The James Bond Thread: RIP Robbie Coltrane

[bacardimayne]

Connery, then a tie for second between Craig and Brosnan (just because his movies sucked balls doesn't mean he wasn't a good bond)

this

[James Bond]

For fuck sake Miser, there is no reason for this thread as we already have a Bond thread. I understand wanting a Poll but still it seems silly when we have a perfect thread for it already

Maybe I should add a poll to the ongoing Bond thread. Might be good to keep a tally and it'll lead to the same discussion anyways.

[Tater Totts]

For fuck sake Miser, there is no reason for this thread as we already have a Bond thread. I understand wanting a Poll but still it seems silly when we have a perfect thread for it already

Maybe I should add a poll to the ongoing Bond thread. Might be good to keep a tally and it'll lead to the same discussion anyways.

Might be for best, I mean all of the discussion we will be having here has already been done in there.

[Black Sabbath]

For fuck sake Miser, there is no reason for this thread as we already have a Bond thread. I understand wanting a Poll but still it seems silly when we have a perfect thread for it already

Maybe I should add a poll to the ongoing Bond thread. Might be good to keep a tally and it'll lead to the same discussion anyways.

Go ahead and do that and whenever it's done I'll merge the threads

[James Bond]

Merge away! Sorry Miser.

[Georgy Zhukov]

You can't win Miser, you will be assimilated.

[Tater Totts]

Finally got around to seeing Skyfall, thought it was brilliant. Craig, Barden and Dench were all awesome.

Any news on whether it has passed Thunderball yet JB?

[James Bond]

Nice that you caught it in theaters, as I imagine it won't be around much longer.

The latest update:

Domestic - $299,363,000

Foreign - $733,500,000

Worldwide - $1,032,863,000

I've seen two numbers thrown around for Thunderball. One is $1.031 billion, and the other (the one I posted earlier) is $1.037 billion. I think we're safe to say Skyfall has passed it. It should pass $300 million domestically in the next week (another milestone) and it opens in China on the 21st where it's being predicted to make anywhere from $50 million to $70 million.

[Georgy Zhukov]

So it will finish around $1,200,000,000 making this the most successful James Bond film ever. Craig now has three films in the top then most successful James Bond films. Here's a list for 2011 inflation.

http://www.007james.com/articles/box_office.php

I voted for Daniel Craig by the way. I'd go Craig, Dalton, Connery, Lazenby/Moore and then Brosnan. Brosnan was okay, to me he was the weakest and most unconvincing Bond. I could kick his ass.

Edited January 14, 2013 by Georgy Zhukov

[Vincent Vega]

Connery will always be Bond, followed by Moore.

Lazenby was forgettable though he starred in a great Bond film.

Dalton was utterly boring and took all the fun from Bond.

Brosnan tried too hard to be a mix of Connery, Dalton and Moore and had shitty scripts except his first film. Goldeneye is a good film but has a dated store, but it does at times have a bland '90s action film feel.

Craig plays James Bourne or Vladimir Bond more than he does James Bond. He looks little more than a blond Russian looking thug. The spirit of Bond was drained in favor of mixing Bond with Jason Bourne. Craig doesn't even look anything like what Fleming intended Bond to look like, if we're going by the books. Dalton and Connery came the closest in that regard.

Connery will always be #1 to me. I don't care about box office tallies or this or that....Bond is a character fit more for the 60s and 70s than today anyway.

Connery I choose because he has that perfect mix of charm, grace, camp, ruthlessness and coldness that no actor has managed to recapture. Moore veered too far in the direction of camp, Dalton too far in the direction of coldness and ruthlessness, Brosnan tried to be a mix of Connery, Moore and Brosnan, and Craig is basically a more appealing version of Dalton in terms of just being a dark, ruthless character.

Edited January 14, 2013 by Vincent Vega

[Vincent Vega]

I could never really buy Roger Moore as playing a guy who is an assassin. He had the charm and dry wit down, but he just didn't strike me as in anyway lethal or physically imposing. He stuck me as a sort of dandy, but it fit the films he was in, which are good for their own reasons. Though perhaps if I look at it another way, maybe he really is the best sociopathic Bond. This is a guy who literally seems to have no care whatsoever about what his job entails and just does it with a clever quip.

