Even though James Bond films are rarely topical, they do sometimes tackle environmental issues. In A View to a Kill(1985), for example, James Bond (Roger Moore) must stop a greedy industrialist from triggering a massive earthquake to destroy California’s Silicon Valley and corner the microchip market. In The Living Daylights (1987), Bond (Timothy Dalton) combats an organization trading clearly non-conflict free diamonds for weapons. And in The World is Not Enough (1999), Bond (Pierce Brosnan) must protect a beautiful oil heiress from a notorious terrorist. Quantum of Solace, however, goes further. It not only examines a contemporary environmental issues, whether or not water is a resource to share or to sell but also individualizes that issue, connecting it explicitly to an actual event, the Bolivian Water Wars that began less than a decade before the release of the film.
Juxtaposing a secret organization fronted by what looks like an environmental group against Bond and the British Secret Service, Quantumconstructs water as a commodity worth more than oil, the resource the organization, Quantum, claims to be seeking on its now environmentally protected lands in Central and South America. Most notably, however, the film addresses water rights issues in Bolivia, drawing overtly on the 2000 Bolivian Water Wars for its narrative. The film merely replaces the World Bank and Bechtel Corporation of the actual water war with a military coup and a secret organization fronted by Greene Planet whose mission is to acquire and commodify environmental resources, an act which amplifies the tenets of the appropriative doctrine. Although the film’s plot obviously parallels the Cochabamba Water Wars, however, only one review mentions this connection. Joshua Clover calls it “wholly plagiarized from the archives of reality” (8). As Clover declares, “None of them manage the word “Cochabamba.”
The typical action sequences move the plot forward, introducing the film’s eventual Bolivian context and its connection both to corrupt CEO Dominic Greene ((Mathieu Almaric) and to Bolivia’s ex-dictator, General Medrano (Joaquin Cosia). Greene’s “organization” can give Medrano back his government as long as Medrano ensures they will gain access to what looks like a worthless desert in Bolivia. Medrano declares, “You won’t find oil there. Everyone has tried,” but Greene explains, “but we own everything we find.”
Bond and fellow spy Camille ((Olga Kurylenko) escape by plane after another action sequence and parachute into Greene’s Bolivian eco-park where they discover the real reason for Greene’s establishing nature preserves: “They used dynamite,” Bond exclaims. “This used to be a riverbed. Greene isn’t after the oil. He wants the water…. It’s one dam. He’s creating drought. He’ll have built others.” With control of water, Greene and Quantum, the clandestine company he fronts can charge exorbitant prices for the resource. When Bond and Camille walk through a nearby village, they see firsthand the results of this manufactured drought—an empty water tank and a line of peasants coaxing drops from a dry faucet.
Although Bond is now seen as a rogue agent, he and Camille elude the Americans with M’s approval and finds Greene’s hideout where Greene and Medrano are finalizing their deal. Greene tells Medrano he must sign over the land. Greene’s phantom organization, Quantum, owns more than sixty percent of Bolivia’s water supply,” and Medrano’s “new government will use [Quantum] as [their] utilities provider.” When Medrano objects because the cost is double what they are now paying, Greene illustrates what consequences Medrano might endure if he refuses to sign: “You will wake up with your balls in your mouth and your willing replacement standing over you.”
The film’s action-filled plot resolves in conventional ways. Camille kills Medrano to avenge her family, and Bond saves her from a series of fantastic explosions and fires. Greene tries to escape, but Bond leaves him in the desert with nothing but a quart of motor oil to drink. His organization ends up killing him. The eco-plot, however, is resolved in ways that again highlight the film’s connection with the Bolivian Water Wars: “Well, the dam we saw will have to come down,” Bond declares. “And there’ll be others too.” Ultimately, however, Quantum of Solace most effectively illustrates the repercussions of the appropriative doctrine and its solution: a water democracy like that established in Bolivia after the recent water wars there.
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