Listen, I know I said that I wouldn’t talk about James Bond again until Denis Villeneuve announced the name and cast of the next film, but there’s a lot at stake here. Despite the talent and resources that Amazon has poured into the 007 franchise, I’m still bearish on its prospects. Disney did the same thing for Star Wars and look at what that got us. And before they got their hands on Star Wars, JJ Abrams and Alex Kurtzman torpedoed Star Trek. So all I’m saying is that we should prepare ourselves for the enshittification of yet another legacy IP. For 60 years prior, The Broccoli name, in addition to being behind the famous vegetable, rested on the quality and success of the James Bond franchise. That is no longer the case. Jeff Bezos’, Denis Villeneuve’s, Steven Knight’s, Amy Pascal’s, and David Heyman’s careers will all go on regardless of the success of the next production. In other words, James Bond is no longer a family operation. It’s now a product that can be bought and traded like any other commodity. So beware.
But, on a positive note, the first Bond video game in years has been overwhelmingly well received. And it should have. Whoever made it apparently spent $200 million to make it. I watched the first 13 minutes of it on YouTube. I’m not a gamer, so I can’t assess its quality as a game. But I guess the premise is that you play as James Bond, starting as a British SAS operator, on until he receives his license to kill from MI6. From what I saw, it didn’t feel like James Bond, but so what? I suppose the idea is to follow him from being James Bond, common pissant, to becoming James Bond 007.
There’s a lot of speculation over how much this video game is informing us on the future of the film franchise. And it shouldn’t come as a surprise that, in my personal view, watching the “birth” of James Bond 007 might make a good video game, but it would make a disastrous film concept. I’ll reiterate that James Bond has no beginning. He’s more myth than man. While No Time to Die controversially killed him at its conclusion, death is such a connecting theme across all the movies that I thought it was a fitting end to Daniel Craig’s tenure. While Casino Royale did show Bond briefly before he became 007, it was maybe three minutes of the total runtime and it was disconnected from the larger plot. Casino Royale also hinted at Bond being prior SAS, which would make sense, but should that aspect of his career be explored?
There’s a lot of problems with it. First off, Bond is a lone wolf. Being former military (I’m a veteran of World War Two AND One), I can tell you that Bond’s proclivity for winging it and ignoring orders whenever it damn well suits him wouldn’t go over well in any Army. And two, Bond is well educated and has an appreciation for the finer things in life. That alone wouldn’t prevent him being in the Army and/or Royal Navy, but, with all due respect to those who served, his posh lifestyle wouldn’t mesh with military culture. ADDITIONALLY, being Cambridge educated, he probably wouldn’t have been an enlisted grunt. He would have certainly entered military life as a commissioned officer. So James Bond as a troop commander? I mean, it makes more sense than seeing him as an enlisted piss ant. But even then, Bond would likely grow tired of this role, probably not understanding why his troops don’t have the same kill and survival skills that he has. In short, while a great filmmaker can make anything work, I think it’s best if we leave this aspect of James Bond’s life to the video games and not put it on the big screen.
But there’s something here that producers HAVE to get right. While there’s been many interpretations to the character, there’s something they all share: James Bond is a broken man. He’s not a moral man. If the winds have blown slightly differently, he would have been MI6’s enemy and not its hero. The franchise isn’t about tropes and cliches—the tux’s, the martinis, the women, or the gadgets—those are all distractions for both the audience AND for the character himself. Because James Bond at his core, for a lack of a better description, is suicidal. He’s nothing without the mission. Only danger provides any sense of comfort. Long before the SAS and long before MI6, James Bond made a wager on himself: It’s much more interesting to be alive than to be dead.
And whatever caused this gigantic hole in his soul can be hinted at. But it can never, ever, EVER be explored in great detail.