The name's Bond. James Bond.
A lengthy series of
Films based on an lengthy series of
literature about a British secret agent, also known as 007, which have also inspired many TV series.
The 22 official movies thus far are: (Some of these link to individual pages on the Wiki. Any quote on them that is not identified are from Mr. Bond)
Sean Connery: As the first cinematic Bond (but not the first person to play him — that title goes to Barry Nelson in the 1954
Casino Royale, while the first person to play a British Bond was Bob "I'll have a Q, Bob" Holness in a 1956 South African radio version of Moonraker), Connery is perhaps the best known. When people think of Bond, they often think of his distinctive accent and his suave sophistication.
- Dr No — Bond shoots someone in cold blood. He encounters a number of death traps. Ursula Andress comes up from the water.
- From Russia With Love — Blofeld makes his first appearance and does his first ploy. Features The Baroness in the form of Rosa Klebb, a Cat Fight and one interesting seduction technique.
- Goldfinger — A battle at Fort Knox, the infamous laser scene and a scene that got busted by Myth Busters. Perhaps most famous for the oft-parodied line, "No, Mr. Bond, I expect you to die."
- Thunderball — Two stolen nukes, a shark and "I think he got the point".
- You Only Live Twice — 007 goes to Japan and becomes a Ninja. 007 gets married. 007 gets widowed. 007 meets Blofeld.
George Lazenby: Lazenby was an obscure actor and an obscure Bond. He only appeared in one movie. OHMSS, however, is well liked among non-Bond fans.
- OHMSS is well liked among hard-core Bond fans, too.
- OHMSS is well liked among casual Bond fans who see the movie, too.
- How many people don't like the movie?
- People actually just don't like Lazenby's performance.
- On Her Majesty's Secret Service — Blofeld looks different, but so does 007. 007 gets married, again. 007 gets widowed, again. As it turns out, they don't have all the time in the world.
Sean Connery: See above.
Roger Moore: Moore tended to play his Bond more for comedy, but he did do it pretty serious at times, as in
For Your Eyes Only, his finest performance as Bond (although as a movie,
The Spy Who Loved Me is better). He probably hung around too long and
A View To A Kill isn't very popular among fans.
- Live And Let Die — Includes the line, "kill the honky." Also prompted some controversy as to whether or not Bond's bedding of Jane Seymour was really consensual. Has a villain who may or may not be an actual Loa (voodoo god). Includes numerous plot points that rely on the assumption that 99 per cent of all black people on the planet (or at least in the greater Caribbean area) are happily complicit in criminality, if not criminals themselves.
- The Man With The Golden Gun — Christopher Lee tries to hold the world to ransom during the energy crisis. One of the greatest stunts in Bond history is ruined by a sound effect.
- The Spy Who Loved Me — Barbara Bach does a bad Russian accent. The film makes a bad nuclear error. And Jaws (as in Richard Kiel with metal teeth, not the shark) does a bad job of trying to kill 007.
- Moonraker — Bond investigates the theft of a space shuttle, and ends up going into space to stop a genocide plot, then having sex in orbit with Lois Chiles.
- For Your Eyes Only — In which an Englishman, a Frenchwoman and an Israeli do Greek. In character, a Mancunian does Austrian. Roger Moore's love interests are now young enough to be his granddaughters. And 007 kicks a car off a cliff.
- Octopussy — Maud Adams appears again as a different Bond girl. A mad Soviet general tries to destroy a US airbase. 007 dresses as a clown and makes it work.
- A View To A Kill — Christopher Walken and an exploding blimp. Duran Duran and the Eiffel Tower. 007 has wrinkles. Oh, and San Francisco's City Hall ends up on fire.
Timothy Dalton: Nothing will start an argument among Bond fans as raising Timothy Dalton,
the Marmite of Bond actors. Reading the Fleming novels after he was cast, his Bond is by far the most serious. Some of the fans, including this troper, like him a lot. Others think he was rubbish.
- The Living Daylights — Diamonds, drugs and arms for the Soviets in Afghanistan. Silent Hunter still can't remember the precise scheme, despite watching it three times. Great stunts though.
- Licence To Kill — Felix Leiter gets introduced to a shark. 007 goes on a vendetta. Plus a man explodes. Darker And Edgier in the wrong way. Ironically, in this movie Bond has his Licence To Kill revoked, but the producers decided that Licence Revoked wouldn't have made a good title.
Pierce Brosnan: Brosnan is the other person who people think of when they imagine Bond at the moment (as does this troper, who got into Bond in the late 1990s). He was supposed to appear in
The Living Daylights, but the production stuff of
Remington Steele decided to pull a fast one on EON Productions. Brosnan was just what the franchise needed after the six-year hiatus due to legal issues. He rates second on the Bond poll.
- GoldenEye — A tank chase through St. Petersburg. A record-breaking bungee jump. And more fake Russians than you can shake a stick at. Made a great video game too.
- Tomorrow Never Dies — Jonathan Pryce tries to start a war between the UK and China, in between heaping helpings of scenery chewing. Bond gets a new gun. A car hire shop gets a BMW returned in an interesting way.
- The World Is Not Enough — A boat chase down the Thames. A probe chase through an oil pipeline. A ski chase down a mountain. Oh, and it's got Robert Carlyle in.
- Die Another Day — 007 gets tortured. Halle Berry hits a career high, and comes up from the water. And both halves of the Korean peninsula get rather annoyed.
