James Bond Needs to Stop With All the Drama and Go Back to Having Fun
After 15 years and five films, Daniel Craig's tenure as James Bond has come to an end.
No Time To Die, the 25th installment in the franchise, was the last of the five Bond films starring Craig. With Craig gone, an era of Bond films that began with a reboot of the franchise in 2006's Casino Royale has come to an end.
A number of critics clearly regret this, but the fans on Reddit seem to have a different opinion. Of the Craig films, Casino Royale and Quantum of Solace were controversial among the fanbase for various reasons, from the details of their plots to the fact that not everyone likes reboots.
Skyfall was relatively well received, but it started a trend that quickly became tiresome in the films that followed: they all rehashed the "Bond is old now and the world has moved on" theme.
These films used their high budgets to be serious, dark and dramatic, and somewhere along the way the filmmakers increasingly forgot to make them fun.
Sure, "Daniel Craig made James Bond a human being instead of a superhero", but, well... yes, the original books by Ian Fleming had some (not very convincing) pretensions of being serious spy thrillers.
In fact, Craig's Bond can be seen as a relatively faithful recreation of the book character. However, not many people in the film audience have read the books or care about them. And the James Bond of Eon Productions' films has always been a superhero.
For a long time, one of his trademarks was his use of high-tech gadgets. Sure, the exact level of silliness versus seriousness varied from film to film, but the general tone was in keeping with the superhero comics. In fact, "Bond villain" became a term for an over-the-top supervillain before comic book adaptations made actual supervillains more popular.
While Daniel Craig as Bond hasn't been too badly received at the box office, the gritty and serious reimagining seems to have outlived its welcome.
With another reboot of the series seemingly in order, fans are hoping to see the return of the deadly, charming, suave, sophisticated, womanising playboy they remember James Bond as. Whether that hope is realistic remains to be seen.