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selenakDisclaimer: I invoke the death of the author principle for this one. Meaning: no, I don't claim anyone - scriptwriters, producers, directors, actors - involved in the production of the last three Bond movies actually intended any of this. Also, I'm well aware you can read the films very differently (including as a long exercise in misogyny); my own, different interpretation is undoubtedly influenced by what I want to see. But then, this is how we read any myths, those born of current pop culture as much as those created by the ancient Greeks. * This being said: here is the story I, personally, saw Casino Royale, Quantum of Solace and Skyfall creating.
The Bond formula has entered pop culture consciousness so much that in the 90s, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine would do an episode ("Our Man Bahir") based on it without ever using the name "James Bond" once, and yet count on the audience knowing exactly whom regular character Julian Bashir is impersonating, and what typical elements of a Bond film are parodied/used. With most Bond films, no matter from which era and which actor they star, it doesn't particularly matter in which order you watch them: they're self contained, and if there is a vague nod to continuity ( for example: "James has been married," says Felix Leiter to his bride in "License to Kill" when she doesn't get why a joke about marriage makes Bond (Timothy Dalton version) look glum, but you don't have to be familiar with In Her Majesty's Secret Service (Bond: George Lazenby) , where the marriage happens, to understand Dalton!Bond or either of his two films), it never forms an important part of the story.
With the decision to go back to the very first Bond novel, Casino Royale, as a story basis, and tell it as a James Bond origin story - which never existed in the previous films, or, for that matter, the novels, including CR - , to play Quantum of Solace as a direct sequel that's virtually incomprehensible if you haven't watched Casino Royale, however, it became possible to see a longer story, which, in Skyfall, reaches a thematic conclusion. Not to be coy about it: it centers around Death/(Re)Birth, melding the two into one in a way that appeals not only to the Neil Gaiman reader in me. (Death in Gaiman's Sandman is not only the entity that everyone meets when they die but the first one they encounter when being born - she makes the transition for them in both cases.) Casino Royale opens with Bond killing two men, with the two killings, one played as brutal hand-to-hand combat, the other as a sparring with words followed with a blood-free classic spy film shot, intercut: these deaths are what makes him a 00 agent. The whole film is about the building of the Bond persona, which at the start doesn't exist yet (which is why we hear the classic musical Bond theme only at the end), and at the same time about the cost. It's a build up and deconstruction at the same time. "I've made my own choices," Bond says in Skyfall when the film's villain postulates that he and Bond are both M's creations, literal lab rats, and his counter part replies: "That's her genius; she made you think you did."
"She" being M. Now Skyfall's villain is by no means a reliable source of information, but as in all good stories, the truth is in between. Bond was created as well as creating himself, and while there are several forces and factors at work, the primary creator is M. Making the head of the secret service female instead of male allows her a mythical dimension a male equivalent couldn't, and can't have. M stands for many things, including, but by no means limited to, "Mother". ("Your mother?" asks Camille in Quantum of Solace. "She likes to think so," replies Bond, even though she rejects that appellation in the same film. "Mummy has been very bad," says Silva in Skyfall even while making a sexual overture to Bond and declaring it to be all about M.) The mother country, too: when it comes down to it, the reason for it all. If you kill for a living and want to see yourself as someone who does it for more than kicks, you need a reason. Saving the Western world is no longer it. "If we never did business with villains, there wouldn't be anyone left to do business with," the minister tells M in Quantum of Solace, which is scathing about geopolitics, and the three Craig!Bond movies no longer give into the illusion the original Bond films maintained, that Britain is a super power on the level of the US (and back then, Russia). Skyfall , a good third of which is actually set in Britain instead of in random "exotic" locations, offers Turner's painting of the Fighting Temeraire in the National Gallery and the titular house (which turns out to be Bond's first home) as explicit stand-ins for M, and the country. For non-Brits and non-Americans like yours truly, it's worth brushing up just which national myth Turner's painting depicts. To quote a handy description: In the hellish tempest of the Battle of Trafalgar, in an act of almost suicidal valour, the Temeraire's captain chose to draw fire away from the Victory, in which Nelson lay dying. (Obvious plot foreshadowing in Skyfall is obvious.) When the battered Temeraire was later brought back into the harbor, a young Turner saw it happen, which is the origin of the picture. It's sad, says young Q in Skyfall, watching the painting, to think of her, this great battleship, being towed away, decommissioned, hauled for scraps. (M has been told in no uncertain terms that her term as head of the service is over; she gets the blame for the ongoing deaths and will be forced to retire once the current inquiry is over.) Then he asks Bond what he sees. Bond, however, doesn't see something doomed to die: he sees "a bloody great ship".
