James Bond Appreciation Thread

[Rome's rightful successor]

 

[Mr. Zed da Robot Poon Fed]

So adding to my previous posts, now having finished the Craig movies as well and the series overall.

S

• Skyfall - This movie rules. I love Javier Bardem, but I also hate how it was planned to be the last Craig Bond movie, only for then to release the sequels.

A

• Quantum of Solace - The good thing about this movie is that it's the shortest, and it should be considered a fourth and final act of Casinò Royale overall. I like the villain, but I am still pissed at how they killed off Mathis.

C

• No Time To Die - First part of this movie, up until Felix's death? Solid as fuck. And they sideline Ana De Armas, kill off Jeffrey Wright like a fucking bitch, dump in the trash what's left of Brofeld, and then throw you into the island endgame against a slightly better played villain, with a better motivation (compared to Brofeld) for the events of this movie that weren't just "Daddy loved you more than me." Also nice try making the new 007 a POC woman, worked charms.

D

• Spectre Fuck Brofeld, fuck the waste of Christoph Waltz, fuck every actor whispering lines and the whole retcon ending of every Craig villain into Spectre. Most of all, Silva. I know he was a freelancer for the highest bidder, but he was not after Bond in the previous movie, he wanted M to pay.

Side note: what I did really notice from the Craig movies, is how fucking useless and a waste of screen time for other characters is Tanner. Instead of having him do the menial shit, it should be calling this or that, certain scenes in No Time To Die could've been perfectly fine if Tanner was to be erased from the screen, giving Moneypenny, the other 007, Q and M more 'air to breathe'.

And I'm done, back to reading Casinò Royale.

I agree that Skyfall was the best of the Craig Bond films, the only one I bothered going to the theatres for.

View attachment 5374314

As long as it's not as convoluted as Tenet, this might peak my interest.

 

[Mary the Goldsmith]

Nolan doing a Bond film, I have my doubts mainly because I feel he loves doing convoluted shit just to get the reddit pseudo-intellectuals to think the film is some deep piece of art.
On the other hand, this also means the film wont be saturated with shitty CGI, I wonder who he is gonna cast in the lead.

 

[IDanceonTrannyGraves]

I've been reading the books off and on, and they're pretty great.

 

[Introvertigo]

So this is happening:

https://www.variety.com/2023/tv/global/brian-cox-james-bond-reality-series-trailer-007-road-to-a-million-1235744418/?fbclid=IwAR2GtnFq71CPYG0Kvhyj9ypTVwWzXH9r3dWTFQm-d-sbPJyzudXLAMa5qSY

 

[Curious Lurker]

https://www.npr.org/2025/02/20/g-s1-49866/amazon-has-acquired-creative-control-of-the-james-bond-franchise

So this happened...ngl i'm seething here , James Bond is one of my favorite series

The slopfication is imminent, we are getting nigger Bond guaranteed now. Or god forbid, a She Bond

 

[Raging Capybara]

I have watched all the movies, from Dr No to No Time to Die. But the journey ends right now.

It was super fun while it lasted. Half a century is not for everyone.

 

[khaine]

Super depressed about the future of the franchise.

 

[Commander X]

https://www.npr.org/2025/02/20/g-s1-49866/amazon-has-acquired-creative-control-of-the-james-bond-franchise

So this happened...ngl i'm seething here , James Bond is one of my favorite series

The slopfication is imminent, we are getting nigger Bond guaranteed now. Or god forbid, a She Bond

It was probably a good deal for Eon, because James Bond is a completely done franchise and the last movie was no one's favorite. With the overpaid Craig gone, it was improbable they'd ever find a replacement who was gay enough while still having broad appeal (as opposed to appealing to...) As we've seen in so many franchises, those days are long gone. What hasn't gone is producers and studios' need to keep recycling old IP names forever, like how Amazon did a Road House remake for no reason, or Crackle's attempt at a modern series based on Guy Ritchie's second film Snatch.

Besides POC or Girl Power-Bond we also have a chance at seeing Amazon produce:

A boring prequel series full of the sort of ponderous fixation on franchise mythology that weighed down No Time To Die.

Other series about all the secondary characters, like a Moneypenny series about how, like in QoS, she was a kickass girlboss.

Other series about all the villains and their backstories.

I'm sure it will be "ambitious" but any attempts at Bond spin-offs will probably flop like the MCU and Star Wars streaming series.

 

[Raging Capybara]

You are right, Bond will become just a shit series on amazon prime.

Yearly low-budget slop to get dumped on their streaming service. Say goodbye to famous actors, beautiful locations around the world, enormous set pieces, larger-than-life sets, and all the high production value Bond films always had.

