['Blueprints For Brilliance' is a non-regular feature focusing
on how best to adapt challenging or interesting properties to a certain
medium. It's a bit like Flixist's How To Do It, where a version of this article was first published, but with added alliteration.]
The next entry in the James Bond series is set to start filming during the next
month, with more and more details of shooting locations and possible
cast members being unearthed as the time draws nearer. We now have enough concrete details and strong rumours by
now to start speculating on how Skyfall, the twenty-third entry in the Bond series, could shape up.
Once again, the Bond series finds itself at something of a crossroads after Quantum of Solace failed to receive the same widespread adoration as its celebrated predecessor, Casino Royale, and even recouped slightly less at the box-office. Skyfall is going to lay down an important marker for how people see Daniel Craig's Bond: was Quantum
a one-off blip caused by the writers' strike, or symptomatic of the
writers' struggle to create strong stories for the character without
having the work of his literary creator, Ian Fleming, to fall back on?
Let's first think about who Daniel Craig's Bond is and what he
represents. In the aftermath of the Pierce Brosnan-starring debacle, Die Another Day, Casino Royale
was supposed to take Bond back to his literary roots. It isn't the
first time this has happened, with the casting of Timothy Dalton
happening for many of the same reasons following Roger Moore's infamous
tenure of the role. The way Ian Fleming describes Bond in the novels
fits in quite well with how Craig (and Dalton) portrays him:
good-looking - even if Craig looks nothing like Hoagy Carmichael, the
jazz composer whom Fleming used as a model for Bond's facial appearance -
but ruthless, cruel in the mouth and cold in the eyes. Craig's baby
blues get that last detail spot on.
In character, though, a mistake made in Quantum was to assume the literary Bond was a merciless killing machine. That's as far from the truth as could be: in the novels, Bond kills efficiently and out of professional duty, but only because he has to. The Goldfinger novel opens with a wonderful scene where Bond reflects on life and death while sitting in an airport lounge, having killed a man less than twenty-four hours earlier. Bond's exact way of thinking is as follows:
In character, though, a mistake made in Quantum was to assume the literary Bond was a merciless killing machine. That's as far from the truth as could be: in the novels, Bond kills efficiently and out of professional duty, but only because he has to. The Goldfinger novel opens with a wonderful scene where Bond reflects on life and death while sitting in an airport lounge, having killed a man less than twenty-four hours earlier. Bond's exact way of thinking is as follows:
It was part of his profession to kill people. He had never liked doing it and when he had to kill he did it as well as he knew how and forgot about it. As a secret agent who held the rare double-0 prefix – the licence to kill in the Secret Service – it was his duty to be as cool about death as a surgeon. If it happened, it happened. Regret was unprofessional – worse it was death-watch beetle in the soul.
In Quantum, Bond quite happily slaughters any number of people
without any hint of feeling. Although similarly brutal, his portrayal
in the Casino Royale film is more in line with Fleming because
though Bond kills, it is made clear that he suffers the consequences:
you don't drain back whisky while staring at your bloodied self in the
mirror for hoots. Quantum's Bond may have been on a revenge mission, but that was no excuse turning him into a mindless psychopath.
Since nobody wants to retread old ground and outright repeat scenes from Casino, the best approach would be to take a leaf out of Tim Dalton's book in Licence To Kill.
Bond was also on a revenge mission there and responsible for many
deaths, yet while there weren't any full scenes dedicated to him showing
guilt for the slaughter, Dalton humanised the character by giving him
more physical pain, more panic when on the brink of death. In Quantum, Craig's Bond took everything in his stride. In Skyfall,
it would be nice to see Bond stumbling just a little, taking his share
of hurt and not tearing through fights and peril like an automaton. The
character is first and foremost a hero, far moreso than the likes of
Bourne or Bauer, so if he's going to do these terrible things, the
audience need to see them affect him in some way.
Now let's talk villains. There's a justified fear of Bond turning into Austin Powers,
which skewered the ridiculousness of the camp megalomaniacs whom the
series had used for antagonists in the past. Yet that fear has turned
Bond a little too far into absolute seriousness, where much of the
appeal of the series comes from its slightly escalated fantastical
elements. Producer Michael G. Wilson used to say that Bond occupied
reality plus 10%, a fair summation. It's not that every Bond villain
with a deformity or unusual trait is instantly camp, just the ones that
go too far. You'd be hard pressed to get away with metal teeth these
days, for example, but Le Chiffre's bleeding eye in Casino was a
perfect mixture of the sinister and the grotesque, larger-than-life
without being comic book. Bond's villains should be a bit boo-hiss,
counteracting Bond's heroic nature, but hopefully Skyfall's writers will remember that there's a way of doing that without slipping into silliness.
Although he gets a lot of criticism, I was a fan of Tomorrow Never Dies'
Elliot Carver, who represented a megalomaniac for a modern,
media-driven age. Where his being nebbish and weak was part of the point
that his power came from his empire ("[...]Words the new weapons,
satellites the new artillery."), Quantum's Dominic Greene was
similarly meek, but also only a middle-man in a bigger operation. He
never felt sufficiently powerful, either physically or in terms of his
position in a criminal empire, to give Bond a proper challenge. (His
henchman was also a wordless bore with a similar lack of physical
prowess - a good henchman should offer muscle when the main villain
cannot). The lesson here is that there are many different types of
villain, some physically imposing and others powerful through their
connections, but the one thing they all have to offer is a sense that
they can put Bond in real danger when required.
