Daniel Craig's James Bond

   I'll be the first to admit that even though I watch and enjoy a lot of movies, I'm not that into James Bond. I like some of the really old ones, but the franchise overall never really hit it for me. When I saw Casino Royale as a young lad all those years ago I remember asking myself why more James Bond movies weren't like this. And when I saw Quantum of Solace a few years later I remembered. Now that I've seen Skyfall, and they've wrapped up a good trilogy of Daniel Craig I think I understand the point. 

   Let's go back a ways shall we? James Bond , code name 007, is a fictional character created in 1953 by writer Ian Felming, who featured him in twelve novels and two short story collections. He's a British secret service agent who drives hot cars, fraternizes with any and all hot women, and shoots many manner of cheesy villain with a number of crazy guns and gadgets. The original novels have to date been adapted to death and over the last fifty years film after film starring the suave James Bond have hit the screen and always hit high numbers in the box office. 

  The series has had it's highs and lows, it's amazing works of art and its shoddy piles of shit, but the films always keep to form and always try their damnedest. At some point in the early 2000's someone decided to change it up a bit. 2006's Casino Royale put a lower ranking (Now mega star) Daniel Craig in the role of James Bond. While keeping to a lot of the classic James Bond traditions it certainly feels more serious and more real than any of the films that came before it. By making the villain seem cartoonishly evil, but then wrap him in a very realistic conflict with lots of deep espionage that we haven't even begun to scratch the surface of by the end of the film. That said its still a great movie, Craig proved to be the perfect modern day James Bond and they squeezed out a damn good espionage thriller out of what should have been a generic action movie. It also introduced to great casting choices, Craig as Bond and Judi Dench as M, the head of MI6 the British Secret Service. Dench is always a good choice but as her part in these movies gradually got bigger, to the point of her being a main character in Skyfall it was obvious someone was thinking ahead. She's strong in every one of her many scenes and brings the trilogy to a whole other level of quality.

   Despite being different Casino Royale was a success and Craig was signed on for a sequel entitled; Quantum of Solace. Which critics across the board deemed far less than satisfactory. In an effort to keep the story of the previous film going it picks up right where Casino Royale left off and gets immediately kinda confusing and strange. Not really making the antagonist or the conflict clear, it tries to deal more with Bond growing and changing as a character based on the events of the first movie. 

   Except it can't really do that because James Bond is pretty much a stock character and the way Craig plays him he's already a lot more badass than any of the Bond's before him. So his growth is all played out vicariously through a side character, a girl out for revenge of the man  that killed her family. While this sounds good on paper it forces us to accept some things that don't seem within Bond's character. For one we're supposed to believe he genuinely loved the girl who died at the end of Casino Royale. Which while the movie tried to make it seem that way, that isn't something James Bond would do. He's a suave womanizer but he's far too cold and distant for true love. 

   It also means that we're supposed to pay more attention to a supporting character's feelings then the protagonists  But we can;t do that either because while the film tries to keep up its main story it can't always contrive reasons for the girl to be around except  in the beginning and the end. We don;t get to see her change, and nothing ever confirms that she does. So we're left with Bond trying to play off this girl, he's supposed to relate to her struggle so that they can over come vengeance together. It all kinda falls flat because we don't get enough of the girl and it doesn't suit Bond on his own. 

   By the time the end rolls around the movie has plainly tell us "He was the bad guy, and this was the bad thing he was doing". No one really cares movie. Sorry. While I don't hate this movie, it really isn't very good. It begs the question, where were they going with this?

   Looking back on all that I'm surprised this wasn't more obvious. Skyfall turns out to be both the least and most James Bond - esque movie of the Daniel Craig trilogy. What really boggled my mind was that it could be so action packed, and have a great deep villain with an interesting story, and segway out of this series perfectly without feeling the need to compensate for the weird shit that happened in the previous two stories. I'm pretty sure they planned a lot more of this out from the start than anyone predicted and as far as I'm concerned these three films make the entire series of movies feel a lot more complete. 

  Basically during a rough mission Bond gets taken out of the job for a while and most people presume he's dead. As it turns out he's just trying to move on from everything that happened to him. But when a villain from his supervisor M's past come out swinging at MI6 agents through cyber terrorism Bond will have to come back to finish the job.

   And that he does with gun fights and car chases and international travel and its all very sloppy because he's so out of practice from those years of being dead. This movie doesn't have nearly as much espionage as the other two and it absolutely has its heart set on one thing, seeing James Bond stare his limits in the face. He's not fit, he can barely fire a gun, and he spends all his time in a stressed panic because he can't keep up with the villain played by Javier Bardem. Who, as we all know, is the best a playing psycho killers. I won't spoil where all that ends up or what the movie is really playing trying to show us Bond's weaknesses but by  the end of the movie, with all its great action and fantastic acting coupled with starborn writing I understood theses movies. What I'm about to go into is A SPOILER and I recommend if you haven't seen the movie yet do that because it's great. 

   The Daniel Craig James Bond films are prequels to the series as a whole. Through the three films they've managed to explain all of James Bond most known qualities; he's a heartless womanizer because love betrayed him, he doesn't go out for revenge and stays cold and calculating because revenge doesn't solve anything, and he's loyal to his job because the one person who always stuck her neck out for him died under his protection and he wants to do his country the utmost justice. That's why these movies don't feel like James Bond movies, because they seem to be more about the origin of how James Bond as we know him came into being. Which in my opinion makes them all totally awesome. Daniel Craig's acting never falters and in Skyfall there is literally a scene where he allude's to his past and explains how he got to his lowest point and we as the audience realize with him that James Bond can't leave, nor can he die, nor can he love, nor can he look back. Because if he does, the world around him literally crumbles. 

   I for one cannot wait to see where they take James Bond in the future but the franchise seems to be in good hands.