It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!
^ Back to Top
The MI6 Community is unofficial and in no way associated or linked with EON Productions, MGM, Sony Pictures, Activision or Ian Fleming Publications. Any views expressed on this website are of the individual members and do not necessarily reflect those of the Community owners. Any video or images displayed in topics on MI6 Community are embedded by users from third party sites and as such MI6 Community and its owners take no responsibility for this material.
James Bond News • James Bond Articles • James Bond Magazine
Comments
In my case, if I wasn't getting a movie like DN, FRWL, TLD or LTK, then give me fun like YOLT. TND was FUN. SF was NOT fun and it was not serious (except in killing Severine and M to make us go "Oh crap!"). But SP was at least fun. QOS is still my favourite 'hard' Bond film after Dalton. So there. ;)
I've read the GE novelization. Pretty enjoyable. Haven't gotten around to the others though unfortunately.
As for the question of the thread. For fun I would say Brosnan's films were high on fun. Craig is by far the most serious Bond we've had. As Bond says in YOLT..."no not better just different. Just like Russian caviar is different from Peking duck but I love them both."
So it depends on my mood as to which film I shall grab off the shelf. I can appreciate both sets of movies for what they are attempting to do with the character and with the stories. Not sure I can say one is definitively better then the other.
As for me, i love both pretty much equally, Brosnan and Craig. Especially because they are so different from each other, so there is barely any competition.
I grew up with Brosnan. He got me into Bond and the franchise as a whole. My love in that stage was always with Brosnan as Bond, not the character itself. I would watch Sean and Roger, and while i could acknowledged that they were very good themselves, they were simply not Brosnan, and the movies were 'old' which made it a bit hard for me to get into them. Also Brosnan became an Idol of mine and has considerably informed my own sense of humor and style etc, when I was very young and looking for male role models in movies etc.
Nowadays I am a different type of Bond fan who loves all charaterizations of the Character in all types of media, books, comics, games etc. But i never lost my connection to the initial love i had for Brosnans portrayal of him.
I have come to realize, by studying this forum and all the fine gentleman who share my love for the Brozz, that one integral part of understanding his era are definitly the video games. If you asked me what was better about Brosnans era, the movies or the games, i would have a really hard time answering that, and would possibly even lean to the games.
A movie is a fine piece of entertainment for 2 hours, but a game lets you BE Bond for hours and days and participate in all the crazyness and action in a way a movie never could. It let you identify with Bond on a different level, and Brosnan was the first true multimedia Bond in that regard and is still the Best. Most of the Brosnan fans here love the games, while older Bond fans who never got into video games, could never share that enthusiasm we had for the era.
Even though i love all the Brosnan movies, i can aknowledge that some of them have their flaws, and might lack a certain edge. But they still have Brosnan in them, which is good enough for me.
During the Brosnan era, I felt I was still being served up the type of Bond film I'd grown up with. All the elements were there, and a new film came out every couple of years.
Then Casino Royale came along, and it was such a great movie that I didn't mind so much that it wasn't the formula, and that I couldn't relate to Craig as the same character that the previous actors had portrayed. But when QOS came along, it made me a bit sad, because they'd made this 'gritty' Bond, and he's strangling people all bruised up, and it's all choppy editing and you can't tell what's going on. He was just like some thug. But because it was more serious and arty than Brosnan's movies, that made me think 'ah well, they've re-invented him and he's a blunt instrument in Fleming's vision'. I suppose.
Then he's a stubly 'old dog' in the next film. Jesus, when are we going to have him on a mission, where the bad guy has a vile plan, and Bond gets the job to go off around the world with gadgets and stuff and get in adventures?
Okay, that would be SPECTRE. Moneypenny's back, the gunbarrel, so thirteen years after DAD we're back to traditional format. But then it's about his family, and I'm not sure the villain has an evil scheme. What was it again? Building a database or something? Not exactly blowing up Fort Knox, is it?
I think ive still got the first 2 of those.
BrosnanBond films more fun than CraigBond films ? ..100% yes.