Mendes' camera, instead of softening her looks, lingers in awe over every wrinkle Judi Dench has, just as it exposes Bond's shaky state, hair looking more grey than blond now, blood shot eyes. The modern MI6 headquarters get bombed early on and the service retreats to Churchill's old bunkers, underground. It's London Below. The shadows, which is where M is Queen. One with scars, and under attack. And by no means without her own guilt. M is not an innocent: this, too, makes her a symbol of the country responsible for its shares of deaths and exploitations. "You know the story, you know all of it, you've always known," Bond says to her when she asks about his dead parents, and she replies: " Orphans make the best recruits." When she makes Bond into 007 at the start of Casino Royale - when she gives Bond the means to make himself into this - she makes him a killer.
She also keeps pushing him to remember the cost of being one, and not to let death itself become the purpose. When, near the end of Casino Royale, Bond, having loved and lost Vesper, retreats into the now nearly complete persona and affects indifference, saying (which is a direct quote from the novel the film was based on): "The bitch is dead", M immediately (which isn't in the novel and is strictly the films' addendum and change) reproves him and points out that Vesper saved as well as betrayed him: that, in fact, he owes his life to her. (Not so coincidentally, the other time Bond uses the term "bitch", it's for M in the Skyfall psych evaluation he knows she's listening in on.) The dilemma Vesper was in - blackmailed with the death of one man she loves in a set up that calls for the death of another -, she solved by actually saving them both. (As far as Vesper knows; I'll get to the QoS reveal about her "captured" lover in a moment.) Quantum of Solace has been described about Bond avenging Vesper; that's one of the things he does, but actually the main emotional task is to stop blaming her and pretending to hate her, and to live with the fact he could not save her. Which is avenging-via-killing actually is what Bond's fellow "damaged goods", as a villain calls them both, and comrade for QaS, Camille, does at the climax of her story, while Bond's big effort at the end of his quest in the second film is to not kill his enemy, the man who set Vesper up and started the development that led to her death, but to deliver him to M instead. M challenging Bond to bring in a villain alive instead of dead and him failing to do so is something of a cynical running gag through the first two films, until he finally manages it at the end of QoA. He manages something else, too: saving himself and Camille after Camille has completed her vengeance. They're both suicidally reckless and traumatized in that film, but in the end, she doesn't want to die, and neither does her. In Casino Royale, Vesper dies in the water, hastening her death when she sees otherwise Bond will die with her. But the man who emerges from the water with Vesper's corpse is only half alive and (nearly) all enshelled. In Quantum of Solace, Camille (who, in new territory for the Bond films, at no point becomes Bond's lover or even as much as flirts with him, or vice versa) and Bond survive and get another shot at life through the fire.
In Skyfall, both elements are there. Turner's painting again: the Temeraire, drawing fire, on water. Bond at the start of the film falls into water after getting shot because M, when having to choose between greater cause and individual life always picks the cause, and comes out half alive again, and of course there's a bookend near the film's climax where he falls into water again, this time by his own choice, and emerges whole once more. In between, there are two fires: Silva blowing up the MI6 headquarters, M's home, to taunt her before destroying her and Bond blowing up Skyfall, his own home, to destroy Silva's cronies and save M.