Same goes for Brosnan in many cases. I just can't really picture him being an assassin. He has that layer of darkness about him that Bond is supposed to have, but there's something lacking. It just feels too much like a mixture of all that came before.

I can easily picture Connery and Dalton being assassins. But Dalton is too depressing and too dark about it all, and Craig is just a brute.

Edited January 14, 2013 by Vincent Vega

[arnold layne]

Why is this still a thread?

[Vincent Vega]

Because James Bond is one of the coolest characters ever to grace the silver screen?

[Georgy Zhukov]

I don't see how Lazenby can be forgettable is he starred in a memorable film. Kind of heard to miss him don't you think?

See, that is my biggest criticism of Brosnan. He plays "James Bond's greatest hits" covered by Muzak. He never made the role his own. He was a glorified television actor. Roger Moore was a better actor than him.

Craig took a leaf out of Dalton's book and went to the basics and gave us the most developed and human Bond we can have. That is why he is number one. He has made Bond relevant for all times.

Moore was pretty convincing in cold blooded scenes such as knocking the guy off he roof or kicking a guy off a cliff. He went psycho on numerous occasions. Charming man, but would fucking kill you without hesitation. Now that is a assassin.

[Vincent Vega]

I don't see how Lazenby can be forgettable is he starred in a memorable film. Kind of heard to miss him don't you think?

See, that is my biggest criticism of Brosnan. He plays "James Bond's greatest hits" covered by Muzak. He never made the role his own. He was a glorified television actor. Roger Moore was a better actor than him.

Craig took a leaf out of Dalton's book and went to the basics and gave us the most developed and human Bond we can have. That is why he is number one. He has made Bond relevant for all times.

Moore was pretty convincing in cold blooded scenes such as knocking the guy off he roof or kicking a guy off a cliff. He went psycho on numerous occasions. Charming man, but would fucking kill you without hesitation. Now that is a assassin.

The movie is memorable, it's just not carried well by Lazenby. He just doesn't have the pull or "it" factor that the other actors have....Maybe it's because he only starred in one film, I dunno.

I agree with you on Brosnan. He just hits the beats. Plays all the cues that Connery, Moore and Dalton hit.

I don't agree that Craig's Bond is relevant for "all times". He's relevant for OUR time--Our time, when we want our heroes to be totally human and have well developed psyches and whatnot. That's the standard for heroes in the current era--Nolan's Batman being another example. Right now, in the 2000s-2010s, we want these complex, fully figured out heroes. But, we've gone through periods like that before, and the trend has always reversed itself to wanting more escapism. Which is my point of view.

Heroes like James Bond became popular because 'men wanted to be them and women wanted to be with them'. There was that exotic, escapist sort of mystique to the character. You want to be James Fucking Bond in your Aston Martin and be able to be sexist and a womanizer and get away with it. It's a fantasy. I wouldn't want to be Dalton or Craig's Bond. Both are tortured, dark, vicious characters who have deep complexities over what they do. Why would I want to BE that? Life is often times too dark and complex as it is, why add more darkness to it in what's supposed to be a medium that's an escape from real life? Someone like Connery or Moore's Bond sort of, to a point, enjoys the fruits of their job. There's just a certain charm about them. You want to be them, because while they have a human side, they're not psychological portraits.

If I want a film like that, where it's about a dark character with a tortured psyche in a depressing job, I can go watch Taxi Driver or The Conversation or The Godfather Part II.

That's the thing in our pop culture today. We're so focused on realism that we're forgetting why we liked characters like Bond in the first place. We're forgetting escapism, and putting our own humanity and our own complexities on screen in these heroes. That's today's darker, post 9/11 era. But that in time will pass.

I do agree on Moore. He is a psycho. He literally is at times dead emotionally. Doesn't give a fuck that he just killed someone, just makes a little quip and rearranges his suit. His first three or four films are good, it's just the last two get way too carried away. I suppose an assassin doesn't need to be physically imposing, technically, but in the films' fight scenes, it doesn't work as well as it does with say Connery. Like, I can believe Connery would kick someone's ass in a hand to hand fight. I can believe he'd be capable of murdering someone with his own hands. I can't get that with Moore.

