It was an inspired move that led to a genuinely great movie, but it re-shaped the Bond franchise from the ground up into a post-Bourne muscular bruiser, shorn of escapist trappings and innuendo and replaced with dry wit and modern geopolitical smarts. Wilson to reinvent the franchise and, with Casino Royale, return to the essence of Fleming’s first book and original character. Everyone knows how Die Another Day’s critical mauling in a post-9/11 landscape, where it more resembled Austin Powers: Goldmember than The Bourne Identity (all of which came out the same year, 2002), led Eon custodians Barbara Broccoli & Michael G.
#Spectre film blofeld movie#
To consider why this might be the case, it is worth considering how the James Bond series has changed over the last fifteen years with Craig as 007.ĭespite the fact Pierce Brosnan was a genuinely great James Bond, he was plagued by largely disappointing material, certainly from the triumphant GoldenEye (the best Bond movie ever – come at me) onwards. This marks a sea change in the Daniel Craig era that could well stick through the upcoming No Time to Die, and into the uncertain waters for 007 beyond, as the franchise adapts to a vastly changing cinematic landscape. Blofeld’s plans are only foiled thanks to the entire MI6 squad backing up Bond’s determined action. M, or Mallory, is the most narratively involved head of MI6 in the series’ history, working to expose Max Denbigh aka ‘C’s connection to villain Ernst Stavro Blofeld, and gets his own (admittedly rather anaemic) action tussle with the man toward the end.
Moneypenny is no longer the sweet, desk bound, lovelorn secretary who he flirts with and leaves behind, she actively aids him in terms of intelligence, and aides him in the field in Skyfall. Q covers for him, later joining him in Austria to help him reach Madeleine. Bond only wins the day with the help of the MI6 team around him back home, and sometimes in the field. Spectre, building on character introductions and developments introduced in Skyfall, begins to change that. If ever we did see his personal life, which we seldom do across any of his incarnations, it almost always revolves around women as opposed to family or friends. Fleming describes Bond’s general routine, in Moonraker, as “evenings spent playing cards in the company of a few close friends, or at Crockford’s or making love, with rather cold passion, to one of three similarly disposed married women weekends playing golf for high stakes at one of the clubs near London.” Bond’s life is distant, remote and detached from the world around him, aside from gambling or disposable sex. Historically, Bond was, of course, a lone wolf, certainly in Ian Fleming’s source novels and particularly in the film adaptations produced by Eon from 1962 onwards. He worked with Eon Productions for a film version of Thunderball, and he allowed them to use SPECTRE and Blofeld, but after his licensing deal with Eon ran out, he wanted to make another film version of Thunderball (he eventually did, as Never Say Never Again, in 1983) and while they were fighting back and forth in court as to whether he was allowed to do so, he threatened Eon over the use of Blofeld and SPECTRE.Looking back at Spectre, 2015’s unfairly maligned James Bond film, it becomes apparent just how much of 007’s future may lie around a team ethic. Well, that meant that he had the rights to Blofeld and technically SPECTRE itself. The problem is that that novel started as a screenplay and through various legal shenanigans (BY Fleming, which is why he ultimately lost big when it went to court and he was forced to settle), Kevin McClory, one of the screenwriters of the initial screenplay, received the film rights to that novel.
Each time around, I’ll give you the context behind one such “meta-message.”Īs you may or may not know, Ernst Blofeld and SPECTRE, the terrorist network that he was in charge of, did not actually debut until the ninth book in Ian Fleming’s James Bond series of novels, Thunderball.
In Meta-Messages, I explore the context behind (using reader danjack’s term) “meta-messages.” A meta-message is where a creator comments on/references the work of another creator (or sometimes even themselves) in their work. Today, we look at the time that the Bond films killed off Ernst Blofeld just to show that they didn’t need him.
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