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Comments
My thinking, too. The last EON Bond actor. Everything changes now, and it's questionable that it'd be for the better.
Everything SP did was in other Bond movies already. Nothing about it was M:I novelty, if anything it's M:I that copied Bond.
No Time To Die was written before Endgame came out, and absolutely nothing about NTTD copied Endgame, unless I missed the time travel in No Time to Die or the garden of death in Endgame.
I don't think Craig's Bond was any deeper than any previous Bond. Bond has always been a fully-fleshed, 3-dimensional character with contradictions, flaws, and pathos. Some movies highlighted these traits more than others, but even in the sillier movies like DAD we see what motivates him, what angers him, why he's so dedicated to his job, etc.
The idea that Bond's psyche needs to be explored strikes me as silly, a waste of time, and a substitution for an actual story. Giving Bond and Blofeld a shared childhood is not giving the story depth, it's a low-effort gimmick that gives the illusion of depth but actually has no bearing on the plot whatsoever and no consequences for either character.
That pretty much aligns, I think, with the majority of opinions about the matter. I do agree as well. Poor gimmicks, poor writing, poor character treatment. It’s the story in which Bond finds himself immersed that is key, not Bond’s own story. That was telling of some fatigue, I think. Let’s see if someone out there can fly pass that and come up with some original stories.
Not to her, though. In interviews and public statements, she was enamored with Daniel...almost to the point of, yes, not being able to move on without him.
I think she could have continued without one but perhaps without both was too much of an ask
Exactly this. Bond is the character we follow as he experiences the story. The story is not Bond himself. This is what annoyed me most about the last three movies.
In other words, you could easily replace him by a robot. I'd rather watch the adventures of a fully-rounded character whose motives I can understand with a minimum of kitchen psychology. Doesn't mean I subscribe to all the antics the writers put into the last movies, especially not that foster brother nonsense. But it must also be noticed that even that left Bond surprisingly untouched, doing his job in spite of those tribulations. I'm all for that.
Yay
NB - In "No Time to Die," the SPECTRE agents use a high-tech gadget that looks like a portable anti-gravity device or a personal hover platform. They drop it down the shaft, and then they jump off and use it to float down slowly, defying gravity.
No worries, those are the only two threads I felt it was relevant to, but I couldn't make up my mind between them
What happened to Gregg Wilson? I wish EON had continued on, not every Bond film and not every Bond Actor has to feel some sort of divinity. It's ok to just make a good Bond film with a good actor, and I don't think anybody could have topped Daniel Craig in her mind.
Bond is quite enigmatic really, there's lots of situations we don't see him in or know how he'd react to. Part of the whole 'cool' persona is that he's slightly unknowable in some senses. Exploring that is no bad thing as the movies are literally about him.
Also I'm not sure we could say he's always been a three dimensional character: that guy in You Only Live Twice isn't a human, he's a walking quip machine who presses buttons on other machines and that's about it. His depth has varied throughout the movies, and that's not a bad thing, it keeps it interesting.
In fact, I think it's cool that Bond isn't a traditional character who learns things and goes through phases of soul-searching. We love him more for what he does than for who he is? Something like that? I'm not sure that's the right way of phrasing things, but I'm tired. ;-)
Interesting to consider, is Craig-Bond really any different by the end of NTTD than he was at the end of CR?
Dead as opposed to very much alive? ;-)
Jokes aside, even the Craig Bond, who "learned his lesson", doesn't change all that much, you're right. But compared to most of the others, I think he at least changes a bit.
A character doesn't need to change to be three-dimensional. Bond has already become who he is when we meet him in CR. He goes through ups and downs over that novel and the novels that follow, he has flaws, drives, and an inner world, he has a particular way of life and a particular way of seeing the world around him. I think that makes him three-dimensional, and it's why he doesn't necessarily need to have a traditional arc.
In contrast, characters like Jack Reacher, John Wick, and Rey from Star Wars are two-dimensional power fantasies of their creators. That's very different from what Bond is.
Bond can overcome obstacles, certainly (both on the job and how that affects him personally). That seems to be what you're trying to get at here anyway. I'd say that's all the Craig films. Bond's core values don't change in essence throughout his tenure. He's just knocked off course by certain things and his circumstances change by the last one, but he ultimately comes back. For me that's great. A character like Bond needs obstacles and challenges in these stories.
I don't particularly mind scraps of Bond's history coming up either. Maybe not for every film, but it's nice to see a mention of Bond's past in GE and in SF. It informs a bit about the character in tandem with the story, but doesn't hang on to sentimentality nor does Bond himself dwell on it, which is the kind of character he is. I'd say the same about things like Bond having a previous relationship with Paris in TND. It's good storytelling.