Edited January 14, 2013 by Vincent Vega

[Georgy Zhukov]

Eh, even Connery was tortured. He clearly felt bad when women and friends get killed because of him. All the Bonds were tortured. I wouldn't want to be them because James Bond is a pretty lonely character. He has a woman to warm his bed but his ultimate commitment is England. He was ready to give it up twice. Never went back.

Craig and Lazenby were the only Bonds to show how he came close to quitting the service. Skyfall shows why he simply couldn't leave.

[Vincent Vega]

Eh, even Connery was tortured. He clearly felt bad when women and friends get killed because of him. All the Bonds were tortured. I wouldn't want to be them because James Bond is a pretty lonely character. He has a woman to warm his bed but his ultimate commitment is England. He was ready to give it up twice. Never went back.

Craig and Lazenby were the only Bonds to show how he came close to quitting the service. Skyfall shows why he simply couldn't leave.

But that's the thing. He was tortured, but it wasn't like, hamfisted. It wasn't overly in your face. It was an aspect to his character, but the other aspects--the glamour of it, the action, the fact that he beds nearly every woman he wants--sort of overwhelms that. It doesn't define him and make him TOO human. Human enough to not be a cartoon not also not to be a psychologically tortured dark character. I can actually identify more with a Connery sort of Bond than I could with Craig's.

See, I wouldn't want to see that. Why would I care about how close he comes to quitting the service? I don't want an overly conflicted, lost, lonely character. You do your job, do it well, give the other fella hell, and move on. As my mother taught me from working as a Nurse, you have to have a certain level of detachment to survive, which as I've grown older, I've come to appreciate. My mother's first job as a nurse was basically wrapping up a dead baby, something along those lines. She was just 21 and her father had just died suddenly a month or so before, and she was the one who first discovered him when he was calling for help in his bed having a stroke, before the ambulance took him away, where he'd die less than an hour later. Her sister, also a nurse, was next to him and ended up giving him mouth to mouth resuscitation when he suddenly went into respiratory arrest while talking to the doctor attending him; it didn't work and he died in front of her. Seeing stab wounds, gunshots, and death on a daily basis made her (she worked in the ER) and her sister (who worked in the OR) detached to a degree--not to the point of being brooding or inhuman or psychologically tortured and conflicted, like Craig's Bond--but to the point of having just enough detachment from people, even from family, to not crack. Sort of like Connery's Bond. He knows all too well the darkness of his job and what it entails, but is detached enough to still be likable, human, to laugh and not be overly dark or bitter, to be cynical but not to the point of being depressing. I can relate to that, it's something my mother and my aunt taught me, and something their father before them sort of was. I can bitch all I want ON HERE--which is basically just a vacation from real life--but in real life I'm pretty cold and detached. Things don't affect me the way they would've even say, three years ago.

Connery and Moore's Bond are "comfortably numb", which is what you have to become. Craig's Bond is far too tortured, too complex, too conflicted, to enjoy.

Edited January 14, 2013 by Vincent Vega

[James Bond]

I actually agree with the notion that Craig is the Bond of our times. I think each Bond actor, save for Lazenby I guess, has been right for the time he played Bond for. Dalton was perhaps a little ahead of his time, and Moore hung around a little too long, but I think the changing of actors is one of the things that has definitely added to the series longevity.

I do disagree that Craig is too serious, which is a point I brought up earlier when I pointed to some Skyfall reviews saying Craig "finally smiled" in the film. I think Craig in Casino Royale is on par with Connery's Bond. I have to point to the scenes at the Ocean Club again, which fit Connery's Bond all the way. Even when he returns back to the club after the airport sequence to find Solange dead and M remarks "quite the body count you're stacking up" or something to that effect, Craig kind of has that detachment from the scene like Connery where he knows it's a dark job, but doesn't dwell on it. It doesn't stop him from making a few quips a few minutes later when M is briefing him about Le Chiffre:

"Do you want a clean kill or do you want to send a message?"

"So he's been gambling with his clients funds? Well, they won't be too happy when they find out it's gone."

