Skyfall, 007 Legends, & rehabilitating the Bond canon

ASIDE FROM THEIR RATHER UNFORTUNATE resemblance to Austin Powers in Goldmember, one thing that’s puzzling about the two most recent Daniel Craig-starring Bonds – Skyfall and Spectre – is the inconsistent way in which they attempt to revive the canon of the old Bonds.

From 1962’s Dr. No to 2002’s Die Another Day, the twenty James Bond films existed in the same loose, yet mostly consistent, continuity; the understanding was that GoldenEye‘s opening scene took place during Timothy Dalton’s tenure in 1986, and this didn’t cause any conflict since both actors were still portraying the same character. Similarly, each of George Lazenby’s successors had scenes alluding, explicitly or implicitly, to Tracy Bond, the wife he loses at the end of On Her Majesty’s Secret Service: Sean Connery in Diamonds Are Forever, Roger Moore in For Your Eyes Only, Timothy Dalton in Licence to Kill, and Pierce Brosnan in The World is Not Enough (potentially in GoldenEye and Tomorrow Never Dies also). However, in 2006, someone at Eon decided to take a cue from Batman Begins and give the series a gritty reboot, modernising certain elements and retelling the character’s origin to keep him in line with the times*; thus, the four-film arc that Casino Royale, Quantum of Solace, Skyfall & Spectre together constitute is to be understood as a standalone timeline, that has no direct story connection with the 1962-2002 series of films.

Or not. While Casino Royale & Quantum have a hard-boiled, mostly humourless approach informed by the Bourne series, Skyfall and especially Spectre evidence a yearning for the grandiosity of the 60s Bond, even suggesting confusingly that the old continuity isn’t completely uncanonical, referencing Goldfinger‘s DB5 and GoldenEye‘s exploding pen. Possibly the world depicted in the old films is canonical to the new ones, i.e. spycraft really was sillier back in the day, but their specific stories clearly are not, since we know that neither Bond, nor Moneypenny, nor Felix Leiter nor Blofeld were around back then. A main thematic strand of Skyfall/Spectre, similarly to GoldenEye, has to do with whether Bond, an old agent with old ideals, is still relevant in the modern world. This is hard to take when Casino & Quantum‘s main thematic strand is that Bond is a hotheaded rookie, not yet made cynical by years of experience. Following The Dark Knight Trilogy (&, coincidentally, the Star Wars Prequel Trilogy, in which all but the first & final battles of the Clone Wars take place offscreen between the 2nd & 3rd entries), we seem to have missed out on seeing our hero in his Golden Age of heroism, when he was hampered by neither inexperience nor age.

Those who are dissatisfied with The Dark Knight or Star Wars can rectify the problem with some quite excellent animations (For The Dark Knight, Batman: Gotham Knight; for Star Wars, Star Wars: Clone Wars and the similarly-named Star Wars: The Clone Wars), and Bond fans, if they please, can treat the videogames as canon. Four games have been made during the Daniel Craig era: 007: Quantum of Solace is a mostly straightforward adaptation of that film which also includes flashback levels covering the plot of Casino Royale; James Bond 007: Blood Stone has an original story by Bruce Feirstein, who wrote Tomorrow Never Dies and co-wrote GoldenEye and The World is Not Enough; GoldenEye 007: Reloaded is a remake of the Nintendo 64 classic GoldenEye 007, with its story updated to Craig’s reboot era; finally, 007 Legends presents one adventure each from Craig’s five predecessors, remade to star Daniel Craig and told in the style of his films: Goldfinger, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, Licence to Kill, Die Another Day, and Moonraker**.

The gameplay of these four, unlike past classics such as GoldenEye 007 or 007: Everything or Nothing ranges from average (007: Quantum of Solace) to terrible (007 Legends), but they are recommended to truly hardcore fans on the sole basis that they fix the apparent gap between Quantum of Solace and Skyfall. James Bond 007: Blood Stone, the best-written one, features a James Bond who is transitioning from the angry young man of Craig’s first two films to a character with more of the smoothness associated with the classical Connery/Moore/Brosnan depictions. After that, with GoldenEye 007: Reloaded, we get to see the modern James Bond living out a properly classic adventure and then, in 007 Legends, five more!

If James Bond lived out seven full-scale adventures between Quantum of Solace and Skyfall, then it easily accounts for him being presented as a haggard old warhorse in the latter. Remember, other action heroes have been presented as past-it old men when they’ve had only three on-screen adventures to their name (John McClane in Live Free or Die Hard; John Rambo in Rambo; Indiana Jones in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull), or in poor old Batman’s case, only two in The Dark Knight Rises. Aside from patching plot holes, treating these games as canon also makes Skyfall ring much truer in a thematic sense. If GoldenEye, Goldfinger and On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, especially, “happened” to Craig’s Bond then the bombastic feel that Skyfall tries to recapture already has some historical presence in this new universe; it contains, or used to contain, more than just the drab cynicism of Casino/Quantum.

