It's been a while since the last time I watched Skyfall. Did they specify when she was station chief in the Far East? It seemed like she was new to the position of M when we first meet her in GoldenEye, so she could have been working in the Far East between 1990-1994/early '95.
One of the Craig timeline M's first lines of dialogue was where she says she's been the head of MI5 for a very long time and pines for the days of the Cold War when you could pretend that a rogue agent just didn't exist or had no connection to the agency. That seemed to imply as early as 2006 that this M had been the head for a lot longer than the original Bond timeline's Judi Dench M.
I haven’t seen it for some time earlier but if this link is reliable (and it rings a bell), then she was station chief in China in 1997, which is hard to reconcile with that year’s Bond film, Tomorrow Never Dies. https://jamesbond.fandom.com/wiki/M_(Judi_Dench)
Not necessarily; as a station chief she might have also had to deal with situations where she'd have to disavow an agent; she did that with Silva, though I'm a little fuzzy on whether she was still station chief or had risen to head of MI-6 when she left him to be picked up by the Chinese. I really need to rewatch the Craig movies, but they just aren't as much fun as the "prime timeline" Bonds.
Original Bond timeline > current Bond timeline. Also, the codename "theory" is and always has been shite.
Each actor presents a soft reboot. All the previous material acts as ancillary background to be recalled as needed. That is, frankly, how any cinematic franchise should work. Canon, continuity, and connectivity and all that nonsense is silly. The whole codename thing is fucking stupid beyond the fact the very idea would be redundant.
And even the ages of the actors more or less worked out in a linear way until Moore retired and was replaced by the obviously younger and more physically energetic Dalton. From Dr. No straight through to A View to a Kill you could buy that you were seeing a thirtysomething agent maturing into a fiftysomething veteran with a lot of battle scars and emotional wounds from decades in the field.
The big difference between Dalton and Craig is that the former pretty much played Bond directly from the Fleming pages, who was more of a prickly kind of character, whereas with Craig he fused Fleming's cynicism with Connery's machismo. And that's why Dalton failed to grab audiences in his day. He wasn't playing up the swagger that people associate strongly with cinematic Bond, whereas Craig did and is why he's so popular in the role. He's more of brute, a "blunt instrument", but has an air of cool around him and I think it really clicked with me in CASINO ROYALE during the Bahamas section where he's figuring out how to distract security, charm the receptionist, beat someone at cards like it's no big deal, seduce a married woman for information, etc. Dalton didn't really exude that, but that wasn't unintentional on his part. I think if Dalton wanted to play up cinematic Bond, he easily could have. If you look at his performance in THE ROCKETEER, that's where he's turning up the charm in a way he never did as Bond. Anyway, took the algorithm and it turned out to be super close to my actual list. I know these Bond flicks well enough to know immediately what I'd rather watch, and this list really reflects that. From Russia with Love Goldfinger Skyfall On Her Majesty's Secret Service Casino Royale Dr. No The Living Daylights GoldenEye Moonraker Thunderball Octopussy For Your Eyes Only Diamonds Are Forever The Spy Who Loved Me Spectre You Only Live Twice Live and Let Die Licence to Kill Quantum of Solace A View to a Kill The Man with the Golden Gun Die Another Day Tomorrow Never Dies The World Is Not Enough
It says a lot for Brosnan's era that three of his four films routinely rank close to or at the bottom of many lists. I adore Pierce as a person and an actor but he has maybe two really good Bond films and arguably just one great one. Die Another Day may not be a completely irredeemable mess but it's close enough to one that his swan song as 007 is easily one of the worst films in the entire franchise.
Aside from the very cringe worthy dialogue between Brosnan and Halle Berry, I think the first half of DAD is actually pretty damn good, right up to the sword fight. In fact I think it features Brosnan's strongest performance as Bond. Roger Ebert wrote about that quite succinctly: As much as I enjoy GE, I never felt Brosnan "owned" the role in his debut. There's just something stiff about him, his mannerisms and the way he carries himself feels too calculated to come off natural like his predecessors, as if he's focusing so much on projecting a Bondian performance that it's all surface level. He'd later go on to admit that he felt he never quite nailed the role, which really makes sense to me because he never feels like the same character across all four films. But with DAD there was a certain air of confidence in him that I don't think was quite there in his first three films. He suddenly comes off like a man with a purpose and is reveling in it. Brosnan aside, I find the first half overall pretty damn entertaining and if the latter half was as good it may have ended in the upper half rankings... Alas, once Bond goes to Iceland the film just plummets so hard and fast in a way I've never seen in any other Bond film. It just suddenly shifts from being a pretty good Bond film to something that would be more fitting in a parody like AUSTIN POWERS. It's even more frustrating because it's obvious DAD was partially inspired by the original MOONRAKER novel which is one of the stronger books. Sad to see it's loose adaptation done so poorly. The only reason I rank it just above TOMORROW NEVER DIES and THE WORLD IS NOT ENOUGH is because unlike those two I never find DIE ANOTHER DAY dull. It's a bad film, but it at least had some color and vibrancy to it, whereas the other two just feel generic.
People talk about Elektra King as a great Bond villain and I just don't get the energy coming from her to care about her the way I do about the other Brosnan-era villains. Even Gustav Graves and the North Koreans in DAD were more interesting and kept my attention more successfully even if the plot was ridiculous and the overall film was worse in my eyes than TWINE. There are Bond films with subpar or downright mediocre plots who at least give us memorable villains who help carry their movie. Francisco Scaramanga. Max Zorin. But Elektra King is just...there. Her vendetta against M is serviceable enough but just doesn't carry enough emotional weight for me to care that much about her wanting revenge.
She’s a wonderful idea. The Bond girl turning out to be the mastermind villain. As the writers put it “Bond thinks he met a Tracy, but then realizes she’s a Blofeld”. It’d a shame that the final product doesn’t exactly live up to it.
They even took the film's title from an OHMSS reference and molded Elektra King's appearance in some scenes on Tracy but like you said: it just never added up.