Bond 25: 10 Things That We Need In The Next 007 Film
7. It's Not Personal, It's Strictly Business
The decision to bring Ernst Stavro Blofeld, 007’s classic villain, into the modern rebooted fray as Bond’s thought-dead foster brother was, to quote Spectre itself, “cuckoo”.
Bond films are renowned fantasies, but ret-conning the SPECTRE organisation in the latest film so that it was ostensibly the secret force behind each of the villains Craig has ever encountered beggared belief, even to the most lenient fan.
Aside from that, simply too many of Bond’s missions in the Craig era have been personal in nature. From avenging the death of his love in Quantum of Solace, to protecting his mentor from a deranged former agent in Skyfall, revenge has been a theme tackled again and again. Even before he battled his brother in Spectre.
It’s no coincidence that Craig’s best film is still his debut, in which the raw double-oh agent is given a highly dangerous, high-stakes mission that initially has no personal baggage bogging it down.
While modern storytelling tendencies favour elements of continuous story arcs which don’t necessarily need to be discarded, James Bond’s world is growing too small for comfort. How about, for Craig’s final film, a big bad that neither Bond nor his associates know personally?