Unprecedented Times
His time as the famed secret agent is coming to an end, but Daniel Craig’s tenure as James Bond has much to say about the world he was working within. Focusing on British politics in particular, Louis Rabinowitz maps the curious true-to-life journey of this iteration of 007.
Having starred in five films since 2006 as superspy James Bond – fewer than both Sean Connery and Roger Moore – it’s easy to forget just how long Daniel Craig has been the incumbent secret agent. His first appearance was 15 years ago now, making him the longest-serving James Bond actor by a hair.
The world was a very different place in 2006. Just five years had passed since 9/11, and the world was still gripped by the War on Terror, spearheaded by President George Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair. Through all the tumult that has followed – the financial crisis, Brexit, the COVID-19 pandemic – one of the nation’s chief cultural icons has retained the same face.
James Bond is an inherently political character – as an employee of the government on Her Majesty’s Secret Service, he is in many ways an embodiment of British establishment forces, focused above all on protecting the nation and following the direction of those in power. But overt and detailed politics don’t sell millions of cinema tickets – and it certainly doesn’t translate into the lucrative foreign markets that helped Skyfall earn a franchise-record gross of over £750 million in 2012.
Yet either by intention or accident, the Craig films – starting with Casino Royale and ending with No Time To Die – have offered a chronicle of the UK’s relentlessly changeable 21st century political landscape, with each instalment offering a snapshot of the conditions of the year in which it was released.
Martin Campbell’s Casino Royale, released in 2006, was conceived and filmed at a time when Tony Blair’s Labour government had been in power for nine years, during which the franchise had put out three entries starring Pierce Brosnan (Tomorrow Never Dies, The World is Never Enough and Die Another Day), which retained most of the franchise’s most well worn tropes. The gadgets (including an invisible car), the cartoonish foreign villains (a North Korean general who transformed himself into a white man through “gene therapy”) the sexualised Bond girls – these staples dating back to 1962 were redeployed with virtually no acknowledgement of the 40 years that has passed in the interim.
But Casino Royale is an almost painfully self-conscious update of the franchise, as just about the only remaining element from the more outlandish Pierce Brosnan era was Judi Dench’s M. In the brilliantly brutal sepia-toned opening scene, in which Bond makes his first two kills to qualify himself for the 007 codename, the film declares itself as a start from scratch, taking Bond back to his very origins. It was the exact playbook Blair used in 1997 – the promise that an old, tired British institution had taken stock of the way in which it had aged, and had entirely rethought itself to reflect the demands of a contemporary audience.
There was just enough of the old framework – Bond was still agent 007 working for MI6 to thwart the evil plans of a foreign villain who drove fast cars and had no trouble with killing – to satisfy the old faithful, but the film was clearly geared towards reeling in a new demographic. All previously established continuity was jettisoned, the expensive gadgets were gone, and the villain’s plan took the (decidedly grounded) form of financing international terrorism.
New Labour’s success, of course, didn’t last. Jumping ahead just two years, to the release of Craig’s second film Quantum of Solace, the cracks had begun to show. The advent of the financial crisis would precipitate Labour’s downfall, and the departure of Blair would make room for Gordon Brown, who lacked the same media-friendly slickness and capacity for soundbites. Quantum, though, barely reflects this contemporary climate.
Indeed, the main external force acting upon the film came from America in the form of the 2007-08 Writer’s Strike, wherein Hollywood’s writers left work for three months to protest the unfair conditions brought about by the advent of new media such as DVDs that left the film essentially without a workable script. As Craig (who had to rewrite scenes himself due to the sheer lack of material available) eloquently put it in a later interview, the production was “fucked” and it shows, in a sequel so obviously lacking the cohesiveness and polish of Casino Royale. It offered a sobering reminder that the country where James Bond was conceived was just another foreign market out of many, and that global forces as well as domestic ones played a role in deciding his fortune.
Four years later, all had changed. Where Quantum was the epitome of an internationalised Bond, with almost no important scenes or action sequences set in the UK, Skyfall saw the franchise embrace its Britishness more than it had in decade, spending the entirety of its second half on domestic soil, including a third act finale at Bond’s ancestral home in the Scottish highlands. It was a good time to do so: 2012 marked a huge milestone for the franchise with its 50th anniversary, and a huge milestone for the country in the form of the Summer Olympic Games hosted in London.
Evidence of Bond’s political significance was on full display in the Opening Ceremony, specifically during a sketch in which Craig appeared alongside the Queen as both appeared to parachute out of a helicopter into the stadium. The bit doubled up as a clever bit of stealth marketing for Skyfall, which was due for release a few months later, and it stood as a perfect indicator of the nostalgic, celebratory direction in which the franchise was going for that 50th anniversary instalment.
Skyfall’s British focus felt like a fitting choice for an instalment that re-embraces reams of the franchise’s iconography – both its classic characters and gadgets – after the first two Craig films held them at arm’s length. Gadget-master Q (now played by Ben Whishaw) re-entered the picture after his absence from the previous two films, Bond drove an Aston Martin DB5 (the car most associated with Sean Connery or Roger Moore’s interpretations), MI6 secretary Moneypenny returned in a new guise (now played by Naomie Harris, and initially a field agent until her resignation at the end of the film) and the film’s final act killed off Dench’s M and handed the role to Ralph Fiennes, making the character a man again as he had been in previous Bond eras.
This restoration of the Bond status quo goes hand in hand with a pointed focus on British scenery and culture – whether it’s Judi Dench quoting a Tennyson poem, the situating of MI6 in a real London location (near Vauxhall Bridge, if you’re sightseeing), and the final act’s loving depiction of the tranquil Scottish highlands, just before they’re filled with explosions and gunfire.
