Le James Bond

I have finished re-watching every James Bond film (the EON ones, I mean, so not Casino Royale 1967 or Never Say Never Again), and the verdict is...



These films are pretty decent, aren't they?

Can't wait for SPECTRE.

Still, one wonders if the ride might be coming to an end.

Okay, it's not, because $. But think about it for a moment. Fleming's Bond was a drunken racist asshole who smoked a gazillion cigarettes a day. Okay I exaggerate slightly. Sixty cigarettes a day. Outrageous levels of alcohol consumption too. How much of that is present in the modern Bond? When was the last time we saw anything like that on screen?

1989, I guess

What we have now is basically a shuffling zombie of a franchise that will not die. And, hey, this is fine if what you want is outrageous entertainment (though the "entertainment" you will derive from Quantum of Solace is vastly different from the "entertainment" you will derive from Moonraker). But Fleming's Bond would be totally out of place in the modern world. Can we update The Spirit Of Fleming for the PC crowd? What would be the bloody point? I aver that the Connery, Lazenby, and Dalton Bonds were all, to varying degrees, Not What The Audience Was Expecting. And I don't simply mean, with regards to the two short-lived Bonds, compared to their predecessors. Connery was a fair bit of a culture shock. Hell, even Roger Moore started off as a bit of an ass (they smoothed the edges down when it was obvious that that approach wasn't working.) In contrast, Daniel Craig seems to fit in nicely with the Bourne-a-likes. And yeah, that gets the $ and keeps the franchise afloat, but...

Did the series die with The Spy Who Loved Me? After that, did we stop caring about Ian Fleming's James Bond aside from brief and glorious moments (mostly clustered around the years 1987-1989)? Did we focus on spectacle instead? Was that when the Bonds finally gave up the pretense of innovating and started imitating instead?

I think so. (Though you could argue that innovation went out the window a few years earlier, post-OHMSS.)

The film series exists basically independent of the books at this point. And that's fine. They provide great entertainment, and the wonderful buildup to the release of Yet Another One is a perennial joy that will never grow old. You're not going to get me to endorse something like Bond being played by a woman - this isn't Doctor Who, kids - but I suppose that would grate less than the umpteenth declaration that "we're going Back To Fleming." You can't do that. You'd lose half your audience. Quantum of Solace was as close as they've dared to go post-Dalton, and it's no surprise that it's the least popular of the Craig films.

Still, something bothers me. For all the Craig films have done, blasting The Formula into smithereens, there's still a sense that they franchise is inexorably bound to some glorious yesteryear - 1969, most like - they can never recapture. Hence them shoving SPECTRE into the plot as soon as they acquire the rights to it, haphazardly retconning the earlier Craigs to make NotBlofeld The Author Of All Your Pain.

One of the many things that bugged me about Skyfall - it's overrated, deal with it - was that the Goldfinger DB5 was shoehorned in there as if to say "hey, remember this? This is JAMES BOND, this is CLASSIC, you will enjoy this!" I fear they're doing the same thing with SPECTRE.

But, hey, I'll find out soon enough.