- Everything or Nothing — Not technically a Bond film, but a video game that used the voices and likenesses of Brosnan and the other the other Bond fixtures of that period (Cleese as Q, Dench as M). William Dafoe steals some metal-eating nanobots and Bond chases him around the world. Contains lots of Grappling Hook Pistol.
Daniel Craig: When Daniel Craig was cast as 007, he got a lot of flak from the press. He was blond. He was ugly*. He wore a life jacket on a speedboat ride to the announcement. A "Craig Not Bond" movement started up. Then
Casino Royale came out.
There are also at least three Bond films outside of the accepted canon:
- Casino Royale (1954): The first screen adaptation of a Bond novel. A 1954 made-for-TV movie which recast Bond as an American. Named "Jimmy". It was performed live, which led to some unintentional hilarity such as Felix Leiter missing a cue and improvised dialogue when Jimmy couldn't undo his binds quickly enough.
- Casino Royale (1967): spoof starring David Niven, Woody Allen (the second “Jimmy Bond”), and Peter Sellers, all as James Bond — along with five other Bonds, after a key point, including Ursula Andress. Despite being either So Bad Its Good or So Bad Its Horrible, depending on your opinion, it had a number of interesting things, such as predicting the offical franchise's habit of replacing its leading man, and being the only Bond movie in which Bond dies.
- Never Say Never Again: 1983 remake of Thunderball, returning Sean Connery to the role.
Common things in the official Bond films include:
- The Q scene, in which Bond gets his gadgets for the movie. Expect humorous other gadgets to be seen i.e. a decapitating tray (completely absent from Casino Royale and Live And Let Die. While Q appears in On Her Majesty's Secret Service, he doesn't introduce any gadgets).
- Bond and Moneypenny flirting (again, absent from Royale).
- The gun barrel sequence, which has started every movie (yet again, except for Casino Royale, where it's moved to the end of the pre-titles sequence).
- The Bond Girls. Usually at least two of them in one movie. You could write a book on the different girls Bond has bedded over the years- in fact, Maryam D'Abo and John Cork. The former played Kara Milovy in The Living Daylights, so she knows what she's talking about. Although it goes back to Thunderball, the Bad Bond Girl has become something of a feature recently with all of the last three movies featuring one (Casino Royale takes it to the ultimate level with the Bond girl being bad).
- "Oooh, James!"
- Lavish, surreal opening credit sequences, often featuring silhouettes of naked women, set to a Title Theme Tune. May also be a Villain Sucks Song (Most notably, Goldfinger).
- Every Bond film (at least pre-Casino, which includes three of the four) includes at least one of the following
- Underwater action sequence
- Skiing action sequence
- Aerial action sequence
- Car chase (pretty much all of them!)
These films include:
The cultural impact of 007 is, in a word, immense. The tuxedo has become associated with James Bond. The series has spawned legions of imitators and is pretty much
the definitive spy fiction. Legions of media have also tried to "de-glamorise" espionage, such as the works of
Len Deighton (the Stale Beer Approach To
Spy Fiction, although it in fact pre-dates Bond).
On a number of occasions, people declared that Bond is old hat and that some new spy has replaced him, most recently with
Jason Bourne. This troper would like to remind people that the Bond films continue to be massively popular among cinema goers, hugely influential in popular culture and when adjusting for inflation, the franchise is the highest grossing in history (although Potter has done it more quickly). If
Quantum Of Solace goes down significantly in revenue from
Casino Royale, then he'll start believing them.
- This editor agrees. There'll always be other spy films but Bond won't disappear in a hurry.
So let's see what he's responsible for:
Tropes:
- Action Girl (Wai Lin and May Day, principally. Though others, despite not lacking of good moments, go more for the Faux Action Girl side, sadly)
- Alternate Character Interpretation (007 is either a skilled, charming ladies' man or a manipulative, misogynistic sociopath, depending on who you ask. The movies tend to go with the former, whil in many of the novels it's the latter pretending to be the former. The new Bond films seem to take the middle ground. While Bond doesn't really come off as overly malignant, he does have the cold, calculating, cynical personality one would expect of a professional killer.)
- The Blofeld Ploy
- Bond One Liner
- Bond Villain Stupidity
- Death By Sex (several of the girls. Bond is also this close to fall on that often)
- Death Trap (not the originator, but certainly a popularizer)
- The Dragon (several)
- Eigen Plot (gadget variation)
- Girl Of The Week (or in Bond's case, more a Girl Of The Movie — though some movies have two, often one good and one evil)
- Go Karting With Bowser (The various villains inevitably have bond over for dinner or cards)
- Heel Face Turn (often happens with Dragons)
- James Bondage (how many times has Bond been bound and/or gagged?)
- Just Between You And Me (Probably better named "Before I Kill You, Mister Bond...")
- Kill Sat
- Latex Perfection
- No Mr Bond I Expect You To Dine
- No Plans No Prototype No Backup
- Not My Driver
- Pursued Protagonist
- The Other Darrin (Bond, obviously. But also other recurring characters such as M, Moneypenny, Blofeld, and Felix)
- Overt Operative
- Rare Guns (Bond's Walther PPK, which eventually gets replaced by a P99)
- Right Hand Cat
- Shoe Phone
- Spy Drama
- Spy Speak
- Time Bomb
- Universal Drivers License (at least the most extreme example of it)
- Wicked Cultured - most of the villains.
Series:
It's sometimes been stated that James Bond is the quintessential Englishman. Which is a tad ironic considering that he's half-Scottish/half-Swiss.
*Note that even
this opinion
varies.