People joked about the shitty CGI in Die Another Day, but it'll become just the rule for Amazon, green screen trash for their 12-episode shitty series with retarded action scenes and literally whos playing the villains.

But if they decide to make a theatrical Bond film (I doubt), it'll certainly be the worst of the series by far, and I'm not going to watch it.

I'm glad EON killed Bond in the last film, I think they did it on purpose, they probably knew the future of the series was not sustainable anymore. It's just impossible to keep a ridiculously expensive series alive when movie theaters are disappearing. Box office nowadays is just fucking shit.

 

[ZMOT]

I'm glad EON killed Bond in the last film, I think they did it on purpose, they probably knew the future of the series was not sustainable anymore. It's just impossible to keep a ridiculously expensive series alive when movie theaters are disappearing. Box office nowadays is just fucking shit.

mission impossible still makes money.
the whole reason theatres are disappearing is because there's nothing to watch anymore. it's easy to have some amazon-slop bond series about moneypenny's girlboss troubles as background noises doing literally anything else, but bombastic spectacle-kino blowing your socks off isn't the same no matter how big your 4k TV is.

 

[Captain Syrup]

mission impossible still makes money.
the whole reason theatres are disappearing is because there's nothing to watch anymore. it's easy to have some amazon-slop bond series about moneypenny's girlboss troubles as background noises doing literally anything else, but bombastic spectacle-kino blowing your socks off isn't the same no matter how big your 4k TV is.

There’s no one ready to step in when Cruise finally calls it quits. When he’s gone, the Mission Impossible franchise will go with him.

Now, we’ve seen with Bond that constantly swapping out the lead isn’t exactly a strength. People expect him to keep up this streak, but the second he has a bad film, it’s game over. He’ll just be stuck treading water, chasing his own tail, until the next forgettable guy shows up.

People also expect more from James Bond, which is why it gets hammered when it doesn’t deliver. But with Mission Impossible, everyone’s just expecting mindless action. So, when it actually manages to impress, it's a low bar to clear.

I’ve never bothered with the Mission Impossible show, but I’m guessing it doesn’t have all the same iconography that James Bond does. With Bond, whenever the script is weak, it’s always the same old clichés to fall back on. Not just Spectre, but the endlessly tired plot of MI6 being shut down.

But I can’t exactly blame Bond for clinging to nostalgia. They tried something bold with Quantum of Solace, and nobody liked it. That’s why they keep going back to what works – even if it flops.

 

[AvonHertz]

Mission: Impossible the TV show was a completely different animal compared to Bond and even the M:I movies. The original series was more about clever capers and slight of hand trickery to fool villains into either giving away their plans to the authorities or set up bad guys to be killed by their own organization. Some episodes had the IMF trick people into thinking they were in the future or past to get information they needed. Though the M:I movies did incorporate some of that into the movies with the face masks and the self destructing mission briefings.

Bond was on a downward spiral for a while now. The problem with the more recent Bond movies is that they were taking them way too seriously to appeal to the Oscars crowd. They were no longer trying to be fun for the whole family kind of movies and were too focused on being "Premier cinema." That and other dumb things like making Bond and his arch nemesis Blofeld foster brothers is basically stolen from Goldmember.

 

[Quarterback Rex Grossman]

https://www.npr.org/2025/02/20/g-s1-49866/amazon-has-acquired-creative-control-of-the-james-bond-franchise

So this happened...ngl i'm seething here , James Bond is one of my favorite series

The slopfication is imminent, we are getting nigger Bond guaranteed now. Or god forbid, a She Bond

Meh. I saw this happening years ago, I just thought Babs would wait until Michael Wilson croaked before selling it all off. She obviously hasn't given a shit about the Franchise since about 2008.

Everything after Quantum has been pure ass. Bond is bi, Q is gay, Moneypenny is a sassy black woman, Bond is a cuck, Bond is a cuck times two who gets replaced by a sassy black woman, Bond dies like a little beyotch.

 

[Commander X]

Mission: Impossible the TV show was a completely different animal compared to Bond and even the M:I movies. The original series was more about clever capers and slight of hand trickery to fool villains into either giving away their plans to the authorities or set up bad guys to be killed by their own organization. Some episodes had the IMF trick people into thinking they were in the future or past to get information they needed.

