Various YouTube channels that I follow have been posting videos lately with some very similar titles. A whole slew of “Nice knowing you, Bond” and “R.I.P. Bond” posts, all of which being responses to the latest cinematic offering in the venerable franchise, No Time to Die. These guys and gals are all up in arms at the moment, crying foul about the latest big-budget movie release in a long running series to go full woke and tell an existing fan base to screw in order to appease the Twitter PC gods who now rule the universe. And while I’m entertained by these creators and would love to join in the chorus, I just have to say…where were you until now? They've been killing this character for 15 years.
Thanksgiving Day, 2006. I was in my final semester of college,
nearing the end of a period of my life that still qualify as my darkest days. I remember getting back to where I
was living then after a nice turkey lunch and with a long night in front of me,
and a light bulb going off in my head when I realized that there was a new
James Bond film in theaters. But not
just any new James Bond film. A new
JAMES BOND, period. Pierce Brosnan was
out and Daniel Craig was in, and this was a movie that had some amazing advance
buzz conveying that this incredibly prolific, incredibly successful franchise was
about to raise the bar even higher.
Those were my expectations when I watched Casino Royale that day. I expected the best Bond ever, based on everything I had heard. What I got was something very different from what I expected. It was certainly a competently made thriller, with nothing to complain about from a scripting or film-making standpoint. But I remember walking out of the theater that day feeling that something was off. In the ensuing days, I played the movie over numerous times in my mind, picking up more instances of occasions where the story COULD have given us one of the series’ classic tropes but intentionally chose to go a different direction for no other reason than the fact it could. Did I…not like this movie?
Want to know something that I can
acknowledge as extremely stupid in retrospect?
I was in denial over how I felt about this movie for the next two
years. I couldn’t not like this
movie. I mean, it was Bond! There were conversations with friends during
this time where I would voice some of my critiques of Casino Royale and
then rationalize them away, telling myself that this was just the setup movie
in a new series that would surely rock my world the next time around. At one point, there was an honest friend who
interrupted one of these soliloquys with “dude, you clearly did not like this movie. Why are you convincing yourself that you did?” Once again, I rationalized the astute
observation away.
I did a pretty good job of it, too,
because I remember that familiar excitement being back in my mind when the
follow-up film Quantum of Solace neared its release date. Surely, this film would tie everything together
from the first movie and give us something we all could cheer for. And it was sitting in the theater watching
that film that something inside me finally snapped. "What the fuck is this?" I thought to myself. "This isn't James Bond!" It was drab, it was uninspired, it was filled
with uninteresting side characters and villains, it was populated with that
ridiculous shaki-cam that all modern action films have fallen in love with. Oh, and Q and Moneypenny were still nowhere
to be found. I gave this series one more
shot in 2012, and while I found Skyfall to be an improvement, I was done
watching the mental anguish of a character who was never meant to be anything
more than a male projection fantasy.
Ordinarily, this is where I would
be posting a movie review. There will be
no review of No Time to Die, and the reason for that is simple. I refuse to watch it. And to anybody who wants to stampede in here
and call me a raging -istophobe who won't give this movie a chance because it tries to replace Bond with a black chick, I genuinely could not
care less about that. I never watched Spectre, either. As far as I'm concerned, race- and gender-swapping is the least of the problems when it comes to these films.
We’re seeing a lot of think-piece
articles right now on the legacy of the Daniel Craig era of James Bond
films. To me, that legacy will forever
be one of betrayal. I had been a huge
Bond fan for many years by the time that Craig came along, watching all of the
Connery and Moore classics in middle school, lapping up each Brosnan film at
the multiplex on multiple occasions. Why? Because these films were FUN, in every sense
of the word. They were funny, both
intentionally and unintentionally. They
were preposterous, with their impossibly awe-inspiring world of international
espionage and ridiculously hot women who somehow always wound up attached to
these major world political situations.
They were memorable, with their over-the-top villains and intricate Q
gadgets that 007 got to test out in the field each time out. More than anything, this character was an unapologetic
male icon, one that every guy watching – myself included – could watch and
fantasize about what it would be like to have this life.
The Craig films stripped all of
that away. They came along and told us
that this guy, this character, was nothing worth getting behind or cheering for. They took a patriotic, stealthy ladies’ man
and turned him into an emo sourpuss.
They made the mantle of James Bond into a curse. The fun, the humor, the gadgets, the women…yes,
they were all gone, but it went deeper than that. These films subverted your expectations by
every definition of that term. They came,
and they perverted the series with laser-like focus, sniping away every
franchise hallmark and comforting thing that you had come to expect. This was clear to me by the time I had
finished watching Skyfall. If
this was Bond 2.1, I preferred Bond 1.0.
Inevitably, someone always comes
along right about now and says that art needs to evolve and that things can’t
stay the same forever. I agree. The series had successfully reinvented
itself multiple times over before Daniel Craig came along. Let’s just look at the last great James Bond
renaissance, when GoldenEye was released in 1995 after a six-year
hiatus. The film has clever dialogue
scenes that comment on Bond’s place in a changing world, how the Cold War is
over and the character is a relic of the past, but it presents us with a
compelling situation and villain where Bond is needed once again to save the
world for free democracy. Most importantly, the character of Bond himself was unchanged; he still had the funny quips, the cool Q gizmos, and his way with the ladies. This was how to adapt a familiar property to a new era, and I
find no reason why this method could not have been utilized in the mid-‘00s. James Bond resonates in any era. Hell, right now, the wiseass, ladykilling
James Bond might be needed more than ever.
The world needs escapism. That is what entertainment is supposed to be, a portal out of the real world and a ticket to something much more interesting and wonderful. This is what the James Bond films were until 2006. But it's not even 2006 anymore. Unfortunately, we live in 2021, where escapism is not allowed. In 2021, everything must be punishment, and this mindset has taken over every major franchise like a virus. Terminator, Ghostbusters, Star Wars, Star Trek, even the Marvel movies. In that regard, Casino Royale really was a movie ahead of its time. Given that the Bond franchise was, at that point, the longest-running stalwart in motion picture history, it really shouldn’t surprise me at all that it was the first target marked for destruction. Well, they succeeded by every measure. So I guess what I'm really trying to say is…Goodbye, Mr. Bond. It was nice knowing you.
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