For those chomping at the bit for a commentary to tear down all the scientific inaccuracies, Double D have posted the 1st commentary for it online (according to Zarban's site), and go quite in depth: http://www.zarban.com/?p=29987

Can tide us over till the official DIF take on it.

I don't understand why this is so hard for you. You seem to insist on a bizarre explicitly binary morality code. Things aren't either just good, or just bad, you factor lots of things in. Killing an innocent person is bad/irredeemable no matter what. If they're a kid, defenseless, and have yet to live their lives, it's a worse act. Genocide is even worse on the scale.

Son of Doty is not to be messed with

Or even beyond that, adults have at least had a chance to live through a certain part of their lives. The younger a victim is, the more troubling it gets because of how much they are losing, whereas killing a 100 year-old feels inherently like a lesser tragedy.

Ya, at best you could do it for certain movies, like a gritty street-level crime movie like French Connection, or Collateral (the only time I've liked Michael Mann's digital cinematography). Anything slightly fantasy or sci-fi at all is going to be jarring as fuck

He goes into this on the slashfilmcast talk. They were originally playing around with a more ambiguous version where it cuts before Willis pulls the trigger and you don't hear a gunshot or anything. It was still heavily implied that he did it, but they found that audiences like Bruce enough that they were willing to let him off the hook for that in the more ambiguous cut, so they had to make it more visceral and explicit.

I think both things were explicitly left out because Johnson wanted us to be rooting against Bruce Willis for the 2nd half. If you gave more time for his motivation, it would help justify his actions and put the audience on "his" side. This is also part of the reason he put the "flashback" chronicling Older Joe's life towards the middle of the movie instead of at the very beginning where it would make more sense chronologically.

There actually was a potentially completely different but still cool version of this movie that could be made with Old Joe as the protagonist. We go through his whole life until he zaps back, and then follow him having to deal with his younger self as the "bad guy".

To be fair, if you really want, you can assume they're the same universe just based on Alien and Blade Runner having the exact same "purge" graphic on take-off:

I'll hand it to you, that does indeed look amazing, in a very disturbing way

I think it would have turned out basically the same for Brosnan if he had started with the Dalton flicks, and we might never have gotten golden-eye as a result. Their problem ultimately was the same thing that screwed up Quantum of Solace, namely, trying to ape what was considered "trendy" in action films at the time, instead of leading the way and doing their own thing. With License to Kill, it's extremely obvious they were trying to model themselves on Die Hard, which had just come out and revolutionized the action genre. The weirdly violent tone, the marginalization of spy elements, the blatant Die Hard/Lethal-Weapon wannabe score that sounds nothing like a Bond film (seriously ,listen to this thing:

).

We should probably be thankful Brosnan managed to dodge that bullet.

I'm a big fan of Tomorrow Never Dies, definitely like it more than Golden-Eye. Surprised it doesn't get more respect, it's by far the best Brosnan bond in my opinion.

However, if you want to talk most realistic bond films, by far the most grounded in the series, and my personal favorite, is From Russia With Love. It manages to be a super grounded straight-ahead spy thriller, while still setting up most of the tropes that we still associate with the series today. The gadgets bond gets are actually believable and practical (a suitcase with sniper rifle), the villain is great, the story is small-scale and intimate (stealing a Lecter encoding machine), but there's still some cool bond action as the story wraps up. I actually think Goldfinger is pretty over-rated. It's iconic as hell and helped cement the series tropes that From Russia With Love introduced, but there's also tons of wacky ridiculous shit, some pretty slow sections, and a pretty weak final act in my opinion. I think From Russia With Love and Thunderball are both much better.

Casino Royale is a close 2nd for me, for having the balls to re-invent the series while also having some of the best action film-making of the last decade (steady cameras, clean cuts across action, elaborate practical stunts, extended action sequences that have a chance to build momentum and escalate throughout). Hollywood Saloon have a pretty excellent extended breakdown of why it's amazing in the context of the series (http://www.hollywoodsaloon.com/podcastEP28-3.html)

Sidenote: A bunch of bond blu-rays are on sale today as part of the 50 year anniversary, worth picking up

District 9 is to be commended for doing what it does. I LOVE that it abandons the found footage and expands into a normal narrative for the 2nd half, that's what I wish Chronicle had done.