clearspira wrote: ↑Fri Jan 24, 2020 11:16 am
As a Goldeneye fan who has rallied against the new stuff, yes, I will grant you that. There is a level of hypocrisy I am guilty of.
But, in my defence, I think this also backs up what I have said regarding just how far the goalposts have moved when it comes to woke politics. Because whilst it is rather inarguable that Bond is a sexist, misogynist dinosaur - did the script writers seek to change him? No. That was part of his charm. He was a 1960s man in the 1990s and we f-king loved him for it. But that is not the case anymore. Now He doesn't smoke, he drinks less, his ladies man skills are dull, many want to take away his dick, and he will probably end up driving a
Leaf.
That is the difference. Brosnan was allowed to be Bond. I cannot say with confidence the next actor to play Bond can say the same.
You're correct about the lack of smoking, but I think you're wrong about everything else. Craig's Bond has been depicted drinking more heavily than his predecessors by a considerable margin, that in just one of his films he's drinking SIX martinis in a row. It's frankly amazing that Bond can even converse coherently after that, but this is a guy who has the dumbest luck at card games. Bond's advances on women actually upset a lot of the PC crowd like how he just approaches a woman in a shower in SKYFALL (someone who was revealed to have been trafficked for sex as a child), and how aggressive he sexually approaches a widow after attending her husband's funeral in order to get information out of her in SPECTRE. So the idea that the producers are making him more PC overall just rings false. But it's always been odd to me that they were willing to embrace some of the less glamorous traits of Bond with Craig's era yet not give him a smoke. Both Craig and director Sam Mendes made similar complaints about how they can have Bond shoot someone's brains out but God forbid the producers let him light a cigarette. There was a somewhat similar attempt at lessening his sexual activities with Timothy Dalton due to AIDS scare but that obviously got brushed aside after one film.
If there is one thing they've done to contrast Craig's Bond with his predecessors it's that they've made his profession less glamorously "cool" in a sense by putting more emphasis into the fact that he's a hired killer. That's fine by me, because it's one of the things that the original novels did that made Bond more compelling in the books than he was on the big screen. If you read the first chapter of Goldfinger it's basically just Bond drinking himself drunk after having just killed a "capungo" in Mexico. Then there's certain phrases like "blunt instrument" that Judi Dench calls him in CASINO ROYALE that was taken straight out of the pages. Unlike in the older films he's not described as a spy but as an assassin (which actually started with Brosnan's campy DIE ANOTHER DAY interestingly, along with many other ideas that Craig's run would go wild with).
So yeah, it is kind of a weird disconnect that they haven't allowed Bond to smoke his cigarettes since Timothy Dalton, but they amped all his other vices.
As for Bond driving "a leaf" as you put it, my understanding is that he won't. The green car featured turns out to be the female 00 agent's which you can see briefly in the trailer. Besides, Ian Fleming was actually an advocate for electric vehicles in order to help the environment so he'd more likely be cool with the idea of Bond driving electric. It's kind of funny to me as he's known for smoking 70 cigarettes a day.
And most importantly, Phoebe Waller-Bridge made it clear she had no intention of changing Bond, and that part of Bond's appeal is that he is a relic of the past that shouldn't change. You say he was a 60s man in the 90s, but the secret weapon of Bond is that he was ALWAYS a man of the past even at the start of the books. He's described as a relic of the British Empire, someone that is "pre-WWII" caught up in the changing geopolitics in the 1960s. It wasn't something emphasized in the Connery films, but it was certainly played up with his successors like Moore teaming up with a leading lady that represented 70s feminism, as they say a "Bond equal". Brosnan is described as "a relic of the Cold War" by Dench. Then with Craig you have Javier Bardem mocking Bond's patriotism for a "fallen Empire".
Though I am open to an actor that's black playing Bond, I do think nothing represents the olde British Empire more than a white bloke in a suit. Even though Idris Elba would be a convincingly great performer in the role, the perceived "relic of the British Empire" would be lost in his casting. It's a quality a lot of people probably don't recognize about Bond, but whatever.
