From The Guardian:
The [23rd James Bond film] would be Mendes’s first proper action film – the director is best known for taut relationship dramas such as his 1999 debut American Beauty, for which he won the Oscars for best film and best director, and last year’s Revolutionary Road. However, he has dabbled in more high-octane fare before: on the 2005 Gulf war tale Jarhead, as well as the 2002 gangster flick Road to Perdition.
Well if it’s true it would make perfect sense, and would point ever more clearly to Bond 23 being the third part of a trilogy that kicked off with Casino Royale.
<spoilers ahead>
At the end of that film (and indeed the book as it was a fairly faithful adaptation), the treacherous Vesper lay dead and Bond retreated into the emotional shell that sees him through the rest of the series with the immortal words ‘The job’s done and the bitch is dead’. They were lifted directly from the book.
It’s only when he meets Tracy – an equal – that he is finally able to let down his guard where women are concerned.
Quantum of Solace picked up an hour on from the end of Casino Royale, and followed Bond on his quest to track down the Quantum organisation, which was ultimately behind Vesper’s death (through revenge of duty? Who knows – it could be a little of both). In the closing scenes he confronts Vesper’s betrayer in a Moscow flat, but apart from leaving him more or less alive we know nothing of what happened between them or the content of their discussion.
Bond 23, then, must surely repeat Quantum’s trick and pick up the story an hour later as Bond sets out to use the information he learned in the flat, find a way to reconcile himself to Vesper’s betrayal and finally become the a fully-formed, rounded character who can leave this thread behind in Bond 24 and beyond.
The 23rd instalment will be Bond’s final counselling session. So who better to direct than Mendes? A man who, in the words of The Guardian, is ‘best known for taut relationship dramas’?
That’s what Bond has been since Casino Royale.
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Tags: 007, films, james bond
