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After NTTD, Madeleine/Seydoux entered as a third member in this Club.
Experiences in life certainly can mold perceptions and Madeleine somehow reminds me of my wife, and my heart was aflutter during this film. I was in love with Madeleine as much as Bond was. When he tracked her down at "home", I understood him professing his love for her, after letting her go (I had a not dissimilar experience professing my own love for my wife; it's uncomfortable yet necessary. It's the peak of vulnerability and feeling exposed and naked, and this scene also found me breaking down).
Having had three children with my wife, I knew that once Bond discovered he had a child, everything changed for him in a blink.
So, yes, life experiences, people I've known and loved, somehow connected me to this James Bond over a fifteen year period. And it ended with a perfect conclusion (for me). I'm glad they did it, as I saw no other exit plan for Craig-Bond. In fact, I can say I was filled with joy they did it, because it felt like the most truthful end for him. Yes it hurt me watching it, but I'm a bit of a masochist, and embraced this pain because, for me, this was wholly the right decision.
Before NTTD had come out; I figured they would need to give the next Bond a clean slate. A reboot seemed inevitable. Craig’s predecessors had the benefit of having their films be episodic. In a lot of ways DN, LALD, TLD, GE, and CR were perfect for audiences that may not have known anything about Bond beyond cultural osmosis. So here was their chance to see a new guy assume the role and make it his own.
OHMSS kinda overplayed the idea that it’s the same guy we saw in the past films not only by giving Lazenby the signature lines/moments but also literally call back to those previous adventures. It almost feels desperate trying to make it seem like this new guy was exactly the same as Connery. It was overdone to the point that with LALD they stripped Moore’s Bond most of the iconography. No tuxedo. No martini. No “Bond, James Bond”. It made sense given the context of how Lazenby was treated like placeholder, and there was an attempt to make Moore stand on his own, until by TSWLM he had fully solidified as Bond.
GE doesn’t overplay it too much like OHMSS, but it does lean on the idea of Bond having a long history prior to 1995. It was kind of perfect because it could introduce audiences not just with a new Bond but be enticing enough for them to want to go back and see what came before.
I'm not clear what you mean about not buying who she is. Rather than strange, I find her performance quite real and unaffected, which is why I come back to the film so often.
But then again it's all perception. We like what we like.
Beautiful for sure, but she played it more like a villainess, unlike in the novel where she's an innocent with a devil manipulating her from inside, she's morally torn and ambiguous, something that the Vesper of the film lacked, because she showed her attitude from the get go, she's always criticizing Bond's ways and being abrasive to him.
Vesper is a woman who's more of a Hitchcockian type, there's a mystery to her, she's an enigma that's why those pages of Casino Royale were very compelling.
It doesn't helped that her makeup in the film are too dark and thick and often comes off to me as signalling about her real intentions.
Yeah I’m not saying you’re wrong, but I find her quite strange at times with the eye-bulging and all that. She seems to speak only after expelling all the air from her lungs too in that weird croaky way- I find it a rather mannered performance. And for me she doesn’t suit the character all that well: for starters she’s supposed to be British. Stuff like the train scene I think she really struggles in too: Craig is being sparkling but she can’t match him- I always imagine Rigg in that scene.
The shower stuff is good though, and I like them being a couple in Venice; I just often think there are a quite a few others who would have been better in the part and I might have bought more.
She is physically attractive, sure.
Well it's not about blaming Green as an individual: just that perhaps the choice of her and realisation of that version of Vesper doesn't work for all.
The way she looks when she first meets Bond and arrives in Montenegro is basically her armour, I'd say. I don't mind it too much.
I often wonder how it would be if they'd held off on Rosamund Pike for one film and got her for this. I think she'd certainly be better at the early stuff with Vesper in control- how would she do the later vulnerable stuff? Hard to say for sure, but I think she's brilliant.
I think for better or for worse we're unlikely to see the ending of YOLT/beginning of TMWTGG adapted anytime soon. At least directly. Its roots are definitely there in SF, and as much as a brainwashed Bond works on the page, I'd argue the film version does something much more interesting with the basic concept of Bond being presumed dead and going AWOL.
It's also an ending which requires a sequel with the same actor playing Bond in order to get the full impact of the character trying to kill his superior. Had Craig been signed on for another film then perhaps this plot point could have been done. It would have been unfair introducing a new Bond with him brainwashed and trying to kill M though because the audience need to get to know that Bond in his 'prime' as a functioning agent as it were. To see how far he has fallen, to get a sense of his betrayal, we need to see what he was like beforehand. Otherwise it leaves the viewer cold.