Kind of the dark, not so in your face humor that was found in the Connery films. Until Vesper dies Craig is all smiles throughout the film. There's some more serious and/or tender moments of course, but it's balanced nicely with the hints of classic Bond throughout. Craig even smiles in the torture scene.

Quantum might have been too serious, I'll give you that, but there were a billion problems with that film in general. Skyfall returned to Casino Royale's approach of mixing the modern spy film elements that they've been working with in the Craig era with classic Bond. Skyfall managed to be a "fun" or "proper" Bond film without it seeming like a joke that you've got Craig's Bond in there. Quantum had a little too much Bourne, namely in the action sequences, but the action sequences this time around returned to the more grand, traditional Bond kind of action sequences.

Mix in the simple to follow plot, a great villain, great locations, lots of humor, a gadget-laden Aston Martin, a smoking hot Bond girl, a male M, Moneypenny, Q... sounds like a Bond film to me.

Why is this still a thread?

Now now Arnold, you could always join in the discussion too. Even if Pierce is your favorite Bond and Never Say Never Again is your favorite film - we won't judge.

I do owe you a thanks though - every time you post in here to mock the thread it gets bumped to the top of the page.

[Vincent Vega]

I actually agree with the notion that Craig is the Bond of our times. I think each Bond actor, save for Lazenby I guess, has been right for the time he played Bond for. Dalton was perhaps a little ahead of his time, and Moore hung around a little too long, but I think the changing of actors is one of the things that has definitely added to the series longevity.

I do disagree that Craig is too serious, which is a point I brought up earlier when I pointed to some Skyfall reviews saying Craig "finally smiled" in the film. I think Craig in Casino Royale is on par with Connery's Bond. I have to point to the scenes at the Ocean Club again, which fit Connery's Bond all the way. Even when he returns back to the club after the airport sequence to find Solange dead and M remarks "quite the body count you're stacking up" or something to that effect, Craig kind of has that detachment from the scene like Connery where he knows it's a dark job, but doesn't dwell on it. It doesn't stop him from making a few quips a few minutes later when M is briefing him about Le Chiffre:

"Do you want a clean kill or do you want to send a message?"

"So he's been gambling with his clients funds? Well, they won't be too happy when they find out it's gone."

Kind of the dark, not so in your face humor that was found in the Connery films. Until Vesper dies Craig is all smiles throughout the film. There's some more serious and/or tender moments of course, but it's balanced nicely with the hints of classic Bond throughout. Craig even smiles in the torture scene.

Quantum might have been too serious, I'll give you that, but there were a billion problems with that film in general. Skyfall returned to Casino Royale's approach of mixing the modern spy film elements that they've been working with in the Craig era with classic Bond. Skyfall managed to be a "fun" or "proper" Bond film without it seeming like a joke that you've got Craig's Bond in there. Quantum had a little too much Bourne, namely in the action sequences, but the action sequences this time around returned to the more grand, traditional Bond kind of action sequences.

Mix in the simple to follow plot, a great villain, great locations, lots of humor, a gadget-laden Aston Martin, a smoking hot Bond girl, a male M, Moneypenny, Q... sounds like a Bond film to me.

The thing is, I feel a lot of the elements that made Bond Bond are not really in step with today. Bond was a gambling, borderline alcoholic, womanizing, misogynistic guy, with a touch of racism about him. In the 1960s and 1970s, that was all acceptable; Hell, a man being a gambler then was a sign that he was a gentlemen; Being a drinker who knew his liquor and respected it showed he was a high society, refined guy. Womanizing was pretty much accepted and was the sign of being a masculine man, and misogyny really wasn't even thought about. Today it's the exact opposite. In today's world, it's generally frowned upon to be a gambler, womanizing is something only douchebags do, misogyny is taboo and any hint of racism is on par with being a Nazi--in today's world.

The world of James Bond, and our modern times, aren't really compatible unless you fundamentally change James, and when you have to transform the character into something almost totally different, what's the point of continuing? Shouldn't even good things come to an end eventually?

Yes you have M and Q and the gadgets and the Aston Martin, but that's just window dressing to make it seem Bond-like, when really you now have a character who more resembles Jason Bourne than anything else. And it doesn't really make sense anyway...You have these antiquated sort of old fashioned, traditional elements, which seem kind of kitsch today, with a character that is supposed to be hyper-realistic and dark and all 21st century....

