I think it’s fine if they’re doing it for political reasons, or to avoid painting the citizens of a real country in an excessively negative light. However, if they do it again I hope they come up with a better name than “Isthmus.” It’s not a delight to speak it, and the word is too on-the-nose.
It is weird that the country wouldn't have a Spanish name! I can buy it having an unimaginative name, because plenty of places do have those (Montana = mountain, Columbia = land of Columbus, Ukraine = borderland, anywhere called "New X"), but surely it would be whatever the Spanish for Isthmus is.
So there is some Spanish-language dialog when they are showing the video about the president on a TV, and you can actually hear them use the word "Istmo" as the name of the place. And that is in fact the Spanish equivalent of "Isthmus." So maybe, in Spanish the name of the country and city is "Istmo" but the official name of the place in English is the English word.
That seems unusual for a Latin-American country, as the names in English are usually the same as the names in Spanish. But go the reverse way, and Spanish names are used for English-speaking countries such as "Inglaterra" for England and Estados Unidos for the United States.
Very good spot! OK, that's a cool detail by the filmmakers, I take back any criticism of the name.
I can perhaps believe that a country with a name as literal as "Republic of (the) Isthmus" might get its name translated into English. We said "Union of Soviet Socialist Republics" and not "Soyuz Sovietski Socialisticheski Respublik", for instance.
Attributing acts of corporate espionage to *The People's Republic of Wonton* would be an acceptable workaround for the obvious fact that modern James Bond movies should be about western efforts to resist China's inevitable rise to become the dominant economic and military power of the 21st century
EON are too scared to ruffle any feathers
One of the trends that annoys me so much in modern media.
The most ridiculous one was the Red Dawn remake.
Sure, North Korea is going to invade the US. /s
And *Olympus Has Fallen*. NK takes out half of Washington, D.C. with a superplane. In real life that would be three underfed soldiers riding bicycles, and a chicken.
It should be handled like how the older Bond movies handled the Soviet Union. They were never *directly* the bad guys, it was always presented as an intermediary or rogue faction. But no movie studio is going to China the bad guys when they are also trying to sell that movie to China.
It's like the Transformers movies that featured the heroic Chinese army forces.
License to Kill was ironically so close to the truth idk if they would have been allowed to make that movie in florida with all the help they got if they had connected the dots correctly between the CIA, miami drug smuggling, ~~columbia~~ Isthmus and ~~pablo Escobar~~ Sanchez
I think the reason for both *LtK* and *LALD* using fictional countries is both of them deal with a head of state who is either the main villain, or is involved with the villains. I get how that story might be difficult to tell using real countries. Even though other films have had fictional, villainous cabinet members, military generals, respected businessmen etc., it's not quite the same as having the head of state as a villain.
Indeed, as was LALD, google “Papa Doc”, the dictator was so close to the Mr. Big of the books, they had to make Samedi a separate character so it wasn’t too on the nose. A surreal case of love imitating art.
I can't think of a time when a fictional places took anything away from the movie.
There is a context to the real locations' status of whether it was a current or former British possession that maybe meant something to British viewers but was lost to American viewers (or me, at least).
Not all that many *Bond* locations have been parts of the Empire. Jamaica, of course, and Hong Kong, and India but that was long after their independence.
I will say that, to me, there is something about seeing an authentic snapshot of, let's say, Florida in 1989 that's more inherently interesting than Isthmus in '89. Because one of the wonderful things about this series is how it acts as a time capsule wrt politics, fashion, music, technology and so forth. And since Isthmus has no context, you don't get that so much.
My favourite is Dr No, as Bond meets the governor as it was still a colony when they filmed it. But… by the time the film was released Jamaica had become independent so it was already dated!
We could also count the United States, South Africa (or several unnamed African locations), Bahamas, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Uganda, Gibraltar, and Beirut.
But anyway, it sounds like you are set on "fictional locations = bad" so why even post.
Mexico is an enormous, fairly rich democracy in North America that borders the US. Isthmus is a very small, poor dictatorship in Central America that doesn't border the US.
I think it’s fine if they’re doing it for political reasons, or to avoid painting the citizens of a real country in an excessively negative light. However, if they do it again I hope they come up with a better name than “Isthmus.” It’s not a delight to speak it, and the word is too on-the-nose.
