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1. The Gunbarrel - A proper Maurice Binder stylised gunbarrel, with the blood trickle and opening up on the location. No text, no fade out/fade in, no CG bullets.
2. The Song - No ballads. An exciting track that sets the pace for the exhilarating thrill ride we're about to embark on, with riffs repeating throughout the score.
3. The Mission - Bond is sent on a mission at Ms request. It doesn't have take place in M's office with handing over a dossier, it can be "off the books" but M needs to have full awareness and consent.
4. Cat and Mouse - Bond and the villain engage in an charged but friendly game of one-upmanship in a casual environment, where they play along as polite acquaintances despite what they know about the other.
5. The Bond Girl - Miranda Frost, Jinx, Vesper, Camille, Strawberry, Madeline Swann, Nomi. How about a bond girl who isn't either another agent or has some connection to the crime world. I for one like the Kara Milovy type, who gets thrust into this world of danger and gradually has to learn to rise to it. That's more compelling to me than the ones who sit down and have bonds number from the moment they meet.
6. The Locales - The bulk of the film should take place in one country to give enough time to get a feel for the place. Bonus points if theres some local activities taking place for Bond to interact with.
7. Inventive Action - A Bond action sequence should have more to it than cars chasing eachother through exotic vistas, there should be that extra element to spice things up. That doesn't have to mean gadgets, it could be driving half a car with the back ripped off, or skiing through a resort cafe, or riding a cello case down a mountain. Get creative, people.
8. Spy Another Day - we get at least one sequence of Bond infiltrating a facility featuring old-school tension and suspense, where his acumen as a spy is demonstrated.
9. Runtime - The length should be kept to under 2 hrs and 20 minutes to give it that breezy flow of the Connery and early Moore films. There's nothing worse than a Bond film feeling saggy and bloated, cut out the fat and keep it to a lean 2 hrs 10 mins.
10. Another Happy Landing - wherether Bond ends up, once the baddies plans have been dashed he and the Bond girl get to enjoy themselves and relax after a job well done, and the film ends with them on a happy note together.
Don't agree or disagree.
Put your "ingredients" into a script and see if it actually works.
Once again it's about execution and writing a list isn't a story.
If anything, I'd like to see more inventiveness. This is all kind of been there, done that. But once again, can't tell until it's put into some kind of story form.
I agree @peter it has been done before, that's what makes it a formula. This list isn't about bringing in a completely new set of ideas, but about highlighting aspects that have fallen by the wayside, or simply not been seen in a while. I could have added "army versus army finale in boilersuits" but I thought that might be a bit contentious, even among fans. I'm trying to stick to things we can all agree with, generally. Most people want to see M personally give Bond a mission again, but not everyone wants gadget laden vehicles and laser weapons.
Have you ever considered that we all don’t think the same?
I hear you. In the end though, it all comes down to execution. If globetrotting is done well, it’s done well. Same with a single location outside of the UK. The danger is, one main location and the execution is weak, the locale becomes stagnant and the film loses pace. Once again, it comes to the bigger problem: the story. Does the story benefit from keeping on the move? Or does it benefit one location.
Story plus execution.
That’s why I can’t disagree, nor agree with @Mendes4Lyfe ’s list because it’s based on the absence of a story, which is not how Bond films are made. Or scripts in general.
I know a lot of people will think you're crazy, but I think that could work. I bit like Brosnan posing as a banker with his BMW in TND. Some things are so outside of Bonds wheelhouse that they circle around into being weirdly appropriate in a counterintuitive kinda way.
You're winning me over @QBranch. I love the idea that after Mission Impossible 8 people are wondering how Bond can top them locations wise, and instead Bond spends 2/3 of the next film in a metropolitan American city. You have to keep defying expectations like that.
I agree with pretty much all of this, but there is one criteria that is drastically missing. Unused Fleming scenes from the books (there are still plenty). And properly adapted too, not some half-assed, micky-mouse attempt like the very loose connections to YOLT in NTTD, or MR in DAD.