M has already received the wound that will kill her by then, though she hides it. If she creates killers (not just in the sense of training agents), there is a symmetry in her dying, in a way, of her own creations. Though it is not Silva directly who kills her. I find this appropriate because it denies Silva, who has seen "Duel in the Sun" once too often, both of his two goals: to kill M and to be killed by her, or rather, drive M to kill them both. M, otoh, while having blood on her hands both literally and metaphorically never buys into that type of self-romantisizing nihilism: she always has a purpose, and remember, death is only one of the two gifts she deals out. Quantum of Solace already plays, briefly, with the scenario of Bond on the run and having to wonder whether or not M wants him dead; with the question of how far they trust each other. In Skyfall, it's not "just" her decision to sacrifice him for the greater good that smarts at the start but, as he says, the fact she didn't trust him "to get the job done" himself. When she clears him for duty despite his having failed every single test and thus, rationally, being in no condition to fight, you can see this, as Silva does when taunting Bond, as her being willing to send him to his death all over again, or, as Bond interprets it, as the exact opposite: an expression of faith. Against all odds. When Vesper in Casino Royale restarts Bond's heart, it's an obvious metaphor for what she does emotionally. What M does is giving him life back, after taking it, by giving him faith.
"What's Bond's thing with cradling people?"likeadeuce asked, rethorically, when commenting on Quantum of Solace, and indeed all three of the recent films use the gesture for crucial emotional moments. Bond cradles Vesper after she killed with her own hands for the first time, under the shower, and at that moment they truly emotionally connect; and he does after he death, when he retreats into being the soulless killer persona she first saw him in. He spends half of Quantum of Solace in that mode until Mathis dies, and during Mathis' death scene abandons it completely, being openly tender towards the older man. "We forgive each other, then?" Mathis asks, and forgiveness, as I mentioned, is one of the elusive emotional goals of the film. The second cradling in QoS comes after Camille killed her villain and is seemingly trapped by the fire of her childhood, and Bond has the option of life and death for both himself and her again: it's the only tender gesture towards a woman he makes in the film, including the brief interlude with the unfortunate Fields, QoS's version of the doomed secondary Bond Girl. In Skyfall, the people cradled are again a man and a woman, Bond's dying fellow agent Bronson at the start, and M near the end. It's the combination of love and death, but not love as Eros; Agape. (This is why Silva, who is as villains tend to be a twisted version of Bond, goes for the combination of Eros-and-Death when trying to get M to kill them both and is rejected.)
But the intertwining of love and death would still result in a myth that's negative and aiming at annihilation were it not for the element of sharing and rebirth. The gift of faith is mutual; at his most lost, Bond doesn't doubt M's righteousness (a brand of righteousness that enables her to sacrifice people who trust her, yes, but which makes her just as ruthless towards herself and her own life, and does not put that life above the realm, realm in the sense of both organisation and country she serves), and so he can give her more than killing in her service. Silva's computer taunt at M is "remember your sins"; Bond never forgets her virtues, and at the last quiet moment they have together before the big showdown, the one point in the film where M admits doubt in the presence of another person, he can repeat what she angrily said in a far earlier scene and believe it utterly, that she did her duty. They're both worn out, deadpan, battered and framing their mutual compliments/avowals of trust in irony, but they mean it: shadow people, the Queen and her knight.
