The Next Incarnation of Bond

The James Bond franchise is amazing.

And not necessarily for the right reasons.

Of the twenty-five official movies, I’d posit there’s only one truly great film – From Russian With Love. It’s a grounded spy thriller with brilliant performances from Sean Connery, Robert Shaw, and Lotte Lenya. Then the series becomes more gimmicky, which irked Connery, and which the Roger Moore era truly embraced – perhaps to accommodate an era were movies were growing sensational in their storytelling.

Of the other twenty-four movies, I’d suggest there’re a handful of good ones, and the rest are middling, forgettable, and – in some cases – terrible.

I grew up when Roger Moore was the incumbent Bond, but I wasn’t so far removed from the Connery era to feel any real separation. Both actors were equally valid. It was the burning question: which Bond do you prefer – Connery or Moore? (George Lazenby was considered an outlier, although one of my older brothers said Lazenby at that time was closest to the book Bond.)

One of the problems with the Moore era was that rights issues meant the filmmakers could no longer use Blofeld and SPECTRE. That left Bond without an arch enemy. It’d be like Batman losing the Joker, or Superman losing Lex Luthor. Unfortunately, Bond has no other rogues gallery.

Timothy Dalton felt it worst. He took on Bond just after the Cold War ended, so the Russians were retired as the enemy. Attitudes were shifting against smoking and promiscuity, so Bond could no longer be the hard-living, womanizing spy he had always been. He also had a new Miss Moneypenny, which mightn’t sound like much, but she enjoyed some telling banter with Bond.

The great thing about the two Dalton Bonds is how much grittier they are than what the Moore era had turned into. Dalton played Bond as serious, burned out, and just always a breath from quitting. Desmond Llewelyn (who played Q) said he was the closest to Ian Fleming’s Bond.

Dalton’s getting the respect he deserves now, but he was reinvigorating at the time, although it didn’t necessarily click with audiences who were growing accustomed to wise-cracking over-the-top action heroes like John McClane, Martin Riggs, and pretty much any character Arnold Schwarzenegger played.

Then Pierce Brosnan had to deal with a new M, and a series that began to lean back into the outlandish – stupid jokes, more gimmicks, and rent-a-week villains. Brosnan also played Bond the way he played the TV character who’d made him famous, Remington Steele, although that was likelier a result of how they were writing the character for him. Brosnan’s a much better actor than that – check out his portrayal of the spy Osnard in The Tailor of Panama. It’s the Bond he should’ve been.

Bond had grown progressively divorced from his literary inspiration, and that could’ve worked if they knew how to adapt around him, but they didn’t. I always thought that after they lost the rights to SPECTRE, they should’ve invented some new terrorist organization. The Cold War had ended. There would’ve been all these spies who might’ve been left without purpose and could be recruited as freelancers. It would’ve been easy enough to create a new supervillain and an organization like SPECTRE for Bond to combat.

With Daniel Craig’s era, they were able to reacquire rights so they could finally adapt the Casino Royale novel – a movie which, in my opinion, is goodish, but not as great as many make it out to be. I feel it’s appreciated because of what Bond had become. It’s like Star Wars: The Force Awakens – that feels like it was overly appreciated because the Prequels had depreciated the brand. It was being graded against a curve in its favor, although it truly is shitful.

But at least during Craig’s run, they got some things right. Judi Dench is great as M, and Ralph Fiennes came into the role with the same gravitas. So that worked. And that was it. The actors who replaced Moneypenny and Q were good actors, but unable to distinguish those roles. The filmmakers also reacquired the rights to SPECTRE and introduced them – and Blofeld – and then defeated them all in the space of one movie.

I’m not the fan of Daniel Craig that many are – he’s the bottom of the list for me as Bond (yes, behind Lazenby); I find Craig too dour, and there’s not a lot of variation in what he does. The hard reboot was unnecessary, and then in Skyfall they seemed to retcon it when Bond used the car he had in Goldfinger.

Killing Craig’s Bond is also a major fuck-up. We understand our heroes aren’t going to die in most movies – and not in a franchise. It’s a conceit we fear for them. Inevitably, they’ll survive and succeed. But we at least need to fear they might fail, that they might die, because that sustains the tension.

Dr. Who can get away with killing the protagonist because they regenerate a new character. It allows them to reboot time and time again within that universe and audiences accept it. That also means they can experiment, and if it’s not working, just hit the reset button.

Bond’s different. He’s meant to be a normal guy. Killing him is signaling you’re rebooting in a universe where he’s mortal. Death is a terminal choice. That generates a simple question: why should I continue to invest in this character if there’s every chance you’ll just kill him again to reboot everything?

I want to think that Bond is part of our universe. I invest in him because he’s saving our world. But if he dies in our world, then where’s the next Bond functioning? He’s not in our world. Our Bond is dead. If he is in our world, where does that other Bond belong? This isn’t Doctor Who, where regeneration is a function of the character, and everything around that character stays a constant. They don’t reboot the universe. They reboot Doctor Who inside that same universe. With Bond, you’re starting over.

I know movie continuity implies that already. Dr. No screened in 1962. Here we are sixty years and six actors later, so quite obviously this isn’t just one character and one world, and yet we’re romantically tied to the affectation that it is.

George Lazenby marries in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service; in Diamonds are Forever, Connery avenges her murder. In For Your Eyes Only, Moore stands at her grave. In The Living Daylights, Dalton expresses melancholy when Felix Leiter’s new wife, Della, jokes he’ll be married next. In The World is Not Enough, Brosnan’s asked if he’s ever lost anybody close to him, and he shows fleeting pain.

All these different Bonds are tied to a single bit of movie continuity that perpetuates the fiction that we’re watching the same character, regardless of what era the story’s taking place, and which actor’s in play.

In whacky movie timeline continuity, we accept that this character is timeless, so when you reboot him after 44 years, you’re compartmentalizing him and asking us to invest in not only a new reinterpretation fashioned around the actor, but a new incarnation. So, while they haven’t killed the earlier version(s), they’ve euthanized his timeline.

And then to kill him sixteen years later, you’re telling the fans that this character no longer has individual significance. He could be anybody, any time, and it’s all a restart.

And that might happen again.

And again.

So why should I care?

Now that Amazon owns Bond and Denis Villeneuve is behind the next reboot, I hope they treat Bond with the respect he deserves, rather than a rechargeable yet dismissible commodity.

And I hope they find a way to contemporize the things that did make the franchise so popular.