The Missing Second Act: The Craig-era Bond films
Now that we are far enough away from the end of the Craig era, I have been thinking about something that always made me a bit unsatisfied with his slate of James Bond movies.
In 2006 ‘Casino Royale’ seemingly pulled off the impossible, and brought James Bond into the present day, made it relevant in our post-9/11 world by breaking with established tradition by giving the character a “soft reboot”, updating him in limited and specific ways to satisfy audience expectations and the watchful guardians of the franchise, the Broccoli family. Daniel Craig proved himself to be a fantastic actor and for younger generations, he became the definitive James Bond.
‘Casino Royale’ starts with a thrilling and decidedly film noir-inspired pre-credits sequence about how Bond became a 00 agent, cleverly subverting audiences’ expectations of the usual high-octane large set piece. It’s a tense black and white sequence full of suspense and close-quarter violence signalled a clean break from the Brosnan-era’s less serious approach. The rest of the film uses it’s running time cleverly to show us how James Bond grows into what he ought to become – from a blunt instrument to a sophisticated man of action. And at the end of ‘Casino Royale’ we get to see James Bond seemingly at his fully-formed James Bondness: the elegant three-piece suit, the dry wit, the immortal line “The name is Bond… James Bond”, and composer David Arnold finally gives us the full James Bond theme in its greatest and most glorious orchestration. A perfect ending that also sets up the sequel, which – to a certain extent – I expected to at least rhyme with ‘Diamonds Are Forever’. In which Sean Connery returns to the role for a quick vendetta – to find and kill Bloefeld who is responsible for the death of Bond’s wife in ‘On Her Majesty’s Secret Service’. And when it’s done, he returns to his job – now let’s glaze over the actual film – only to be confronted by his nemesis again. This film serves as cleaning of the slate – dealing with the loss and come back to active duty to save the world in the next film. Okay, not so much “dealing with loss”, ‘Diamonds Are Forever’ is made before there was any desire to have strict continuity between instalments, and, well… the film has its own problems, can we move on now please? The point is, the following films returned to a somewhat disconnected series of adventures, bar the pre-title credits sequence of ‘For Your Eyes Only’ in which James Bond, this time played by Roger Moore is visiting his wife’s grave and subsequently dispatches an overtly Bloefeld-coded unnamed villain, closing off that particular theme and storyline in a characteristically tongue-in-cheek way that only a Roger Moore-era Bond film can.
After the amazing start with ‘Casino Royale’ however the follow-up ‘Quantum of Solace’ came two years later, and I can say with moderate confidence that it’s no one’s favourite James Bond adventure. A film which was plagued by the then-ongoing writers’ strike and the financial woes of its studio MGM, resulting in a rushed production and one of the shortest modern-era Bond movies, clocking in just under two hours.
‘Quantum of Solace’ picks up right where ‘Casino Royale’ ended, with the worst filmed and edited car chase sequence in a major studio production. Two black cars chase a dark grey car in a quarry. Really fast cuts. So. Many. Cuts. And close-ups. You never really know where you are geographically in the chase. And then magically in about 0.3 seconds, Bond kills the last chasing car’s driver, the car falls off a cliff for some reason and suddenly we are in Siena.