However, while James Bond 007: Blood Stone & GoldenEye 007: Reloaded present no conflict with what’s shown in the actual films, 007 Legends is a little trickier. While it correctly uses the likeness of Daniel Craig’s Bond, Judi Dench’s M, Naomie Harris’ Moneypenny and Rory Kinnear’s Tanner in those rôles, someone seems to have forgotten that Jeffrey Wright appeared in Casino Royale and Quantum of Solace as Felix Leiter, as the Goldfinger missions use a character model based on Cec Linder – this is typical of the laziness with which 007 Legends is put together. Even taking into account that videogame models don’t always capture perfectly the features of the people they’re based on – try to work out who’s meant to be Connery, Moore, Dalton or Brosnan in this screenshot from GoldenEye 007! – and that the Bond series is renowned for changing the actors of almost all its recurring rôles, it’s still hard to square Linder’s whiteness with Wright’s blackness, and clearly the films take precedence here in determining what Felix truly looks like.

There are also other problems: On Her Majesty’s Secret Service features an encounter with Ernst Stavro Blofeld, which was absolutely fine and actually quite cool until Spectre came out, confirming that such a meeting was impossible. Until the Blofeld rights mess was disentangled in 2013, this would have been the only way such a meeting could have been possible. In any case the character model used here, a rather pleasing compromise between the Donald Pleasance and Telly Savalas portrayals, nicely closes the plot hole of his missing facial scar from You Only Live Twice, while opening a plot hole regarding whether he looks like Telly Pleasance, or Christoph Waltz, and whether or not he’s bald). Also, if Bond lost his wife in the events of On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, you’d think that tragedy would be greater than, or at least equal to, his losing Vesper Lynd in Casino Royale, yet it is never mentioned in Spectre. One suspects, in any case, that Madeleine Swann is being set up as a new version of Tracy Bond; her only decent chance of surviving Bond 25 will be if the producers completely ignore the previous story.

Well, it’d be nice to think that 007 Legends added something decent to the Bond canon. Its version of Licence to Kill skips the part where Bond punches M and continues his adventure as a rogue agent; in real life this behaviour would likely have seen Bond spend the rest of his life in Guantanamo Bay, and he certainly wouldn’t have been reinstated as a 00. So in some ways it actually improves on the films on which it’s based. Perhaps there is a place for it in canon; its set-up, borrowed from Hitman: Contracts, sees Bond flashing back to previous adventures while he lingers in the grey area between life and death, at the start of Skyfall when he’s shot and in the water. So maybe his delirious mind for some reason misremembered the real face of Felix, but Blofeld still presents a probably intractable problem. This is a shame as, before the release of Spectre, it really did enrich Skyfall as a viewing experience.

I’m sure many would say that we oughtn’t to be taking something as ephemeral as continuity in Bond, of all places, so seriously. But where’s the fun in that?

*Uncoincidentally, both Batman Begins and Casino Royale follow a film so hideously camp that a complete reboot of the franchise was deemed to be necessary damage control: Batman & Robin and Die Another Day, respectively.

**Skyfall was made available as DLC after its release; Spectre still lacks a videogame adaptation. Unless this situation is rectified ten years down the line, as 007 Legends did for Die Another Day, it will be the first Bond film since 1983’s Octopussy to lack a videogame adaptation.

James Bond, Mission: Impossible, & the nonsense of spycraft

FIRSTLY, sorry for being away for so long. I’ve been busy moving city & also I’ve been spending a lot of time writing about film over on mrrumsey.com.

Secondly, in case no-one’s noticed, Spectre, the 24th – or fourth, in-continuity – Bond film, comes out in just over a month, & it’s incredibly exciting. Since rebooting the franchise with 2006’s Casino Royale, the producers have crafted an intricate & continuity-heavy universe that manages to be just credible enough to work without going full Man of Steel & sucking all the vitality from its source material.

This is in stark contrast to Bond‘s rival, Mission: Impossible. Their latest, Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation, released earlier this year, delivers all the spy action thrills (& leans heavily on the rebooted Bonds for inspiration; see “Recycled Script” here) in a big, preposterous package. Among its other borrowings, it takes from the new Bonds a slight inclination towards the political thriller, a sense that, rather than being a series of cool standalones like the television programme on which it is based, the film series now takes place in a real world, an organic world in which actions have consequences & overweight CIA men get stuffy at you when, despite saving the world, you can’t prevent a deactivated missile clipping a building slightly. Since Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol was probably the coolest action film ever made, I’m sure fans were very happy to see it granted a continuing influence on the plot of this new, slightly more action-oriented movie. But in copping a move from Bond once again, the M:I series sink further into their own nonsensicality.