I do agree with you though, it's an ending which leaves me cold too. It's not an uncommon opinion, and I think much of it comes from the film being a bit hit or miss. As much as I want to love the film (and as much as there's a lot I do love about it) it never quite sits right with me as a whole. That said as a creative decision I wouldn't say the ending is a failure. Controversial, sure, but just from cursory glance at this forum there are clearly people who felt the impact of Bond's death and felt it dramatically satisfying. That counts for something.
I think people that grew up with the Connery and Moore films would have seen the actors as playing the same character. Particularly as events in previous films were mentioned, and the supporting cast was often unchanged.
I suppose it'd make an interesting new thread, if anyone's brave enough to put it up.
"When did James Bond first start a new timeline, for you?"
In other words, when did one Bond become a different character to the Bond before. Was it as early as Lazenby, as late as Craig, or don't you care?
Continuous reboots with alternate Bonds with alternate histories is not appealing to me. I got going down that route for CR, it was an opportunity to film the first Bond book, a story we hadn’t seen adapted before in the Eon series, and it didn’t contradict the other films too badly other than being set in 2006 and some casting elements.
I always saw DN-DAD as being the stories of the same person, barring a few continuity issues in that YOLT/OHMSS/DAF era where it's basically "choose your own adventure:" you can go from TB to YOLT to DAF or, alternately, TB to OHMSS to DAF.
In terms of the character not aging, it didn't bother me. I suspended my disbelief because it wasn't relevant either way. You can simply regard the previous eras of Bond as also happening to the current Bond, just maybe in a different time, like maybe Brosnan's Bond also married Tracy, but in the 80s as opposed to the 60s.
To be pedantic about it, Connery and Moore can realistically be the same Bond in the same exact continuity, as can Dalton and Brosnan. Generally speaking though, I wasn't too bothered about continuity because the films weren't.
Even though CR gave us the first rebooted Bond, I still didn't feel it was totally separate from all the others, but was rather a spiritual prequel. By the time Spectre came out, though, it was clear that Craig's continuity was its own thing, even though that clashes with the previous films since Dench still played M, and the films kept referencing the previous eras.
So I guess I still don't know what to make of the Craig era. It just seemed to be constantly at war with itself and contradicting itself, never deciding what exactly it wanted to be.
But I don't know, it's worth saying that I grew up watching films in a world where there were several different versions of characters like Batman, Spiderman, and not to mention the many number of reboots of big franchises, including Bond. The very idea of a 'fixed continuity' beyond each individual interpretation (or again, 'universe') has never really been a thing for me. Films are by their nature fiction and these things can be quite malleable. The only constants are what we already know about the basic background or the iconography of these characters/franchises (ie. the fact that Batman's parents died, Superman being from Krypton, and, more superficially of course, the iconic Bond theme, 'shaken not stirred' line and the DB5) so much of it is about what every new film does with them. I don't know what it's like for older Bond/movie fans though.
Given that the first 20 films are mostly standalone, it doesn’t really matter if they’re portraying the same exact iteration of Bond. There’s not much interconnection. Watching A VIEW TO A KILL doesn’t necessarily inform TOMORROW NEVER DIES, and so on.
Yeah I don't even really consider that the guy in AVTAK is the same one in LALD anyway. And if it was, it's almost odd that in MR he doesn't say 'oh Drax's plan is just a ripoff of what Stromberg was doing, only in space'. Some of the time it actually makes more sense that they're not in any kind of continuity. For example: why doesn't he just wear that watch from LALD all the time? It seems incredibly useful! :)
Which is obviously fine: I like the old Bond movies. But equally I thought putting them in an explicit continuity with the Craig films made good sense too: it's what Fleming did after all.
I wish Q had supplied Bond with Little Nellie again somewhere in the Brosnan years. ;-)
It does make the acceptance of the different 'Bondverses' we're now, erm, enjoying, more explainable though.
I've always enjoyed the obviously barmy idea that they're all the same, till CraigBond bought the farm.
You're right, the entire killing off Bond really muddies the believability that this could all be one man from '62 to 2021... If he didn't die, it's so obvious that this "barmy idea" would be so seamless, and takes no intellectual and creative gymnastics, at all! No contortions here, carry on.......
