Reboot? Remake? Retro? Which direction should the series take next?

I see it this way: Bond is the veteran which invented the playing field.

Now he looks at the imitators playing on it and picks from them what he likes, showing them again and again how it is done.

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That’ll always be the conundrum. In the 60’s Bond was the biggest franchise on the planet, it was the one others wanted to be and spawned countless imitators. But by the end of the decade people where questioning it’s relevance. If there’s one thing that’ll guarantee irrelevance it’s refusal to change so the franchise had to evolve but where do you go? Taking inspiration from emerging was certainly one way to go and given that Bond has been making hits for 5 decades means that the approach clearly worked. And the other franchises still want to be Bond.

Right now nostalgia everyone seems to be looking to their own past for inspiration.

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Vanya is spot-on. Copying/taking inspiration/ripping off pick-your-descriptor, is only an issue when you don’t do it as well. And for this franchise, it’s only been a talking point when the knock-off is clearly inferior.

To be fair, aside from one sequence, TMWTGG is nowhere near a kung-fu flick, yet because overall it’s… er… a little below the standard grade…it’s easy to throw that criticism at it. MR is a more obvious example of bandwagon-jumping yet because it is very popular film, it’s doesn’t get the same-level of criticism that hits TMWTGG.

I do love LTK, but yep, I hear that the Joel Silver-wannabe leaves it more than a little rudderless. On the other hand, OP, so clearly inspired by Indiana Jones, escapes that harshness of the rip-off tag, because it chugs along quite nicely as an homage, both in story, spirit, and to be honest, pacing. I’d say John Glen out JJ’d, JJ Abrams on that score…

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They do. And to most of the general public, Bond is still the gold standard.
How many times did you hear: ā€œOh, that’s just like it’s from a MI movie!ā€ or Star Wars, or Harry Potter or Avengers or Bourne or whatever? Never. If there’s some crazy new invention on TV, some breathtaking stunt or a really stylish and expensive new gadget, everyone will immediately say ā€œNow, that’s a James Bond thing!ā€

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I’d argue that Star Wars and Marvel probably also have that brand recognition. But Bond has a different style from the other 2.

Today’s Bond piece from The Guardian collects some suggestions for the reboot…

The most probable - and best - part from the article:

Plausible though these ideas are, Cumming argues, ā€œall that might take up a lot of unnecessary screen time. The producers could just as well make no reference to what happened at the end of No Time To Die and introduce a new James Bond to a new generation. Audiences won’t care how or why 007 has come back into their lives as long as the script is entertaining and Barbara Broccoli has cast the right actor to play him. Bond is like Hamlet or Sherlock Holmes. He’s eternal.ā€

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God, the rest of those ideas are horrible.

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I’m shifting this across threads as I think there’s an interesting conversation to be had with regards to the characterisation of the next Bond. The consensus seems to be a lighter tone for the next film but how do you reconcile that in the Bond character, someone who is a professional and licensed killer?

The Roger Moore ā€˜he kills but doesn’t like it’ is one way to take it, recognise that there are people who needs to be killed and that he has to be the one to do it. Another quote I love is from TLD ā€œStuff my orders! I only kill professionalsā€ which helps establish clear lines that he won’t cross.

Another approach would be to consciously take down the kill count of the next film. Have fewer instances of Bond indiscriminately machine gunning armies of henchmen and more non-lethal take-downs. Then when the kills do come you really make them count.

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This is where I thought there was too much in Tomorrow Never Dies. Sure, there are more killings in YOLT, TSWLM, and Moonraker, but they were large scale cartoonish battles. There’s something coldly violent about the ones in TND, especially the machine gunning done on both sides. AVTAK had this too but it’s cause for May Day to switch sides. TND everyone just goes about their business afterward. Carver orders his wife’s death without even confronting her. And yet Kaufman’s death had the right tone, ā€œI’m just a professional doing a job.ā€

Whereas in CR the quote ā€œmade you feel it, did he?ā€ instructs the audience what to expect. We feel each death, so we have empathy for Vesper’s reaction to it.

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It’s indeed these mass killings that often don’t sit well, not even with the Fleming source. He described a guy who more or less ended up with his role because he didn’t mind shooting the opposition - as were most members of the armed forces in times of war.

Bond frowned. ā€˜It’s not difficult to get a Double O if you’re prepared to kill people,’ he said. ā€˜That’s all the meaning it has. It’s nothing to be particularly proud of. I’ve got the corpses of a Japanese cipher expert in New York and a Norwegian double agent in Stockholm to thank for being a Double O. Probably quite decent people. They just got caught up in the gale of the world like that Yugoslav that Tito bumped off. It’s a confusing business; but if it’s one’s profession one does what one’s told.’

That’s not somebody who nurses a pathological desire to kill and mow down countless enemy troops - though he will kill a specific opponent if told so. Or if he has to in the course of self defence.

Over the years Bond’s readiness to kill becomes noticeably less pronounced. In Berlin he refuses to kill his KGB opposite because he judges maiming to be enough. And his plan to eliminate Scaramanga is essentially to dare him into a gunslinger duel where Bond hopes to come out on top. The ideal moment to act, when he’s sitting behind Scaramanga in a car, he lets slip because he doesn’t like to kill in cold blood and doesn’t like the prospect of having to kill the driver too.

Bond isn’t a pacifist by any stretch of the imagination. But the character described by Fleming values life probably more than many contemporary characters in fiction. And sadly in real life.

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For my taste, the eras of Connery, Moore and Dalton had the right approach here that would still work today.

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I took a look at Bond kill count in preparation for my last post.
https://www.007museum.com/kill_in_bondfilm.htm
Interestingly GoldenEye has a higher kill count than TND, highest of any Bond film in fact. I think TND came off worse as the majority come during the climatic battle whereas GE’s are spread more evenly thought the various shoot-outs.

This is probably a sign of the times. Action films of the 80’s and 90’s were very different in their approach.

A great way of looking at it.

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As did most special forces operatives especially in WW2. It may sometimes necessary but isn’t palatable.

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Goldeneye I would lump in with the cartoonish like YOLT’s big battle scenes. But it does have the machine gun sequence in the opening. And Xenia at the satellite station. That’s probably where the kill count exceeds TND’s, but even Orumov is a little dismayed by it. With TND nobody is dismayed by it.

Late 80’s to mid 90’s was big into that. The cast of The Expendables made an entire career out of making those kind of films at the time.

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Just to clarify, when I was comparing the kill counts I was talking about Bond’s own kills rather than the overall body count.
But what you said about other characters react is also a good point about how the violence is presented.

Really? What are the numbers?

It’s interesting that one of the moments that always comes up as the coolest or most defining for movie Bond is the ā€œYou had your sixā€ scene. That involved exactly two people, two guns and a bit of memorable dialog. Another is the battle with Grant on the Orient Express, a mano-a-mano struggle capping nearly two hours of mounting tension. Meanwhile I have NEVER heard anyone single out the machine-gunning in TND or similar bloodbaths for equal praise.

I think maybe the film that got it closest to ā€œrightā€ – and certainly the best recent example – is Casino Royale. The messy, choatic killing in the men’s room during the PTS, the battle on the stairwell that’s followed up with Bond staring at himself in the mirror as if thinking, ā€œGood god, what AM I?ā€ and the tense struggle for the knife at the BodyWorks exhibit that no one else in the room knows is even happening…THIS is the kind of stuff that works for Bond, and as good cinema, period. It may be ā€œkewlā€ to have a hero who can wipe out foes by the score, but it does not make for engaging viewing. I can admire it on a technical level, but I don’t really care.

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Perfectly put.

One would hope the-powers-that-be take note.