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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 9692674" data-attributes="member: 18">I mean, that's kind of always been true of Bond though, hasn't it? In part because Bond has tended to set what "generic spy movies" are doing at that time, and in part because Bond has continually updated and remade itself to "go with the times", which inevitably means it's going to incorporate some of the same elements as "generic spy movies". I mean, we almost have more "eras" of Bond than we have Bonds, even - Moore for example has basically two or maybe even three different eras of movies, style-wise.I'd also say Craig's era has been slightly different to other contemporary spy movies in two ways, which whether they're good or bad is... uh... in the eye of the beholder:1) They look and feel much more like adverts for luxury holidays and goods than most 2010s and 2020s spy movies do. MI treads some of the same ground, but most "CIA slop" as [USER=1]@Morrus[/USER] puts it tends to be gritty and nasty and slightly to extremely fear-monger-y/racist in a way Bond has tended to eschew in the Craig era (even when earlier films were super-nuclear-racist, it tended to be in a more "exotic east" or "noble savage" and less the contemptuous "these brown people are basically subhuman barbarians/fanatics" way - with some exceptions, eh, Dr No?). There's more romanticism and expensive/luxury beauty in Craig Bond than other spy movies (indeed including earlier Bond movies, some of which had this, many of which didn't - they often had exoticism, but without the same element of "luxury you can aspire to" in the way it was shot).2) The interesting decision, never seen in any earlier Bonds, to give Bond a deep backstory where he was an orphan (sigh) raised with Blofeld (sigh), and keep referencing his childhood and so on. In general the later Craig movies seemed to go into exploring people's pasts and origins (not just that of Bond) in a way that previous Bonds just at most mentioned in passing to set up a disability for Bond to exploit or w/e. This didn't feel like "generic spy movie" to me, but rather some entirely different genre, almost Harry Potter-esque or something. Some people were definitely into this, but I kind of doubt it'll be repeated for the next Bond.Actually describing this makes me like the Craig Bond era a little better - I have zero time, even negative time for the backstory nonsense (the last thing I need is Bond's backstory, especially one which was basically telenovela grade imho) - but frankly Craig Bond was a lot better than gross CIA slop stuff, and cooler and weirder, even with the consumerist stuff. I don't think it was quite as fun as it could have been, but even then it had its moments.Casting is going to be everything here. If they get some charmless smug oik, and that's at least 50% of the people reported to be in "serious consideration" for the part, it's going to be painful. Craig succeeded in huge part because he's rugged yet really good at being vulnerable.</blockquote>

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