There is something medieval about them, and not only them. The Algerian necklace Vesper wears in Casino Royale, which in the end pledges her to her death, is a token that dooms her, and Bond keeps it but in Quantum of Solace can change the meaning: he uses it to expose and doom (but not kill) the man who betrayed her and by that also keeps another woman from Vesper's fate. The various equipment pieces Bond collects in the course of that film - the gun, the car, the tuxedo, the martini - all belong to the complete James Bond persona which is a trap as well as an armor. The tacky British bull dog figurine from M's desk, which survived Silva's destructions and which Bond hated is what M leaves him, both a last dig (well, he did call her a bitch) and a last exchange of faith. As with M's clearance of Bond for duty, there are two interpretations given: Eve thinks it means M suggests desk duty for Bond, Bond thinks it means just the opposite. Either way, it means M was sure he'd survive, and continue. Continue for what? Much of Skyfall takes place under ground - the old WW bunkers, the London tube system, the decrepit old Scottish house with its life saving tunnels, the Macau casino - or among ruins (Silva's island), but for this scene, we're not only in broad daylight, with a clear sky, but also on the rooftop, overlooking a London that is both old and new, and alive. And M's last message is brought by Eve, whose last name, as it turns out - like Mathis', like Mallory's - ,also starts with M, and whose first name is that of the first woman: Eve, who, like M in her younger days, made the transition from field agent to administration, and who in the service of duty both dealt out death and life to Bond. She's part of the image of rebirth and renewal the film leaves us with: the symbol of the present and future. If James Bond, 007, will return, as every Bond film promises, it's because Bond, who will never make the transition from knight to ruler because that's not his myth, has something other than himself to return to and fight for.
*If Aristophanes' comedies are anything to go buy, Euripides' female characters were seen as a slander on the sex and women bashing - and if your fellow ancient Greeks think you're a misogynist, um... - but today Euripides' female characters stand out as the most interesting, subversive and agenda-having of all Greek tragedy has to offer.
The Bond formula has entered pop culture consciousness so much that in the 90s, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine would do an episode ("Our Man Bahir") based on it without ever using the name "James Bond" once, and yet count on the audience knowing exactly whom regular character Julian Bashir is impersonating, and what typical elements of a Bond film are parodied/used. With most Bond films, no matter from which era and which actor they star, it doesn't particularly matter in which order you watch them: they're self contained, and if there is a vague nod to continuity ( for example: "James has been married," says Felix Leiter to his bride in "License to Kill" when she doesn't get why a joke about marriage makes Bond (Timothy Dalton version) look glum, but you don't have to be familiar with In Her Majesty's Secret Service (Bond: George Lazenby) , where the marriage happens, to understand Dalton!Bond or either of his two films), it never forms an important part of the story.
With the decision to go back to the very first Bond novel, Casino Royale, as a story basis, and tell it as a James Bond origin story - which never existed in the previous films, or, for that matter, the novels, including CR - , to play Quantum of Solace as a direct sequel that's virtually incomprehensible if you haven't watched Casino Royale, however, it became possible to see a longer story, which, in Skyfall, reaches a thematic conclusion. Not to be coy about it: it centers around Death/(Re)Birth, melding the two into one in a way that appeals not only to the Neil Gaiman reader in me. (Death in Gaiman's Sandman is not only the entity that everyone meets when they die but the first one they encounter when being born - she makes the transition for them in both cases.) Casino Royale opens with Bond killing two men, with the two killings, one played as brutal hand-to-hand combat, the other as a sparring with words followed with a blood-free classic spy film shot, intercut: these deaths are what makes him a 00 agent. The whole film is about the building of the Bond persona, which at the start doesn't exist yet (which is why we hear the classic musical Bond theme only at the end), and at the same time about the cost. It's a build up and deconstruction at the same time. "I've made my own choices," Bond says in Skyfall when the film's villain postulates that he and Bond are both M's creations, literal lab rats, and his counter part replies: "That's her genius; she made you think you did."
