Author’s Note: I am
about to begin what will become a recurring series about movies from 2012, a year
that, for many reasons, I consider one of the last great years when it comes to
cinema. But sometimes in order to explain why you consider certain films great,
you have to give a more detailed description than the plot summary, the acting
and all the technical aspects. Sometimes to do it justice, you have to give a
more detailed explanation as to why a film meets standards that you personally
consider high.
In order to do so, I
have to go into my own personal history. Some of you will figure out from the
title of the article and the above paragraph what the first film in this series
is going to be. Some of you may not need persuasion as to why its one of the
greatest films of all time. But because I am going to be taking the point of
view that quite a sizable number of people will have a problem with, I feel
obliged to give an explanation. So here
we go.
As the title says, I
spent the first twenty five years of my life loathing James Bond movies. Some
might understand this, considering that I grew up when Pierce Brosnan was the face of
the franchise, and that the movies he played the lead in are considered the
bottom of the barrel. This is true, but my dislike of Bond came long before
that.
For much of my
childhood ABC would devote Sunday nights to Bond movies. I watched many of them
on television and cable throughout my childhood. I found them all horrible
movies. None of the Bonds – not Dalton, not Moore, not even the sacred Connery –
could do anything to make them interesting or even good in my opinion. I thought
there was something wrong with me because I disliked them so much, and millions
loved them.
I have only recently
begun to put together why I disliked them, and I’m encouraged by the fact that
my opinion of them was one that many people have shared from the start –
including someone who you’d think would count the most.
In 1962, Dr. No, the
first James Bond film premiered. An instant box office smash, it was critically
regarded by many. However, when someone tracked down the writer of original
novels they were based on, a striking minority opinion was registered. Ian Fleming intensely disliked the film and was
appalled what they had done to his work. Considering how little critics
appreciated his novels and how badly they had sold before the films debuted,
this is a striking opinion from him. One wonders if he might have wanted some
more editorial control over the scripts for future films, but he died
prematurely two years later, not long before Goldfinger premiered. Considering that the James Bond movies have
been the influence for practically every novel, movie and TV series about spies
ever since, it’s kind of remarkable that Fleming intensely disliked them so
much.
Perhaps there is a
decent reason for that. I have never read any of Fleming’s novels, but I have
read many of the works of John Le Carre, who like Fleming had been in British
intelligence (Fleming served during World War II; Le Carre during the early
stages of the Cold War) Both men wrote their novels in reaction to their lives
in espionage; indeed in many introductions to his own work, Le Carre would
openly state that much of his writing was influence by his working alongside
Kim Philby and being utterly unable to detect that he and the Cambridge Five
were working for the Soviets.
When one looks at any adaptation
of a Le Carre work – and there have been many, if not more than those of Fleming’s
during the last half-century - it is true
to the source material in that it is remarkable dense. Most of his characters, such as George Smiley,
labor in the darkness, their personal
lives suffering as a result of the secrets they must keep, have no ability to
trust anything or anyone they meet, and they are always aware of their defeats
and unsure of their victories. I have no
way of knowing with any certainty, but I’m relatively sure that this is very
close to what working in espionage must really be like. I have a feeling most American audiences would
like their spies to be Jack Bauers or Sydney Bristows, in that they are always
in disguise and have a clear perception of what good and evil are when we see
them shouting at a suspect or wearing fancy wigs. Both series, however, were also clear on the
moral ambiguity that made up so much of their careers and the costs that it
took – something that Le Carre movies and TV adaptations are very good at relaying,
but the Bond films for forty years, really didn’t.
There is also, of
course, the critical reaction to both author’s films and shows. A Le Carre film
is far more likely to be nominated for major acting awards by the Oscars or get
high prestige television treatment.
Indeed, a limited series is by far the best way to treat a Le Carre work
because of how dense his stories are.
(This isn’t necessarily always the case: I found virtues in both the
1970s adaptation and the 2011 film version of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy).
And with the course of time, Le Carre was capable of writing novels that could
deal with the modern world far better than the Bond films did for decades without
sacrificing integrity. (Le Carre, I should add, was always impressed by the
work some of the writers did: after AMC adapted The Night Manager in
2016, he was so impressed by Olivia Colman’s work that he said he couldn’t see
anyone else doing it – even though the character had been a man in his book.)
Put at it’s simplest:
Le Carre’s work is as close to what actually being a spy is really like. A
James Bond film is the cartoon version. There’s always a clear evil doer to kill
with a ridiculous plan for world domination, there’s a woman to seduce with a ridiculous
name, and he gets to sleep with her when the job is done with no apparent
trauma for the body count he’s laid out over the course of two and a half
hours.