The commemorative atmosphere of reviving so many franchise staples is an unusual accompaniment to a bleak time in British politics, from which the Olympics served as a brief distraction. The coalition government led by the Conservatives was busy with their programme of financial austerity, gutting public services and other government institutions as a “recovery” from the financial crisis.
Escapism from hard times was welcome – hence the Olympics being so fervently embraced – and the astonishingly successful Skyfall, the first movie at the time to gross £100 million in the UK, fits into that. It’s an open question, though, just how much one ought to judge the Bond franchise becoming an instrument of distraction from the times at hand rather than one that reflects them, especially given how tuned into current politics the Craig era was at first.
Three years on, in 2015, the question still didn’t have an easy answer. After the confident Skyfall, Spectre was a disappointing development for the franchise. It can’t be a coincidence that it’s also the longest and highest-budgeted film, its production plagued by writing issues, especially in finding a suitable action conclusion to the story (the same issue, actually, that lead to a shutdown of Mission Impossible Rogue Nation’s production that same year). In part, Spectre acts out the ethos set out by Skyfall, which interrogated Bond’s relevance in the modern day only to conclude that the character still had a fundamentally timeless worth and value.
More mythology, like the introduction of old foe Ernst Stavro Blofeld from the Connery films as played by Christoph Waltz (who convincingly denied throughout the promotion cycle that he was playing the character) was thrown into the mix. In a slightly less savoury throwback, the film chose to pair its ageing leading man (Craig was 47 at the time of filming) with a far younger actress playing his love interest, Lea Seydoux (30 at the time), whose character Madeline Swann was introduced by insisting she would never fall for Bond, only to do exactly that after just one action sequence together.
Spectre does gesture towards 2015’s pressing political concerns with a subplot about the dangers of intrusive government surveillance that had been kicked up by Edward Snowden’s NSA leaks, but there was little substance to a a storyline which framed Orwellian spying as the evil plot of a rogue government agent (hi, Andrew Scott!) to be defeated by the good guys in government.
In spite of its milquetoast engagement with current affairs, Spectre became an accidentally perfect reflection of the climate around its release. October 2015, when the film was released, was right in the middle of a brief political interlude in the UK after David Cameron’s Conservative government had consolidated their hold on British politics by winning a surprise outright majority at the general election, and before the 2016 Brexit referendum which would bring it all down (with Bond’s habitual globe-trotting, it’s hard to tell exactly what the agent might think of it all). The mood of that period was one of complacency – the mood that propelled Cameron to call the vote in the first place with the expectation of a victory for Remain.
It’s the same complacency at the heart of Spectre, which believed that bringing back the tone of the pre-Craig era and throwing in increasingly convoluted twists (such as Waltz’s Blofeld being secretly behind the plots of each villain which Craig’s Bond previously faced) would satisfy audiences and keep the franchise ticking. Granted, Spectre was a commercial success, but it made roughly £100 million less than Skyfall, severely struggled critically, and it preceded the longest hiatus within any one Bond’s era in the franchise’s history.
The same old tricks only work so far, perhaps – which brings us to 2021 and No Time to Die. The stakes are extremely high for Craig’s final instalment, which was subjected to seemingly endless delays spanning two years and six different release dates (Bond was ahead of the times here, having been delayed twice before COVID-19 even existed), giving the film plenty of time to die.
Even before that, Hollywood trade publications were full of rumours about different script doctors – franchise stalwart Paul Haggis, Scott Z. Burns and most prominently Phoebe Waller-Bridge – being brought on to punch up the script. For MGM, James Bond is virtually the only guaranteed successful cinematic brand they have. The many delays, and refusal to sell the film to streaming services despite exorbitant offers, clearly indicate just how much they have riding on this film (although MGM were in fact acquired by Amazon recently, leaving Bond’s fate up in the air once more).
Much of that uncertainty is reflected in the attitude of the actor now resigning the role that made him so famous. Daniel Craig’s antipathy towards playing Bond, famously encapsulated in a 2015 interview where he proclaimed he would “rather slit his wrists” than play the role again has haunted him for years. Yet now, with the press cycle for No Time to Die in full swing, and Craig’s vision of his tenure seemingly more rose-tinted, stating in a recently released video from his last day on set that “he has loved every moment working on these films”.
Maybe he’s simply toeing the line while No Time to Die needs promoting, or maybe, as Craig himself argued in the same documentary, his frustrations were both temporary and humorously exaggerated. Very possibly, it’s a bit of both. Those contradictions perfectly encapsulate the 15-year story of Daniel Craig as James Bond, caught often between a desire to leave old things behind and strike out a new direction for the franchise, and the everlasting need to appease a fandom who often seem to grade the films on their similarity to the entries of the 1960s and 70s.
It’s a fitting story for a political era where, for all the “unprecedented times” we’ve faced, the solution of our governments has often been to fall back on cynically evoking nostalgic visions of a time before “cancel culture” and “woke politics” - and where even our official opposition is currently offering a rerun of 1997 as its main political vision. The difference between Bond’s world and our own political sphere in the UK, perhaps, is that while our government lurches from crisis to crisis, with Bond we have the reassuring certainty that the hero will always save the day and the story will always continue, even if it’s with a different face. Or to put it in a way that Bond himself might appreciate, it’s very unlikely that James Bond will ever run out of fuel.
Louis Rabinowitz is a writer and creative based within Thameslink distance of London. He loves overthinking, Stephen King, massive sci-fi novels and talking about how much he loves his dog. Please do not talk to him about Spider-Man 2.