News Daniel Craig signs up for Bond 25, Christopher Nolan in talks to direct

[marillion]

It actually took me a while to catch onto that. I remember after the first time I saw Casino Royale one of my first complaints was "why does he keep throwing his phones away, only to get a new one when he needs to do something different? Why doesn't he just have one phone to do everything?" I think it took nearly a year before someone pointed out to me he isn't just throwing phones away, he's throwing anything/everything away after it's no longer any use to him.

Because of this misunderstanding it always amused me when one of the complaints I saw many have about the Jeffrey Deaver modern Bond novel was that Bond's smart phone was used way too much.

This point is also exemplified with the death of the woman he beds to get information about the plot to blow up the jet at the airport... She was married to someone who knew the plan.. He bedded her, used her for the information and then she was killed for it, a fact that M doesn't let him forget... This is akin to the girl he uses to get to Goldfinger and then ends up getting killed and painted gold for her troubles...

 

[Kai "the spy"]

And Spectre doesn't? It may not be as colorful as Skyfall, but what it doesn't have is Bond whingeing about being shot when it was his own fault, and then getting the head of MI6 killed for no reason at all.

Let's be fair, that flashlight-waving blockhead got herself killed.

 

[Gaith]

^ Another point for Spectre, against Skyfall.

 

[Starkers]

Let's be fair, that flashlight-waving blockhead got herself killed.

Skyfall has its issues (Silva's ridiculous plan for starters) but it's ten times the film Spectre is, which is a shame because the first two thirds of Spectre I like, it just goes downhill dramatically post Austria.

Re the flashlight bit I'm forgiving of that. Yes she's head of MI6 but do we ever get the impression she'd been a field agent? Plus she's mortally wounded by this point which affects your thinking one imagines. As for Kincaid, he's a gamekeeper and likely not used to escape and evasion against mercenaries, what he likely is used to and is concerned about is them not stepping out onto frozen water and having the ice give way beneath them.

 

[Gaith]

^
1) There was no reason for them to leave that tunnel in the first place. They were hidden and perfectly safe.

2) Even if I were to approve of Kincaid very carefully pointing the flashlight pretty much straight into the ground and only away from the house, there's just no excusing the way they wildly flailed it about.

 

[Captaindemotion]

Hmm - Bond 25 announced but Craig not? Hopefully his name will follow soon.

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/heat-vision/james-bond-25-sets-2019-release-date-1023977

 

[CorporalClegg]

Yuck. Purvis and Wade again? They have one competently written story in six attempts.

It's time to move on.

 

[Kai "the spy"]

November 2019. Remember when we used to get a new Bond movie every two years?

 

[Timby]

Yuck. Purvis and Wade again? They have one competently written story in six attempts.

It's time to move on.

On the plus side, John Logan's name is nowhere near it.

 

[bigdaddy]

November 2019. Remember when we used to get a new Bond movie every two years?

Article I read said Craig had 4 films in 9 years. It's clear he's coming back once more so that's 5 films in 11 years.

Pretty damn close toevery 2 years.

Remember when Bond movies had plots? Remember when Bond movies didn't cost $300 million?

 

[Starkers]

^
1) There was no reason for them to leave that tunnel in the first place. They were hidden and perfectly safe.

2) Even if I were to approve of Kincaid very carefully pointing the flashlight pretty much straight into the ground and only away from the house, there's just no excusing the way they wildly flailed it about.

It’s not perfect, it just annoys me way less than Silva’s “Oh I set up this convoluted underground plan months ago” And that mainly annoys me because it would be easy to rectify “Oh James, I had so many plans, so many contingencies. This is just one of them.”

Skyfall is still IMO a much better film than Spectre though

Yuck. Purvis and Wade again? They have one competently written story in six attempts.

It's time to move on.

November 2019. Remember when we used to get a new Bond movie every two years?

The trouble is they tried to move on and then the Boccoli’s dragged them back again. Skyfall was supposed to be their swansong but they were pulled back fro rewrites on Spectre. What bothers me is that it’s only a few months ago that one of them pretty much said “I don’t even know how you’d go about making a Bond film these days!” LINK

On the plus side, John Logan's name is nowhere near it.