I just think find the 1960s-1970s films to be the definitive films, and Connery and Moore the definitive actors, and I suppose Dalton has his place, in that everyone--even Craig--has tried to follow or live up to what they did. Brosnan was too much of an obvious emulation, Dalton was too bleak and removed a lot of the fun....And with Brosnan and Craig's films, while they're enjoyable for their own reasons (though I'll never accept Craig as Bond, and it's a reboot anyway--not in the same continuity as the rest of the series), I just feel they're sort of beating a dead horse.

What I mean is, there's nothing really new or exciting either Brosnan or Craig offer. We've already done the "update James Bond to meet the modern era" thing with Brosnan, who at least even if he emulated his previous actors too much, still was playing James Bond, not a hybrid character.

They're basically just revamping and rehashing a relic of the past. If Brosnan was a mix of Connery and Moore put into the '90s, with '90s sensibilities, Craig is Connery and Dalton mixed together with '00s-'10s sensibilities. Like you said, Craig does try to act Connery-ish, but also acts like Jason Bourne. If I want James Bond, I want James Bond, unapologetic, not tailored to the modern era and modern politically correct sensibilities.

It's like, we've already had a Bond who was a mix of lethalness and charm (Connery), a Bond who was a mix of lethalness, charm,and camp (Moore), and a dark Bond (Dalton). Every actor since has tried to play off those three models to greater and lesser degrees. I just feel it's a loss-loss either way. If Craig acts like Jason Bourne, then what's the point of it being called a Bond film? If Craig acts like Sean Connery meets Jason Bourne, what was the whole point of the series being rebooted if we're just going to retread the same sort of boundaries again? You can't really call Craig the best when he's still trying to be Sean Connery, mixed with Jason Bourne.

I mean, in today's day and age, I can't really believe in a spy in a tuxedo, even if Craig doesn't wear it all the time...It's just basically revamping and redoing another generation's hero with the only newness about it being added elements and new gadgets. There's nothing really new about it at all. It's not really a hero like Batman who can easily evolve to suit every era. Bond has very strict sort of defining aspects that make him who he is and many of those aspects are not compatible with the modern world; take those away or add in things from another series, and you utterly change the character and what the character was supposed to be.

A character like Batman, on the other hand, is pretty simple: Rich guy whose parents were killed when he was a boy, becomes a conflicted hero because of his parents' death, lives with a servant named Alfred who took care of him and helps him, has a hidden lair, drives a Batmobile. You can take that basic formula and adapt it to any age without having to change the character. In every Batman movie, it was never the character who was off---it was the film itself which was bad.

Basically, in an ideal world, the Bond series would've stopped with Dalton's films. He could've done Goldeneye as his last film and ended the series there. James Bond isn't, IMO, a timeless hero in the way Batman is. He's a sexist, misogynist dinosaur, a relic of the Cold War...And I think it's best if he's kept that way. It really only dilutes the series when the series begin to try to emulate itself, which started with Brosnan, or when it basically takes on the feel of a completely different series, which started with Craig. It's like, how long can you keep the train going?

Edited January 14, 2013 by Vincent Vega

[James Bond]

The reasons you bring up against the series continuing is exactly (in my opinion of course) why it is still able to thrive. You're right - put Connery's Bond on the screen today and people would call him sexist and racist among other things. Elements of the character changed and will continue to change, and that's why the series continues to be successful. It is always adapted to fit with the times. Gone are the days when Bond set the standard and everything copied Bond. That ended in the sixties when Broccoli and Saltzman found their winning formula and kept redoing it while other franchises took it an extra mile. Inevitably, Bond had to start following trends rather than set them.

I can't deny that Bond, at least the character of Bond that Connery played, was meant for the sixties. If that's the Bond you prefer, there's nothing wrong with that. Just because he was the first doesn't instantly mean he's the best though. That's where it comes down to strictly preference. Some prefer the sixties womanizer, some prefer the modern grittiness, some prefer Roger and so on.