"She" being M. Now Skyfall's villain is by no means a reliable source of information, but as in all good stories, the truth is in between. Bond was created as well as creating himself, and while there are several forces and factors at work, the primary creator is M. Making the head of the secret service female instead of male allows her a mythical dimension a male equivalent couldn't, and can't have. M stands for many things, including, but by no means limited to, "Mother". ("Your mother?" asks Camille in Quantum of Solace. "She likes to think so," replies Bond, even though she rejects that appellation in the same film. "Mummy has been very bad," says Silva in Skyfall even while making a sexual overture to Bond and declaring it to be all about M.) The mother country, too: when it comes down to it, the reason for it all. If you kill for a living and want to see yourself as someone who does it for more than kicks, you need a reason. Saving the Western world is no longer it. "If we never did business with villains, there wouldn't be anyone left to do business with," the minister tells M in Quantum of Solace, which is scathing about geopolitics, and the three Craig!Bond movies no longer give into the illusion the original Bond films maintained, that Britain is a super power on the level of the US (and back then, Russia). Skyfall , a good third of which is actually set in Britain instead of in random "exotic" locations, offers Turner's painting of the Fighting Temeraire in the National Gallery and the titular house (which turns out to be Bond's first home) as explicit stand-ins for M, and the country. For non-Brits and non-Americans like yours truly, it's worth brushing up just which national myth Turner's painting depicts. To quote a handy description: In the hellish tempest of the Battle of Trafalgar, in an act of almost suicidal valour, the Temeraire's captain chose to draw fire away from the Victory, in which Nelson lay dying. (Obvious plot foreshadowing in Skyfall is obvious.) When the battered Temeraire was later brought back into the harbor, a young Turner saw it happen, which is the origin of the picture. It's sad, says young Q in Skyfall, watching the painting, to think of her, this great battleship, being towed away, decommissioned, hauled for scraps. (M has been told in no uncertain terms that her term as head of the service is over; she gets the blame for the ongoing deaths and will be forced to retire once the current inquiry is over.) Then he asks Bond what he sees. Bond, however, doesn't see something doomed to die: he sees "a bloody great ship".
Mendes' camera, instead of softening her looks, lingers in awe over every wrinkle Judi Dench has, just as it exposes Bond's shaky state, hair looking more grey than blond now, blood shot eyes. The modern MI6 headquarters get bombed early on and the service retreats to Churchill's old bunkers, underground. It's London Below. The shadows, which is where M is Queen. One with scars, and under attack. And by no means without her own guilt. M is not an innocent: this, too, makes her a symbol of the country responsible for its shares of deaths and exploitations. "You know the story, you know all of it, you've always known," Bond says to her when she asks about his dead parents, and she replies: " Orphans make the best recruits." When she makes Bond into 007 at the start of Casino Royale - when she gives Bond the means to make himself into this - she makes him a killer.
She also keeps pushing him to remember the cost of being one, and not to let death itself become the purpose. When, near the end of Casino Royale, Bond, having loved and lost Vesper, retreats into the now nearly complete persona and affects indifference, saying (which is a direct quote from the novel the film was based on): "The bitch is dead", M immediately (which isn't in the novel and is strictly the films' addendum and change) reproves him and points out that Vesper saved as well as betrayed him: that, in fact, he owes his life to her. (Not so coincidentally, the other time Bond uses the term "bitch", it's for M in the Skyfall psych evaluation he knows she's listening in on.) The dilemma Vesper was in - blackmailed with the death of one man she loves in a set up that calls for the death of another -, she solved by actually saving them both. (As far as Vesper knows; I'll get to the QoS reveal about her "captured" lover in a moment.) Quantum of Solace has been described about Bond avenging Vesper; that's one of the things he does, but actually the main emotional task is to stop blaming her and pretending to hate her, and to live with the fact he could not save her. Which is avenging-via-killing actually is what Bond's fellow "damaged goods", as a villain calls them both, and comrade for QaS, Camille, does at the climax of her story, while Bond's big effort at the end of his quest in the second film is to not kill his enemy, the man who set Vesper up and started the development that led to her death, but to deliver him to M instead. M challenging Bond to bring in a villain alive instead of dead and him failing to do so is something of a cynical running gag through the first two films, until he finally manages it at the end of QoA. He manages something else, too: saving himself and Camille after Camille has completed her vengeance. They're both suicidally reckless and traumatized in that film, but in the end, she doesn't want to die, and neither does her. In Casino Royale, Vesper dies in the water, hastening her death when she sees otherwise Bond will die with her. But the man who emerges from the water with Vesper's corpse is only half alive and (nearly) all enshelled. In Quantum of Solace, Camille (who, in new territory for the Bond films, at no point becomes Bond's lover or even as much as flirts with him, or vice versa) and Bond survive and get another shot at life through the fire.
