Woohoo!

That looks sweet. Have been a bit disillusioned with Bond in recent years (Brosnan's got progressively worse culminating in the piece of shit that was DAD) but this looks like being the most involving story since Licence to Kill and posessing the style that that film lacked.

Still not liking the presence of Judi Dench. Makes no sense.

I've never gone to see a Bond film in the cinema before.

I want to see this one desperately.

"Still not liking the presence of Judi Dench. Makes no sense."

Nah, it's fine. She's really, really good and that's all that I care about. It doesn't matter that she was in 4 of the old films with a different Bond cos this is a whole new re-boot, innit? Nothing that went before should be considered.

>It doesn't matter that she was in 4 of the old films with a different Bond

Particuarly when the old 'M', 'Q', Moneypenny et al appeared with both Connery and Moore.

> Particuarly when the old 'M', 'Q', Moneypenny et al appeared with both Connery and Moore.

And Lazenby. But all 20 previous Bond films were, in a flimsy way, part of a single continuity. (Lazenby lost the wife, but Moore visited her grave, and both Dalton and, by implication, Brosnan are tied to a late wife by dialogue.)

Weirdly, only Connery has no narrative reasons to be seen as part of the same thread - his Blofeld doesn't seem to be the same guy as Lazenby's; when the characters meet in OHMSS, the villain doesn't recognise Bond despite meeting him in You Only Live Twice. And when Connery returned on a Blofeld vendatta at the start of Diamonds Are Forever, it's never mentioned that he might be doing this to avenge his dead bride.

Still, the assumption is that they all shared a single history...ish. In a parallel never-time where the 60s to the 90s all took place over about a decade.

Dench's casting may fail to fully sever connections to the old franchise (as if the theme tune, titles, logos, catchphrases and hero in a tux weren't already contributing to THAT), but as Cappsy says, she's too bloody good to waste. And it affects nothing continuity-wise, cos it's a reboot.

Wait... this is a reboot? Frankly, how are you going to tell the difference? (not least since the B&W flashback [a] covers a period the films have never covered before and [b] clearly has someone playing the Bernard Lee M the way, say, another actor stood in for the deceased Hartnell in the Five Doctors]. And Bond movie continuity was always hellavaloose to start with - other than recurring cast, the *only* explicit link between any two movies is the Tracy Bond's grave scene. Even the stuff in the disused station in DAD only gives implicit references, and that movie's filled with fanwank references like that and the scene with the grape earlyish)

> Wait... this is a reboot? Frankly, how are you going to tell the difference?

Well, it's not set in the 60s for one thing... :-)

You could say the same for Batman Begins - "The other films never showed that period" - and, to be fair, I did hear people coming out of the cinema saying "But Batman made the Joker...and the joiker killed his parents."

Which really shows just how far you apparently have to break continuity before an audience starts to think 'Hey, maybe this is a different series!'

(Still, I don't wholly disagree. This COULD have just carried on, though it's easier to shed the bad habits by starting afresh, as Batman did. It's a very comic-y thing to do, as well. Though it's ironic - the novel being adapted, despite being the first, already began with 007 as an experienced agent.)

The implication coming from the production - and this may change - is that they're aiming to make 'a series' with Craig, as opposed to sequels. That there will be more follow-on elements than just a few key cast. In this, as with many areas, they've been heavily influenced by the Bourne films. (And that works better without the old baggage, or people worrying about when, exactly, these stories will dovetail into Doctor No.)

Still this, of course, is how the Connerys started - with SPECTRE involved in all but one of his stories. The original re-casting of Bond is when things went screwy - the Blofeld continuity change for Lazenby, then the mess as Connery came back for one more film, then left a second time. By the time of Moore, they just kinda gave up...

> other than recurring cast, the *only* explicit link between any two movies is the Tracy Bond's grave scene.

Post-Connery certainly. Though I love seeing the recurring characters - General Gogol, Tanner, Robinson... (Oh, another way you know it's a reboot - they've got Felix Leiter in this one. Who Bond Mk 1 only met in Dr No.) (Ooh, and he's not using a beretta, Mk 1's pre-No gun of choice.)

Question is: changing every cast member (okay, save one), telling the Year One origin, reworking some of the style elements AND sticking (ish) to the first novel...if this isn't enough to tell you it's a reboot, what is?

Is a franchise of vague continuity forever cursed to be un-reboot-able?

Oh - and how can it be a part of the main continuity if Dench's M is there when he first becomes a double-o? Did she quit, have two successors, and then come back? :-)

I guess I'm still thinking of this a prequel and that's clearly not the case. The reboot idea jars with me as you're kind of ignoring 40 years of one of the best loved franchises in movie history (in direct contrast to Die Another Day).

I'm unsure of the whole Bond Begins angle (Cubby Broccolli never wanted to show it and Fleming never really touched upon it) and wonder if audiences will really take to a Bond movie where he makes mistakes and doesn't get the girl.

But, as I said above, the trailer rocks. Craig's Bond looks as interesting as Dalton's. It will be interesting to see how they intend to 'sequelise' this and whether the Bond movies can ever revert to a series of virtual remakes rather than a coninuing story.

> [b] clearly has someone playing the Bernard Lee M

Sorry, I just noticed this. Surely that guy in the trailer isn't supposed to be M...

Aside from anything else, who sends a first-timer to assassinate the head of his own seret service?!

> I'm unsure of the whole Bond Begins angle (Cubby Broccolli never wanted to show it and Fleming never really touched upon it)

I said as much in my bbc.co.uk piece. But then, Broccolli also wrote those 'delicatessen...in stainless steel' lines into For Your Eyes Only. ;-)

> and wonder if audiences will really take to a Bond movie where he makes mistakes and doesn't get the girl.

I hope so. OHSMM is far better remembered than it was liked at the time, and the harder, more flawed hero stories generally hold up for longer - both Dalton's, FYEO, Live and Let Die and even TWINE. There's more substance to them. Though I take your point that audiences flock more easily to the big, silly ones!

At the end the O's morph into 0's to express digits but then not back into an O when they're used again in words. I think I'll pass on this one, thank you very much!

The last Bond I saw in the cinema was Tommorrow Never Dies which was OK in the popcorn fun stakes, and Jonathan Pryce was a decent villain (way better than Robert Carlyle in the next one, he's a great actor but the role was shit), but Goldeneye is still the last really good one. That's because they relied less on flash and more on character (probably because they had less money at that time). Of course, there WERE some OTT parts, but that's par for the course. I like it when Bond is more personally involved like with Trevelyan here.

Craig still feels more like a British Bauer than Bond, and it's gonna take some getting used to. People slag off the Brosnan flicks but he was very popular as Bond and each of his movies made shitloads at the box office. I wonder how well CR will do. There's SO many shitty action flicks around and I imagine CR will be a cut above most of them, but is that what the masses want? They seem quite happy with shit like Final Destination 3 and TF&TF: Tokyo Drift.