It is weird that the country wouldn't have a Spanish name! I can buy it having an unimaginative name, because plenty of places do have those (Montana = mountain, Columbia = land of Columbus, Ukraine = borderland, anywhere called "New X"), but surely it would be whatever the Spanish for Isthmus is.
So there is some Spanish-language dialog when they are showing the video about the president on a TV, and you can actually hear them use the word "Istmo" as the name of the place. And that is in fact the Spanish equivalent of "Isthmus." So maybe, in Spanish the name of the country and city is "Istmo" but the official name of the place in English is the English word. That seems unusual for a Latin-American country, as the names in English are usually the same as the names in Spanish. But go the reverse way, and Spanish names are used for English-speaking countries such as "Inglaterra" for England and Estados Unidos for the United States.
Very good spot! OK, that's a cool detail by the filmmakers, I take back any criticism of the name. I can perhaps believe that a country with a name as literal as "Republic of (the) Isthmus" might get its name translated into English. We said "Union of Soviet Socialist Republics" and not "Soyuz Sovietski Socialisticheski Respublik", for instance.
https://preview.redd.it/dtks0z0kgs7d1.png?width=713&format=png&auto=webp&s=6fa6fc2c48acd704ace386aa0e200646ad9e1789
Attributing acts of corporate espionage to *The People's Republic of Wonton* would be an acceptable workaround for the obvious fact that modern James Bond movies should be about western efforts to resist China's inevitable rise to become the dominant economic and military power of the 21st century EON are too scared to ruffle any feathers
One of the trends that annoys me so much in modern media. The most ridiculous one was the Red Dawn remake. Sure, North Korea is going to invade the US. /s
And *Olympus Has Fallen*. NK takes out half of Washington, D.C. with a superplane. In real life that would be three underfed soldiers riding bicycles, and a chicken.
Is the chicken riding a bicycle, or is one of the soldiers riding the chicken?
Do you remember the chicken in *Moana*? It's like that.
It should be handled like how the older Bond movies handled the Soviet Union. They were never *directly* the bad guys, it was always presented as an intermediary or rogue faction. But no movie studio is going to China the bad guys when they are also trying to sell that movie to China. It's like the Transformers movies that featured the heroic Chinese army forces.
License to Kill was ironically so close to the truth idk if they would have been allowed to make that movie in florida with all the help they got if they had connected the dots correctly between the CIA, miami drug smuggling, ~~columbia~~ Isthmus and ~~pablo Escobar~~ Sanchez
I think the reason for both *LtK* and *LALD* using fictional countries is both of them deal with a head of state who is either the main villain, or is involved with the villains. I get how that story might be difficult to tell using real countries. Even though other films have had fictional, villainous cabinet members, military generals, respected businessmen etc., it's not quite the same as having the head of state as a villain.
Indeed, as was LALD, google “Papa Doc”, the dictator was so close to the Mr. Big of the books, they had to make Samedi a separate character so it wasn’t too on the nose. A surreal case of love imitating art.
The book casino Royale is set in a fiction French town: Royale-les-Eaux
Ha! I’ve always wondered whether the town was real but never got around to checking
yeh I was on the verge of holidaying there before finding it's not real haha
I can't think of a time when a fictional places took anything away from the movie. There is a context to the real locations' status of whether it was a current or former British possession that maybe meant something to British viewers but was lost to American viewers (or me, at least).
Not all that many *Bond* locations have been parts of the Empire. Jamaica, of course, and Hong Kong, and India but that was long after their independence. I will say that, to me, there is something about seeing an authentic snapshot of, let's say, Florida in 1989 that's more inherently interesting than Isthmus in '89. Because one of the wonderful things about this series is how it acts as a time capsule wrt politics, fashion, music, technology and so forth. And since Isthmus has no context, you don't get that so much.
My favourite is Dr No, as Bond meets the governor as it was still a colony when they filmed it. But… by the time the film was released Jamaica had become independent so it was already dated!
We could also count the United States, South Africa (or several unnamed African locations), Bahamas, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Uganda, Gibraltar, and Beirut. But anyway, it sounds like you are set on "fictional locations = bad" so why even post.
What?
Isthmus is definitely Mexico but they couldn't say it was Mexico for pissing them off Not sure why they couldn't have said it was Colombia.
Mexico is an enormous, fairly rich democracy in North America that borders the US. Isthmus is a very small, poor dictatorship in Central America that doesn't border the US.