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Since my pre-review based on the first trailer of Denis Villeneuve’s much-anticipated and much-postponed Dune got a good discussion going, I decided to do the same with the equally-hyped, equally-postponed Bond movie No Time to Die.
Everybody has a time to die, including James Bond. Bond has cheated death countless times, but this time his number may be up. If so, the death certificate will list COVID-19.
No Time to Die, the twenty-fifth Bond film from Eon productions, stars Daniel Craig in his fifth and final outing as Bond. No Time to Die was supposed to have been directed by Danny Boyle (Trainspotting) who was to share script-writing duty with his Trainspotting collaborator John Hodge. I thought this was a fantastic team. But they left the film because of creative differences.
Boyle was replaced by Cary Joji Fukunaga, the half-white, half-Japanese American director of the first season of True Detective. The script is by Fukunaga with Neal Purvis, Robert Wade, and Phoebe Waller-Bridge, who was brought in to add wokeness, which does not bode well.
The cast brings back Christoph Walz, Ralph Fiennes, Léa Seydoux, Ben Whishaw, and Naomi Harris to reprise their roles from past films. Rami Malek plays the villain Safin, which is an inspired bit of casting.
But there are bad portents in the music department. Fukunaga associate Dan Romer left while scoring the film over creative differences and was replaced by Hans Zimmer, who has done a large number of undistinguished but workmanlike scores. Billie Eilish’s theme song is one of the worst Bond songs ever, and there’s stiff competition. These lapses of taste alone do not bode well for the film.
No Time to Die was filmed from April to October 2019 in Italy, Jamaica, Norway, the UK, and the Faroe Islands at the cost of $250 million. The release was scheduled for April 2020 but because of COVID-19 was postponed twice, first to November of 2020, then to April 2021.
That’s a very long time to wait to recoup such a huge investment, and if further delays are necessary, the financial burdens will only mount. This could very well be the first straight-to-video Bond movie, which financially would be a very far cry from the box office receipts of Skyfall ($1.111 billion) and Spectre ($879.6 million).
A commercial flop won’t necessarily kill the Bond franchise, but it could put it on extended hiatus, as well as dry up potential talent and funding. It might be the final straw for Eon Productions, led by half-siblings Barbara Broccoli and Michael Wilson, who might just pull a George Lucas and sell the franchise to one of the studio conglomerates. We know how well that worked out for Star Wars, which Disney ruined with cynical, formulaic remakes and obnoxious ultra-Left propaganda.
Of course, Eon Productions has its own history of cynical remakes and Leftist propaganda, and, judging from the two trailers for No Time to Die, and other publicity materials, Bond’s death certificate may list political correctness as a co-morbidity.
In July of 2019, the world learned from alleged “leaks” and “inside sources” that No Time to Die would feature a black, female 007 played by Lashana Lynch. This was simply a cheap, calculated, and dishonest publicity stunt designed to mislead readers who initially thought that the character of James Bond had been turned into a black woman played by Lashana Lynch (no relation). But the merest glance below the headlines indicates that, no, Bond is still a white man, but at the beginning of No Time to Die, Bond has retired from MI6 so his number 007 had been assigned to a black woman.
If Eon wants to generate even more buzz about this film, perhaps they will reveal that Bond’s office has been reassigned to a gay Chinaman and his parking space has been reassigned to a crippled lesbian.
This kind of cynical and dishonest publicity has been a feature of the Bond franchise for decades. For instance, it is often claimed that the new Bond girl will be a strong, independent woman—unlike all the rest. Of course, every Bond girl from the start has been strong and independent. The Bond franchise is also notorious for sex and race replacement, casting Judy Dench as M who dressed down Pierce Brosnan’s Bond as a “sexist, misogynist dinosaur.” Eon has also blacked up the recurring characters of Felix Leiter and Miss Moneypenny, and every few years, they float the rumor that a black male James Bond is in the offing.