One of the prime examples of this in the original M:I was the third season episode "The Mind of Stefan Miklos", which was a mental chess match between the IMF team and the titular enemy, played by TV veteran Steve Ihnat. US agent Townsend (played by TV veteran Jason Evers) was found to be a double agent and was carefully fed false information the agency wants his true nation's intelligence agency to act upon. Townsend's contact, undercover agent Simpson (played as an insecure, stammering milquetoast by none other than Ed Asner) believes the information was fake and denounced Townsend as a traitor. Aware that Simpson is resentful towards Townsend, the enemy intelligence service has sent their most brilliant man, Miklos to investigate and determine whether the intelligence is good or not. As Jim Phelps briefs his team in the beginning, Miklos is no stranger to playing mind games on opponents. He's also a cold, calculating, ruthless man, who won't let little details like Townsend being an old friend affect his reasoning. Also, Miklos has a photographic memory. In this case, the goal is to convince Miklos that Townsend was framed by the Americans to make Miklos think that the information was fake, therefore the intel must be real.

The game plan is to play on Miklos’ own cunning; to manipulate his belief in himself and his abilities. To accomplish this, Phelps and his team lead Miklos through a precise maze of small clues and have him think his way to the “right” conclusion. Banking on his photographic memory and brilliance, they attempt to get him to believe he has caught enough faint, subtle flaws and discrepancies in the US game to come to the conclusion they desire. As pointed out, Miklos is not one not easily led to a conclusion, so the IMF team's plan for Miklos must not be too obvious…but also not so byzantine that he can’t decipher it. Indeed, that becomes part of the suspense, as Phelps starts to worry at one point if the subtle clues they left were too subtle and Miklos won't pick up on them, that he's misjudged Miklos' character:

“He’s letting his emotion affect his reason. He’s never done that before. Maybe I was too clever. Maybe the matchbook and the painting and the time discrepancy were too subtle for him to pick up!”

Phelps' only advantage over Miklos in this “sting” is the fact that Simpson and Miklos have never met nor know what the other looks like. Thanks to some swapped photos and documentation, Martin Landau's operative Rollin has to impersonate Miklos when he meets Simpson and convince him he's been compromised and must flee, and then stand in for Simpson when Miklos shows up. Landau really runs with it in this episode, he nails both characters he must imitate, the coldly rational Miklos and Simpson's undercurrent of bitterness and resentment. the way he carries himself and the way his face looks is completely different when he impersonates both men, and without any makeup or wigs.

Another fun episode where they had to play fast with the gambits was the fifth season episode, "The Killer". Robert Conrad plays Eddie Lorca, mob hitman who works for the mystery man known only as Scorpio. He's been assigned a hit and the IMF's mission is to prevent that and discover Scorpio's identity. A considerable hurdle, as Phelps explains to the team is that Lorca thrives on randomness. He doesn’t make his decisions — including which method he'll use to kill his target — until the last moment and often by chance. He's a real improviser in that regard which had made him difficult to catch up with. So the team has to try to ensure that every random choice he makes leads to where they want him, and how they do it is inspired. On arriving at LAX, he picks a hotel at random out of the phone book, and team member Willy (Peter Lupus) is waiting as the cabbie — but Lorca decides at the last moment to take the next cab. And Paris (Leonard Nimoy) is driving that cab. The team has rented a vacant hotel and stripped it of all signage, and once they hear Lorca tell Paris to go to the Bower Hotel, they put a whole team of sign makers, printers, seamstresses, etc. to work putting up Bower signage and stationery all over the hotel, while Paris and Willy try to slow the cab ride down long enough despite Lorca’s urgings for haste. Then, when Lorca lets his dice pick his room number (7) Barney (Greg Morris) puts a 7 on the bugged room they’ve prepared and labels the surrounding rooms in relation to it. Thanks to the bug, they manage to substitute Dana (Lesley Ann Warren) for Scorpio's female go-between, have her meet up with Lorca, and figure out who the target is (the black president of a labor union, who with a swapped photo is being impersonated by Barney) and the team keeps trying to keep ahead of the hitman, and not let anything give away that he's being played, but his being Mr. Random complicates that...

 

[⋖ cørdion ⋗]

Bond was on a downward spiral for a while now. The problem with the more recent Bond movies is that they were taking them way too seriously to appeal to the Oscars crowd. They were no longer trying to be fun for the whole family kind of movies and were too focused on being "Premier cinema." That and other dumb things like making Bond and his arch nemesis Blofeld foster brothers is basically stolen from Goldmember.

I recently watched all the MI movies followed by modern Bond, and honestly, MI mogs the newer Bonds. The entire "national celebration of the best actors and writers" of Bond is long gone. They were somewhat up there with Potter and LotR in the whole "annual release" type event. Now, the story is dull and the action seems more like those videos of steven seagal where nobodies flop over for this great guy they've worshiped their entire lives.