This, to be sure, is
the biggest flaw of the James Bond movies: for forty years, the actor playing him
would change but the character never did. I have a feeling that may be the
reason why so many people think Sean Connery is the best Bond: it has less to
do with the quality of his performance or the films, but rather because he was
the closest one to the era that took place in. The world kept getting more and
more complicated, and James Bond essentially was stuck in place.
To be fair, most of
this is the fault of the people behind the films and not any of the actors who
played him. There have been countless franchises based on a single character
before, but all of their creators had the logic to keep them to the period in
which they lived. Sherlock Holmes might come out in a B-Movie to fight Nazis
during World War II, but for a hundred years, almost every film maker or TV
writer kept him in 19th Century London. (And in the past decade, when
Sherlock and Elementary came along, they made it crystal that both
Sherlock Holmes bore no relation to the nineteenth century version, which led
to immense success for both series.) Comic book movies and TV series are so
ubiquitous that its well worth remembering that until about twenty years ago,
they were considered box office poison because no one could figure out how to
put characters created fifty or sixty years previously in to a modern setting
and not look like a hack doing so. And for all the adaptations of TV series as
films over the decades, only a handful have been capable of taking these
versions of the past and putting them in the present with fewer still being
successful film franchises.
It didn’t help matters
that so many other action film franchises around the 1980s and nineties were
basically superior when it came to giving its leads a character and backstory
to work with. One might have trouble with the later sequels to Lethal Weapon
and Die Hard - how many films
was Murtagh away from retirement? How did John McLain go from being a cop who
needed aspirin to nurse injuries to having a car crash into a helicopter? – but
there was enough of a backstory from the originals and at least the minimum of
character development in each of the films that they could carry it off. James
Bond, by contrast, might very well have been a stick figure for so many of the films
he made in the seventies and into the nineties. The writers concentrated so much
on what made a Bond film (the gadgets; the women; the hummable theme song; the
scenery chewing villain) that there was nothing for Bond. It did not
help matters one bit that for each different Bond, everything around him was
essentially the same. And let’s be honest, the fact that the creators were fine
with different Bonds every decade but had no problem keeping Desmond Llewellyn
on for forty years really shows how little effort they were putting in to what
Bond should have been. You’d think Q of all people would notice that he was
giving an exploding pen to a different Bond every so often.
Which actually brings
to me to the main problems of the Pierce Brosnan era. To be clear, none of the
problems with the films of that era lay with Brosnan. Indeed, none of the
problems I have had with the Bond films for the first forty years have to do
with any of the actors that ever played Bond. All of them (with the exception
of George Lazenby, whose career never gelled with mass audiences) were superb
actors all capable of great range and emotion, before and after their stints as
Bond. I don’t even have much of a
problem with their work as Bond; all of them were basically doing the
best they could with what the writers gave them to work with, and as I’ve
pointed out before, the writers gave them very little.
No the problem is that
with each subsequent Bond movie in the Pierce Brosnan era, the plots became
more and more ludicrous, even by the loose standards of Bond movies. By the
time we got to Die Another Day, a movie that I think not even the most
devoted Bond fan will defend, you get the feeling these films were just being
greenlit with no script supervision, drafts, or even a story pitch. I think the
filmmakers were just saying “the next Bond movie” and the studio heads were
greenlighting it. Because the story of Die Another Day is so badly
written, so utterly laughable in its plot, with the main villain’s reveal being
so blatantly racist you don’t understand how it got greenlit in 2002, with
stunts so ridiculous they were mocked from the moment the film was released, that
if it had been written for any other character at the time, somebody, somewhere
in the process would have said: “You can’t be serious about putting in this in
the movie? The audiences will never believe it.”
And indeed, when the movie came out, audiences
didn’t believe it. The Bond movies of Brosnan’s era, when compared with the
amount of money for their production, were breaking even at best. Bond movies
had never done well critically, but critics were holding these movies with
contempt. There was talk before Die Another Day was released about doing
a spin-off series based on Halle Berry’s character. After the film, it died on
the vine – and I have a feeling Halle Berry was not the only reason they did.
For all the people who
never liked what James Bond became in the Daniel Craig era, let’s not kid ourselves.
After the last group of films, there was no way that Bond could continue in the
current form. You could put James Bond against media moguls or stick him in a
North Korean prison camp, he was still the same James Bond – and that was the problem.
Something radical had to be done to make James Bond relevant to 21st
century audiences – and even if he’d gone to fight the War on Terror, as some
suggested he might have, does anyone really think a man in a tux would have fit
in the desert?
No in order to make
James Bond work, they had to start from scratch. And that maybe why my opinion
of Bond did a 180 during the Daniel Craig era. To give credit to that, in the conclusion
of this article, I’ll explain just why everything about Daniel Craig and the
Bond he and his creator brought forth was exactly what Bond – and so many
action films – truly needed.
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