Hilariously enough, though, Lashana Lynch made the rounds in the media taking the farce with deadly seriousness. She pretended that having the number 007 is a great achievement for someone black and female (and trans, by the look of her), as if her character were more than just an empty collection of PC “firsts” which she was qualified to play for reasons other than being a black trans woman. Lynch vows, moreover, to play the role authentically, the comic potential of which was explored in countless racist “Ms. Bond” memes.
This pushback was completely predictable, for Eon’s stunt was not just calculated to mislead but also to offend. White people are increasingly sick of the Great Replacement, both on the silver screen and in the real world. So Eon basically dared racist web wags to go after Lashana Lynch.
They were probably hoping to replicate the troll storm that greeted another black trans woman, Lesie Jones, when she was cast in the 2016 SJW remake of Ghostbusters, a campaign that led to Milo Yiannopoulos being permanently banned from Twitter. This was, of course, great publicity for Ghostbusters, since it promoted black, feminist, and SJW solidarity against evil racists and anti-feminists. It wasn’t enough to prevent Ghostbusters from bombing, however.
If Eon’s publicity agents are worth their salt, they were trying to provoke the same reaction. Who knows, maybe they created the prototypes for the Ms. Bond memes.
Since No Time to Die did not appear in November due to the second wave of COVID-19, Eon has decided to generate a little buzz by trotting out the Lashana Lynch stunt again, this time focusing on how bravely she endured the pushback from “toxic” and “racist” Bond fans who were scandalized by the idea of her having Bond’s old number. She even had to take a break from social media for a whole week, poor dear. Of course, not one in a hundred people is dumb enough to care about Bond’s number. What offended them was the tiresomeness of the Great Replacement, the fraudulence of this particular stunt, the emptiness of Lynch’s historic “achievement,” and how seriously she seemed to be taking it.
The whole thing smacks of desperation. Is this the best case they can make for this film?
Now let’s look at the trailers and see what they reveal.
The first trailer was released December 4, 2019.
Lashana Lynch is disturbingly prominent. She’s dark black, sweaty-looking, ugly, arrogant, and threatens to shoot Bond. In all fairness, though, she’s not nearly as scary-looking as Grace Jones. When Bond returns to MI6 headquarters, his name is not recognized by the black fellow at the desk. Then we see Bond flanked by Lynch’s 007 and Miss Moneypenny, both black. “The world’s moved on,” says Lynch is a voiceover, and that means the Great Replacement. It is that disgustingly blatant. And the reaction of many white normies has been visceral rejection.
Let’s hope they cut together all the anti-white bits and put them up front. But the question is: Why? Why the ritualistic humiliation and replacement of a white hero? Obviously, because the Great Denigration and Great Replacement of whites is the central ideology, the Satanic anti-religion of our time. The sad truth, though, is that the filmmakers do not do this to appease blacks but to appease other whites, especially their fellow white people who dominate the movie business.
The second trailer, released on September 3, 2020, dials back the wokeness to about zero:
It is an enormous improvement.
There’s also a fan edit of the two trailers plus other bits of the film that have been released, which plausibly reconstructs the sequence of events:
I have to admit: If I had only seen the second trailer and ignored the Lashana Lynch publicity stunt, I would really want to see this movie. I am strongly prejudiced, though. Daniel Craig is my favorite Bond, and I think Casino Royale and Skyfall are two of the best Bond films of all time. If the script of No Time to Die is on a high enough level, Craig can carry the show, and no woke monkey business will be able to sink this film. Also, as a Bond fan with a long memory, even the worst woke elements of this film will probably not compare with Live and Let Die (1973) or A View to a Kill (1985), in which our hero ends up in bed with Grace Jones.
As a reviewer, I will of course see this film no matter what. But I am reasonably optimistic that I will actually like it. If it is woke garbage, I will certainly let you know.
But there’s a real question about whether the white men who are the core of Bond’s fan base are going to see No Time to Die or stay away in droves. “Go woke, go broke” was wrecking movies long before the death of George Floyd set off months of black rioting. A lot of white men are not just experiencing Negro fatigue, they are increasingly embittered. But bitterness is a wild card, because it leads to spite. A spiteful man will even harm his own interests to avenge himself. He can’t be reasoned with, predicted, or controlled, which will prove to be a problem for more than just the movie business.