The reason I like Craig's portrayal so much is because he mixes that charisma that Connery had with the current direction of the films. It's neither strictly classic Bond nor Jason Bourne. I also highly disagree with all the Bourne comparisons for that matter. The direction of the films themselves, namely Quantum of Solace, clearly took inspiration from Bourne. However, the character of Bond is still the character of Bond. The idea of making the films more character driven was probably, again, a Bourne influence, but that doesn't mean Bond is Bourne all of a sudden. We're looking more into Bond's character. It's a nice change from the mindlessness of the Brosnan films. Maybe after Craig we'll all be craving a Brosnan-style Bond again. For the time being though, it feels right.

I also think it has much to do with Craig's abilities as an actor. When Michael G. Wilson commented on Dench's ever expanding role as M during the Brosnan tenure, he said that when you've secured an actress as good as Judi Dench you better use her as much as you can. Something to that effect anyways. I believe the same is true of Craig. They're using his capabilities to their advantage.

Don't forget, the whole point of the reboot was to redefine the character of Bond and let him become the "classic Bond" again. Skyfall sets that up perfectly, and since Craig has two more films to go, maybe he'll get that straight up Bond adventure next time around.

Even if the next film screams "sixties Bond" there will always be more character driven plot elements, at least for this era of Bond. Keep releasing Die Another Day over and over again and the series would be dead. It needed a change and thus far, the change has been bringing in big bucks and therefore it will continue to happen. You might not like it, but that's how it's going to be. Naturally, I can't change your opinion of Craig. I do agree that the films have taken a different feel with him, but isn't that how it's always been? The Moore films felt different from Connery's (hell, You Only Live Twice and Diamonds felt different from the first four Connery's), the Dalton's felt totally different from Moore's, and so on.

The change keeps things exciting in the Bond world.

[Georgy Zhukov]

I really don't see how the Bourne influence on the series is a bad thing. Since the death of Cubby Michael G. Wilson and Barbara Broccoli didn't seem to know what direction the films should take so they just copied popular action films at the time. Pierce Brosnan fires machine guns, sometimes two guns like John Woo films. The Bourne films re-introduces a character driven action film that was previously explored with Timothy Dalton but was brushed aside in favor of cramming as many Bond elements in one film. One thing they left out were locations. If you blink and miss you will forget that The World is Not Enough took place in Azerbaijan and Istanbul. James Bond is right when he said Dalton was a ahead of his time because he was the first to dish out that character driven Bond. Previous Bond actors such as Connery and Moore would express distaste but that was it. They quickly move on.

It was actually George Lazenby who said in an interview following the release of OHMSS that Bond should be more character driven. The films relied on locations and action and crazy plots and leave little for Bond. Lazenby has praised Craig but is not a fan of the direction of the series, but as Pierce Brosnan said, he's a bitter old bastard.

[Crazyman]

Looking at a list of highest grossing movies (withhout adjusting for inflation), I think Skyfall will ultimately end up being the 7th highest ever, just above the Dark Night Rises, with around $1.1 billion. Insane!

[Vincent Vega]

I really don't see how the Bourne influence on the series is a bad thing. Since the death of Cubby Michael G. Wilson and Barbara Broccoli didn't seem to know what direction the films should take so they just copied popular action films at the time. Pierce Brosnan fires machine guns, sometimes two guns like John Woo films. The Bourne films re-introduces a character driven action film that was previously explored with Timothy Dalton but was brushed aside in favor of cramming as many Bond elements in one film. One thing they left out were locations. If you blink and miss you will forget that The World is Not Enough took place in Azerbaijan and Istanbul. James Bond is right when he said Dalton was a ahead of his time because he was the first to dish out that character driven Bond. Previous Bond actors such as Connery and Moore would express distaste but that was it. They quickly move on.

It was actually George Lazenby who said in an interview following the release of OHMSS that Bond should be more character driven. The films relied on locations and action and crazy plots and leave little for Bond. Lazenby has praised Craig but is not a fan of the direction of the series, but as Pierce Brosnan said, he's a bitter old bastard.

But why want a character driven Bond? Why does everything have to be deep and psychological? You can have moments of character but we're making a spy film, not a psychological drama story. For example, having Bond have a wife be killed by his enemy and him going on revenge was a good storyline. But don't dwell on it and make him this tortured lonely soul. What is it with having tortured, complex, conflicted heroes?

