowing viewers to skip ads. you can’t skip product placement.
i hate it, personally, but i’m quite biased. can you tell?
Ahh, that’s sort of what I was trying to get at. It’s something that seems like an natural occurrence, so I don’t mind it or put much thought to it. I’m sure I heard TV/Film can get free props like that, (ex: if you’re stocking a supermarket set) which can – depending on how it’s used – just add some sort of innocuous grounded element to it.
That does make sense with spoken product, though I think it comes easier to comedy genres, given that any company and every company can be mocked (and or promoted) in a script-writer’s hands, making it feel like an anti-promo despite what’s happening behind the scenes.
Now I see what you’re getting at.
There’s definitely a case for advertising, no matter how it appears, to be malicious in how it tries to dominate or subliminally cement itself in being the primo product it delivers on.
I just think in this day and age that kind of stuff is unfortunately inevitable and inescapable. So long as it’s as innocuous and throwaway as possible, it doesn’t bother me.
Heck, I already default to IKEA when I think of furniture.
I just want to at least think i can make my own purchasing decision, advertised or not, rather than be told what it is I should be buying.
@Happy_Squirrel Interesting points about Quantum. I still don’t really like the film, it has a bunch of issues that like you say, everybody brings up. I want to ask though, do you think the alternate unreleased ending would of worked better? With Bond killing Mr White and apprehending the Prime Minister’s advisor Guy Haines?
I need to watch it again sometime. Not too familiar with the alternate ending, aside from a cutscene at the end of the Quantum video game which alludes to Bond going after Haines.
Well, noone is familar with it since it is unreleased. The video game is the closest allusion to it but it has so far never been released. I was just wondering if you felt it tied in better with the movie? Guy Haines in the movie is arguably a bit of a loose thread despite being mentioned several times.
People tend to get upset when the creation and popularity of the sci-fi genre is attributed to Jules Verne or H. G. Wells instead of Mary Shelley for her work writing Frankenstein. Folks, Frankenstein is not a science fiction novel. Yes, it has a bit of science fiction in it, with the creation of the Monster, but that’s all, and only for that one scene. The rest of the novel is a horror drama, dealing more with the philosophical struggle of what makes a human, and the horror of facing such a question head on. Yes, it’s been categorized also as sci-fi in many circles; that category is wrong. Having one moment in the entire story be based on a sci-fi concept does not warrant categorizing the entire story as such. If H. G. Wells had written The War of the Worlds with only one scene involving the Martian invasion, it wouldn’t be appropriate to categorize that story as science fiction just because of that one moment, either.
I know the accomplishments of many women are often overlooked in favor of the accomplishments of men, and that’s why people get upset over this issue, but this is not a case of that. Mary Shelley did not invent the sci-fi genre; she invented the horror drama. People need to stop whining about what she’s not acknowledged for and start focusing on correctly acknowledging what genre she actually contributed to, and see to it that she gets due credit for that.
Horror and Sci-fi aren’t mutually exclusive genres though. Frankenstein is a novel about a man who applies speculative science to create a monster. In fact Frankenstein’s experiments are an allusion to alchemy, a pseudoscientific field. That monster is then used as an allegory and we see how this new being interacts with the world around it. Structurally, it is a sci-fi novel while also being about a monster while following its exploits much like a horror novel.
Only one academic has claimed that it is the first true sci-fi novel, Brian Aldriss. Other academics would say Margaret Cavendish’s The Blazing World would be the first female sci-fi work (this isn’t without contention either) with the actual first sci-fi book (mostly) defined as Lucien’s A True Story which dates back to the Roman Empire. Also this ignores that Shelley is recognised as a sci-fi author not only for Frankenstein but for The Last Man which is a dystopian novel and would classify as sci-fi especially since its plot about the sole few survivors of a plague has been used by countless other works.