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I’ve enjoyed Craig ever since Layer Cake. I remember enjoying Casino Royale, but nothing about it.
Bond movies are about tech, stunts, and PG rated sex. The primary audience seems to be young men and boys. Now they are trying to satisfy the female tomboy/gamer/woke type.
Those trailers seemed pretty boring.
Looking forward to your review.
To stretch a metaphor: I’m not going to bite in a sh*t-sandwich in the hope that there is a decent burger hiding in it.
Personally I prefer to pay for a VPN service over a legal streaming service, but I know a lot of people prefer ease-of-use. However, that crowd is also not going to sign up in droves for premium movie releases.
iirc Boyle is the Irish wanker who organized the opening ceremony for the London 2012 Olympics, which was notable mainly for celebrating sexual relationships between black men and white women and Britain’s NHS (which a lot of Brits seem to regard as the envy of the world, lol). In other words a disgusting subversive, nothing fantastic about him.
And James Bond was always low-brow trash, time to end this idiotic franchise.
Bond should have died with Connery.
You got it.
James Bond belongs in the world of Cold War I, the Profumo Affair, the Philby revelations, and at the latest, maybe the Cuban Missile Crisis. Anytime later, Ian Fleming’s hero became a bit anachronistic.
And anyway it was a cartoon series as early as Goldfinger, and most definitely by the time of the underwater combat-ballet sequence in Thunderball, which was 1965.
Ayn Rand was asking this back in the 1960s. She just took it for granted that heroes existed for little twerp liberals to rip down. Over 50 years on, it seems Rand still nailed it with that insight. Call it woke or call it moral midgets jealous of efficacious giants, it’s the same thing.
Since Ayn Rand also hated feminism it’s probable she’d have given up on Bond years ago.
Here, I’ll save you all this verbiage:
James Bond sucks.
Doesn’t that describe the movie business in general? TV as well?
It’s remarkable how quickly Bond got woke, whatever yardstick you want to use. Probably, it was related to how the character was oversexed, and there was a lot of innuendo in the films, beginning with their titles.
I read one of the books a few months ago, on a whim, published in the late ’60s, a few years after Fleming died, and it was so politically incorrect that I found myself enjoying it, despite the fact I don’t consider myself a Bond fan.
I have come to appreciate Bond a little bit though. In this environment of soy, before Bond got woke (I take ’73 as that point) it is refreshing how masculine he was. Protagonists are pretty feminized these days, even when they are not women.
Ah the virtue signalling is strong in this one.
Seeing how you claim to be German, I have to conclude you are a fan of either scat porn or beastiality. Since every German I have ever met was devoted to one or the other.
And you probably enjoy watching your wife being fucked by negroes as all white American men do, you stupid cuck.
Amazing how so many alleged right-wingers have a soft spot for James Bond. The movies are just silly escapism, maybe fine watching it as a guilty pleasure, but definitely not worthy of any deep analysis. The original novels by Fleming might be a bit more interesting, as a reflection of Britain’s post-1945 decline and ways of coping with it through a fantasy in which Britain still was an important world power (iirc there’s even some anti-American sentiment in the novels; e.g. at one point Bond is apparently somewhat shocked about America’s murder numbers, unimaginably high for 1950s Britain). But all of this political content was never prominent in the movies which are just puerile fantasies.
Here’s an interesting gem (from 1968):
https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/mordecai-richler/james-bond-unmasked/
Maybe I should give the Bond novels more credit, if they pissed off ethnocentric Jews writing in Commentary they can’t have been all bad.
In the first movie, Connery tells a black to fetch his shoes. As late as ’83, there is a scene where Moore hands some money he won at gambling to an Indian and says “This ought to keep you in curry for a week.” There are a few scenes like that, but, you’re right they are never prominent. And I think there was one or two movies, where they make fun of Southerners. And of course, there are the black femme fatales beginning as early as ’73. It’s funny how Dolph Lundgren, the Swede, fell in with Grace Jones, who was blacker than night.