I did also watch a documentary on Craig as the first bond. Completely forgot how absolutely hated he was until those beach photos emerged.

 

[khaine]

So this is what came out on the recent the rest is entertainment podcast:

“So a lot of people think that this is a bit of a smokescreen, her saying that, you know, that quote you keep seeing from her father in all the coverage of this, don't let temporary people make permanent decisions. Actually, what happened is that she was in a funk. And since the end of No Time To Die, here is the spoiler, where Bond is killed, killed off, she didn't know what to do.

And all this goes back to the relationship between her and Daniel Craig. As I said, she took over midway through the Pierce Brosnan era. But Daniel Craig was her pick.

And it was a big swing and it came off utterly amazingly. They have five incredibly successful, critically acclaimed films. Or four on Quantum of Solace.

But he was a sort of platonic ideal of what Bond was, and she had an incredibly intense relationship with him”

“But a key thing happens, which is in Skyfall, the death of M, Judy Dench. Now, of course, like everything, you have to sort of petition for it and it happened.

But that was, and it was obviously an incredible moment, but Daniel Craig, lots of people will tell you that he saw that, and he wanted a big moment for himself. He wanted a huge moment. Don't forget how hard it was always to keep him involved.

How many interviews, every time he did it, he'd say, I'm never going out there again, I'm not doing it again.”

“There should really have been a film, as you suggested, between Spectre and No Time to Die. But he was very powerful creatively too. He got a producer credit.

He went No Time to Die, eventually he was the one saying, I want Phoebe Waller-Bridge to punch this up, the script. He wanted a huge moment because it was definitely his last movie. The condition for his return was that he had this huge thing, this huge moment.

Originally, Danny Boyle was going to direct this, don't forget. It's not correct that Danny Boyle left because he was going to have to kill off Bond and he didn't want to do that. In fact, Danny Boyle wants to do all kinds of subversive things with the character, as he's talked about a lot.

Barbara Broccoli, who has a lot of ideas of what you cannot see James Bond doing, didn't want to do it. It was creative differences there.”

“And so many people connected with Bond World could not believe that she was doing this and that she had allowed this to happen. They thought it was crazy that her dad would just be like completely appalled because she had all these great instincts. But it sort of creates beyond a temporal paradox, whatever.

But the maddest thing that people couldn't understand is, okay, if you are going to do it before you even do it and before you even greenlight that decision, you've got to know how you're going to get out of it for the next movie after No Time to Die. Kick around the ideas at the time before you okay this because it's such a huge thing to do. They didn't and more to the point, they still hadn't for the last five years, bear in mind they filmed this before the pandemic.

Well, the thing is, she didn't know how to get out of it.”

“ust work out how you come back for that before you allow it to happen. But it didn't happen. Anyway, after No Time To Die, so she was stuck and there were meetings had or whatever of bringing people in.

A lot of people said this to me, that she's pining creatively for him, for Daniel Craig, who's obviously sort of moved on with this career and is doing what you would expect.”

From The Rest Is Entertainment: Bond and Meghan Markle’s Big Gamble, 25 Feb 2025

https://podcasts.apple.com/au/podcast/the-rest-is-entertainment/id1718287198?i=1000695605532&r=1822

This material may be protected by copyright.

Basically, she loved Craig too much, let him fuck everything up and doesn't know how to fix it, so has sold it.

 

[skykiii]

My favorite Bond was Ian Fleming's, though second favorite would probably be Pierce Brosnan because like many fake fans, I got into James Bond thanks to Goldeneye--the game made me watch the movie. Though it was reading the novels that really got me into it.

It's a shame Brosnan was the last Bond and the series ended after Die Another Day. I actually think Die Another Day was not a terrible movie, and it was probably a fine place to end. Apparently there were plans to do an adaptation of Casino Royale starring some blonde guy. I'm sure that would have been fine and not at all led to the typical 2000s thing of making everyone angsty and angry all the time in order to "humanize" them and definitely would not have been followed up by a boring fuck piece of shit that attempts to claim its somehow an adaptation of Quantum of Solace, a short story Bond was barely even in. And I'm sure that would not have been the point where I dropped James Bond like a hot potato.

 

[Captain Syrup]

My favorite Bond was Ian Fleming's, though second favorite would probably be Pierce Brosnan because like many fake fans, I got into James Bond thanks to Goldeneye

Fan of 35-year-old Bond movies qualifies as "real" Bond fan.

Fwiw it was hilarious hearing myself and the other American kids butcher the pronunciation of Sean Bean. ("Shawn Bon?")

 

[AvonHertz]

Casino Royale was the last good Bond movie. Everything that came after just got worse and worse.