Logan is an odd one. It’s clear in many ways he is a terrible scriptwriter, yet he made Penny Dreadful which was amazing. I suspect it’s just a case that he isn’t suited to big budget action films. I can perfectly imagine him adding some poetic flourishes to Purvis and Wade’s script for Skyfall (M reciting Tennyson and Silva’s “Death clung to me like a disease” line had his fingerprints all over him) but when charged with writing a Bond script from scratch he clearly didn’t put enough action in (though guess he’s to blame for Madeleine Swann’s Proustian name). That they had to get P&W back in and then still had to get Jez Butterworth in to polish Purvis and Wade’s polish is frightening. Just how bad was Spectre’s third act originally?

Article I read said Craig had 4 films in 9 years. It's clear he's coming back once more so that's 5 films in 11 years.

Pretty damn close toevery 2 years.

Remember when Bond movies had plots? Remember when Bond movies didn't cost $300 million?

The weird thing is in terms of time in the role only Moore has been Bond longer and if Craig does do Bond #25 he’ll exceed even Roge!) yet he'll be one of the worst for a film to time ratio!
Connery 1962 – 1967 (+1971) 6 official films in 6 years (though harder to quantify given the OHMSS gap)
Lazenby 1969 one film in one year
Moore 1973-1985 seven films in twelve years
Dalton 1987-1989 two films in two years
Brosnan 1995-2002 four films in seven years
Craig 2006-2019 five films in thirteen years

 

[Timby]

Just how bad was Spectre’s third act originally?

It was like 20 minutes longer, with an endless highway chase that goes on for fucking ever, Blofeld's big, nefarious plan is to disrupt a NATO event and cause a blackout, and Blofeld realizes Bond's plan is to release a magic document that will reveal the conspiracy. Bond also flat-out kills Blofeld with a bullet to the head.

Really, Logan's whole script was a massive wet fart. Logan and Mendes wanted Tanner to be in cahoots with C and Blofeld, for example. Both Q and M get kidnapped (M multiple times). It was explicitly written as Bond's retirement mission. Et cetera.

Oh, and Blofeld--who, again, is summarily executed--was a woman.

 

[Kai "the spy"]

Article I read said Craig had 4 films in 9 years. It's clear he's coming back once more so that's 5 films in 11 years.

Pretty damn close toevery 2 years.

No, Casino Royale was released in 2006, which was 11 years ago. So far, he's had 4 films in 11 years (or 9 years, if you don't want to count the 2 years since the release of SPECTRE). That's a movie once every 2.25 years. If he's in the next one it's gonna be 5 films in 13 years, which makes it a movie every 2.6 years. Sounds like little difference, but by then it'll be closer to one movie every three years rather than every two.

Remember when Bond movies had plots? Remember when Bond movies didn't cost $300 million?

I remember when Bond movies had a plot, and that's all the plot they needed.

 

[Starkers]

It was like 20 minutes longer, with an endless highway chase that goes on for fucking ever, Blofeld's big, nefarious plan is to disrupt a NATO event and cause a blackout, and Blofeld realizes Bond's plan is to release a magic document that will reveal the conspiracy. Bond also flat-out kills Blofeld with a bullet to the head.

Really, Logan's whole script was a massive wet fart. Logan and Mendes wanted Tanner to be in cahoots with C and Blofeld, for example. Both Q and M get kidnapped (M multiple times). It was explicitly written as Bond's retirement mission. Et cetera.

Oh, and Blofeld--who, again, is summarily executed--was a woman.

Yeah I'd read some of that, the trouble is release of a document/reading all our emails just isn't scary unless handled very well.

I have no issue with Bond summarily executing anyone, it's his job after all and we've seen him do it to numerous men and women over the years.

Blofeld as a woman might have at least been more interesting than the subGoldmember 'brothers' plot we actually got. I wonder if Bellucci was supposed to be Blofeld?

 

[Gaith]

What bothers me is that it’s only a few months ago that one of them pretty much said “I don’t even know how you’d go about making a Bond film these days!” LINK

A fair question - and, as I've said numerous times before, the answer is to do a period reboot, starting with Bond as part of a WW2 Royal Navy commando unit.

 

[N-121973]

A fair question - and, as I've said numerous times before, the answer is to do a period reboot, starting with Bond as part of a WW2 Royal Navy commando unit.

