After long dreadful years Bond is finally back!

Rating: 9/10 (11 November 2008)

Great movie! At last Bond is BACK!
When Moore was Bond and the right hand of the villain had lethal teeth of steel everything was bad and laughable. It became better with Timothy Dalton, then went downhill again with Brosnan and his invisible cars. (With the exception of "The world is not enough").
Now Bond at last became a believable character again. And both Daniel Craig movies were to me a hell of a ride, action at its best, with a minimal but strong plot (those things exist, thinking of "Rear window" for example... naah, maybe not that good an example, but there wasn't terribly much plot) and an agent, who is not infallible.
This is of course personal taste, but I have reason to believe, that a lot of criticism contradicts itself.
A lot of long-time bond lovers miss the gadgets, the shaken Martini, the "Bond, James Bond"-line, Mrs. Moneypenny and so on and they say this is not James Bond any more.
What is Bond then?
Is Bond a character solemnly defined by the drinks he orders, the women he gets or the car he drives? If that is SO important and even what makes Bond "Bond" it should be possible to give all these things to Rowan Atkinson for example, put him on a mission and there would be no difference at all to the previous Bond movies.
So please help me: What really makes a Bond movie?
Or else: If Roger Moore would have had a phone in his shoe, wouldn't he have been much closer to an impersonation of Maxwell Smart than the famous 007? Did the reviewers say "This is not Bond anymore" when Moonraker hit the screens?
Back to the movie: well, there's two points of criticism. First, it's the shaky camera. A bit too shaky. Secondly, if one did not watch Casino Royale then it could be a bit difficult to understand.
The concept of the series has changed too: There's no gigantic super laser orbiting in space or some kind of devious earthquake machine. No megalomaniac superevil genius watching the world burn from the loneliness of his stronghold.
The evil comes slowly, and in this movie it's just a tip of an iceberg Bond discovers. A networking evil, impersonated by people, which are dangerous because they're intelligent, ruthless, able, not alone and not even accounted for by MI6.
Future installments certainly will reveal more of all this, gradually. But now, starting with Casino Royale, continued in Quantum of Solace, the viewer will witness the development and evolution, and this for me is the reason why i like the movies better than a lot of Bond movies before them --- they're connected with each other, like chapters in a book, not monolithic.
Or better: It's the story of Bond (and Felix Leiter and M), not the story of "How Bond defeated the man with the golden gun who actually hired a bunch of sumo-wrestlers to help him rule the world... no really, he did!". Sounds promising to me.
And maybe as a "Quantum of Solace" to pre-Craig Bond lovers:
There's no indication, that there won't ever be some kind of evil genius with a super laser, nor is there any indication that Bond won't use any gadgets whatsoever again. Maybe he's going to, maybe not, maybe even some kind of Q comes back. And maybe in the next installment Bond will order his Martini shaken, not stirred. And maybe he works on his humour.
But then, the viewers know why.