Daniel Craig resurrected Bond

The argument

Craig rejuvenated the franchise, and the argument measures that against what he inherited. He took the character away from Pierce Brosnan's unbelievable, glossy spy, with its shoddy CGI, and gave it a vulnerable, gritty side for the modern viewer. The contrast carries the point: a Bond who is never in real danger, in films whose effects announce themselves as effects, offers spectacle without stakes, and an audience by then accustomed to more demanding screen drama has little reason to invest in it. What replaced it was a character with an interior life, and the argument holds this to be the more plausible reading of the role as written. He gave the character more realism, because a person who had spent their career having empty sex and killing people might well end up a little jaded and vulnerable. The realism is therefore not imposed on Bond from outside; it is drawn from facts about the job the earlier films had always stated and never examined — the same biography, taken seriously enough to have consequences for the man living it. That reinvention is what the argument credits with the franchise's survival rather than merely with a good run of films. A series can continue indefinitely while its lead remains a fixed quantity, but it cannot recover an audience that has stopped believing in it. Supplying a Bond who could be hurt gave the character somewhere to go, and gave the films that followed something to be about. The judgement is not the argument's own alone. Roger Moore, himself a former Bond, famously told Time magazine that he believes Craig's portrayal of 007 has ensured another 50 years of Bond movies — an assessment from someone with every reason to prefer the older interpretation, which is precisely what makes it telling.

Context

After Pierce Brosnan’s poor showing in Die Another Day, Bond was on shaky ground. The character didn't appeal to modern viewers. The wildly fantastic element was too unbelievable for modern viewers to relate to.

Premises

Counter-arguments

But Craig's modern Bond goes against the spirit of James Bond. He is not supposed to be dark, vulnerable, and broody. He is supposed to be witty, humorous, and refined. The producers and writers even seemed to detect this. In Craig’s most recent outing as Bond, in Spectre, writers try to return to the original spirit of Bond. There is a villainous henchman, new innovative gadgets, gags, humour, one-liners, and a car chase.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] Bond is not meant to be believable or modern.