Quantum Of Solace's confusing title was just the start of the James Bond film's problems
Released on Halloween, 2008, Daniel Craig's second outing as 007 was beset with production woes
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What’s the only James Bond film to date that doesn’t feature the title of the film in either its dialogue or the lyrics of its theme song? Five points if you guessed Quantum Of Solace, Daniel Craig’s troubled second outing as 007.
Courtesy of a deal with distributor Sony, Bond 22 was in development for a May 2008 release before Bond 21, (2006's Casino Royale), was even released in cinemas. That faith proved well placed, as Craig’s debut was a critical and commercial smash, but production on this direct sequel was troubled to say the least.
The release was eventually postponed to 31 October, 2008 in the UK, a date that led some sections of the British media at the time to report that the various delays, injuries, and other production problems could be attributed to a “Halloween curse” – The Daily Star quoted a psychic who speculated that the release date was to blame.
Read more: What you need to know about the next James Bond film
But from the off, the biggest stumbling block for the sequel is that title, which speaks to the emotional timbre of the movie but also mistakes obscurity for depth.
What even is a Quantum Of Solace?
Like Casino Royale, Quantum Of Solace was an as-yet-unused Ian Fleming story title. Featured in the 1960 short-story collection For Your Eyes Only, the story finds Bond at a dinner party between missions, chatting to a government official about a relationship that went wrong.
Unlike Casino Royale, the title Quantum Of Solace elicited confusion from the moment it was announced. Compared to the first Bond novel, the short story is a deep-cut Fleming reference, but after mulling over several potential titles, the producers opted for the one they felt reflected the mood of the film.
In the story, the theory of the quantum of solace is the name the governor gives to the amount of comfort and empathy you have in a relationship. 'Quantum' being an infinitesimal amount, it’s suggested that as long as it’s above zero, it’s what makes it worth continuing.
Broadly speaking, this tallies with the themes of Marc Forster’s sequel, which sees Bond investigate an international power-grab by a shady organisation, but also team up with Bolivian agent Camille Montes on her own quest for revenge. When she gets her vengeance on exiled criminal General Medrano (Joaquín Cosío), it’s cold comfort, and Bond explicitly moves on from his own vendetta before the credits roll.
That’s the reading we’ve come to with 15 years of distance but announcing that title nine months before the film arrived in cinemas was bound to hit differently.
In fan circles, Sony’s purchase of the domain “quantumofsolace.com” got chins wagging, but the reveal still came as a surprise. Chris Tilly, a journalist who attended the traditional press launch for Bond 22 on 24 January, 2008 recalls "a stunned silence" when the title was revealed, "followed by murmuring and a spot of head-scratching."
During the press conference that followed, Craig said, of the short story: "It's quite a moving story for Ian Fleming really — it debates relationships and how they hurt... what he suggests is that if you don't have that quantum of solace in your relationship, you should give up.
"It's that level of comfort or niceness or whatever the word is."
This didn’t do much to quell the vitriolic reaction that followed the announcement. The Guardian’s Xan Brooks opened his column: "This title should have been taken out and shot."
No time to rewrite
That wasn’t the end of the film’s troubles. When Quantum Of Solace began production in January 2008, there had been no time to polish the script draft submitted by Casino Royale co-writer Paul Haggis just hours before the 2007-8 Writers’ Guild of America strike began.
With a November release date fixed, the production pressed on and accordingly, the script as filmed is a bit mixed. On top of the pages written earlier by Haggis along with Bond regulars Neal Purvis and Robert Wade, further uncredited contributions came from Forster and Craig, the only people who were allowed to work on it, and Joshua Zetumer, who joined the production as a script doctor after the strike ended in February.
Certainly, the filmmakers made choices that writers wouldn’t — like calling the film’s start-up SPECTRE-a-like organisation 'Quantum', and further obfuscating the meaning of the title.
And still, the negative press around the film continued to swirl, right up to the mixed reception for the film’s jagged symphonic-rock theme song, Another Way To Die, a duet by Jack White and Alicia Keys.
Among the various barbs aimed at the song, BBC 6 Music DJs Adam Buxton and Joe Cornish came up with their own title tunes for their Song Wars segment, with lyrics like “I’d like a quantum of solace, but no more than a quantum,” and “I’ve written it down, I remember it now.”
The shortest of the Bond films to date, Quantum Of Solace runs into the expected bigness of the franchise. The plot keeps the personal focus on Craig’s Bond, but its tone is closer to those Fleming short stories, in which 007 encounters interesting characters between missions, than the geopolitical blockbusters we’ve come to expect. To put it another way, the movie makes a short story long.
Ultimately, reviews were considerably cooler on Quantum than Casino Royale. But the film did decent business at the worldwide box office ($589m) and has even come in for a warmer reappraisal in recent years.
The title does it no favours though, and you can probably expect other unused Fleming story titles such as The Hildebrand Rarity or Risico to stay on the shelf when the time comes to name Bond 26 and other future films.
Quantum of Solace is streaming on Prime Video.
