Odds & Ends
Saturday, February 26, 2005
Casino Royale with Cheese
As a follow-up to my post about Casino Royale early in February, some of Martin Campbell's views on the new film have featured in a story over at CommanderBond.net (apparently pretty much lifted verbatim from The New York Daily News).
While it's good to hear Campbell wanting to do the character-based nature of the novel justice, what's with the "Bond at the start of his career" stuff? So it's not a prequel, or a period film, but it is about Bond at the start of his career? This is basically what they tried with Jack Ryan in The Sum of All Fears, and that basically killed that franchise (admittedly, a weak franchise to begin with). Of course, the Bond series doesn't have any real sense of internal consistency - the Bond of Die Another Day can't feasibly be the same Bond we saw in Dr No. But the slippage of the internal time has always been fairly invisible - one Bond film generally can be seen as taking pretty much right after the other, and certain aspects of the character are consistent. For example, the loss of his wife in 1969's On Her Majesties Secret Service is explicitly acknowledged as still part of the character's past in 1981's For Your Eyes Only (with Roger Moore), and fairly directly in 1989's Licence to Kill (with Timothy Dalton). The Brosnan films deliberately kept this aspect of the character ambiguous - it wasn't acknowledged, but there were occasional references dropped to losses in his past that the fans could read as references to Tracy if they wished. By contrast, an explicit disavowal of all that came before is really unusual and seems a risky move. The previous lapses in continuity have tended to involve quietly ignoring what came before. 1971's Diamonds Are Forever, for example, completely ignores the death of Tracy in the film before. The principal villain (Blofeld) was the driver of the car from which she was shot, but there is not a single mention of the incident, and Moneypenny flirtatiously jokes about marriage in the first few minutes. (As Jim Smith and Stephen Lavington put it in their book Bond Films: "Surprisingly Bond doesn't respond by shouting, 'My wife was murdered at the end of the last film you heartless cow!' at her.") That ruled a line under the very close continuity than through all the 60s Bonds, and the consistency was always much looser after that. Yet even The Living Daylights (from 1987), which introduces a much younger Bond, avoided actually acknowledging any change. What's strange about this is that "resetting" the character is an unnecessary risk from usually risk-averse producers. They would be better off setting Casino Royale totally outside the established continuity of the series - effectively quarantining it as an art Bond film, in the way I described back in the early days of this page. (Click here and then scroll down to the 23/5/04 entry to read that post.) I'll write about something other than Bond or animation next post, I promise. Labels: bond Posted by Stephen Rowley @ 26.2.05  
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