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Yes, exactly ... it's a story for our times.
And was it not always so? Different stories, different times?
It turns out that Bond stories are a lot more flexible than anyone might have imagined in the '50s. And they will continue to be so in the decades ahead.
No. However, I do believe that Pete Wurst was one of the original Avengers. ;)
I think repeated application of the trope would be sexist and unoriginal, but when restricted to Tracy and Vesper it makes the point that if Bond settled down with either of them he would "die" as well, in the sense of no longer being a fantasy figure but a domestic one. Vesper and Tracy have to die for the series to continue, just as in NTTD Bond has to die because the series can't continue with him as a family man. Tracy and Vesper's deaths also show that Bond has made a Faustian bargain--he's most alive when on the job, but the job also prevents him from having permanent attachments and romances. Unlike Bond, Vesper and Tracy won't return to life, unless someone has the horrifically ill-conceived idea to remake OHMSS or CR. There's something special in a death being permanent and beyond any demarcation of continuity.
Killing off a villain who, in his modern form, has only been in one previous film doesn't raise the stakes that high. Killing off Felix does, but after you realize Bond dies, and that the film has been leading up to this, you know he'll be back too. The stakes are raised for one film and then immediately reset--nobody who sees the next Bond film will go in thinking Bond might die. That will only happen if the actor is appearing in what he's agreed on to be his last film in the series.
She doesn't. In some movies Bond has a female lover or a male partner that gets killed to further motivate him and make the audience hate the villain(s). Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't, but did anyone ever have a problem with it?
How many men are killed in these movies? Hundreds? The female characters who are killed off just stand out more.
Because it's his series and he's not a superhero you can just continually reboot.
Blofeld can die. It was done in the novels and FYEO (the movie). Maybe Felix can die, though I'd argue that it should be done properly and not just for shocks. I don't understand why subversion for its own sake should be commended. And yet it's probably the most common bit of praise I see for the Craig era, as if all it really did was make positives negatives and vice versa.
BTW, "Cringe" is the German Youth Word of 2021. Apparently there is a jury which decides on this.
It depends. The Craig era has been the most successful run since Connery at the boxoffice. In truth, Craig holds a better per-movie average than Sean adjusting for inflation, even with NTTD’s gross being damaged by the pandemic.
That’s an easy fix, she remains in the observation room the entire time. I think her calling him Commander at that moment , and his reacting, would have been a nice moment for the two.
How would the next movie work? In the exact same way that they did the transition from YOLT to OHMSS, DAF to LALD, AVTAK to TLD, and LTK to GE. Just change the actor with zero fanfare, move on to the next story, don't dwell on a specific movie being an actor's last one. Again, it's self-serving in a way and seems to me like you're putting your era's legacy above the legacy of the character and franchise as a whole. I think an audience would EASILY forget about any of the plot threads in the Craig era once we have a new actor doing different things, taking a different approach to the material, being involved in different stories, etc.
What confuses me is how people rationalize the Craig era being a pocket universe or somehow separate from the "main timeline". First off, I disagree with the notion of there being a "main timeline", as if it makes any sense that Brosnan from 1995 fought Goldfinger back in 1964. It was enough that an audience could accept this as being the same man, that every film and new actor just continued showing the exploits of this ageless icon. Over the course of 40 years, continuity just didn't matter (I know I never cared about it).
But then Craig shows up and they say they want to restart fresh, new continuity (or a continuity that actually makes sense). Craig never fought Goldfinger in 1964. That stuff never happened because we just got too bloated and maybe you want to start a new tenure differently. Fine. But then you start to introduce the GF Aston Martin. You have the same M from the Brosnan era. You reference and wink at stuff from the "previous timeline". If you want a clean break, divorced from everything before and want to forge ahead with a new interpretation of James Bond, why reference previous elements that are unmistakably James Bond?
Because this history is precisely what makes James Bond....well, James Bond. Craig Bond is not actually divorced from the "main timeline" but a part of it. Isn't that what the point of SF was? "The old ways are the best"? So if in this new timeline you actually kill James Bond, this is killing the actual James Bond, not a different version of the character, pocket universe, whatever. Honestly all of this is enough to tie one's head into knots. Unless you're somehow saying that Craig Bond isn't just a new actor putting his own spin on the character like all of the previous ones? So this Bond is an imposter of sorts, a mimic or shadow that in fact isn't the same character and doesn't have any traits of classic, "main timeline" Bond, which I would definitely not agree with.
As for not knowing who Tony Stark is, do a Google search. There's really no reason to be willfully ignorant in this day and age when someone is drawing parallels between one franchise and another. I can really understand having never watched a Marvel movie but knowing the context of killing a superhero, like they also did with Superman and which has been done in canon many times over, should be enough to understand the gist of an argument? Also as a tangential side note, we can thank the Marvel universe for introducing this idea that continuity in a series has to be clear and consistent, that one story has to build off of and continue into the next. We can't just have the same characters, but they have to be interconnected and their stories follow a rigidly outlined timeline.