As a fan of the books as well as the films I've wanted for sometime to see faithful period adaptations of the novels & short stories. It would probably have to be done on TV perhaps with the novels as feature-length episodes or serialised in two to four parts and some of the novels/stories might admittedly be difficult to film such as 'You Only Live Twice' & 'Quantum of Solace'. Some action scenes may need to be embellished or added, but relative to the films and I'm using 'Dr. No', 'From Russia With Love' & 'On Her Majesty's Secret Service' as my baseline as they were among the most faithfully adapted as opposed to say 'Moonraker' or 'You Only Live Twice' which weren't very faithful at all, they would be even more faithful to the source material.
https://www.mi6-hq.com/news/daniel-...-done-deal-according-to-new-york-times-170725
If the above story is true then Daniel Craig will break new ground in the sense that up until now, every Bond has been associated with a particular decade, even if they've made films in the following decade as most of them have.
Sean Connery - Bond of the sixties with all but one of his official films made then.
George Lazenby is the odd one out as he only made the one film in the same decade as Connery's heyday.
Roger Moore - Bond of the seventies as four of his seven films were from that decade and even though the remaining three spanned the first half of the eighties.
Timothy Dalton - Bond of the eighties as both his films were made then.
Pierce Brosnan - Bond of the nineties. Like Connery all but one of his films were from the same decade.
Daniel Craig - this is where the pattern ends. He debuted in the last decade but if he does five he will cover two decades being both the Bond of the Millennium and the teens.

 

[bigdaddy]

I remember when Bond movies had a plot, and that's all the plot they needed.

Those were the dddaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaays!

 

[Starkers]

I can't see the notion of a period reboot working, certainly not for the movie series. It would be interesting, but I fear it would turn a lot of people off the character (or rather I fear that the producers would fear that). Take The Man from UNCLE film (which I actually like better than Spectre pound for pound because it's fun) which did poorly. The other difficulty is how far you can go with that? Sure have Bond as a commando in WW2, maybe even linking up with the SOE by the end of the war, then segue into him becoming a proper 00 agent in the second film, and have the third with him fully formed.

Where do you go from there? Plus you're just doing the Craig films again, only with a period setting.

I think they're ready for another reset, so it's odd for people who in the past have been more than happy to jettison their leading man even after he's delivered a huge blockbuster hit (thanks for the money, Pierce now sod off) that they seem desperate for DC to do one more. Bringing back Purvis and Wade just adds to the sense that they're retreating to something comfortable, and I worry that Bond #25 will be another overlong film that tries (and fails) to link to every other Daniel Craig film because heaven forbid one of Bond's adversaries doesn't work for the same organisation (yes Dr No to Diamonds all featured Spectre, but Goldfinger proved they didn't all have to work for Blofeld--and yes I get that it's eminently possible that Auric was working for Spectre and it just didn't come up in conversation, just wish they'd done that with Silva-.

Who knows, maybe the gap is to give them time to produce an ace script rather than just to seduce Daniel back by giving him a long time to get used to doing it again. This really has to be his last film though, especially if they're now settling into a 3/4 year gap between films, otherwise he'll outdo Roger Moore age wise!

 

[Gaith]

I can't see the notion of a period reboot working, certainly not for the movie series. It would be interesting, but I fear it would turn a lot of people off the character (or rather I fear that the producers would fear that). Take The Man from UNCLE film (which I actually like better than Spectre pound for pound because it's fun) which did poorly.

Eh, take the Wonder Woman film. Seems to me audiences will definitely embrace period films when they're done with purpose. (To be clear, I'm not advocating adapting the novels. I can't say as I care about those.)

The other difficulty is how far you can go with that? Sure have Bond as a commando in WW2, maybe even linking up with the SOE by the end of the war, then segue into him becoming a proper 00 agent in the second film, and have the third with him fully formed.Where do you go from there? Plus you're just doing the Craig films again, only with a period setting.

Doing another origin series doesn't necessarily mean coming to the same conclusion. A new WW2-era could establish a team dynamic among the commando/00 crowd that takes as many cues from the Mission: Impossible movies as Casino Royale and Quantum of Solace took cues from the Bourne series. But then again, once you're into the Cold War, you can do stories as episodic as the classic films; there's no ironclad need to try to string together an emotional narrative like the Craig movies have done.

 

[Captaindemotion]

I wish Eon didn't guard the rights to onscreen 007 so jealously. A few years ag, Jeffrey Deaver wrote a modern-set Bond novel which aimed to serve as a sort of literary reboot of the series. But since then, there have been period-set novels by Anthony Horowitz and Sebastian Faulkes. I would love it if Eon allowed the BBC or Netflix to do lower-budget one-off period pieces with different actors in the role. If we can have several different Sherlock Holmes at the same time, several versions of the Flash and technically even Superman (the one in Supergirl), surely Bond lends himself even more easily to multiple incarnations?