Blueprints For Brilliance: Skyfall (Bond 23)

['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?

  

Blueprints For Brilliance: Why Transformers 3 fails as a dumb action movie

 

['Blueprints For Brilliance' will be 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, but with added alliteration.]

Transformers: Dark of the Moon opened about two weeks ago to critical revilement, before going on to take a hefty $645m (and climbing) at the global box office. Predictably, this led to the usual round of accusations that critics were out of touch and that their snooty attitudes had no place being applied to the summer genre commonly called the 'dumb action movie'.

Flixist's review tended towards the positive end of the critical spectrum, though my own thoughts were significantly less generous - were it not for the depressingly lazy Pirates 4, Dark of the Moon would comfortably be my worst movie of the year so far. Just as plenty of people were ready to stand up and defend Pirates against its critical pillaging, so too would a significant percentage of viewers dismiss my opinion (and those who agree with me) on the basis that since I write reviews, I must be a snob and automatically averse to the spectacle-over-sense mantra that Transformers and director Michael Bay have come to symbolise.

 

Blueprints For Brilliance: How to make a great James Bond video game

['Blueprints For Brilliance' will be 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, but with added alliteration.]

Despite achieving great things in cinematic and literary form, James Bond's record as a video game character has a mixed history. The high point was of course GoldenEye 007 on the N64, which in addition to being my all-time favourite game, remains one of the top-selling and most influential FPS' in the genre's history. The Bond game that followed it, a loose adaptation of Tomorrow Never Dies by Electronic Arts for the  PlayStation, achieved commercial success - albeit shifting under half as many copies as Rareware's game - but was critically reviled. The next generation marked a period of stability for the licence, put to games that mostly received both good reviews and sold in respectable numbers, a run of form which ended with the inglorious GoldenEye: Rogue Agent.

Following the Bond licence's move from EA to Activision and the arrival of Daniel Craig to replace Pierce Brosnan in cinemas, there has been an increasingly problematic debate about how best to use the character in his latest incarnation. Quantum of Solace was a mess, while Blood Stone did abysmal numbers at retail and received little mercy from critics, resulting in its developer Bizarre Creations going out of business. The re-adaptation of GoldenEye 007 for Wii was a gamble that paid off both financially (one of the few traditional third-party games on the console to sell over a million copies) and creatively, yet concerns were still voiced that it was more a re-skinned Call of Duty than true Bond game.

So with Activision announcing this week that the licence is being put to a new title by Raven Software, one question remains: what makes a good Bond game?