Or, each actor is a depiction of a fictitious character, in his own timeline, with a history loosely based on the original books, and after sixty years, the producers still find ways of interpreting and presenting the character to new audiences around the globe?
The last itinerarion we witnessed a raw, new double-O agent and journeyed with him as he found and lost love, had to learn to control vengeance, was abandoned by his adoptive parent at MI6, at a most vulnerable time in his life (being shot and almost killed); he resurrected to live another day, confronted the man who has been out to destroy him and was the cause of his first love's murder, and finally watched as he sacrificed himself to save his family...
And when the new actor strolls through M's door, the filmmakers have a clean slate to explore more aspects of this character we haven't seen before.
They're all James Bond, just as the many actors were all Sherlock Holmes, but not necessarily THE Sherlock Holmes.
It's fiction, not real life. Have fun with it.
If Craig cocked it up for you, then ignore it. Love up all the other ones, and love the next guy.
But... It's just fiction.
@slide_99 , I will not assume to know why anyone does anything, especially the filmmakers of Bond, but I'll make a guess they were more thinking that this little inside joke may've been seen, at the time, as a kind of insult to their own product, and has nothing to do with the belief that this was all one man.
Later in the series, they did return with a little joke that called back to another time in the franchise (exploding pens), but it was more appropriate as an Easter egg, in a film celebrating the series 50th... And this joke would have been about Brosnan-Bond, who can't possibly exist yet! So, yeah....
Well it's not quite as proactive as that; I don't actively think them different characters as such (even though I guess you could say that Moore's Bond does have a slightly different personality depending upon the director of the film) more that there's not much reason to think he has the memories of the Bond in that earlier film. They're so standalone as to not really be sequels to each other.
And there's so much that doesn't add up: like Bond and Blofeld not recognising each other in OHMSS etc. And that's without mentioning the issue of Never Say Never Again, where Bond never questions the exact same events happening to him twice! :)
I suspect it was more because the joke was stepping over the line slightly too much. The Bond films are all spoofs to some degree, and have their tongue slightly in their cheek a lot of the time; but a joke where they poke fun at themselves is a touch too much and kind of brings the whole thing down.
I see every Bond film as a tiny "reboot." Bond is always set in the present. Connery through Brosnan are the same Bond, eternally young enough to do the job.
So it's a bit jarring and wrong to see actual years in a Bond film, as in CR and QoS.
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Brosnan Bond simply couldn’t have had existed as a 00 agent in 1962, but he’s old enough to be considered a “veteran of the Cold War” since he could have had those kinds of adventures in the 1980s. By the time we get to Craig, that might have stretched it. The next Bond we get in BOND 26 certainly could NOT have been a Cold War agent by any stretch of the imagination. That’s unless they decide to go period piece.
I think the only way Eon could have tried having every Bond function within a single timeline is if they had kept Bond in a specific era like Indiana Jones. I always liked how with TEMPLE OF DOOM it’s established to be 1935, one year prior to RAIDERS. Theoretically, that means we could have seen many different Indy adventures that went back and forth through the years had they not stopped after THE LAST CRUSADE. The later films only jump forward in time because Ford obviously aged.
Imagine we get films but confined to the literary Bond timeline. Connery debuts in DR. NO set in 1958, and then when Moore picks up the role it’s 1954 (the year LALD was published). Brosnan’s last film would be in 1967 (as Bond would be 49 by that year), but then when we get Craig in CR we’re all the way back to 1953.
But of course, Fleming and Eon had always stuck close to the idea of Bond existing in contemporary times. Fleming’s books were always adjusting to the present times. That’s why he would discard SMERSH and invent SPECTRE because they would function better as a timeless enemy while the political landscapes keep changing. That’s why I don’t subscribe to the idea of Bond being treated like a period piece. That’s not how Fleming meant for Bond to be approached, and I always suspect those who do want to see a return of the 1960s is only out of nostalgic desire. “The good old days”. Fleming’s Bond was always meant to be portrayed as a man out of time, seeing the world changing around him and how he comes to grips with it post-WWII with the British Empire no longer being what it was. That’s why it plays so well when toyed with in GE and SF.
That’s why I find Phoebe Waller Bridge’s comments about how to approach Bond in the #MeToo era encouraging. Keep Bond as the same old bastard, only address the times changing around him and how he finds a way to still function as the same guy we liked.