Every James Bond movie is a story of its era

It was an important shift in the Bond franchise’s nearly 60 year history when Daniel Craig played James Bond. Craig’s run in the iconic role brought Bond into the age of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, with its long-continuity stories, regularly recurring characters, and franchised extended world. So of course the new take that circulated in the wake of the latest installment in the series is that 2021’s You have no choice but to live. is the Bond movies’ equivalent of Avengers: Endgame.

[Ed. note: Significant spoiler ahead for the end of No Time To Die.]

In that regard, this claim is completely accurate. No Time To DieThe final film in which long-time Series star Daniel Craig played James Bond closes an era. Like Robert Downey Jr.’s Tony Stark, Daniel Craig’s Bond entered our lives embittered and cold, and bowed out as a big old softie in a sentimentalized blaze of glory. Like. Endgame, this 25th Bond movie is overly long, with a bloated, disappointing middle that’s destined to be overshadowed by its cathartic finale.

However, the bond between Bond and MCU extends beyond a single comparison of films from two franchises. The franchise’s versatility is evident in this connection. Nearly every entry in the 007 story has similarly been a reflection of its era’s cinematic trends.

James Bond vs. The MCU

Photo by United Artists

Craig’s run as Bond even straddles multiple eras, and multiple trends. His first Bond movie, 2006’s Casino Royale, The suave Bond from previous eras was transformed into a hardboiled, gorilla-esque assassin.Bourne Identity age. It was 15 years ago. This was before the MCU changed our notion of a blockbuster star into a one size fits all jokemeister. The jokemeister saves everyone while remaining remarkably good-natured.

Even Deadpool, modern cinema’s most recognized bad boy, is more adorable than anarchic. No Time To Die’s incarnation of Bond — who slices apples in the kitchen for a little girl and even sheds a few tears about his bad relationship choices — may feel far from the character that author Ian Fleming described as an “A government department uses an anonymous blunt instrument,” but that’s just the franchise for rolling with the punches, as it always has.

We all certainly became more aware of this trend with 2015’s Spectre, which brought Bond’s archnemesis Ernst Stavro Blofeld back out of the shadows and announced him as the author of all of our hero’s pain. This was exactly the kind of cynical pandering used to resurrect Emperor Palpatine. Skywalkers Rise. This late-game reveal of the Craig era’s Big Bad was clearly an attempt to unnecessarily tie the Craig entries together into one overarching narrative, while presenting Blofeld as some sort of Thanos figure for the franchise, even though the character was Thanos-ing long before Josh Brolin snapped his purple fingers.

A rewatch of the Bond franchise, and some contextual research done during the movies’ more missable moments (looking at you, Clifton James’s Two cameos as Sheriff J.W. Pepper), reveals just how the creators behind any given Bond movie have always been reactive, both to Bond’s previous adventure, and to whatever else was succeeding in the marketplace. But the films have become such reliable institutions that it’s hard to recall the era when they rode into the cultural consciousness on a wave of outright controversy.

James Bond vs. Vietnam War

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This was the beginning of James Bond’s first movie. Dr. released in 1962, the Vatican condemned it as “a dangerous mixture of violence, vulgarity, sadism, and sex.” Sean Connery’s Bond, with his murdering, gambling, and hairy, hairy sexiness, is a far cry from that year’s Oscar winner for Best Actor, Gregory Peck as Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird. Made before “the spy movie” was an established genre, the film sticks unusually closely to the Ian Fleming novel it adapts. Its version of Bond is a traditional movie-lead tough guy, more like a cinematic gangster with a cause than like the earnest strivers of 1962’s big box-office hits, from Lawrence of Arabia To Mockingbird ToThe Music Man.

But by the time of 1965’s Thunderball, Bond’s countercultural status had been completely transformed into mainstream box-office success. 1967’s The Only Time You Live OnceThe old Goliath must have appeared like a crusty Goliath in the David-esque New Hollywood waves of Bonnie and Clyde: The Graduate, Cool Hand Luke And Cold Blood. So it’s no small wonder that the next installment in the series, 1969’s On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, I found it shockingly different than its immediate predecessor.

It’s notable for being the first (and best) series entry to give James Bond a soul, but that makes perfect sense, given the cultural context, in a time dominated by anti-war sentiment over the conflict in Vietnam. George Lazenby’s softer Bond, with his ruffled shirts and hayside proposals, went down easier than Connery’s brusque killer for an audience weary of the political and social unrest of the day. Amazing ski-POV cinematography. OHMSS flies in the face of old-guard critics of the time who found Mike Nichols’ lively shooting of the living-room-set Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf too “jazzy.”

James Bond vs. Star Wars

Photo by United Artists

The copycat pattern is best exemplified in the franchise’s Roger Moore offerings, where producing partners Harry Saltzman and Albert R. “Cubby” Broccoli seemed to take an insatiable amount of glee in flitting from genre to genre, retrofitting their hero to whatever type of movie was dominating the box office at the time. Bond moved from Blaxploitation into Let Die and LiveKung fu instruction The Man With the Golden GunThen we added the final touches. Moonraker, a blatant 1979 capitalization on the success of 1977’s Star Wars.

Even 1977’s The Spy Who Lovingly Loved Me feels like a rebuttal to the criticism that Moore couldn’t do a Bond film with the scale and style of GoldfingerOr It’s a Twice-A-Lifetime Experience All the praise!Eyes only earned as one of Moore’s less goofy offerings, it’s clearly an overzealous attempt to show that he, like the Connery of Russia, LoveThis could lead to serious consequences.

After Moore came Timothy Dalton, whose cold-blooded killer Bond feels as alien opposite Moore’s as Pierce Brosnan’s Moore/Connery synthesis Bond would feels next to Dalton’s. Which The License to KillThis was an action movie about revenge that was violent and gritty in the days of Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger. GoldenEyeThis felt exactly like the kind of toy advertisement that could be easily understood by children. It was a film for the decade that featured Batman and a huge robot spider in the Wild Wild West.

Considering this context — James Bond as a chameleon, becoming whatever his era required — it becomes easier to embrace and enjoy the franchise’s low moments. The faults in Bond movies can be awkward as well as dated, but they’re often useful freeze-frames of what action filmmaking looked like in a very specific era. At the same time, viewers can elevate the series’ highs as rapturous instances of cinematic kismet, where the trends of the time and the tastes of whoever had the keys to the Aston Martin combined to produce a SkyfallYou can find out more at http://www.amazon.com/?p=238. CYou can find more information atsino Royale, a GoldfingerOr an On Her Majesty’s Secret Service.

It’s silly to box James Bond in, to criticize any new interpretation of the character as too goofy, too grumpy, too violent, or too emotional. It’s not like any film character that has made it to nearly 60 years without becoming malleable. From now on, it will be decades (and possibly more Bond movies). You have no choice but to live.It will be a cinematic time capsule, a film that shows us the state of blockbuster moviemaking in 2021. James Bond will still be around, but he’ll die another day.

No Time To Die

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This final James Bond film of the Daniel Craig era sees 007 come out of retirement and reconnect him with those he loved and haters in the past. Available now for digital streaming on premium.