I wouldn't have opted for the child angle in the first place for the movie, so this wouldn't have been an issue for the next Bond film. So if we are talking about rewriting the end of the movie in fantasy land, we may as well address that aspect too.
Because of the wonderful things he does.
We're off to see the Wizard. The wonderful Wizard of Oz.
(sorry, couldn't resist).... ;))
I tend to think that Michael Wilson and Barbara Broccoli who have a certain amount of input to these films know better. Cf the interview at the start of filming.
Yes I agree with you, you are confused.
What confuses me is why people cling to the notion of a main timeline in the first place. Any attempt at creating such a thing is built on quicksand. Passing references to the death of Tracy aren't enough for a timeline in which the James Bond of LTK is literally the same man who fought Blofeld in a hollowed-out volcano or travelled into space. Some bits are carried over from one film to the next, but they can't weigh up against the de facto continuity reset at the beginning of each film pre-Craig. Unless I am mistaken, a timeline requires continuity, and continuity was relinquished early on. It just never was a big deal for the people making the Bonds. The idea was that at any point in time, new fans could be lured in, even if they hadn't ever seen another Bond film. Keep the continuity bar as low as possible, and you're guaranteed to build the biggest fan base, especially in an age when home video access to films (and the required "homework" before the release of a new entry in a series) was almost non-existent.
When i read the original post my initial reaction was to offer a very detailed rebuttal on the wider question you answer but for the sake of levity I decided on a tongue in check response.
But of course you are right. This main timeline argument is a straw man argument. I would rather discuss the idea that if George had stayed they could have mined the loss of Tracey in his future behaviour. To look at it the other way round the writing of Blofeld as Franz Oberhauser maybe unpopular but it is a clear statement that this little bit of lore belongs to Craig Bond alone. It is so radically different and important to the narrative he is not Donald Pleasance or Kojak.
While, true, there were but vestiges of a "main timeline" before Craig, the number of his films and length of his tenure, plus maybe the influence of the MCU, seems to have obscured this for many, perhaps especially younger fans.
But now having established a "timeline" with Craig who is to say what direction EON will go in next? Perhaps they'll regard it as a successful aberration of a kind but go back to the prevailing model of self-contained stories with little to no continuity as in films 1 - 20. That might seem strange for many, especially casual viewers. ("But you just killed him! Who is this new guy? A codename James Bond?")
Or does EON establish a new series of interconnected stories with one actor, as with Craig, which will probably require another origin story? And is that origin story always to be a variation on Casino Royale?
I suppose there might be other unforeseen ways forward after this break with tradition. But what might they be? And how will they go about it, assuming Broccoli & Wilson are still around come production time for Bond 26?
There are two options, either they killed Bond to signify them quitting the series.
Or they will continue with the slate wiped clean.
I think it's clearly possible that they continue the storyline with the new actor, playing the same Bond as Craig, only without knowledge of what has gone before. Who knows. Wait and see.
This is really spot on, and how I usually view the films as I watch too! Sometimes there is a direct reference, like Moore's Bond visiting Tracy's grave and that makes you think about the events of the film 11 years prior.
"Keep your hair on!"
The way I understood the pre-Craig movies is that they were all one character's story, or maybe transcendent mythology would be a better term. So while Brosnan's Bond may not have been done the exact same things in the exact same context that Connery and Moore did, they did all have the same story: they all fought Dr. No and Goldfinger, they all married Tracy and lost her, they all went into space on the Moonraker shuttle, and they all avenged Felix's wife.
That being said, it is technically possible that they could be the same literal flesh-and-blood man for the 40 years between DN and DAD. If we suspend disbelief and say that Bond is 25 in DN, he'd be 65 in DAD. Let's just say he took care of himself and had a good diet. It's far-fetched but it could technically work. I mean, Harrison Ford's been playing Indiana Jones for 40 years.
However, I prefer to be less literal and consider DN-DAD to be a general continuity instead of a specific one like Craig's.
One wonders, though, whether there ever was a "story" of Bond before Craig, with the notable exception of OHMSS perhaps (and also LTK?) on account of the personal involvement of our guy. Whenever I think about GF, DAF, AVTAK... I see stories with Bond in them, but never the story of Bond. CR may very well have been the first time in the entire series that Bond himself, as a character, was subjected to change, that his views and traits were challenged, that he himself had to make amends, had to learn, had to see things in a different way.