If the central thesis of ‘Casino Royale’ was to see the birth of a legend out of a man, then ‘Quantum of Solace’ would be something like “What if James Bond tries to deal with his grief by killing a lot of people?” Bond is being blamed for events that are literally out of his control. He didn’t choose to kill any of the people in the course of the movie, it just worked out that way. Contrast that with how in ‘Casino Royale’ Bond makes the conscious decision for example to 1.) break into the embassy in Madagascar 2.) decides to shoot his way out of the embassy with the rationale “one less bomb maker in the world is better”. It might be the wrong way to conduct oneself, but there is a reason and logic behind it while also signifying that Bond is not fully-formed yet. In ‘Quantum of Solace’ he basically acts like he learnt nothing, he is still just the eponymous “blunt instrument”. Beyond the problems of a heavily plot-driven narrative that makes its MacGuffin a very illusive one – from machinations of a shadowy organisation through the corruption of governments and intelligence services to the real prize, which is control of a country, then control of oil, then control of water. The James Bond movies were always very much on top of contemporary anxieties and conversations – ‘Thunderball’s plot revolves around nuclear blackmail, Ernst Stavro Blofeld in ‘You Only Live Twice’ tries to engineer a World War between the two superpowers, ‘Tomorrow Never Dies’ is an overt warning about the power of a press baron and so on. But these were always presented in a clear and concise way, audiences always knew what was at stake in any of the previous films. And naturally one of the topics of conversation in the 00s was the scarcity of drinking water especially in the Global South and how these factors will determine geopolitics and wars of the future. But beyond signalling towards these anxieties, they don’t play a significant role in the actual story of James Bond. As far as he’s concerned, the threat could be anything, anything at all. His mission objective is as illusive as it’s unimportant it seems. But what’s even more alarming that most of the character development of our main character seemingly happens in the very last scene of the film. ‘Casino Royale’ ends with the simple, bitter line taken verbatim from the Ian Fleming novel (“The bitch is dead.”) which can signal one of two probable feelings regarding his dead lover, leaving the door open to explore his grief. The ending of ‘Quantum…’ when Bond confronts Vesper’s apparently not-dead fiancée serves to demonstrate he’s capable of not killing.
I’m only speculating but my guess is that the filmmakers painted themselves into a corner with the runaway success of Casino Royale. Instead of moving forward with Daniel Craig’s fully-formed Bond character to have more adventures, they painstakingly anchored the follow-up film to its predecessor, hoping that it will do the same. And at the time of the late 00s it became a trend to tell long-form character based stories in large blockbuster franchise form – think of Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy of movies. In a desperate attempt to show a significant character change with Bond they anchored it to a very personal motivation – but the density of the plot demanded that most of the emotional labour of that change was put on the shoulders of Olga Kurylenko’s character. In the end it is unsatisfying for both of them.
Reception of the film was mixed and as a result the franchise went onto a prolonged hiatus – meaning we, the audience, have been deprived of an important part of the journey of James Bond as a character. 2012’s ‘Skyfall’ was exploring a very different Bond from the preceding film: someone who is at the end of his usefulness, someone on his way out. There’s an exploration of the character’s relevance in the 2010s, some side-swipes of some of the more – in hindsight – ludicrous aspects of Bond films of the past, and there is a palpable attempt at ending everything that came before – except for Bond himself. The films following ‘Skyfall’, ‘Spectre’ and ‘No Time to Die’ certainly feel like an extended coda to the Craig-era, and thematically, at least for my reading, something obvious is missing – the stories which have happened between ‘Quantum…’ and ‘Skyfall’.
In his popular screenwriting book Blake Snyder explores the structure of a Hollywood screenplay, and observed that one important element of the Second Act of any film is a section he refers to as “Fun-And-Games”; he describes it as “the movie you came to see”, the scenes and set-pieces most likely to be featured in the trailer for the movie. Applying his loose definition to film franchises, those are the films where we get to see the protagonist – in our case James Bond – to do what he or she does best: face a villain and defeat them in a way only James Bond can. No overarching narrative to follow, no lasting repercussions to pick up on later, much like how the Mission: Impossible instalments functioned until ‘Rogue Nation’. I can’t help but to feel that we missed out on some fun, dare I say some ‘A Spy Who Loved Me’ or a bit of ‘The Man with the Golden Gun’ type-of stories. I think the latter example is an especially relevant story for our purposes with it’s relatively (in James Bond terms) smaller stake. Francisco Scaramanga is not threatening the world with extinction – he just wants to make a bit of money on the back of a revolutionary new technology, and maybe kill James Bond in the process to prove he is the greatest assassin in the world.
With that I don’t want to say that the latter two films of the Craig-era are bad in any way – I have my doubts about the point of Spectre though – it’s just that for my liking, this long goodbye feels a bit unearned for the character. Seemingly we spent a lot more time in his latter years, and never got to see in his prime, which is something I would have loved to explore.