Bond as a Trend Setter

edited December 2011 in Bond Movies Posts: 2,341
Maybe this has been covered before but I will try anyway.
Do you find the Bond movies as trend setters, trailbrazers or do they follow the latest trend?
The early Bonds were all trend setters. Beginning in the 1970's (Roger Moore) the movies began to follow the popular trend themselves.
LALD was cashing in on the Blaxploitation of the early 70's...
TMWTGG had King Fu fighting following the Bruce Lee trends at the time...
MR was chosen in favor of FYEO after the success of Star Wars in the late 70's...
CR and QoS contain scenes reminiscent of the Bourne films...
Brosnan's emphasis on machine guns. Machine guns were hot in the late 80's and 90's.
Casting the "it" girl at the time during the Brosnan age. Terri Hatcher (bad) Denise Richards (badder) Halle Berry (worst)
Back to the machine guns: Dalton fired one in one scene in TLD, Lazenby uses one during the climatic battle at Piz Gloria, Sir Roger uses one in TSWLM and OP. Connery never fired a machine gun in any of his films. I think Pierce Brosnan fired more machine guns than previous Bonds combined.

Maybe its just me but can Bond return to being a trend setter or is he doomed to follow the latest trends?

Comments

  • I think Bond films have set the trend of big time action films. Obviously other films had followed so it links them together with them. When it comes to different aspects of the movies I think you will keep seeing trends in the film.
  • There were earlier examples - the influence of Hitchcock and North by Northwest on From Russia With Love, for instance. Fleming was a fan of the Fu Manchu series as a youngster and cribbed it for Dr. No.

    Off the top of my head, you could also mention xXx, Charlie's Angels/Lara Croft, and the Matrix in Die Another Day, Hong Kong in Tomorrow Never Dies, plus the general turn that the Bond movies took following Die Hard (and I guess Terminator) in the late 80s, probably beginning with LTK. Willis and Arnold were pretty influential on action movies in general. Bits of 70s noir in Quantum, some chunks of Indiana Jones in Octopussy, etc.

    I guess the reason Bond seemed a trend-setter back then was because it was a new phenomenon. But it's fairly familiar territory now, isn't it? The trend's been set, Bond set it, it's everywhere, and now you get some odd feedback loops - Ludlum once said Fleming was a big inspiration for the Bourne series.
Sign In or Register to comment.