If everything before CR is supposed to exist in the same narrative spacetime continuum, even disregarding the fact that fashion, technology, habits, world politics... change while Bond essentially remains the same "young man" (even if he ages, then de-ages abruptly, then ages again...), how do we explain the lack of memory Bond clearly suffers from? Diamonds in a satellite in '71... and again in '02. No comment? Space tech lifts off from volcano and ancient pyramid bases, men with steel teeth bite through thick cables, but a secret, private base from which a satellite is controlled is somehow hard to believe? A bikini babe has to shoot at thugs with a machine gun on an oil rig but a woman with a crossbow needs a morality lesson when trying to take revenge for the loss of loved ones? (And that comes from the same man who will essentially tell his superiors to stick it where the sun don't shine while he messes up Key West and a South-American banana republic, leaving a trail of blood several astronomical units long!)
The Bond character is constantly being reset. As an icon, he transcends the need for any character development of the typical protagonist. He is a collection of enjoyable elements which we are constantly happy to consume without needing any befores or afters. That is also why he is constantly in danger of "pastiche" as Timothy Dalton once put it, and why, every once in a while, he needs to be rebuilt from scratch (e.g. Bond in TLD), albeit loyal to that elusive "Bond formula" that almost escapes definition but is something we immediately recognise when we see it.
This, at least, is how I see the Bond series before Craig--and possibly after Craig. As such, there is no timeline for me. You can watch most of the classics in any permutation of your choosing: that should never create any issues. Bond can drive that brand new AM Vanquish in a world full of pop electronics today, and flog the engine of an old Bentley in a Jamaica pre-moon landing tomorrow. Hey, it's that guy James Bond! And that's all that matters.
Again, the DN-DAD continuity doesn't have to be a literal, temporal continuity, just a narrative one that plays fast and loose with time. When Felix says to Dalton-Bond, "he was married once, but it was a long time ago," we understand that he's talking about Tracy. Same when Elektra asks Brosnan-Bond if he ever lost someone close to him and he avoids the question. It doesn't mean that Dalton and Brosnan Bonds specifically lost Tracy in 1969, but it does mean that they have the same life events in their pasts, because they're the same character, and not "resets" or reboots.
Resets and reboots are a very recent thing in cinema. They are cynical attempts to get audiences back in theaters after a franchise has run out of steam. Bond was never reset before Craig. In DAD, R mentions how Bond has gone on 20 missions. He has all the old gadgets in lab. Fan lip service? Definitely. But it's also the filmmakers visually-confirming that, one way or other, Connery, Lazenby, Moore, Dalton, and Brosnan are the same character with the same life story.
The Craig era forces the issue of multiple timelines, though.
The novels were more or less a connected string of chronological stories, but the films clearly diverted from that.
It hasn't been 'reebooting' though, has it? In DAD there were many references to Brozza being the same old Bond. Even down to a bit of Klebb shoe-sniffing.
The daftness with the current situation is we're now supposed to accept that the Craig era is a different character to the previous Bond movies. Except it's the same character, with a different 'arc'.
It's daftness! Either he's the same James Bond screen character, or he's a different one. And if the latter is the case, then give him a different name. Don't call him 'Ian Fleming's James Bond' at the start.
Look, I'm not confused, and I understand that superheroes get killed off and it's a modern trend. But it's daft. At the end of Skyfall they were obviously saying 'Bond is back', we were back to the classic cinematic Bond of old. Then what happened? They killed him off two movies later and we're to assume he wasn't the same old Bond after all, it's an alternative universe Bond, based on this one actor. It's a narrative mess, a complete narrative mess. And now we know he can be killed off and just return when someone says the magic word ("reeeeeboooottt!'). Who cares what happens to him? He's like Dr Who now, he just regenirates.
So yes, daft. I'm calling it very daft.
That's precisely what I said, although I would say they are the same character, only in (possibly) different temporal contexts. In other words, Dalton's Bond could have experienced everything that the previous Bonds did, only in a different time frame. Like maybe he lost Tracy in 1979 as opposed to 1969. Something like that. It's not really an issue with me. The real issue is the Craig era.
I'm only taking it into consideration because EON created a hard, closed, unambiguous continuity with Craig that is clearly very different from fast-and-loose continuity they had before. This is only an issue because EON made it one. They could have avoided this by simply not killing his Bond off at the end of NTTD. There would still be continuity issues given that Blofeld and Spectre are re-introduced in his timeline, but those issues wouldn't be as severe as they are now. NTTD's ending forces us to consider the Craig to basically be an AbramsTrek-style remake of the Bond series. That's not how it started out, but it is how it ended up.
And I stooped watching the MCU films after the sconde AVENGER movie (and before that, I did not most of them), because I don't like to be forced to watch EVERY Marvel movie, otherwise you don't understand, waht's going on.