Real quick. Let’s talk about how James Bond has been doing an increasingly embarrassing impersonation of other spy films. Or even better, let’s talk about James Bond’s most enduring enemy: relevance.
For the past twenty years, the Bond franchise has put on its serious pants. It has wept, brooded, and rearranged the furniture in its metaphorical bachelor pad in an effort to seem like it “gets it” now. What began as a horny imperial revenge fantasy has tried (awkwardly) to become prestige drama. Complete with loss, trauma, and emotional arcs that scream, “We read the Wikipedia summary of two Bourne films and were rather impressed.”
But in all seriousness, the Bond franchise has made a very big, very public show of evolving. Of updating. Of reckoning with the fact that its flagship character is, at best, an anachronism and, at worst, a walking HR violation in a tuxedo. With the Daniel Craig era, we got a Bond who bleeds, who broods, who gets emotionally attached to women before they inevitably die to fuel his man-pain. A Bond who punches people in the face and then reflects on the ethical cost of punching people in the face.
James Bond is forever.
Daniel Craig’s Bond was allowed to feel things, which meant, primarily, guilt and the occasional woman-shaped plot device dying so he could have more of it. He was a Bond with a conscience, when convenient.
And yes, fine, Casino Royale had swagger, and Skyfall looked like a perfume ad directed by a sad poet. But by No Time to Die, we had ourselves a Bond who cried, retired, and produced a daughter, as if fatherhood is the final frontier of narrative growth, the ultimate feminist gesture: “See? He respects women. He made one.”
And look, good for him. Cute kid and all. But maybe instead of another moody reboot, what we actually need is a return to a time we’ve all forgotten. Mainly because a lot of us didn’t really live through it. Because here’s the thing. James Bond doesn’t need to be updated. He doesn’t need a redemption arc. He doesn’t need therapy.
He needs the Cold War.
For our eyes only.
Ian Fleming didn’t invent Bond so much as conjure him from a leftover colonial hangover and a strong martini. Bond was a fantasy of masculine control in a post-imperial, mid-century Britain that had just been humbled by the loss of its colonies and the rise of the American hegemony. Fleming’s Bond was equal parts escapism and propaganda: the spy who always wins, the Brit who’s somehow always one step ahead of the Yanks, the man who knows how to order a drink and make a woman swoon while toppling communist plots in the background.
He wasn’t real, but he was aspirational. And that aspiration only makes sense in a world with clearly defined moral binaries. You know: the Good Guys versus the Evil Empire. The Western Bloc versus the Eastern Bloc. British masculinity versus…literally everyone else.
So what happens when you take that relic and shove him into the present yet again? You get what we’ve been getting for a while. A franchise where Bond looks like a dude in a watch ad at your local airport.
Tomorrow is dead.
Modern Bond doesn’t believe in the mission. Modern Bond barely believes in himself. He exists in a geopolitical mulch pile where the villains are vague tech bros with bioweapons and decent taste in pop music. MI6 looks like a WeWork now. And Q is basically tech support for sociopaths.
Now, I get it. The modern Bond films had to grow with the times. By the late 1990s, even Pierce Brosnan’s Bond felt like a punchline. The World Is Not Enough literally ends with him bedding a nuclear physicist named Christmas Jones, played by Denise Richards, and yes, the punchline is “I thought Christmas only comes once a year.”
Post–9/11, spy fiction got a lot grimmer. The Bourne films, 24, Mission: Impossible—these all painted espionage as morally compromised, bureaucratically tangled, and steeped in American guilt. So the Bond franchise pivoted to “what if Bond was…sad now?”
We no longer live in a world where seduction is a reasonable strategy for gathering intel. Yet the myth of Bond needs a world where it somehow is. And that world already existed! It was called the 1960s, thank you very much.
Back to Russia, with love.
Forget rebooting. Let’s rewind. Instead of sanding down Bond’s edges or retrofitting him into a morally complex twenty-first-century framework, what if we leaned into his origins?
In other words, set the next film in 1961. Give us the Cold War in all its paranoid, nicotine-stained, jazz-scored glory. Throw in a volcano lair while you’re at it. Let Bond operate in a world where surveillance required wires, computers filled entire rooms, and everyone was lying. Especially the good guys.
Don’t modernize. Stylize. Let it be Mad Men meets Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy meets Le Carré meets The Man from U.N.C.L.E. meets The Avengers. And no not the Marvel ones, the ones with the umbrellas and catsuits.
Let him be smug and invincible. But let the movie know what it’s doing. Let the female characters roll their eyes in 4K. Let the audience see the cracks. Make the fantasy feel dangerous. Let the suits be glorious.
More time to die.
A period Bond film could interrogate his contradictions without breaking character. He could still womanize, but now the film could actually comment on it. He could still kill in the name of Queen and country, but with a historical awareness that complicates the fantasy. Think Jojo Rabbit or BlackKklansman, both of which are films that use period settings to reflect on ideology, not glorify it.
There’s precedent for this. Autumn de Wilde’s Emma. proved you can keep the time period and still make it feel modern through tone. The Great turned powdered wigs and palace intrigue into weaponized farce. And even Captain America: The First Avenger understood that setting a character in their ideological heyday is often the best way to explore what made them compelling (and dangerous) in the first place. And that’s not even bringing up their upcoming retro-remix of The Fantastic Four.
Bond is timeless. So let’s lean into that. Because he’s also exquisitely timed. Aging him down doesn’t really make sense in the modern context. But it does if you bring him back to basics. A world, a fixture, where the idea was young.
After all, trying to make Bond “relatable” or “modern” only highlights how absurd he is. A man who travels with cologne and murder in equal measure. Who trusts no one but always wins. Who exists, not to be understood, but to be cool.
Just picture it: Berlin, 1961. The Wall is a Wall. You can see the cigarette smoke for miles. Bond’s there to intercept a Russian defector, seduce a diplomat’s wife, and maybe accidentally destabilize a region. Let the mission unravel. Let him win, technically, but in a way that leaves everyone a little worse.
Let him live twice.
Give us the illusion of victory, threaded with the truth that all these men in suits are just rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic of a soon-to-be-dying empire. Or make it a noir. Or a con. Or a caper where Bond stumbles into the Vietnam War.
The point is: let him be in a world where his belief in Britain makes narrative sense. And then show us what it cost. Better yet, give us a reason to do Moonraker again, whatever the context.
And look, you can still offer a deeper Bond. One who has heart-to-hearts and under-written monologues. Just, you know, in between scenes with villains who have cartoonish accents and a submarine pulled from Andor‘s prop department.
Uh, I don’t know. Octopussy.
People love these films, but they’ve already seen several different types of them over and over again. The common casting call is to wish for a Bond who was goofier. Silly, maybe even sweet. But we do already have Kingsman. We even have The King’s Man.
Regardless, bringing Bond back to basics, even under the authorial hand of Denis Villeneuve as director…it’s the recipe for what typically breaks out in Hollywood these days. Familiar, but also fresh. New paint, familiar structure. And if we’re going to keep resurrecting cultural relics, we might as well admit what tomb they came from. Maybe even shake (not stir) things up.
Jon is one of the co-founders of InBetweenDrafts and our resident Podcast Editor. He hosts the podcasts Cinemaholics, Mad Men Men, Rookie Pirate Radio, and Fantasy Writing for Barbarians. He doesn’t sleep, essentially.
