Bond Died In The 80's. Live With That

Rating: 1/10 (7 December 2006)

When Bond came out in the 60's it was, in many ways, decades ahead of its time. But the other movies caught up with it in the 80's. During that period, when CGI was still almost non-existent, Bond could compete with the best of them. if you watch the action in Indiana Jones, Stallone movies and many contemporaneous sci-fi movies, you can see that Bond is up there in the visual and special effects department. Enter the CGI  Bond, albeit a bigger than life action-adventure movie, is about a REAL secret agent fighting REAL villains and therefore it cannot make use of any science fictional devices, supernatural occurrences, or any too obvious violations of the laws of physics (e.g. some kung fu movies), up until the advent of CGI (and even until today) bond was considered to be over the top and unrealistic, that is because of the bigger than life action scenes, the glamorous lifestyle, the fact that the villains don't simply shoot him, the big explosions, the super-gadgets and the incredible stunts he manages to pull. The problem, in my opinion, is that the modern films in the 'bigger than life action adventure' category, can and do use the most cutting edge special effects they can muster, and when comparing them to Bond, it's like comparing HALO 2 to Ms. Pacman. Everything that has been done in the JB series during the past 12 years, could have been done in the 80's. JB, due to its inherent limitation cannot use cutting edge technology to its maximum effect (it does use super-gadgets to try to narrow the gap, but the last movie, with its invisible car showed that JB will have to cross the line to sci-fi in order to do so, and that's a big No No).
All the other movies move forward, their only limit is the human imagination, and the technology enables them to tell stories that couldn't have been told otherwise. JB is just shuffling the same old scenes: in one movie he will be on a camel and chased by an helicopter, and in the next one he'll be on a race boat, chasing a beautiful female spy named Ann Aljoy, and in the next one ski down the slope while being chased by gliders and in the next, COME ON! This kind of action is so antiquated and just repetitive, how can you compare it to Neo dodging bullets in slow-mo, Spiderman fighting the sandman, Magneto lifting a bridge, CGI Yoda fighting a light-saber duel. Well, YOU CAN'T. (and if they do a new Indiana Jones you KNOW it will have killer CGI). The fact that Casino Royale was beaten by Happy Feet  a CGI animated movie is more than telling.
And please don't tell me that I cannot compare Bond to these movies, since Bond is supposed to be real. Like I said, Bond puts itself in the 'Big action movies' category so I certainly may; in fact, how can I not? It's amazing how something that looked so cool and cutting edge in the 80's looks so lame and boring compared to films today. Next to those movies Bond looks like a pathetic, feeble ordinary man who should have died in the eighties. Those movies really raised the bar miles above JB's head and he could never catch up to them. Actually Bond's producers know all these things very well, that's why they released it in the wilderness of November, they wouldn't dare release it in the summer against the likes of Spidey, Superman and Pirates. Bond is just a middle sized action movie, and it will get smaller, mark my words. (maybe not in absolute numbers, but certainly in comparison with the big boys).
Face it, Bond died in the 80's. Live (with it) and let (Bond) die.