007

I have just finished reading "From Russia With Love", the fifth Bond novel (but the second Bond film). It is a very excellent novel, which I enjoyed a great deal. However, it suffers quite a lot from being very close to the film.

(Okay, the film is rather close to the novel, but then, even though the novel obviously predates the film, I saw the film a long time before I read the book, so... Also, this might be one of the very few times where the film adaptation actually captures the spirit of the novel better than the novel itself does, which was a bit of a surprise. And all that said, there is a point where the two diverge that was truly stunning, and makes this the best book I have read this year. In fact, I was explicitly told about it, and I still didn't see it coming.)

I also watched "Quantum of Solace" this afternoon, which is a much better film than I remembered. It's also much shorter than I remembered, but doesn't really suffer for that. However, while Daniel Craig is a very good Bond, he is not Ian Fleming's Bond. Craig spends a bit too much time playing "a thug with a gun" (where Bond is rather more than that), and a lot too much time playing a rogue agent (where Bond is certainly not that) for it to ring true.

Having now read five of the Bond novels, I have to conclude what we already knew: Connery is by far the best Bond. Roger Moore is actually quite a poor Bond, or rather the films he was in were far too tongue-in-cheek, and don't really match the source material at all well. Pierce Brosnan was, in my opinion, actually very good as Bond... but he suffered a lot from being in two and a half really bad films. Only "Tomorrow Never Dies" and most of "Goldeneye" really match up, and that's a very poor showing. Lazenby suffers from being too wooden, and unforgivably has no chemistry at all with the actress playing the most important "Bond-girl" of the series. And while Dalton was pretty good, and very close to the source, he suffers from the franchise being very tired by the time he gets to it.

For his part, Daniel Craig is very good in both his films, and "Casino Royale" is extremely close to the source in large parts. However, where it diverges from the source material (the start and especially the end), it really suffers. And, in "Quantum of Solace" they suffer from not having a blueprint to work from. And so, that Bond is not the 'real' Bond. Perhaps they should have tried remaking "Live and Let Die".

Despite that, I'm rather looking forward to Craig's next venture as Bond. As I said, QoS was a much better film than I had remembered.

#15: "From Russia With Love", by Ian Fleming