8 Lessons The Bond 24 Villain Must Learn So He Doesn't Fail Miserably

8. Make Your Evil Lair Practical

Most of the bad guy-budget will be spent on a cool lair that's so secret the villain can't even show it off to people - that's inevitable. The same money could have been spent on upping the strength of your personal army, but that's beside the point. We're dealing with megalomaniacs here €“ we've got to assume they'll do something crazy like take an island as their base if they want it, as Raoul Silva did in Skyfall. But when it comes to people like Moonraker's Hugo Drax, who built a whole Goddamn space station as his evildoing HQ only a decade after man had first landed on the moon, we have to draw the line. Not only was Drax's move likely a huge financial drain, but it was completely unnecessary. If you want to create a master race of super-people on Earth, why not just store your Aryan force in an underground bunker in anonymity somewhere on Earth? The authorities are much less likely to become suspicious when you're on the ground and not, say, being an eccentric businessman that sends your own private rockets in space. Similarly, The Spy Who Loved Me's Karl Stromberg may be able to support life for an indefinite period of time (somehow €“ don't even ask questions) in his War of the Worlds-style underwater-seacraft thing after he's nuked the Earth dry, but the question is...why? It's not practical to keep a cool evil lair once you've already killed everything else on the planet.