Casino Royale sheds a little light on the beginnings of legendary British agent and notorious heartbreaker James Bond. The movie touches on Bond’s promotion to his 00 “double O” status and his rather bumpy-yet-interesting relationship with M. It is also most revealing of the background of 007’s emotional life.
In the series of movies covering Bond’s career, spectators are used to his introducing himself with the famous line; “Bond, James Bond.” In Casino Royale, however, spectators do not see 007 using the line until the end of the movie - when 007 has fully matured into the larger-than-life figure that they are used to in other movies telling of subsequent periods of his career.
The usage of this famous line was not the only aspect that was slightly modified in Casino Royale. In a certain scene, Bond shocks fans by declaring that he does not care if his Martini is shaken or stirred. In another scene, Bond confesses his love to Vesper Lynd - a female character introduced, doubtlessly, to explore the tender side of the naughty licensed killer. Interestingly, Vesper Lynd saves Bond’s life three times in Casino Royale, and that just might be a record number. On top of all that, one cannot help but notice that the song in the introduction of the movie did not feature any female figurines - quite unusual for a story on a charmer.
Personally, I thought the movie was great. This is a thrilling movie that I would watch over and over again. I enjoyed every second of it in varying degrees and I thought it was a spectacular treatment of the emotional and professional growth of Bond. I found that the movie gradually took me from Bond’s early rash days to his wiser, more mature ones with convincing eloquence and comfortable sequence. I did not find much to be “out of place” but I would have preferred it if the villain, Le Chiffre, was more wicked.
The one scene I found unconvincing was when Bond cracked a joke while bound to a bottomless torture chair. “Everyone’s going to know that you died while scratching my bottom” - I believe that’s what he said. I hated the laughter that followed, both from the spectators and from Bond himself, and that is one thing I would take out of the movie if I could.
On Daniel Craig’s performance, I thought it was satisfactory. I found he did an excellent job, both with his physique and his acting, and I salute the choice that placed him as Bond (Although I still feel sore about Eric Bana’s not making the cut). That aside, I failed to catch a glimpse of the Austin Martin’s gear.
For the serious, here’s an interesting bit of a review/article on a book titled The Man Who Saved
Britain by Simon Winder. Article by Michiko Kakutani, titled The Empire’s Sun Has Set, but James Bond Is Forever. Good things come from Yoda:
While Britain was coping in the 1950s and 60s with unemployment,
inflation, strikes and demoralization, and making the humbling
transition from empire to welfare state, “a solitary Englishman” — who
embodied the old-fashioned belief that a single individual could save
the day through sheer guts and expertise — was almost single-handedly
maintaining “the country’s reputation.”
While “the magic, the romance and the often squalid reality of
dominion over the world which had animated millions of emigrants,
sailors, soldiers, traders, journalists for so many generations came
to an absolute, unrecoverable, bewildering end,” Mr. Winder writes,
somewhere on the globe, in a luxury hotel, one man was secretly
“slipping a .25 Beretta automatic into his chamois-leather shoulder
holster, examining his rather cruel mouth in the bathroom mirror,
putting on his dinner jacket and going out into the night to save
their world.”
In real life James Bond would be in his 80s now, but he is one of
those literary characters like Peter Pan who never age and never
change. Just as the books and movies follow a familiar formula, so
Bond himself, as Mr. Winder writes, is at his most reassuring when
“like a hamster with his wheel, he performs the same narrow set of
functions over and over — the scenario, the seduction, the foiling of
the plot, the killing of the villains.”
For Mr. Winder, Bond, like the queen, remains a curious “fossil
remnant” of an imperial attitude that has long since vanished from the
rest of Britain.
“The queen must presumably spend some part of the day,” he writes,
“moping about how her dad had been king-emperor, had the allegiance of
a quarter of the planet and had been treated in some quarters as a
god, whereas she has to wander around the streets expressing interest
in the lives of ladies holding plastic flags with ice cream dripping
down their fronts. Bond shows no such introspection or reskilling. It
is a very odd aspect of contemporary Britain that a country which is
almost unrecognizable from the one which nurtured Fleming (aside, of
course, from the occasional survival, such as a seemingly unstoppable
urge to despoil Iraq) should still, for so much of the world, remain
the country of James Bond.”
