If the screenwriters of Quantum of Solace had been a little sharper, there's a lot more about that mess of a movie that would have been different than just that.

Does lithium explode when you heat it? Because the screenwriters really, really needed a better explanation for why those hotel rooms kept blowing up. I'm still not entirely sure; I can only assume that it was a common feature of Brutalist architecture to insulate interior walls with napalm. Which would, after a fashion, help to explain the short life of that architectural movement, but exploding lithium would still be a better explanation.

Rhub, exploding hydrogen tanks (hotel was powered by fuel cells). Hokey, nonetheless

Rhubs -

Are you referring to the ones at the end, in the ultramodern building powered entirely by hydrogen fuel cells?

what ejbenjamin said

tiger and janus, I did indeed understand the hydrogen thing. The problem is that in simple terms hydrogen explodes; it doesn't burn. There's a reason teenage pyros don't bother playing with hydrogen much, despite it being the absolute easiest-to-make explosive substance. It's just hard to get hydrogen to do any seriously cool burning-of-stuff. So yeah, if you had a bunch of hydrogen tanks (or pipes or whatever) in the walls of a hotel, you could indeed cause those tanks to explode like bombs. But getting the place to burn like it did? No way. For that, you need a better explanation. Seriously, that was perhaps the biggest disappointment of the movie for me. Early on, a couple of cars get driven off of proverbial cliffs, and for maybe the first time in action-movie history the cars did not explode. I was all like, "Hooray! Finally, an action movie in which cars that crash do not explode like live ordnance!"

But it turns out the director was saving all of the inexplicable-burning karma for the hotel, and he didn't even have the decency to have the hotel go off a cliff before inexplicably igniting into a raging inferno.

I still thought it was a much better Bond film than it would appear most people did, though, nonsensically burning luxury hotel in the middle of nowhere and all.

We each have our pet peeves and our own rules to suspension of disbelief, I suppose.

I quite enjoyed Mission: Impossible 2 for the sheer brutality of the violence it does to the rules of physics, and settle in every now and again to watch that ludicrous beach fight scene and count how many more bones are broken in that fight than exist in the actual human body. Nonetheless, the new Star Trek movie is already ruined for me, because leaping out of a car driven off a cliff at 80 mph and grabbing the cliff face just gets your hands torn off on the way to a grisly death. We are creatures of chimerical tastes.

I'm with you on the movie overall, though, and also with Mr. Orr (a rare thing). It doesn't hold a candle to Casino Royale, but it was quite enjoyable.

Hydrogen is stored in a chemical compound before it is turned into the gas, that we know, right before it is used, so that there isn't a storage problem.  But let's not forget about Olga.  She was the real draw.  The Antonioni style blow up was wasted on a homely conceived hotel.

I saw the movie finally last weekend.  Good, but two points, one relating to this post:

1 - Major, huge, enormous plot hole: are we really supposed to believe that no one in Bolivia, or in the US government, or anywhere except within the confines of Quantum, knows that 60 percent--60 percent!--of the water supply in Bolivia passes through the one region which Quantum is in the process of acquiring?

2 - I was struck by how conventional a Bond movie it was.  Quantum is an updated and slightly more sophisticated version of SPECTRE.  There is yet another allusion (as in Casino Royale) to Aston Martins.  The girl assistant  is both a) given the customary silly name, in this case Strawberry Fields (thus joining the distinguished company of Pussy Galore, Plenty O'Toole, et al.) and b) bumped off (compare Thunderball, You Only Live Twice), and that by covering her body (in oil this time, in gold paint in Goldfinger, where it made more sense).  Daniel Craig turns out to be an updated Sean Connery, but without the suavity and sense of humor.

But I still liked it.  Good chase scenes.

Tim: come on, there is no more glorious name in all of Twentieth Century literature than Pussy Galore.  And in the movie, Honor Blackman managed to make Lipstick Lesbian rather chic.  Compared to that, Julia Onatop, Strawberry Fields, Fatima Blush and Fuckme Beiby - OK, I exaggerate - are just silly child play.

Have not seen the movie yet - I'm still relishing the torture scene at the end of Casino Royale and don't want to ruin memory with a bad and clothed performance by Craig.

icarus, I like Daniel Craig as much as anyone [he was SUCH a better Perry Smith in Infamous than that mopey emo was in Capote], and I saw Quantum of Sh!t, and DC's performance is not the problem, believe me. It's just a big fat load of bad movie, is all. He's just stuck in it.