007: The Licence To Entertain

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: Last Sunday over lunch in winter sunshine, a friend cum colleague started off a conversation about Die Another Day and how fast-paced it was when compared to earlier James Bond films. Then there was more dialogue, perhaps more time to make love, while now it was all bang, bang! This writer replied that these films have changed over time and that the actor Pierce Brosnan is as good as any of the earlier ones portraying Bond.

What indeed has changed over time? It is interesting that most of us have a view on the Bond phenomenon as it has evolved these last 40 years. When this writer saw the film later that evening, the first thought that crossed one’s mind is that Die Another Day is one of the best-ever Bond films; one of the few such films that one can recall after leaving the theatre — right from the stunning opening sequence of surfing the waves to enter North Korea.

There are also the intimations of a more vulnerable but no less ruthless Bond, who gets betrayed and tortured for 14 months in the Land of Morning Calm. He gets swapped for another North Korean, but is a liability for the MI6 and gets his 007 licence rescinded. But he gets down to business as in the good old days, heads to exotic locations like Cuba and Iceland, beds beautiful women, before finally smashing the North Korean conspiracy.

While much of this is staple Bond fare — with only variations in the origin of the bad guys with megalomaniac delusions of grandeur and women — there is still the lingering (even if outlandish) possibility of a more thinking Bond in the future; of one who learns to take sides in a world that admits only shades of grey. After all, any one who is tortured and jailed for 14 months is vulnerable to the virus of indoctrination! Perhaps even ideology.

A Comrade Bond of sorts obviously is a delusion, but a more thinking version will then establish a lineage to the best spy fiction to emanate from Britain. So far, the Bond mystique largely stemmed from his providing a feel-good factor to thousands of his countrymen in a post Pax Brittanica world of the Cold War in which the country had no influence. But James was always around to fix the evil guys threatening to nuke the world.