And it's because having James Bond be more James Bourne is basically diluting the series. Make a separate character if you really want to do that. The Brosnan films as you said already fucked with the character by basically copying other films.

As it stands I feel Connery, Moore and Dalton are really the only Bonds worth watching. It should've stopped with Dalton in Goldeneye.

And Dalton wasn't ahead of his time. His films were just closer in tone to the original novels than the previous entries.

Edited January 14, 2013 by Vincent Vega

[James Bond]

Bond being stuck on the death of someone, like Tracy or Vesper, is kind of a moot point now though, mainly in light of Skyfall. Quantum of Solace was the revenge story you speak of, and they didn't dwell on it because there's no mention of Vesper at all in Skyfall. He's not all that tortured in Skyfall. The whole movie kind of pokes fun at the fact that there's not a whole lot of room for aging heroes in today's world. He uses his supposed death as a way out of the business, because as much as your heart might harden, it's still a dirty business and Mallory even states most agents don't get such an opportunity. What takes him back is his loyalty to Britain. He's skeptical of M but learns she did what she had to do (both in the Bond situation and later when he learns about Silva). That's it - no overly emotional dwelling (very evident in his almost non-reaction to Severine's death - the "Waste of good scotch" is pure Connery).

Dalton was ahead of his time in the sense that audiences at the time were clearly not ready for a character driven Bond closer in tone to the novels. His two films are among the least successful in the franchise, which is a shame because The Living Daylights is a damn good film and License To Kill isn't all that bad either. Audiences are clearly ready for that now with the success of the Craig films. I think Dalton was just too much of a change all at once from audiences who grew up with Moore, whereas the change of pace with Casino Royale was more of a welcome change after the poor reception of Die Another Day (despite Die Another Day being a box office success).

Why want a character driven Bond? There's no definitive answer to that. It's just want some people like. I like pure escapist fun as much as I like a more serious spy thriller. They can co-exist. The Bonds I just happen to prefer are the more down to earth ones.

[Tater Totts]

Okay just a few points.

1. Why want a character driven Bond? Because the films had stagnated to a point of no return, in Goldeneye they made Bond relevant outside of the Cold War but bits of the film were really dark but they left it behind to the detriment of the series which culminated in the clusterfuck of Die Another Day. EON did not own the rights to Casino Royale, Sony did, in a settlement in 1999 which resulted in Sony getting the Spiderman rights EON finally got the rights for Casino Royale but did not make it yet as it was somewhat an origin story for Bond. When Craig came on board the logical step was to finally adapt Casino Royale, he was perfect for the role, someone who had both the necessary physical and acting chops to pull off the role when adapted from Casino Royale. In my opinion the only possible way to make a good adaptation of Casino Royale is to make it character driven, you have Bond letting his guard down and falling in love with a woman who he is willing to step away from MI6 to be with but he is betrayed and she dies. This betrayal by Vesper lays the foundation for the womanizing borderline alcoholic Bond we see more of in Quantam of Solace and Skyfall, he no longer feels like he could love another woman or let his guard down and as such he begins to see them as disposable objects that he can exploit which is what he does in the earlier films. Through the simple choice of having Craig, choosing to adapt Casino Royale and the fact the consumers had seemingly turned away from the "simpler" Bonds such as Brosnan and Moore meant they had to make it character driven otherwise it wouldn't work.

2. The novels are by and large nothing like the films, Casino Royale is by far the best adaptation of a Bond novel, if you were to compare to novels to their film counterparts you would be stunned how different they are and in the novels Bond is this more complex tortured hero.

3. They are not turning it into "James Bourne" this comment alone just shows you haven't seen all the Craig films, evolving the series and updating it is necessary and something the producers in the past had failed to do due to prior success. While I fully accept there are Bourne influences it is not turning into the Bourne series at all. The humour is still there, the locales, the women, the cars and gadgets are all present it is just a different interpretation of the character much like the prior actors. Go back and watch From Russia With Love, seriously do, the train fight against Grant is as close to a Bourne style type fight as anything Craig has done.

JB agree with everything you say, you take everything I want to say about the series and write it better than I will ever be able to