In Skyfall, both elements are there. Turner's painting again: the Temeraire, drawing fire, on water. Bond at the start of the film falls into water after getting shot because M, when having to choose between greater cause and individual life always picks the cause, and comes out half alive again, and of course there's a bookend near the film's climax where he falls into water again, this time by his own choice, and emerges whole once more. In between, there are two fires: Silva blowing up the MI6 headquarters, M's home, to taunt her before destroying her and Bond blowing up Skyfall, his own home, to destroy Silva's cronies and save M.
M has already received the wound that will kill her by then, though she hides it. If she creates killers (not just in the sense of training agents), there is a symmetry in her dying, in a way, of her own creations. Though it is not Silva directly who kills her. I find this appropriate because it denies Silva, who has seen "Duel in the Sun" once too often, both of his two goals: to kill M and to be killed by her, or rather, drive M to kill them both. M, otoh, while having blood on her hands both literally and metaphorically never buys into that type of self-romantisizing nihilism: she always has a purpose, and remember, death is only one of the two gifts she deals out. Quantum of Solace already plays, briefly, with the scenario of Bond on the run and having to wonder whether or not M wants him dead; with the question of how far they trust each other. In Skyfall, it's not "just" her decision to sacrifice him for the greater good that smarts at the start but, as he says, the fact she didn't trust him "to get the job done" himself. When she clears him for duty despite his having failed every single test and thus, rationally, being in no condition to fight, you can see this, as Silva does when taunting Bond, as her being willing to send him to his death all over again, or, as Bond interprets it, as the exact opposite: an expression of faith. Against all odds. When Vesper in Casino Royale restarts Bond's heart, it's an obvious metaphor for what she does emotionally. What M does is giving him life back, after taking it, by giving him faith.
"What's Bond's thing with cradling people?"
likeadeuce asked, rethorically, when commenting on Quantum of Solace, and indeed all three of the recent films use the gesture for crucial emotional moments. Bond cradles Vesper after she killed with her own hands for the first time, under the shower, and at that moment they truly emotionally connect; and he does after he death, when he retreats into being the soulless killer persona she first saw him in. He spends half of Quantum of Solace in that mode until Mathis dies, and during Mathis' death scene abandons it completely, being openly tender towards the older man. "We forgive each other, then?" Mathis asks, and forgiveness, as I mentioned, is one of the elusive emotional goals of the film. The second cradling in QoS comes after Camille killed her villain and is seemingly trapped by the fire of her childhood, and Bond has the option of life and death for both himself and her again: it's the only tender gesture towards a woman he makes in the film, including the brief interlude with the unfortunate Fields, QoS's version of the doomed secondary Bond Girl. In Skyfall, the people cradled are again a man and a woman, Bond's dying fellow agent Bronson at the start, and M near the end. It's the combination of love and death, but not love as Eros; Agape. (This is why Silva, who is as villains tend to be a twisted version of Bond, goes for the combination of Eros-and-Death when trying to get M to kill them both and is rejected.) But the intertwining of love and death would still result in a myth that's negative and aiming at annihilation were it not for the element of sharing and rebirth. The gift of faith is mutual; at his most lost, Bond doesn't doubt M's righteousness (a brand of righteousness that enables her to sacrifice people who trust her, yes, but which makes her just as ruthless towards herself and her own life, and does not put that life above the realm, realm in the sense of both organisation and country she serves), and so he can give her more than killing in her service. Silva's computer taunt at M is "remember your sins"; Bond never forgets her virtues, and at the last quiet moment they have together before the big showdown, the one point in the film where M admits doubt in the presence of another person, he can repeat what she angrily said in a far earlier scene and believe it utterly, that she did her duty. They're both worn out, deadpan, battered and framing their mutual compliments/avowals of trust in irony, but they mean it: shadow people, the Queen and her knight.
