I love Bond movies. At one point I seriously contemplated buying the blu-ray box set, but all the streaming services now make that somewhat unnecessary. But I haven't watched the full corpus in some considerable time, so revisiting a childhood staple is quite an educational experience.
To start with the serious bit, it goes without saying that 60's Bond is a serial rapist. The movies overall are... problematic. Unlike certain memes I see from time to time, I don't think this means we can no longer enjoy them, let alone that they should be censored. I mean, I grew up watching Sean Connery force himself on women who would - inexplicably - protest ferociously but swoon uncontrollably as soon as they got a taste of that sweet Scottish machismo, and I've managed to go exactly 38 years without feeling the urge to force my testicles upon anyone. It was pretty obvious to me that this wasn't how the real world worked, still less any kind of guide to behaviour. Bond is at best a fantasy figure, but I've never seen a government assassin with a frickin' license to kill as any kind of role model (even when being heroic), because that would be very, very stupid. If you really grow up thinking that this sort of behaviour is acceptable, you have much bigger problems than which fiction you're being subjected to.
I suppose my basic take is that fiction is far more in the eye of the beholder than it speaks for itself. So while I take a much harsher line against reporting on or even presenting interpretative opinion pieces regarding the facts, when it comes to fiction I find it hard to be anything much less than a free speech absolutist. Oh, there are no doubt exceptions, but they'd be rare indeed.
The way I see it, whether you think 60's Bond's behaviour is laudable or contemptible is probably set more by external factors than it is by any direct influence the movies had on you. Collectively, perhaps, fiction shapes our morality at least to some degree, but probably individual works have little impact - and our real life experiences are massively more influential. Maybe the director genuinely thought that every girl should dream of being molested by a random Scotsman, I don't know, but that was never the impression I had. So regardless of the intent, I never saw that aspect of Bond's behaviour as something that was acceptable, let alone desirable.
(In contrast if you're going to go around explicitly saying, "being molested by a random Scotsman is a good thing", this is, to my mind, altogether different than merely depicting it in fiction and letting the audience make their own judgement. At least, I think this is a decent guideline.)
My take on problematic movies, then, is not that we should now spurn them, any more than we should spurn classic literature. There are parts of Plato and Epictetus that are enormously offensive to any right-thinking person, but that doesn't mean we can't both enjoy them and learn from them - in the latter, both in terms of what they got wrong as well as what they got right.
So to the more extreme proponents of cancel culture, I say just accept that these movies were produced in another era and they're going to have problems. Just as everything is offensive to someone, so everyone - absolutely everyone - is offended by something. If you start demanding that everything be acceptable to everyone, you're not going to have much left at all. I say internalise it, state your case as to why it's wrong if you feel the need to, but personally I don't feel that a minor aspect needs invalidate a whole film. The exception would of course be of the whole message of the film were offensive : if Bond were on a mission to support the KKK, take down the European Union, or get Trump re-elected... that I would never condone, but 60's Bond not being sufficiently "woke" is not something I have a problem with.
In short, I'm glad they made the movies when they did, and I'm at least equally glad that they don't make movies like that any more.
On to the movies themselves. Of the earlier Bond movies, my favourite is probably You Only Live Twice. Sean Connery is much the most problematic of the earlier Bonds, and this particular one features some truly cringe-worthy "let's pretend to be Japanese" shenanigans, but it's got a cool gyrocopter (aerial mines !) and a giant base inside a frickin' volcano. And the best, most sinister version of Ernst Stavro Blofeld yet depicted. Goldfinger is the more popular, but for me it's but a close second : it has that iconic laser scene, but it can't compete with Blofeld and an erupting volcano.
