On the Success of Bond with Spectre

Like many James Bond films, Spectre is fantastical and this one feels very much rooted in the tradition of those considered to be camp. The implausibly well dressed Bond and his latest female sidekick/victim emerge from a near death experience, still in perfect attire only to decide that having sex is the best next step. For reasons like this, and many others, Spectre is entirely unbelievable, which inevitably leads to a complete lack of threat.

What is more frustrating about Spectre is that like all the Daniel Craig Bond films it has ambitions of being weighty and is seemingly unaware of its own nonsense. Skyfall (2012) was the same, but at least it looked fantastic, being photographed by Roger Deakins. Spectre has no such luck and returns to the old Bond tradition of looking flat. Spectre has allusions of being a commentary on a post-Snowden landscape, which it achieves through horribly obvious dialogue, ‘democracy is dead!’, ‘we can see everyone.’ What Snowden revealed and sacrificed deserves more respect that being whittled down to one-liners.

Yet this reveals something interesting about recent Bond films. Skyfall used the narrative trickery of The Dark Knight (2008) to provide its key threat and Spectre looks to another simplification of the surveillance state in Captain America: The Winter Solider (2014) to ground its barely hung together narrative. Going back to Casino Royale (2006) we saw Bond respond to the threat of the Bourne films by being more aggressive and quicker in editing. Now, they are responding to the superhero juggernaut. Not only borrowing narrative techniques, but also essentially turning Bond into a Captain America figure. A man with preter-human abilities, incapable of injury. 

It can in fact be argued that the success of Bond is nothing more than an excellent marketing strategy and clever casting. The acting, as much as the dialogue allows in Spectre, is good. The marketing behind this, and every Bond film, is superb. They become events that transcend the cinema, invading advertising across all genre of product and generating innumerable print articles and TV adverts. We are tricked into believing that Bond matters because of the propaganda that surrounds it. In reality these are average films. Average for the genre and less than average for what British cinema is producing on a fairly regular basis. If only Bond had fought all his natural instincts and killed his arch enemy at the end we could all be spared more of this utter nonsense.