Apart from a Bond-a-thon I did about a year ago, when I feel like watching a Bond film, I will throw in Connery/Craig by a very wide margin (and Lazenby in the colder months leading into Christmas).
Some of Moore's work is a distant second, but Dalton's two are sneaking up to over-take this position.
I have never felt the need to go back to Brosnan's entries, except for a very quick look at TND (and I only watched it up until the the end of the motorcycle chase). It just is an era that didn't appeal to me. I understand why people like Brosnan, I just never climbed on board with him.
After the release of GE, it took me two years to accept him as being Bond. I only saw GE once in the cinema (whereas I usually see all Bond releases multiple times).
In fact, I didn't come around to seeing the very good movie that GE is, until years later... Upon that first viewing, I felt like all the Bond elements overshadowed James Bond himself (I found Pierce to be too slight physically, and everything, from Onatopp to Bean to be too commanding, making Bond look even smaller)... Pierce did get better in the role, but then the films got a little too predictable and by-the-numbers.
So, apart from SP, I do find the Craig era more fun-- his first three took me on three, very different, and unpredictable, journeys.
I would never put on any of his Bond films by choice.
However my passion for Bond was reignited with Casino Royale and hasn't abated since, and it's at an "all time high" since Skyfall.
And Craig s debut was so amazing and I still think he's fab and delighted he starring in Bond 25!
I would not worry about that @ClarkDevlin, every Bond era, or actor change, was vastly different from the previous one and in no small part a counter reaction to what came before.
No tone can be maintained indefinitly, even the serious Craig tone, as at some point there would simply be no variety and suprise element anymore.
I think they will definitly have to bring some lightness back eventually, not necessarily in the tone of Brosnan, as he had a different tone from Roger and Connery as well. But whatever it will be, it will have to be different from Craig.
Are you sure you weren't actually pretending to control your car with it?
After GE, which was very exciting for me as it was the first Bond I got to see in the cinema, I didn't much enjoy Brosnan's films either (I'm fonder of them now). But it was a good era for Bond fandom. Other cool things we got were a major exhibition at the Science Museum and a Bond ride at the Trocadero.
Hole in the screen? Ridiculous! And this after Dalton gave the world a new standard how to define lack of charisma.
You remind me of me.
As for the Craig era, it stopped being fun after Blood Stone which was in 2010!?!
I tend to change my mind about which one is my favorite Brosnan film; Goldeneye or TND. The latter certainly is more fun for me to watch.
Just for the record, I see that completely different.
01. A new Bond adventure every two years--or sometimes every year!
02. Bond on proper missions, in definitive films that set the template for the series.
03. All the classic elements, wielded by the original Bond team.
04. Legendary villains with classic schemes.
05. New Bond books by Fleming and Amis up through 1968, rather than corny novelizations of films.
06. Classic gadgets.
07. "James Bond Will Return in..."
The Brosnan years perhaps felt great for those who came of age during them, and I don't want to deprive them of that nostalgia. But speaking for myself, a high schooler when GoldenEye came out, it wasn't an exciting period. To me Brosnan was a clotheshorse compared to the other Bond actors, and the films he starred in were ersatz pastiches. No major players from the classic Bond team were involved in making them, aside from Desmond Llewellyn (Cubby's involvement with GoldenEye was mostly ceremonial). Sometimes they felt more like 90s action films that happened to star James Bond; the rest of the time they felt like contrived, calculated attempts to blend the Connery and Moore eras into a crowd-pleasing product. It was an age of cubic zirconia rather than diamonds.
By comparison the Craig years, despite their over-emphasis on personal stories and lag times between films (not entirely EON's fault), were refreshing. The series felt like it was moving into daring new territory, instead of self-pastiche (the lamentable Spectre is the exception) and had a conviction and edge missing from the bland Brosnan years. That was more "fun" than regularly receiving a formulaic product every couple of years.
That line alone was deeply satisfying. How I miss those days.
A great tradition. If that happened again, I would faint out of joy.