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Doesn’t really make sense that way, because he meets Felix Leiter for the first time in DN… so how could CR work as a prequel if he’s meeting Felix for the first time there?
This is why I have no trouble with regarding Craig’s run being a reboot. Undoubtedly the next guy will reboot too, but whether that actually continues on with the guy after him and so on is something we won’t know for another 20 years.
I feel CR being Fleming's first James Bond novel, makes the film a prequel. Plus, Craig's Bond angry young man take in CR, cements the film's prequel status.
That's pretty much where I am with this. The Craig reboot actually came at the perfect time since he was the first Bond who was too young to have served during the Cold War, so it's not too much of a stretch to imagine Connery-Brosnan all having had similar (or the same) adventures during that roughly 30-year period (62-91).
And yes, maybe Craig had some of the same adventures between QOS and SF (or even between SF and SP), though obviously nothing involving SPECTRE or the Soviets.
As for attempting to sort out a continuity, there isn't one. That went out the window with OHMSS, despite a few halfhearted attempts to suggest there is. Craig's reboot beginning with CR erases all previous Bond films and their histories. There simply is no way to splice Craig's films together with his predecessors.
Since the next Bond is not going to be a past Bond, there is no reason earlier films cannot be remade. Throughout the history of the series, the better films have been those that hewed closer to Fleming's stories, rather than the made up stories by screenwriters.
For example, if DN were to be remade, would today's hipper, younger audiences care? Most probably haven't seen DN anyway, nor are they likely to. When one comments on this site that PB was one's first Bond, remakes shouldn't make a bit of difference.
Given how the rest of Craig’s run turned out, CR was clearly not a prequel to the first 20 films.
Consider it a relief that it doesn't have to matter, continuity is ultimately a frivolous battle with time.
Yeah. It's quite complex though.
Wow! Just wow! I think anyone that has ever posted here, has knowledge and a good relationship with theatre and storytelling, literature, the Golden age of cinema. You could always express your feelings on subject matters, without being antagonistic. I don't think it's necessary, good sir.
Agree 100%.
Imagine all of the complaints about Purvis & Wade repeating themselves if they'd done either.
If they had done they'd have had a number of dramatic options. Anything ranging from Madeline and Bond parting ways at the end with Bond returning to the Service, to a TDKR-esque version of Bond's 'death'.
Personally, I can't say whether these would have been more dramatically satisfying than what we got. I nor anyone here knows this for sure. Regardless the ending is designed for that film... for better or for worse (as I like to say).
The ending I would have loved to see would be the final chapter of YOLT (Sparrows Tears). If done correctly, I doubt many would find it cliched. Bond living as a fisherman not knowing who he is, then one day setting off to Russia. That would have been a great ending to the Craig era, and would start nicely for the next actor to play 007 with the opening to TMWTGG.
Failing that, Madeline plus baggage would not have been part of the story, neither would the female 007 or Safin. Bond would enter the castle of death to kill Blofeld and would escape, with a nice cliched ending of him on a rubber dingy boat with some Bond girl.
I would have been far happier with either of these endings, and I suspect most Bond fans would be too. Leave the cinema on a high, rather than a depressing downer.
Judging by how Top Gun 2 turned out, this is the kind of film audiences still really want to see, rather than what Hollywood and Netflix these days think we want to see.
I came to this conclusion early on in my life, when I was still a boy in my single digits. How can this man be with other women all the time, I wondered. A tad naive? Perhaps. ;-) I guess it makes sense that the pelvic counter is reset every time. What happened to Honey? Never mind, it's Tatiana now. What happened to Tatiana then? Doesn't matter, it's Pussy now. And so on. I guess that's where I stopped looking for continuity (and I hate that Sylvia gets in my way here...)
Stan Lee once said that every next issue of Spidey or X-Men has to be able to appeal to a brand new audience. You keep the things that work but you don't pretend any tight continuity. I've always taken the Bonds to be like that. If OP is your first Bond film, you shouldn't have to pre-school yourself on the 12 that came before.
For me?
Oh I’d have liked them to completely forget about Spectre the way I’d been trying to do since I’d seen it. I wouldn’t have gone down that whole scorched earth route that reminded me of the end of that season of Dallas that they decided was going to be a dream. Killing Felix, giving Bond a child, then killing Bond… all drama without weight for me.
It's okay, but it would feel like a mildly massaged re-staging of the opening of Skyfall, and folks have seen that.
Also, setting off for Russia is a massive cliffhanger, not a final ending. Many audience members would probably have taken it to mean he was going to his certain death anyway, so the rather cliched amnesia stuff would just be a massive detour to get to the same place.
That interests me far less to be honest.
It's fine to say what you would have personally preferred but I don't think you can speak for everyone else. And yes, some folks will agree with you, but that still doesn't mean 'most agree'.
I don't know what that means, sorry. Do you mean they should have done the Sp ending again?
Being a reboot, Craig's tenure was already "dramatically apart from the general Bond run".
The original series tropes were getting stale again by DAD.
CR was a jolt to the system that the series needed. Yes, roots were still embedded to the original author's works (and by extension, the films that preceded it), but EoN had never attempted a hard re-boot. By its very nature, it was a new beginning, and didn't have to be too hung up with what came before... therefore leaving creative options open to them that may not have been open to them before (like finally having bullets sink into Bond's flesh; like getting a lover pregnant (as he did in the novel YOLT), and by actually killing the character (unlike Nolan's "having his cake and eating it too" TDKR's ending))...
Not exploring and stretching will eventually lead to atrophy and decay.
I love that EoN had the balls to not be satisfied with the same old approach, and they took risks-- whether one likes what they did or not, is another conversation. But there's no denying that they took chances that were not seen in this series prior to the Craig era
1. Get the bad guy in the last second.
2. Little coda to the actual story to tie off a larger plotline
3. Back in the saddle, off to the next mission
4. Get the girl, drive off in the car
5. Death
He doesn't have a sex-scene ending, which I guess is a huge omission from the Bond franchise's stand-point, but I'll cheat and say that just counts as "get the girl".
The only other one I could think off is a cliff-hanger and while I know that some here would have wanted that for NTTD, for me it would have been the exactly wrong note to end Craig's tenure on and is just not really something that Bond films do.