Friday, October 14, 2005

No, Mr. Craig, I expect you to DIE!

So what do I, a longtime lover of the James Bond movies (my fascination with which is only predated by my love of Star Wars by two years), think of the announcement that actor Daniel Craig has been cast as Bond for the next film in the series (Casino Royale)?

Well, not much, as I don't know a thing about Daniel Craig. To be frank, though, I'm more concerned that the next Bond film have a better screenwriter than the films Pierce Brosnan did. Not that I disliked those films, mind you, but the Brosnan films never really "congealed" into a vision for the character. I actually liked each of Brosnan's movies, but each time out, there was something a bit off about the atmosphere. Anyway, best of luck to Mr. Craig.

Here's a funny bit of desperate writing from the linked news item, regarding the film in production:

Ian Fleming's first Bond novel, originally published in 1953, Casino Royale is one of the few Bond adventures not to feature the MI6 gadget-maker Q.


My, that's certainly an interesting bit of information, considering that the Bond films haven't borne more than a superficial relationship to the Ian Fleming books in years (in fact, On Her Majesty's Secret Service might have been the last film to really take one of Fleming's novels as inspiration, plot-wise). No Bond film since The Living Daylights has even been named for a Fleming book or story; the ones since then have had Bond-like titles not drawn from Fleming (except for The World Is Not Enough). I seriously doubt that any Fleming-purists even exist anymore, and certainly aren't about to get huffy if Q appears in the new film.

Apparently the new film's story will take us back to Bond's first mission as a '00' agent, which sounds pretty intriguing but could be slightly problematic, given that the film series has been going since the early 1960s. The series has worked around this problem by basically taking the approach that long-running comic book series take: by basically ignoring the implications of such timeframes completely. Taking Bond back in time could "trip things up", somehow.

(BTW, links to my reviews of the entire James Bond series can be found in the sidebar under "Notable Dispatches". A teaser, for those who haven't read them: I don't think very highly of Goldfinger.)

No comments: