25 Bits Of Bond 25: It's the No Time To Die trailer breakdown!

For those of us beginning to wonder if the promise of another Bond film was nothing more than a vicious rumour, the first trailer for Cary Fukunaga's No Time To Die dropped today, proving at the very least that 156 seconds of this movie definitely exist. So what can we learn from this exciting blast of Bondery? Let's find out!

Our first look at the brand new Bond film for the brand new decade sees him being chased through picturesque Italy in an Aston Martin. We haven't seen that kind of thing since three Bond films ago!

I fucking love Angry Bond. Bond looks very angry throughout most of this trailer. Maybe he just got out of a screening of Spectre.

When sitting in the passenger seat of an Aston Martin being driven by James Bond, being chased through winding, hazardous streets, maybe pop a seatbelt on? Just a thought.

Bond diving off a ridic high bridge? We haven't seen that kind of thing since two Bond films ago!

Is it just me or does M appear, in the common parlance, to have become something of a chonky boi?

Absolutely wonderful to see Jeffrey Wright's Felix Leiter back after a TWELVE-YEAR absence. Here he is hanging around in a seedy bar waiting for Bond to turn up. We haven't seen that kind of thing since three Bond films ago!

Here's Bond getting a dusty old Aston Martin out of a backstreet lockup. We haven't seen that kind of thing since two Bond films ago! Actually the return of the Aston Martin Vantage from The Living Daylights is a very welcome one. With any luck Timothy Dalton's still in it.

Cary Fukunaga is really pushing the orange and teal colour palette with this one. It's lovely, but it is a bit every-movie-poster-between-2008-and-2016.

Oh mate, a visitor's pass? Embarrassing.

This joke is excellent and has Phoebe Waller-Bridge's fingerprints all over it. More please.

Q's flat! A new sweater! But will we see his two cats? Nice glass in those doors by the way, I'll keep that in mind in case it becomes relevant later in the trailer.

Blofeld is serving time at HM Prison Wakefield, leading to the very real possibility of Bond visiting West Yorkshire for the first time.

He's still angry. Let it go man, what kind of loser stays cross about a film that came out four years ago, Jesus.

Christoph Waltz here, still claiming he's not playing Blofeld.

Here's Rami Malek's villain Safin, trudging around in Roger Moore's skiwear from the pre-title sequence of A View To A Kill. Will Daniel Craig finally get some winter sports action? We can only hope.

Yes we've all seen your watch, just cash the cheque from Omega and get on with it.

Who's this? And more importantly, what's he or she doing in Q's flat? I swear to God if they've laid a finger on his cats or sweaters I will be very cross indeed.

Trapped under a frozen lake? We haven't seen that kind of thing since two Bond films ago!

Disability campaigners: The evil of movie bad guys being represented by facial disfigurement needs to stop!

Bond films: Absolutely. There's not one evil guy with a facial disfigurement in this one. There are two! 

Rami Malek has much to prove here. As Bond himself says: "History isn't kind to men who play rock gods".

They'll be fine as long as they're wearing seatbelts.

I was as thrilled as you to discover that 'Ana de Armas' is an anagram of 'armed assassin'! [note to self: check before publishing]

  

I don't know what's going on in this villain's lair, it looks like some kind of awful performance art. Come on guys, this isn't the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern, shove a monorail in there or something.

  

Still time to change the title lads.

This shot had better be worked into the gunbarrel sequence or so help me I will mutter under my breath about it for several years.

Are you excited? I'm excited. Please be good, new Bond film, I can't deal with another Spectre.

Forever And A Day:Bond begins (again)

Just a week after Ron Howard's self-defeatingly unnecessary Star Wars prequel Solo limped into cinemas, Anthony Horowitz's James Bond continuation novel Forever And A Day - set before the events of Ian Fleming's first 007 book Casino Royale - arrives bearing another origin story for a 20th century pop culture hero. The timing, of course, is coincidental, but the result is identical: a serviceable but weak yarn that might have passed muster if only numerous other entries in the series weren't vastly more impressive. Both Han Solo and James Bond deserve better.

Ant: man

There's definitely a great Casino Royale prequel to be written, and it doesn't need to cover every event in Bond's formative days that led to him becoming the cold, ruthless, state-sanctioned psychopath we know and love. To his credit, Horowitz realises this and avoids Phantom Menace-ing Bond, but the result swings a little too far the other way. You could fillet out every reference to Bond's pre-double-0 duty in Forever And A Day without much impact on the word count, and it would appear for all intents and purposes like any other Bond novel. It's almost as if the character needs no introduction.

It's a shame Horowitz didn't choose to cover Bond's WWII exploits; there's probably a cracking war story to be told that includes his rise from lieutenant to commander in the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve that doesn't follow all the predictable beats of every other Bond book. I'd also love to see a fully fleshed-out account of the two assassinations Bond undertook in order to be elevated to double-0 status, and to which Fleming briefly and tantalisingly alludes in Casino Royale (nerd note: these were covered in John Pearson's 1973 book The Authorised Biography of 007, but that seems well outside the canon now. Also it's not very good). Horowitz obliges me with a few pages devoted to the latter of those jobs, but it's a cursory bit of connective tissue before the thrust of his own story gets underway.

That thrust is this: the newly-promoted James Bond assumes the code number 007 after its previous (unnamed) owner, who was in the middle of an investigation of unexplained goings-on in the heroin trade, inconveniently rocks up dead in the south of France. Bond sets out to finish whatever his predecessor started, with the added objective of a little payback for the death of 007.1. Grotesque villains, beautiful women, casinos, car chases, explosions, sex, violence and betrayal all follow, just as they always do, and surprises are few and far between. The only way you won't spot the final chapter's "twist" coming from at least the halfway mark is if this is your first ever book.

Oh God James Bond's going to die, he's going to die!

Horowitz writes well enough to keep you reading without getting bored, but his is not a particularly entertaining style. His attempts to emulate Ian Fleming are admirable - the detail with which he describes certain objects or places is almost as exhaustive as Fleming, and there's a great deal of evocative authenticity in his writing  - but you never get the feeling that he's as deep under Bond's skin as the character's creator was. There are brief references here to the way Bond feels about taking a life (which shifts significantly by the story's end), and a weird amount of reflection on the vulgarity of excessive wealth (specifically cruise liners), but Fleming poured so much of himself into Bond that you genuinely felt you were reading about a three-dimensional person, rather than the franchise icon of Forever And A Day. At least that title would have pleased Fleming, being as it is entirely meaningless and crowbarred into the story with minimal justification.

Where Horowitz succeeds is with his version of the Bond Girl: Sixtine, as she's mysteriously called, is a competent, independent woman who's more than a match for Bond and who approaches their relationship entirely on her own terms. She's never a damsel in distress and she teaches Bond a thing or two about a thing or two, which is refreshing to read. Bond first encounters her playing blackjack in Monte Carlo, in a great little vignette that tells you much about both characters with wit and efficiency.

Sadly that fire doesn't spread to any of the other characters: there are two major villains and neither of them are remotely memorable. Horowitz has one of them, a hideously obese Corsican gangster, speak via an emotionless translator, an unnecessary choice which prevents the reader connecting with the bad guy in any meaningful way. And as for the villains' evil scheme, it's lifted wholesale from one of the Bond films and makes even less sense here than it did there. Keep your eyes peeled too for echoes of Quantum Of Solace (spy business set against the backdrop of a performance of Tosca) and Skyfall (a villain's interrogation of a bound Bond that challenges his sexuality, albeit briefly and inconsequentially).

So the quest for a truly worthy successor to Ian Fleming continues: this is Anthony Horowitz's second Bond assignment (following 2015's criminally-titled Trigger Mortis), effectively rendering him the authorial equivalent of a double-0, but it's hard to get excited about any future missions bearing his signature. His style, which often borders on the prosaic (one major character's demise is described in literally the shortest, simplest way possible), is ideal for the younger audience of his Alex Rider books, but for the grown-ups who look to the literary Bond for the meat that's missing from the cinematic version of the character, it's a little on the lean side.

Baccarat To Basics: Dynamite Comics' Casino Royale

Comic book publishers Dynamite Entertainment have, for the last two and a bit years, been steadily ploughing a furrow of new and original James Bond stories told in panel-and-speech-balloon format. The first story - clumsily titled Vargr, as if nobody would read it as 'Viagra' (is it just me? Oh god it's just me isn't it) - kicked off a parallel Bondiverse that has so far produced five full-length 007 stories (with a sixth currently mid-run), another centred on the adventures of Felix Leiter, and four one-shots. In the same time, EON Productions have released one rubbish Bond film and are currently dicking about trying to decide who should write the next one.

So Dynamite's output is catnip for Bond-starved geeks right now, and while the stories they've produced haven't all been 100% successful (more on that in a forthcoming waffle), last week they knocked everything up a notch with the long-awaited (and long-delayed) release of what is hopefully the first in a long series of hardcovers: a graphic novel version of Ian Fleming's debut Bond book, Casino Royale.

Adapted with fastidious loyalty to Fleming's text by Van Jensen and with artwork by Dennis Calero, Casino Royale is everything I'd hoped it would be from the moment it was announced: a perfect marriage of words and images that's the closest we'll ever get to a genuinely faithful screen adaptation of Fleming's work. It takes minimal liberties with the story, scrupulously translating every event from every chapter to ensure Fleming is never short-changed, and adding just enough flourishes to justify its existence as a separate entity. Maybe I'm still on a high from finishing it, but this book has gone some way towards reigniting a passion for Bond I thought had been utterly doused by Spectre's woefulness.

Jensen has made some bold choices with his writing, opting to retain swathes of Ian Fleming's electrically evocative prose to illustrate Calero's panels. Ordinarily this might come across as an excess of exposition, but Fleming wrote with such brutal panache that it's a joy to read those words alongside the accompanying images. To evolve the text, though, Jensen has also added what he describes as "Bond View" (personally I'd have gone for "Bond Vision", but what do I know): labels describing Bond's calculated assessments of situations before him. Initially it makes 007 look a bit like the Terminator, but then you realise that that's quite deliberate - he's cold and methodical, and that's the exact mechanical way in which the character sees the world. When he fails to stop and analyse is usually when it all goes tits up for him, which it does in Fleming far more often than on film.

Fidelity to the source leads to the kind of things we haven't seen in Dynamite's Bond work so far, but it's what makes the whole project exciting. There's no pressure to restructure the story, which plays out nothing like a typical action adventure, and no crowbarring in of explosive action sequences just because it's Bond. The baccarat game at the novel's heart remains in place (no dumbing down to Texas hold 'em here), as does Bond's lengthy mansplaining of its rules to Vesper Lynd. Jensen and Calero depict the game with the appropriate rollercoaster tension, arguably improving on Fleming's narration - which, naturally, is included almost verbatim.

We also get Bond's lengthy meditation on the nature of evil in full, selling his decision to resign much more convincingly than the 2006 film did, and making his subsequent rage-fuelled reversal of that choice (at which point Calero allows himself to portray Bond in the famous gunbarrel pose, and it's a lovely nod) so much more tragic. But unswerving devotion to Fleming means we do have to put up with the author's deplorable sexism (and presumably, in forthcoming instalments, racism). It's to Jensen's credit that he's excluded the most reprehensible misogynistic bile that Fleming spewed into Casino Royale, but hasn't shied away entirely from the attitudes with which the creator imbued his creation. It's still unpleasant to read, but it would have felt dishonest to censor it completely. Jensen himself has publicly expressed his distaste for these elements, saying they're included in order to be discussed, and I tend to agree with his judgement.

Perhaps the boldest augmentation of the novel comes in a double-page spread in which Bond, having survived the infamous knacker-whacking torture dished out by Le Chiffre and his carpet beater (Mads Mikkelsen's knotted rope going the same way as poker), internally expresses the fear that his junk might never return to its former glory. Jensen and Colero illustrate this with a technical diagram of the constituent parts of a gun; literally, a dismantled weapon. The metaphor is both ingenious and, in terms of Bond's self-image, hugely troubling.

Dennis Calero's Bond is a little inconsistently depicted throughout, although for the most part he has more than a little of the Michael Fassbender about him. As Fleming described, his looks are cold and cruel; the scar on the right cheek is mysteriously (and, in all honesty, disappointingly) absent, but the comma of hair on the forehead and ruthless blue-grey eyes are present and correct. Meanwhile Le Chiffre is an unholy hybrid of Aleister Crowley (on whom Fleming based the character) and Orson Welles, who played Le Chiffre in the 1967 film version of which we do not speak. An imposing, meaty figure with snooker ball eyes that give the impression of never having blinked, it's a pity we don't see more of him.

Calero renders Fleming's world in appropriate muted tones with shadows and silhouettes everywhere: the sense of Bond skulking around in dimly-lit casinos is a world away from the movies' idea of him strutting smugly past sparkling roulette tables. And those single-page splashes, naturally reserved for the story's most dramatic moments, are stunningly rendered by Calero and colourist Chris O'Halloran. The first contact betwixt carpet beater and Bondian undercarriage, for example, is unforgettably executed.

So yes, it's an insanely enthusiastic double thumbs up for Casino Royale: an absolute treat for Fleming fans, an education for those only familiar with the cinematic 007 who can't be arsed to read a whole book (if that's you, you're an idiot), and a tantalising appetite-whetter for what may lie in store. I can't deny the excitement I felt when, after tweeting Van Jensen to congratulate him on this book, this was his immediate response:

The script for Live and Let Die MIGHT just already be done. ;)

— Van Jensen (@van_jensen) April 13, 2018

So it looks like yet again, James Bond will return. Now there's a novel idea.

James Bond will return, maybe, who knows, whatever

The future of the James Bond films hangs in the balance. Sony's distribution deal has ended, so MGM and EoN are currently jiggling Bond in front of a selection of suitors, all of whom are desperate for the rights while simultaneously nervous that Daniel Craig might not stay on board to guarantee boffo box office for the next film. It's a delicate situation, and one which could affect the very DNA of the franchise for the foreseeable future. And I, a lifelong Bond fan, couldn't give a hoot.

This is a problem. Mainly for me, to be fair, unless Barbara Broccoli is overly concerned about my devotion to her baby, in which case it's her problem too. But it's emblematic of how I've been feeling about the Bond films since Spectre dribbled onto screens nearly eighteen months ago (in that time I have rewatched maybe three Bond films, which is a dangerously low level of Bondery in my house), and I need to address it in the form of a rambling blog post, if only for my own mental wellbeing.

It seems inevitable that Babs will hand distribution rights for Bond 25 back to Sony, if only because she and Michael G Wilson seem to fear change right now (although Sony's pitch, apparently held on a recreated set from Dr. No, would have sold them to me in the time it takes Sean Connery to order a black man to fetch his shoes). The sooner that happens, the more likely Craig is to get back in the tux, and Christoph Waltz and Léa Seydoux can clear their schedules for Spectre II: Blofeld Boogaloo. Well, sorry if my enthusiasm isn't so much brimming over as struggling to fill a martini glass.

Don't get me wrong, I love Daniel Craig. He's made two Bond films I absolutely adore and one that I - and about three other people - like very much. And he's easily the best thing in Spectre, despite the fact that he still can't fit into his bloody suits. But his excitement levels for another outing seem about as high as mine are right now - obviously I can't read his mind, but my biggest fear for a fifth Craig film is that he snoozes through it like Connery did in the autumn of his Bond years. Compare his performances in Casino Royale and Spectre: the former boasts a wired, barely concealed hunger to make the role his own (partly fuelled by the epically stupid press campaign against him), while the latter has him mumbling monosyllabic retorts and reacting to cinema's biggest explosion as if a cat had broken wind in the distance.

Then there's the Purvis & Wade factor. I firmly believe the writers' contribution to the last six Bond films has been mostly brilliant - even Die Another Day's kitesurfing scene probably looked good on paper - but when they were revealed as the architects of Bond 25 my heart sank. More of the same looms large, and an entire generation of daring, brilliant writers has grown up while they've been at the helm. Casino Royale was a tremendous surprise - as was Skyfall, to some extent - but it feels like Bond needs to regenerate again to stay relevant.

I despise articles called things like "Here's What We Think Should Happen In The Next Bond Film" with an unquenchable passion, but Here's What I Think Should Happen In The Next Bond Film: Play around. Fuck about. Mix it up. Do a period Bond film set in the 1950s at the height of the Cold War, like when Michael Fassbender skulked around Argentina in X-Men: First Class, only for fuck's sake don't let Matthew Vaughn direct it. Do an Old Bond story, with Timothy Dalton (as we all know, the best James Bond) as a 70-year-old 007 who might just be losing the edge he's maintained for years because he doesn't know how not to (watch 2015's criminally underrated Mr. Holmes to see how to do something new and self-reflexive with a pop culture legend). Do an anthology film of three faithful adaptations of Fleming's short stories in tonally diverse styles. Just do something unexpected, for fuck's sake (but not so weird that I don't like it, that would be terrible. Don't forget this is all about me).

I don't know, maybe Purvis and Wade are currently beavering away at exactly one of these things, but I doubt it, because despite the evidence of successful franchises splintering off in unexpected directions (the MCU, Star Wars) it feels like Bond would never dare. I'm not saying the series has to become an entirely different beast forever - God knows its familiarity is the comfiest of comfort blankets at times - but there are 24 near-identical films that everyone can watch at the drop of a steel-rimmed bowler hat if they want to; would a couple of experiments be that bad for the series?

As a tediously vocal proponent of Serious Bond (Licence To Kill is still the best, don't fucking @ me) I'm going to sound like a massive hypocrite now, but you know what I also really want from the next Bond film? A bloody good laugh. An air-punching, howlingly brilliant stunt that's almost - but not quite - too outrageous for Bond. The other evening I drank a bit too much gin and began tearily reminiscing over Brosnan-era daftness like the time he rode a motorbike off a cliff and freefell into a falling plane. I'll never forget my reaction to that the first time I watched GoldenEye: my heart leapt out of my chest and I had to look around to confirm that everyone else in the cinema had seen what I'd just seen. I even miss things as potentially terrible as a smash cut to Brosnan in a Hawaiian shirt strolling through some Spanish backwater while David Arnold tosses off an almost culturally insulting salsa riff and a caption says "Havana, Cuba", because Brosnan looks amazing in a Hawaiian shirt and that salsa riff is KICKING and it's all just so wonderfully silly. I miss silly Bond. I think the Fast & Furious movies might have stolen him.

People who know me as The Boring Bond Guy are always asking me who I think should replace Daniel Craig, but what they don't understand is that I know far more about people who have already been Bond than I do about people who haven't but might. Glancing at random articles speculating on the next 007 fills me with the fear because I haven't even heard of half the names, and if I have I wouldn't know some of them if I fell over them in the street. Jack Huston? No idea. James Norton? Isn't he a TV chef? And you can fuck right off with your Toms Hardy and Hiddleston: the last thing a new Bond needs is baggage. If cornered, I will vigorously fly the flag for Dan Stevens, and anyone who disagrees needs to watch The Guest on a weekly basis like I do. He can do lean and mean, he doesn't take himself too seriously and anyone who doesn't have special thoughts about him is emotionally dead.