Bond is interesting because it is one of those long-running series, where you can see the Overton window moving. The first movie came out, about the same year Jamaica gained independence. That was when the English thought they were divorcing themselves from blacks.
Still, I’ll admit I’d have enjoyed Bond more, if they cleaned it up a bit, made it reliably politically incorrect, and had him fighting globalists. Made it good propaganda.
I actually met the guy who played Jaws once. His hands were incredibly large.
That was in the Roger Moore era during the 1970s iirc, they had some redneck Southern sheriff who was a pretty ridiculous figure (though fairly benign, nowadays he would probably be depicted as an evil racist out to torment saintly blacks).
One could do a Bond movie with Soros as the supervillain, with Erdogan or some similar figure as a secondary villain, plotting the inundation of Europe with “refugees”. Bond is driven out of MI6, when there’s a campaign to make the service more “inclusive” and he refuses to attend a diversity seminar based on critical race theory (his replacement is a strong black woman, who is shown to be comically inept and gets killed on her first assignment, after being mocked by Chinese commies who can’t believe their luck). He flees to Orbán’s Hungary and teams up with a Hungarian agent whose family took part in the 1956 uprising and who darkly mutters “We’re facing an even worse evil now than back then”. Together they blow up some German NGO ships picking up Africans in the Mediterranean, before finally facing Soros himself. Love interest could be some sexy French identitarian gal, whom Bond saves from being raped by Arabs.
I think I’d actually watch such a movie, pity it will never be made.
I’ll return with what I think was my best idea for propaganda (though not connected to espionage):
Finance a racist show, somewhere that they can actually make it. (That’s the hard part, where?) I’ll say Japan, though I’m not sure it would be possible there. (see the latest news) Ideally, it would be live-action, but anime would probably be cheaper.
Premiss of the show: there is a super-wealthy Japanese businessmen, who admires Europeans, and wonders what happened to them. For Europe declined into chaos and has been isolated for some time. He does two things: 1.) funds a school where young Japanese children are shown the accomplishments of Europeans – this is the opening shot of each episode – one work of art, music, or other accomplishment, a good mix of things most would be unfamiliar with, like the Silver Swan at Bowes Museum (mechanical). With Japanese children admiring them, and innocently asking, what happened to Europeans? Or trying to play a piece of music on the piano or violin, or recite Shakespeare.
Transition to the next segment, the bulk of every episode:
(2.) He funds an expedition of mercenaries to travel to Europe and find Europeans.
They arrive there and witness a lot of ruins, inhabited by feral blacks and other groups, who fight them, with spears, and try to eat them. They keep searching. Eventually, they find a hardy band of kilted Highlanders (or similar) who become the protagonists. They are entranced by one or two small songs that the Highlanders sing, or some small piece of art.
But they encounter a saboteur – a man who appears to be white, tricks the Japanese by claiming to be a European, but who really wants to takeover their ships and fill them with blacks to send to Japan. Eventually, a DNA test outs him.
The series is filled with cliff-hangers. The Japanese fail, but end up preventing the blacks being loaded aboard their ships. But they must pull out. As they continue to wonder about the Europeans they’ve met, a battle takes place, the hardy Europeans mostly end up reversing the tide on their own, perhaps by inventing some weapon.
As the credits roll on each episode, some dark clip from real life is played, relating to each episode, like Barbara Lerner Specter talking, after the saboteur episode. Heaven knows that there is enough material.
The final frame of the credits is a recurring card, with one of several messages. (1.) asking the Japanese to have more children, to prevent the scenario from happening to Japan (2.) asking them to write letters and make video messages to Europeans to tell them to have more children and to tell them what they like about Europeans, and to warn them to prevent this future.
Of course, there is an outcry about the show in the West, and calls to cancel the show, but, then that outcry is incorporated into the dark credit sequence. And the Japanese fans respond with, “We are concerned about Europeans disappearing.” In the final episode the dark credit sequence is replaced with some positive message.
Naturally, the show would be dubbed or subbed and distributed on torrents abroad.