There is something medieval about them, and not only them. The Algerian necklace Vesper wears in Casino Royale, which in the end pledges her to her death, is a token that dooms her, and Bond keeps it but in Quantum of Solace can change the meaning: he uses it to expose and doom (but not kill) the man who betrayed her and by that also keeps another woman from Vesper's fate. The various equipment pieces Bond collects in the course of that film - the gun, the car, the tuxedo, the martini - all belong to the complete James Bond persona which is a trap as well as an armor. The tacky British bull dog figurine from M's desk, which survived Silva's destructions and which Bond hated is what M leaves him, both a last dig (well, he did call her a bitch) and a last exchange of faith. As with M's clearance of Bond for duty, there are two interpretations given: Eve thinks it means M suggests desk duty for Bond, Bond thinks it means just the opposite. Either way, it means M was sure he'd survive, and continue. Continue for what? Much of Skyfall takes place under ground - the old WW bunkers, the London tube system, the decrepit old Scottish house with its life saving tunnels, the Macau casino - or among ruins (Silva's island), but for this scene, we're not only in broad daylight, with a clear sky, but also on the rooftop, overlooking a London that is both old and new, and alive. And M's last message is brought by Eve, whose last name, as it turns out - like Mathis', like Mallory's - ,also starts with M, and whose first name is that of the first woman: Eve, who, like M in her younger days, made the transition from field agent to administration, and who in the service of duty both dealt out death and life to Bond. She's part of the image of rebirth and renewal the film leaves us with: the symbol of the present and future. If James Bond, 007, will return, as every Bond film promises, it's because Bond, who will never make the transition from knight to ruler because that's not his myth, has something other than himself to return to and fight for.
*If Aristophanes' comedies are anything to go buy, Euripides' female characters were seen as a slander on the sex and women bashing - and if your fellow ancient Greeks think you're a misogynist, um... - but today Euripides' female characters stand out as the most interesting, subversive and agenda-having of all Greek tragedy has to offer.
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Date: 2012-11-06 03:26 pm (UTC)Ooh, meant to ask if you'd heard about this?
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Date: 2012-11-06 03:41 pm (UTC)Re: McKellen/Jacobi: I have, via
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Date: 2012-11-09 02:19 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-11-09 12:19 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-11-11 11:03 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-11-11 11:15 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-11-11 01:19 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-11-12 02:08 pm (UTC)And thank you for using my James icon with credit! Glad you like it. :)
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Date: 2012-11-12 02:28 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-11-12 02:32 pm (UTC)And I'm very curious in what direction the next Craig Bond films will go and what they will do with the various characters. Especially Bond himself, Moneypenny, the relationship between Eve and James and the relationship between Bond and Mallory (I still can't call him M yet). I don't want it to become what it was in earlier Bond films. I want more complexity. Well, we'll have to wait and see.
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Date: 2012-11-12 04:05 pm (UTC)Well , that's my guess for the next four years anyway, or however long till the next film.:)
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Date: 2012-11-12 04:10 pm (UTC)I can see how Mallory would be a transitional M and I agree his relationship with Bond won't be father-son.
Really hoping we don't have to wait four years for the next one. The quicker they make the next films, the longer we can have Craig play Bond before he is too old for the role.
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Date: 2012-11-20 04:01 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-11-20 06:32 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-11-20 03:08 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-11-12 07:09 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-11-13 12:58 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-11-20 04:05 am (UTC)And my, what a write out for Dench's M, a character I was intensely, madly in love with throughout my teens and twenties. Bless Barbara Broccoli for delivering unto an entire generation of young women her father's work.
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Date: 2012-11-20 04:52 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-11-20 11:12 am (UTC)This is all kinds of fabulous. Picks many things I'd registered but not been able to put into words.
I felt the movie was very much wiping the slate clean, ready for whatever's going to come up next. Bond's past has been destroyed, in a sense; there's no more Skyfall to shackle him. MI6 has also had a ritual cleansing with fire and a new guard's been established. They can now pretty much take Bond in any direction they please, which opens up all sorts of possibilities. I, for one, can't wait to see what they do.
I hope you don't mind, but I've friended you on LJ - I really like your reviews and meta stuff!
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Date: 2012-11-20 03:24 pm (UTC)no subject
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