Proper Fleming adaptations, like the short story used in TLD, or the short stories used in FYEO.
What scenes are you thinking about?
I'd have him make his way out of the capital city and avoid familiar landmarks. Little Island was built as recently as 2021. I wonder if it's been portrayed on screen yet. I've never been to NY though, so members here who are locals, feel free to suggest locations that offer a bit of variety. Bond can visit Jamaica in Queens. Give it all a slightly noir-ish, detective-driven feel and I'm totally there.
I'd say one of the problems with adapting Fleming like that is it's actually quite a superficial way of harkening back to those literary roots. There's no guarantee it'll truly bring the essence of Fleming's stories/Bond alive. FYEO adapts a lot from the short stories for instance, and yet the way Bond acts in that film is very different to the character from the books (the 'you must dig two graves line' is particularly bastardised. In the film it's a finger wagging caution to Melina not to lose her soul in the pursuit of revenge. In the story Bond is being sarcastic and it's mainly about him doing the 'dirty work' in M's personal vendetta). You can probably say similar about when specific lines are lifted from Fleming's books/integrated into the films (ie. 'die Blofeld, die' in NTTD which certainly has little spiritually in common from the scene in the book aside from Bond killing Blofeld).
I think they should continue to do what they've been doing in the Brosnan and Craig era, that's to say using broad ideas from the books to create their own stories. Sometimes they understand and evoke quite vital ideas from Fleming better than some of the more faithful adaptations.
The new stories are not even new.
I'd rather see a FYEO or LTK type pastiche.
Well, all stories come in part from existing ones.
What do you mean by a LTK or FYEO pastiche? I presume you mean a Bond film which adapts material in the way those films do (I wouldn't call that pastiche though and I'm not 100% what you mean).
The question is what should one base this time-line off of, if you indeed want to indulge in it. Obviously COVID-19 pushed the release back 18 months but the film was ready for 2020. You move forward 18 months and you have the premiere and press junkets etc but that lasts a few weeks and once the film dies down, that's it.
For comparison sake, if we're basing it off April 2020 release. We're officially over the gap between DAD and CR and even the SP to NTTD initial release time of 4 years since it was originally slated for November 2019. I guess we had over 6 years between LTK and GE but that was due to legal battles. Otherwise, we potentially could have had one if not two Dalton films in that time or one Dalton and Brosnan taking over in let's say 1993.
This isn't a rant against EON or the creators, producers etc. Just a breakdown of we've gone this far and heard next to nothing about B26.
Making a new movie/story with unused material and leftovers.
Ok... again I'm not sure that's strictly speaking pastiche. And I still have issues with that for the reasons I outlined.
Some food for thought: the average amount of time between an actor's first and second Bond film is only around 18 months:
1962 - 1963, 1973 - 1974, 1987 - 1989, 1995 - 1997, 2006 - 2008.
Which means the liklihood is that when Bond returns we're probably going to get 2 Bond films in fairly quick succession, at least by recent standards. So if there is any spring cleaning to be done, now is the time to do it. I think given Micheal G is in his 80's it is fairly obvious that there's only so long he can continue for, and they want a proper plan in place for what EON will look like after he steps back. They don't want to have to deal with all that when they have an encumbent Bond in the hot seat and time is ticking to get as many films out of them before they get too old. In short, I think they want to get as much about the future sorted out now while they have the opportunity of being between Bond actors, on top of figuring out where they want to go next.
Yeah as you say, CR and QOS are not serious, gritty films; they just seem so when compared to other Bond movies. The first one is about a glamorous, handsome superspy who gets given Aston Martins wherever he goes and is sent to gamble a baddie into submission with a beautiful (inexplicably French) British treasury agent. It's silly.
No one is going to convince me that Bond getting poisoned and then jump starting his own heart isn't daft. In the best way possible that is.
Yeah, Peter said there's no such thing as a perfect movie, but Raiders comes close for me. It's got a lot of Bond in its dna, too. It sort of manages to feel grounded whilst giving us fantastic villains and unusual locations.
I feel the same.