Nice, I like the concept. But unfortunately will of course remain just as much fantasy as my Bond movie 🙁
In reality one gets stuff like this (from Germany’s Foreign ministry):
It’s impossible to take “Trevor Lynch” seriously.
Skyfall was awful.
No way that Daniel Craig is better than Sean Connery.
I think gays appear to like Daniel Craig and his, er, “masculinity”.
Craig doesn’t look the part at all.
Anyway, Bond movies were always pretty silly and quite stupid. Even the ones with Connery, before the politically correct wave came in, were not great. Just the character was fun, that’s all.
The films with Brosnan and Moore were perhaps the worst ones, almost already looking like spoofs, more like The Naked Gun than any spy film.
The modern films with Craig are more “serious”, but this just means that they are more humourless and more preachy about SJW values.
Daniel Craig’s Bond films already had a female M, a black Miss Monneypenny, what’s wrong with putting a black lesbian as another 007 then.
I don’t think I will watch this crap.
Bond always was a Cold War relic. In 1990-91 the Cold War ended.
The last Timothy Dalton picture as Bond ( 1988 ) should have been the time to retire the franchise.
The continuation of Bond under Brosnan (from 1992 ) was commercially successful but increasingly absurd. Always quit whilst your up, or you’ll be forced to quit anyway.
But the people behind the film franchise don’t care. They’ve got an extra 30 years out of Bond, and no doubt there will be a few years more. They won’t stop until they’ve squeezed the last bit of money from this old relic. Like you squeeze the last bit of toothpaste.
What is remarkable is how often their enthusiasm gets the better of them, and they pick people obviously straight from Africa, not even trying to find blacks that have been “laundered” – born into European society and with an accent similar to natives.
I forgot to mention that the first villain in the movies, Dr. No, was supposed to be a German hapa – German and Chinese, somewhat parallel to Kalergi, who was half-Austrian/half-Japanese. Perhaps, it was just a coincidence? I’m not sure if Fleming knew of him.
The later film, Live and Let Die from 1973, while problematic in some ways, has drug-dealing blacks and blacks who believe in vudoo, which, of course, are elements that I approve of. (though the book was written in the ’50s)
I’ve never gotten around to it, but sometime, I want to try to sit down and watch the old Fu Manchu serials, to try to see whether they are actually assertively racist, at any point. I suspect that they might not be, as Hollywood had certain rules. It alarms me a bit to study some of the more recent films coming out of China, and see this same type of obvious censorship.
But, in the long term, my theory is that, if civilization is to survive, in a state above the iron age, it will need to retool and become assertively racist, on both legal and cultural grounds. It may take a hundred years, but I think it will happen. When it begins, racist propaganda will, because of its novelty, be much more impactful. More bang for the buck.
And a black Felix Leiter. First the American spy was transformed, and then the British one.
Though, I always took the female M (annoying, certainly) to be a reflection of Thatcher. Of course, Thatcher’s hair was a bit less like a bull-dyke. And I think the character is a man again.
Have they made Q, the developer of gadgets, a black or Indian Muslim woman yet? (Perhaps, half of both) That would seem to be necessary.
I doubt it was an allusion to Kalergi, it’s probably just a way to create an exotic villain. “Yellow Peril” may have been a background to that, and of course it wasn’t long after the Korean war (I remember having read that Bond in one of the novels calls Koreans the most cruel people on Earth, there are probably similar sentiments about the Chinese). As for Germans, Hugo Drax in the novels was a Nazi who wanted to nuke London as revenge for Germany’s defeat in WW2 (with the aid of the Soviets, lol):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugo_Drax
I’m afraid it’s more likely that much of the world will be Africanized, which will be horrible of course.
I watched the trailer recently released with the Eilish song in the background and I thought it worked. It had a little bit of a retro Bondish sound to it and I liked that. Shirley Bassey, my favorite Bond song singer, said recently in an interview she thought Billie did a good job. The Daniel Craig Bond movies have seemed a little more somber than earlier Bond movies and the somberness of the song matches that.
