It looks like the surface of Mars. The rust-coloured rolling hills of the Atacama desert appear alien, devoid of life - just sand and dirt and rock baked into vast, barren slopes that stretch endlessly into the bruised horizon.

Against this unforgiving backdrop, Daniel Crag is exploring the merciless side of James Bond. Quantum of Solace is the 22nd film in the 007 franchise and Craig's second after the 2006 blockbuster, Casino Royale; It's also the first real sequel to a Bond film, picking up mere minutes after the previous film ends.

The movie, opening Nov 6, has completed its principal photography and is currently in post-production. Filming took the cast and crew shot to Panama, Baja California, Mexico, Italy and Austria.

Today, the action sequence that's being shot in the Chilean desert is a turning point for the embittered superspy, giving him a chance to discover if his thirst for vengeance will turn him into the same kind of cold-blooded killer as the people he is fighting.

"He has his heart broken," says Craig. "The love of his life is killed, and he finds out she's not who she said she was. He's out for revenge, and also out to find a 'quantum of solace". Something has been taken away from him, and he's out to get that back."

Craig is running at full speed along the rooftop of a long, narrow building, wedged like a man-made plateau into the rocky red valley, firing a prop pistol into the mirrored skylights below.

The building is supposed to be an eco-hotel, a buried tropical oasis amid this wasteland that's designed to lure the rich and powerful with its latest environmental technology. The hotel is a front for the villain, Dominic Greene (Mathieu Amalric, The French star of The Diving Bell and the Butterfly), a tycoon whose "Save the Earth" facade is part of his plan to seize control of South America's water supply.

"The villain has taken over this place. Greene is pretending to be 'green', but he's obviously not," says producer Michael G. Wilson.

In real life, this partially subterranean structure is home to scores of visiting astronomers at the Paranal Observatory, which houses four of the world's largest and most advanced telescopes. The silver domes stand sentinel on a nearby hillside awaiting sundown and the universe's nightly display of galactic fireworks.

The only structures for 120km, they are situated in the thin air of the 8,700-foot elevation, where it's easy to run out of breath doing take after take of sprinting and gunplay. Craig's sprinting gunshot scene is literally breathless - but he laughs matter-of-factly when asked about the high-altitude challenges. "It's (expletive) hard!"