The five movies in the series each have a different director &, consequently, a totally different feel: Brian De Palma’s Mission: Impossible was a techno-thriller not too far removed from the TV version; John Woo’s Mission: Impossible II was an action film showcasing its director’s obsessions (slow-motion wirework, flocks of doves, dual handguns with infinite ammo, villains as near-identical Shadow Archetypes); JJ Abrams’ Mission: Impossible III benefitted from his fannish penchant for ditching a series’ silliness while retaining its cool; the best, Brad Bird’s Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol won much praise for its visual “pop” & fast-paced humour, both elements found in the director’s previous animated work. Rogue Nation, by The Usual Suspects screenwriter Christopher McQuarrie, is the first without an agenda of its own. Rather, it tries to be a continuation of Ghost Protocol while also rehabilitating past entries in the series. But continuity isn’t, or shouldn’t be, a big issue here. The series, like the Alien films (Ridley Scott, James Cameron, David Fincher, Jean-Pierre Jeunet & apparently Neill Blomkamp), has benefitted rather than suffered from its tendency to be remodelled by auteurs. If you can ignore your hang-ups, you’re better off seeing each film as a new artist’s interpretation of the material, rather than a continuation of what’s gone before. It’s certainly easier than believing the bombastic M:I II is something that actually happened in the past of the characters in the later films. They probably just try not to talk about it too much.

And, of course, so few film series bother going all the way with continuity. The way science-fiction miracle tech habitually shows up in superspy movies, by your third or so installment you’d be living in an alternate timeline. Take the facemasks of Mission: Impossible; the first scene of the first film screws everything with the first time one of the highly realistic gadgets is removed. While being worn, their wearers are indistinguishable from the real deal (the third film gets hilarious, with fit Tom Cruise becoming portly Philip Seymour Hoffman simply by wearing a mask). Fine, that makes no sense but it’s part of the series’ trademark superscience. The silliness comes in during later films. In every scene – & each movie has at least one – in which a character is exposed as an impersonator, someone will grab the lower left corner of their face & pull, easily removing the mask to reveal Tom Cruise or someone else underneath it. Since the masks are so easily removeable once the characters are aware of them in-universe, why isn’t giving someone’s cheeks a good old pinching part of every standard security procedure in the world? Partly it’s to make the plots work, partly it’s to avoid looking silly, & partly it’s the fact that sequels, in general, tend not to be set in the world prior movies have established; rather, they’re generally about those established fictional characters living in our world, not their own. Example: going by GoldenEye, the Cold War apparently ended the same way in Bond’s world as our Cold War did. But in an alternate universe in which the UK is the most hypercompetent power in the world, the Soviet Union should have been militarily & economically outclassed much, much ealier.

Bond gets even sillier than M:I does with facemasks, too: in You Only Live Twice, Bond undergoes a surgical procedure to appear (unconvincingly) Japanese; in Die Another Day, a Korean villain goes through a more painful reverse version of that treatment, having his DNA replaced (???) in order to impersonate a Caucasian businessman; in Thunderball, a SPECTRE-affiliated villain has apparently spent two years’ worth of plastic surgery & acting lessons in order to become the double of a UN pilot; in Diamonds Are Forever, Ernst Stavro Blofeld undergoes plastic surgery in order to hide out in disguise as reclusive millionaire Willard White (his earlier change from Donald Pleasence into the equally bald but much taller Telly Savalas goes unremarked on). What idiots all those people were! From Russia with Love, an earlier film, opens with “James Bond” dying. Except…it’s a training exercise for villain Red Grant, & the deceased was wearing a facemask! If 100% convincing facemasks exist in this universe – & are commonplace enough to be thrown away on a training exercise in which, verisimilitude aside, they really don’t add much – why aren’t they put to use on all those later occasions? The only reason is that the old Bonds really weren’t a series, just a series of impressions, with certain archetypical features (disfigured villains, shark pits, ski sequences, fake-out deaths for Bond) repeated in slightly different order with little continuity. Mission: Impossible was even worse for this, repeating not only its own tropes (infiltration via aerial descent in four of its entries; the IMF discredited in four of its entries; the aforementioned facemask reveal in all five of them) but also square-pegging Bond tropes such as the constantly shifting love interests – Bond’s a bastard who we expect to continually ditch women, but Ethan is a thoroughly decent sort it’s hard to imagine abandoning so many loves of his life so abruptly*.

But continuity isn’t a bad thing. You can get too much of it, certainly – see the mess Doctor Who periodically becomes before a nice soft-reboot (1970, 2005, 2010) – but if you can manage to stay on top of it, your fun little movies become all the more meaningful & worth returning to. Mind you, it took Bond a complete reboot before the producers could keep their continuity straight, & even now it continually threatens to spin out of control. When it was never there in the first place, it might not be best to force it.

*Tim Burton/Joel Schumacher’s thoroughly decent Batman has the same problem, with a new love interest in each; as does, funnily enough, thoroughly decent Daniel-San in his three Karate Kid movies. His lowest moment is convincing the lovely Kumiko to leave her tiny Okinawa fishing village for America, then dropping her, broke & alone in a strange country before the third film begins.