I’m on the right and most pop singers are on the left but I try to ignore their politics when judging their music. I’m an amateur musician and can spot when someone is doing something that shows more than the average level of talent that I have. Billie Eilish is the Greta Thunberg of pop singers. Just because someone like LeBron James has idiotic political opinions doesn’t mean he is a bad basketball player and just because Eilish has similar opinions doesn’t mean she can’t sing or write songs. Paul McCartney, who is also a liberal but who I also consider to have musical talent, was asked what he thought about her first album that she wrote and recorded as a seventeen year old in her bedroom. He said she did something special in that bedroom.
I am strongly prejudiced, though. Daniel Craig is my favorite Bond, and I think Casino Royale and Skyfall are two of the best Bond films of all time.
When they make Idris Elba the next Bond, you can be sure that Trevor will be even more strongly prejudiced in favour of him.
https://www.mandy.com/uk/actor/trevor-lynch
Fleming’s father was killed during WWI, when he was only about 9. I suppose that he would have had a lot of friends that died during WWII as well. And, in many ways, Germans were a kind of throwaway villain, even before the second war. They were pretty cartoonish in The Great Impersonation (1920), even though the book has an interesting theme about redemption.
I guess there was a kind of popular focus on Germany too, since it had been divided. There are really countless references to divided Berlin, which worked their way into the culture. It could be said to have become almost an obsession, when one considers political speeches. (I think it is a really interesting phenomenon, when you contrast how quickly Berlin seems to be being surrendered today.)
Anyway, I give him the benefit of the doubt, compared to someone writing about Nazis in 2020, or just villainous German soldiers from WWI, like in the movie 1917. He probably didn’t understand how long it would go on for, and to what ends.
In the ’50s, I guess there was still some novelty about nuclear weapons, and they were not as cliched as they are now. When you get down to it, spy stories are usually built around a dumb MacGuffin. The Great Impersonation, which I think is one of the better spy stories despite its numerous flaws, I believe involves of map of a future, planned expansion of the German Empire, which is unaccountably allowed inside London.
I hope not. I like to believe that Europeans are undergoing a genetic shift, as fertility seems to vary by politics, to the point where they will be able deal with this problem effectively.
One of my few consolations in getting older is that most pop stars of today are now completely off my radar.
Well, Fleming was a man of his times, in a way it’s not surprising that he resorted to using German villains. But I do find it pretty absurd that he has Hugo Drax, a convinced Nazi who wants to ruin Britain, working together with the Soviets…apparently the latter had already forgotten what the German invasion had done to their country. It’s a blinkered Anglocentric view with little relation to reality, which reinforces my view that Bond stories shouldn’t be taken really seriously.
In reality ex-Nazis (e.g. Klaus Barbie) were of course more likely to work for Western intelligence services than for the Soviets.
Re Berlin: In retrospect it would have been better if Stalin’s blockade had been successful and West Berlin had been surrendered to the commies, at least Berlin wouldn’t have become a settlement area for Turks and Arabs like it actually has.
Good essay, Trevor.
Normally, I don’t care for films that are mere escapism, but the Bond character is a pleasant reversion to a Cold-war age when men were bold, unapologetic, independent, and not hen pecked by our woke intelligentsia. The British fought two world wars, to victory, but in the last 40 years they have allowed an invasion and replacement of their population without a shot fired. The 007 writers keep dreaming up new enemies, but those woke writers need to look into the mirror, to see the real enemy of Britain.
Good propaganda would probably be the British and Germans working together, just as The Man from UNCLE had the Soviets and Americans working together.
Supposedly, the Soviets did not allow German scientists to work on their rockets. They had them teach them what they knew – and then sent them back. I’m sure that you’ve heard of OTRAG. I think the political dimensions of it are an interesting story.
True enough. Espionage has always seemed to lend itself well to comedy.
Be that as it may, I get the idea that Fleming wasn’t as pozzed as his still living semi-contemporary John le Carré. Le Carré had a pretty funny line I still remember “sun-burnt Irish” to describe a Congolese half-breed.