The silliness of the Bond franchise swings like a pendulum, and it's surely fair to say that it reached the zenith of the arc in the Roger Moore era. Moore's Bond had the best gadgets (the underwater car still to this day has a very high cool factor), but the hamminess definitely reached unsustainable levels. I enjoy all the Moore films to varying degrees, but Moonraker is the epitome of a bad Bond movie - most of the time the Moore films feature silliness embedded within something at least a little bit plausible, but Moonraker just lets go completely. Yet it's still not as bad as the truly dreadful Never Say Never Again, which we skipped on the grounds that it's utter crap.
I personally found Timothy Dalton very underrated as Bond. Both of his films I think have the silliness/grittiness balance just about right. There are cool but silly gadgets and a daft skiing sequence on a cello, but it manages to pull it off. Dalton is suave and sophisticated, the enemies believable (after a fashion) to the extent that the lack of a giant secret underground base is but a minor detail. He deserved a longer outing.
Fortunately, Pierce Brosnan continued in a very similar vein. Of course I have a particular fondness for Goldeneye, not only for the extended Arecibo sequence but also for the car chase in a tank, which remains one of my all-time favourite car chases of any movie. Tomorrow Never Dies is much, much sillier, but it's interesting how it foreshadows later themes that information is the new battleground : it's not the best way to examine the impact of fake news, but it deserves more credit. As for The World is Not Enough, whoever thought Denise Richards could be a nuclear physicist was a bit mad, but whoever put her in a tank top was a genius.
Die Another Day begins with an impressive hovercraft sequence but it quickly falls off the cliff of sanity, specifically a collapsing glacier being blasted by a CGI laser that's so crummy it would look bad if it was on a cheap documentary on the Discovery channel. It's a horrible movie, which is a shame because I rather liked Brosnan as Bond.
We reach now the Daniel Craig era. I hated Die Another Day at the time of release, but I hated Casino Royale even more. This was unfair of me. Yes, it's gritter and less cheesy than other Bond movies, too much so. The "let's whack Bond's gentials" scene is still going too far. But overall, it has more Bond qualities than I gave it credit for - rewatching it in sequence, I liked it a lot more than I did the first time round. There are touches of Bond-esque silliness here and there - subtle ones, but they're there all the same. I still think it's over-rated, but I'm prepared to welcome it back to the fold.
Quantum of Solace I skipped the first time around because I hated Casino Royale and everyone told me it was crap. It isn't. It's a perfectly decent Bond flick. Yes, it's got a silly title, but it builds nicely from Casino as Craig develops further into the sort of Bond we're more accustomed to. This continues in Skyfall, which I loved at the time and still do. Finally the sense of fun returns unfettered, with a self-deprecating take on the gadgets and the best exploding Scottish house you'll ever see. Thoroughly enjoyable from start to finish.
Finally, Spectre. Despite having been thrilled by Skyfall's return to form, I never got to see Spectre until a few days ago. And I was delighted - this is even more Bond-esque than Skyfall. We're fully back to Bond having cool gadgets (albeit malfunctioning more these days, which adds to the humour) and impressive, grandiose physical stunt sequences. And the villain is delightfully creepy. It's a toss-up whether I prefer this to Skyfall, so I'll have to rewatch it.
Of course, the real problem for James Bond is not whether he next should become Jane Bond, but continuity. Does each actor represent a different narrative universe* ? Is Bond a Time Lord who regenerates ? Is Bond just a code name ?
* See the charming theory that Sean Connery's character in The Rock is actually Bond.
Personally I have two preferences. One option is that there's a compressed timeline, with 60's Bond movies actually being set in the 1980s, while the latest ones at set in the early 2000's*. In this way Bond's career has a plausible duration, with Bond currently being no older than 50, and the social and technological developments not being too outrageous. Of course this means Bond can't continue for much longer, or the in-universe character will quickly become far too old. So the other option is that we view Bond like The Simpsons, with the in-universe timeline having little or no relation to the external world, and then we all shut up and concentrate on the car chases and explosions. Which is what we probably should do anyway.
* We have to then view Casino Royale as a sort of modernised retelling of events that actually look place in the early 80's.
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