The problem with modern Bond is that it keeps looking back at itself.
While the early Bond films mixed extravagant plots with tongue-in-cheek humour, they generally played their stories straight. However improbable the villain’s scheme or Q’s latest invention, the characters accepted it as part of their world. The films seldom invited the audience to step outside that world and think about James Bond as a film series.
Consistency was a different matter. They shared characters, organisations and some history, but continuity remained loose. Each adventure was designed to stand alone. You didn’t need to see one film to understand the next, and they can still be enjoyed out of order without fear of spoilers.
Think of how Bond and Blofeld meet face to face in You Only Live Twice, yet in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service Blofeld initially fails to recognise him. The contradiction arose because Fleming’s stories were filmed in a different order, but the filmmakers made no attempt to explain it. They simply expected the audience to accept it.
The first crack in the wall
Probably the earliest obvious crack in the (fourth) wall comes in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service when George Lazenby’s Bond says, “This never happened to the other fella.”
That line only works because the audience knows Sean Connery played Bond before him. If you had never seen another Bond film and knew nothing of its history, you wouldn’t understand the joke. Bond is suddenly acknowledging something outside the immediate story.
The film contains other references to the past. The title sequence includes images from previous films, while Bond later goes through his desk drawer and looks at objects from earlier adventures. These references were reassuring audiences that, despite the change of actor, this was still the same James Bond. But once the story begins in earnest, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service takes Bond, Blofeld and Tracy seriously. The film never becomes a commentary on the series.
The Roger Moore films pushed the formula towards broader comedy and greater spectacle, but generally remained inside Bond’s world. Moore might raise an eyebrow at the absurdity around him, yet Bond himself never appeared conscious that he was part of a long-running film series. The films exaggerated the formula without examining it.
When Goldeneye answered the critics
By the time Goldeneye came along, something genuinely changed. When Judi Dench’s M calls Bond a “sexist, misogynist dinosaur” and “a relic of the Cold War”, the lines are directed at the man standing in front of her.
But it is difficult not to hear it as a comment on the franchise. There had been years of criticism over the way Bond treated women, particularly in the Connery era. The end of the Cold War had also raised an obvious question: was Bond still relevant?
Perhaps that is what makes Goldeneye so interesting. More than simply updating Bond for the 1990s, it acknowledges the criticism and then spends time answering it. Bond may be a relic, but he is still useful to the British government as a blunt instrument.
Fan service and the Bond museum
While the following two films are more conventional Bond adventures, the series takes another look back at itself in Die Another Day. The 40th-anniversary film is packed with references to earlier entries and Q’s workshop has effectively become a Bond museum where old gadgets reappear. There are nods to previous films, including visual references to The Man with the Golden Gun in the Cuba clinic scenes.
But is this actually commentary on Bond history or simply fan service? The old gadgets don’t advance the plot. They exist because the audience recognises them. Die Another Day knows that it belongs to a long-running series, but it doesn’t have anything to say about that history.
Why Casino Royale worked
Then Casino Royale arrives and everything feels fresh again. Part of that is because it returns to Fleming. The film expands the novel quite significantly and updates many aspects for the 21st century, but at its core it is still Fleming and, once again, it largely discards the nods to fans.
There is an Aston Martin DB5, which inevitably recalls Goldfinger, but it has no gadgets and no history within the new continuity. Bond simply wins it in a card game.
The film takes Bond’s world seriously again and shows how he became the man we know. When asked how he wants his martini, Bond snaps, “Do I look like I give a damn?”
It plays with audience expectations while revealing his state of mind. Watched now, the film still feels fresh, precisely because it avoids many of the elements that later made the Craig era feel tired.
And Quantum of Solace may have disappointed many people on release, but it does at least take the Bond universe seriously. In continuing the story of Mr White and dealing with the consequences of Vesper’s death, it remains concerned with events inside Bond’s world without asking the audience to admire the history of the franchise.
Skyfall and Bond looking back
Skyfall is where, for me at least, the shift becomes unavoidable. Its opening mission goes spectacularly wrong and Bond is presumed dead. When he returns he is completely washed out, mentally and physically out of shape. In the space of three films Craig’s Bond has gone from rookie agent to someone who no longer seems to fit into his own world. Failure, age, relevance and Bond’s history are now part of the story.
Q’s introduction comments on the gadget-heavy tradition of previous films. “Were you expecting an exploding pen? We don’t really go in for that anymore.”
The DB5 explicitly links Skyfall back to Goldfinger. The car serves the story, but the ejector-seat joke only works because the audience already knows what the switch does. That moment is fan service, pure and simple.
“Sometimes the old ways are the best” is interesting too. It sounds like a throwaway line, but perhaps it is doing more than that. Skyfall seems to acknowledge that Bond, both the man and the franchise, has to adapt to survive while reassuring the audience that some parts of the old formula will remain.
Earlier Bond films had acknowledged the series but in Skyfall, both Bond and the series itself are put under the microscope.
Looking backwards
SPECTRE pushes that further. The film retroactively ties the previous Craig films to the return of Blofeld and SPECTRE and adds a whole Blofeld foster-brother angle that doesn’t work at all.
The DB10, made specifically for the film, brings back the gadget-laden Aston Martin. This time some of the gadgets fail, a joke that depends on the audience knowing that Bond’s gadgets normally work. Their failure becomes another comment on the conventions of the series.
No Time to Die continues in much the same vein. Bond is retired and arrives in Matera in the DB5. The sequence is superb, but the story only requires that Bond and Madeleine escape. The filmmakers built the entire sequence around an overfamiliar piece of Bond history they knew would go down well with fans.
The score also reaches back to On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. But the music brings Tracy into a story that should belong to Bond and Madeleine. It pulls me out of the film.
Then, finally, Bond dies. The ending gets much of its power from the breaking the series’ oldest promise: James Bond always survives. But looking back now—after years without progress on another film and Eon eventually handing creative control to Amazon—it almost feels as though Eon was saying goodbye to James Bond.
What Bond 26 should leave behind
The best Bond films are driven by Bond’s mission and the obstacles the villain puts in his path. The problem begins when self-reference gets in the way of the plot or leaves Bond looking backwards. When Bond as an institution overshadows the mission, the story suffers.
Bond 26 should avoid that trap. It doesn’t need to reflect on Bond’s legacy or ask whether he still matters. And it certainly doesn’t need to wheel out the DB5 yet again.