There’s a strong anti-German element in Le Carré’s novels from the 1960s, and it’s more focused than with Fleming who pretty much seems to have despised all foreigners equally and had grotesque Slavic, Asiatic and iirc even partly Jewish villains too. The gentile German characters in Call for the dead, The Spy who came in from the cold, The looking glass war and A small town in Germany (especially egregious example, basically there’s a successful neo-Nazi movement in the federal republic) are more or less unreconstructed Nazis whose loyalties to Western democracy or communism are only superficial (e.g. he’s got a STASI operative whose service in the Hitler Youth is emphasized and who still is antisemitic; also an East German officer who hunted resistance fighters in WW2 and uncovers a Pole – with a WW2 service record – sent to spy in East Germany). Whereas the Jewish communists in The spy who came in from the cold are presented as noble, idealistic people. Fleming would probably have them seen as just anti-British subversives, with good reason imo.
Anti-Americanism is also prominent in Le Carré’s novels, but so it seems to have been increasingly in Fleming’s. Rather more incongruous for a left-winger like Le Carré though to complain about Britain’s loss of the empire and her great power status.
Whoops, now that I think of it, I’m pretty sure Le Carré’s phrase to describe the Congolese half-breed was “sun-tanned Irish”, which, if anything makes, it more ridiculous.
Le Carré apparently had a novel out in 2017, which referred back to the plot of The spy who came in from the cold:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Legacy_of_Spies
Apparently it was intended as a protest against Brexit.
I don’t get these people. The fact that England will be majority non-English within just 40 years from now either doesn’t register with such types or they’re fine with it.
When Fleming wrote, these were probably largely unsaleable markets.
As to Jews, it seems pretty subversive that Danial Craig played a Mossad agent, before becoming Bond. Probably the only way they could make a blond Bond.
Wow, you’ve really got to be a hack writer in order to write a book that is both a prequel and a sequel. Though, perhaps, it is common for elderly writers to revisit the more famous work of their youth.
Le Carré seems to come from a bad seed. His father was a fraudster and his mother abandoned him when he was five. It’s surprising that he passed a background check. Probably, British intelligence is filled with people like him and worse, complete fantasists, with no national loyalty.
Kim Philby’s father converted to Islam and became an advisor to the Saudi royal family, supporting them against the more moderate Hashemites:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St_John_Philby
His son becoming a commie and spying for the Soviets looks almost quaint by comparison.
And of course there was also a homo angle to the Cambridge spies, with Burgess and Blunt being homosexuals and MacLean bisexual.
Of course that was long ago, but even today British intelligence seems up to some pretty dubious things (e.g. their involvement in all those anti-Trump machinations, the pro-jihadi stuff in Syria).
Bond films were always pretty stupid. Stylish, but stupid. They were as much product placement vehicle as action movie. The wokeness that started to pervade them when Brosnan (otherwise, a fine actor) took over the franchise has become increasingly insufferable. Judi Dench is awful as M – yeah, let’s make Bond answerable to some awful castrating bitch. And, like a lot of movies, the plots have all come to turn on revenge. Some guy somewhere has been wronged and will now get his revenge against (fill in the blank) Britain, MI-6, Starfleet, etc. It’s a cheap, lazy plot device.
The fact is Bond, as portrayed, was never anything other than a puppet and a thug – a tool of a globalist world order, the British Empire wing of the enterprise. And the fact is, the British Empire has been one of the most malign forces in the history of the World. You don’t have to be an Indian or an Irishman to see that.
I think the world has been enough for these tired, predictable movies, and it is time for them to Die. Or to quote Auric Goldfinger:
No, Mr. Bond, I want you to die!
“White people are increasingly sick of the Great Replacement, both on the silver screen and in the real world…”
No role, no matter how humble, escapes them. Even some white guy who takes a night job as an insurance agent. Consider this low-key, funny ad:
Video Link
Now, though, Jake from State Farm is black. You can find your own video.
Sick of it? Yup.
I don’t get these people. The fact that England will be majority non-English within just 40 years from now either doesn’t register with such types or they’re fine with it.
