Rather than asking who’s going to be the next Bond, let’s ask why we still care. By Greg Bruce.
From the age of 5, when I saw For Your Eyes Only at The Civic and was profoundly moved by Sheena Easton’s title song, I was hooked. I saw every Bond film from then until 1997, my last year at university, when I went to The Monterey in Howick to watch Tomorrow Never Dies and was offended by how much money it cost me to watch more or less the same film my parents had paid for me to see every two years since 1981. I’d like to say this was down to my growing sense of sophistication as a viewer, but I know that’s not true because I liked a lot of objectively bad movies then, and have continued to do so, including as recently as three weeks ago when I laughed from start to finish at the critically eviscerated Ice Age 5: Collision Course.
But as I sat in that cinema in 1997, watching Pierce Brosnan go through the motions, I wondered why I and so many others kept coming back to watch these movies in which the only things that ever changed were the emotionally affecting title songs, interchangeably hot actors and increasingly gratuitous integrated advertisements for luxury brands. Had I been capable of, or interested in, critical thinking, I might have considered what this apparent lack of collective critical thinking might have indicated for humanity’s chances in a future world in which a failure to think critically could cost many lives.
I was also tiring of the idea that our pre-eminent cinematic hero should be an attractive white dude with a sense of entitlement, God complex and sense of smugness at his own terrible sense of humour. Bond nominally fought evil but he was otherwise the cinematic embodiment of everyone that had bullied me since intermediate school.
For some or all of these reasons, I thought Tomorrow Never Dies would be my last Bond film. Then, in 2007, at home on the floor of my flat in Botany Downs, possibly because it was a bad year for me, in which I was depressed and the All Blacks lost their quarterfinal at the Rugby World Cup, I found myself watching Casino Royale. A sort of Bond origin story, it was necessarily a severe departure from the Bond formula and presented a fresh vision. I sat up straight when Daniel Craig as Bond emerged from the water in his now-famous ice-blue boyshort Speedos. “This might be a new era,” I thought. Casino Royale felt moodier, more thoughtful, not so reliant on some boring, smug dick flinging himself round from pillar to post. It offered insight, new interest, character development and parkour. The Bond franchise had finally grown up, I thought. But a couple of years later, when the next movie came out, I realised it had been an anomaly. I gave up and have not watched another Bond film since.