Let's directly address a rumour which has cropped up recently, that Blofeld will be making an appearance
in the new movie, possibly to be played by Ralph Fiennes, who has been confirmed for the film in an unknown role. (Javier Bardem will also play a villain, although my money is on him being a one-shot). My editor at Flixist and fellow Bond geek, Matt Razak, has opined that the series benefited from the
character's absence, opening up a new range of villains and better plots
than always having this one evil figure in the background would allow. I
agree, to a point: villains stroking cats has become the most absurd
cliché and certainly represents territory that can be left behind, with
thanks for all the fighting fish.
However, I do believe that it is quite possible to do a new
interpretation of Blofeld that is consistent with what a Bond villain
should be in the modern era. For one thing, the Blofeld character in the
books had neither a fluffy pussy to fondle, a penchant for drag (thanks
for that, Diamonds Are Forever) or a ridiculous scar over his
eye. He wasn't even bald. Instead, he was a physical behemoth with a
crew cut, black eyes, scientific brilliance and a sexless marriage
(nearly all Fleming's villains are sexually unusual) to his
second-in-command, Irma Bunt - a character who needs to return if
Blofeld does, if only so we can see her killed and thus have Tracy's
death in On Her Majesty's Secret Service properly avenged, albeit in a different timeline.
To
get him right, though, he needs to be more on the James Moriarty side of
the supervillain graph than Fu Manchu. Osama Bin Laden proved that it
is possible to have one man become the embodiment of evil in real life
and the new Blofeld should be similarly reclusive, intellectually
brilliant in all the worst disciplines and with an extremist dedication
to his cause. No more brown Chinese shirts and silly accents: he should
be a figure who inspires fear and exerts control over the modern world
as much as MI6 are struggling to keep up with it. Given the sinister
intensity and otherness he brought to his Voldemort performances,
Fiennes would be a terrific choice.
There's also a scene from Fleming's You Only Live Twice (my
favourite of his books) that I have been longing to see translated to
the screen, which could be easily adapted - without some of the more
questionable racial implications present in the novel - for the modern
era. Bond discovers that Dr. Guntram Shatterhand, the man he has been
assigned to kill, is none other than Blofeld, living in a castle atop an
island off the Japanese coast, where he is cultivating all the most
toxic plants and substances known to man in what is colloquially
referred to as a 'Garden of Death'. His reasons for doing so are
related to the aforementioned racial politics and I will consequently be leaving them well
alone.
Bond scales the cliff to Blofeld's castle and has to navigate
the garden in the pitch black of night, knowing that one wrong step
could result in his being lethally poisoned or drowning to death in a
sulphuric bog. It's one of the most suspenseful and morbidly abstract
sequences Fleming put to page, as well as being a perfect environment in
which to introduce a man driven by his deranged but brilliant
scientific intellect. As for the reason for such a 'garden', that's easy
enough: biological weapons, anyone? Suspense and weird imagery are two
things largely missing from the modern Bond, both of which could be
offered by such a sequence.
I'll end this article with a bit on the Bond girl. In their constant
striving to seem modern and politically correct, new Bond movies have
often sought to present leading ladies every bit as strong and
action-oriented as Bond himself. I don't disagree with the idea, because
the worst Bond girls are always the ones who figuratively and literally
just roll over - say hello, Mary Goodnight! - but more recent ones have
occasionally slipped into the 'female Bond' role without developing any
sort of character to call their own - let's try and avoid another Jinx
(urgh), shall we? - or are defined entirely by their jobs, such as
computer programmer Natalya Simonova or Denise Richards as nuclear
physicist (yes, really) Christmas Jones.
Craig's main Bond girls have both had a nice mix of personality and
proficiency, with Vesper being a proper femme fatale and Camille so
consumed by her quest for revenge that it had turned her almost feral.
Aside from the usual baseless speculation, details have not been
particularly forthcoming about what Skyfall's female lead will
have to do, but hopefully care will continue to be taken so she has much
personality as purpose. Whomever Craig's latest lass turns
out to be, she could probably do with avoiding a comedy name, though,
even if I seemed to be the only person in the known universe who thought
Strawberry Fields was a pretty great Bond girl moniker. Berenice Mahole's character is known to be called Severine, which is appropriately unusual but hopefully will be left at that.
So those are my thoughts on how Skyfall can recapture some of the Fleming-ian flavour missing from Quantum of Solace
without compromising the series' credentials as a modern action series.
I had actually written out a whole possible plot for the movie, using
all the confirmed locations and suggestions above, but thought it best
not to turn this article into fan fiction. I'm currently serialising my own Fleming-inspired action thriller anyway.
My real point is that, with careful consideration, Bond can be relevant
without losing everything that makes his best movies so special.
Moneypenny and Q could easily have taken the place of characters from Casino and Quantum,
for one thing, and slightly mad gadgets are fine so long as they don't
become easy escape routes that kill suspense. As you can probably tell, I
could write several thousand more words on this topic, covering
everything from M to locations and when to deploy the Bond theme for
maximum effect. But even on this blog, that degree of nerditry is probably
going a bit too far.
Oh, but the gunbarrel sequence definitely needs to be back at the
beginning. It's the single most exciting movie introduction ever
devised! What goon thought it would be a good idea...
OK, I'll stop now. Skyfall comes out on November 9th
next year in the US and October 26th in the UK. As you can probably
tell, I'm a little bit excited about it.
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