The British are too polite for their own good. They seem to take pride in being naive.
Along with the French they have bought into too much egalitarian fiction that comes from American universities and media.
Try talking to a British person about race and culture. They are even more confused and indoctrinated than American Whites. They get mad and flustered when you ask them basic questions. As with liberals they walk around thinking they know everything and get upset when you spoil their arrogance.
Amazing how so many alleged right-wingers have a soft spot for James Bond. The movies are just silly escapism, maybe fine watching it as a guilty pleasure, but definitely not worthy of any deep analysis.
Well if it makes you feel any better I’m American and I can’t even sit through them, especially the Connery years.
I grew up assuming that everyone views them as garbage that you watched when nothing else was on. I was shocked when I first saw a collector’s edition series in the store.
The only one I can watch again is moonraker because it is so over the top stupid. Almost a parody of the series.
I didn’t mind the Dalton movies since they are more like 80s action flicks. But I wouldn’t spend money on one.
Le Carré seems to come from a bad seed. His father was a fraudster and his mother abandoned him when he was five. It’s surprising that he passed a background check. Probably, British intelligence is filled with people like him and worse, complete fantasists, with no national loyalty.
He has the same tunnel vision as US conservatives.
Still writing books about spy games with stasi while his elected leaders welcome in the third worlders through the front door.
I really did not like Thunderball, mostly because of all the underwater scenes, which on film are always slow, ponderous, and boring. But apparently it was a very popular one, and one of the top grossing Bonds of all time.
It did have good elements, such as the femme fatale that Bond sleeps with actually remain evil and trying to kill him—in previous films, when Bond slept with a woman, she instantly became putty in his hands for the rest of the film. The Femme Fatale even comments on this, in a meta moment.
Except the communists were never the enemy in any Bond film; they were always used as a red herring by the bad guys, playing off the superpowers against one another for profit.
It’s quite amusing when you watch the films and you see how many times the filmmakers strive to exonerate the commies of doing anything wrong, even up to the 80s (even Timothy Dalton’s The Living Daylights had this plot).
The only time the commies were even hinted to be the bad guys and not exonerated was in You Only Live Twice, where SPECTRE is hired to stir up trouble in the Far East, and the film strongly implies SPECTRE was hired by Communist China—but its never conclusively shown. Aside from that, the commies always get a free pass in Bond’s world.
Chuck Norris and Sylvester Stallone movies were far more accurate in who the bad guys were IRL than the more “sophisticated” Bond films.
Q is still white, but he’s young and almost certainly gay.
This is good. But do a second draft after ingesting mushrooms.
G-R, that is a fantastic premise for a Bond film. Screenplay by Michel Houellebecq.
Gork culture
https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/d-jameson/i-find-your-lack-of-faith-disturbing/
That’s asimilar to the plot of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ short novel Beyond Thirty:
http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks/fr100037.html
Has the James Bond franchise ever had a jewish villain like a Soros type? The villains are always way more interesting than the heroes in this type movie. They always have throwaway stuff that has absolutely zilch to do with the plot that is supposed to make the audience sympathize with the hero or think he is cool. With the villain character there is no wasted anything.
I thought Thunderball was the peak of the series. It was always silly, right from the start with Dr. No working for some secret comic book villain club, but what it was for a time was the mid 60s version of the late 80s Schwarzenegger Action Flicks. Everyone knew it was fantasy, but it was done well and highly entertaining. The series jumped the shark with the next one with the rockets in Japan and turned into almost a commedy farce with Diamonds are Forever.
Right. The choice of Adolfo Celi as Emilio Largo was genius. From the first time we see him till the end, the man was the epitome of the Bond villain: Total self assurance, complete amorality.
Even the ending was fun. That should have wrapped Bond up.
I like most of the 80’s bond movies, and the Connery ones are tolerable enough (dated special effects and photography techniques not withstanding). Golden Eye has it’s moments too. But largely the Bond movies represent indulgent male fantasies and Anglo navel gazing. And they are churned out factory style leading to a sameness and preventing directors and writers from imprinting a fresher take on things.
It did.