This week, Daniel Craig’s final outing as iconic spy James Bond was released after being postponed for over a year because of the pandemic. No Time To Die is the fifth CraigBond movie and marks the end of Daniel’s 15-year tenure as Bond, a number bettered by no one (although Sir Roger Moore has been in more movies). So I thought I’d talk about why Daniel Craig’s time as Bond is the best we’ve ever seen.
First off, and this is kind of important because a lot of the other points lead back to this, Daniel Craig’s Bond films are the first to tell a broad, connected story. Older Bond films, all the way up to the Brosnan era, always had an anthology feel about them. Like two-hour long shorts where the stakes are confined to that particular movie. The events of GoldenEye don’t affect Tomorrow Never Dies. The two Timothy Dalton movies have nothing connecting them besides the fact that the same actors play the characters. And, the thing is, this was a Bond trademark: the movies aren’t linked. You don’t need to watch Dr. No to understand Thunderball, or see Live and Let Die to make sense of The Man With the Golden Gun. In the current age of cinematic universes, especially the runaway success of the MCU, it’s easy to think that big film franchises always ran this way but they didn’t, at least not James Bond. And this new direction seems to have worked, with the 5 CraigBond movies (including No Time To Die) grossing over $3.2 billion in the box office with an average gross of over $648 million per movie, and consistently high critical ratings.
Second, Bond. has existed in film since 1962 but Craig’s Bond was the first time we’d ever gotten an origin story for him. Even on actor change movies, we’d always seen a Bond that seemed well experienced in the life of a double-0, but not this time. In Casino Royale, we get to see Bond’s promotion to double-0, and the origin and shaping of this version of Bond that will keep being relevant in later movies.
James Bond falls in love, has his heart broken, and learns never to trust anyone again (good if you’re a spy). But perhaps the most striking thing about this Bond is how “normal” he is (not sure if that’s the right word). Yes, he’s Bond, with the bod, and the blue eyes, and the impeccably tailored Tom Ford suits, but he’s also an arrogant S.O.B who genuinely believes he knows better than MI6 and does not care very much for oversight. His fight sequences can be, and usually are messy and all about the place. He’s a very rough-and-tumble Bond.
Number three, his villains. Any amateur film critic will tell you that a movie is only as good as the bad guy, and this is very true when it comes to Bond films. Bond movie villains are known for their over-the-top megalomania (who can forget Francisco Scaramanga?), but CraigBond added a new layer to that. Yes, the classic Bond-villain OTT is there (Greene, and Silva), but in addition to this timeless formula, they added a personal connection between Bond and the villains. Sometimes directly; with Silva it was him being former MI6 having served under M, but in the main, all the villains’ connections to him are because of one man: Ernst Stavro Blofeld.
In Spectre, it’s made known that after Bond’s parents died, he was fostered by Blofeld’s father. This made him feel pushed out, referring to James as “cuckoo”, after the bird. All the bad guys in the movies thus far: Le Chiffre, Mr White, Dominic Greene, Raoul Silva, they were all members of Blofeld’s criminal organization SPECTRE. Bad guys who twisted and warped Bond, chipping away at pieces of a soul we didn’t know he had, all sent by an incredibly powerful man who couldn’t get over his childhood anger.
Fourth and finally, the Bond Girls. Bond Girls in CraigBond films are not like they are in the others. His connection to them always seem to get quite personal. The whole saga starts with him falling in love with Vesper Lynd in Casino Royale, which kicks off a whole web of story and intricacy. in Quantum of Solace there is never any sexual tension between Bond and Camille (yes I know they kissed, but that was it). Theirs was a mission-oriented relationship wherein they could both live in and experience emotions they’ve otherwise not allowed themselves to feel. Skyfall didn’t even have a traditional Bond Girl (no, Severine doesn’t count). For narrative purposes, M is sort of the Bond Girl in the film: she follows him to an exotic location and helps take out the bad guy. But even M’s connection to Bond is personal, especially in Skyfall. She takes on a somewhat motherly role, with Silva referring to her as such multiple times in the movie. And finally, Dr. Madeleine Swann. I’m not gonna say too much so as not to spoil No Time To Die, but again Bond falls in love with the Bond Girl. Kind of like the villains, but much more so than the villains, Bond has a personal connection to the Girls that better serve the collective story being told in the CraigBond saga.
James Bond is a franchise with a long history, a lot of which was leveraged in Daniel Craig’s Bond, and I believe that the Saga of James Bond is the best we’ve ever seen.