So that's what's going on with me right now. I'm a bit sad about Bond and I don't know if it's because the last one was upsettingly bad, or if I'm still recovering from two years of self-imposed watching, thinking and writing about Bond for no other reason than to see if I could, or if I'm just getting old and grumpy. But spunking all this self-indulgent bollocks onto the internet might help, although not as much as if Barbara Broccoli reads my spunk and fertilises her Bond egg with it and we make the perfect Bond baby together. Though frankly that's unlikely, not to mention worryingly inappropriately phrased. Anyway, my apologies if you've got this far expecting there to be some informed critical thinking, or at least the merest hint of a point, because there are none of those things to be found here. Just a picture of Roger Moore having his nose adjusted to remind us how much worse it could be.

Spectre

James Bond is back, in case you hadn't noticed, and this time his mission is even more impossible than ever: to top Skyfall. Off the back of the most successful, cannily post-modern and downright surprising Bond film ever, Sam Mendes and his crack team of operatives needed to pull something unbelievably amazing out of the Bondbag with Spectre. So does it top Skyfall? Well, no, not quite. Does it top Casino Royale? Er, no. Wait... does it top Quantum Of Solace?

No. It does not.

In actual fact, Mendes didn't need to make a film bigger and better than its predecessor at all; just one that lived up to it, justified our faith in him and rewarded fans with another glorious slice of world-class Bondery. Spectre does none of those things. Where Skyfall was a daringly-structured rolling boulder of excitement, full of knowing winks and arch commentary on the place of the series in modern cinema, Spectre is a paper chase from A to B to C, deviating only to take in M and Q. It's all surface, like most of the pre-Daniel Craig era; given that we've had three films reinventing the character for modern audiences, the temptation to take him back to his 1970s incarnation - as if that's some kind of benchmark - is both understandable and utterly ill-advised. Parts of it work, sure, but so much of it just feels... ordinary. And if there's one thing Bond must never, ever be, it's ordinary.

Chess, for example. Ordinary. Why not 3D hologrammatic space chess?

Things start well - extremely well - with the return of the gunbarrel to its rightful place at the front of the film, Craig finally getting the walk, turn and shoot right on the third time of asking. What follows is a blinding single shot, maybe five minutes in length, following Bond through the Day Of The Dead parade in Mexico City on his way to take down a bad guy for reasons as yet unclear. It's a virtuoso sequence that takes your breath away and promises so much for the two and a bit hours to come. It's no exaggeration, though, to say that things never get this good again. After a great gag involving a sofa and some typically impressive helicopter stunt work (marred slightly by some unconvincing green screen), Sam Smith's pitiful theme song whines in and brings everything back down to earth. Rumour has it Radiohead were strong contenders to perform the song, and in fact they already had the perfect theme for the film: No Surprises.

If you've followed any of the film's build-up, even just the officially-sanctioned synopsis, trailers and so on, you'll know exactly what happens in Spectre. And what they haven't told you, you can probably guess. Bond was sent to find his Mexico target by a "message from his past", which turns out to be a nice touch but makes zero sense when you think about it. Acting against orders (for a change), he jets off to Rome, where the much-trumpeted "Bond woman" Monica Bellucci is wasted in a staggeringly Moore-esque scene that won't do anything to help the argument that Bond girls women females are treated better by writers these days. He also meets Dave Bautista's Mr Hinx, a henchman whose classically bizarre (but frankly silly) USP is introduced in shocking style, and then NEVER REFERRED TO AGAIN. Imagine if Jaws had come on at the beginning of The Spy Who Loved Me, smiled to show his metallic teeth, then never actually used them. That's what we're dealing with here.

That's right, he can bend flexible rubber tubing WITH HIS BARE HANDS

A semi-spectacular car chase is hobbled by the film's decision to dollop jokes throughout, which grate more often than not; Daniel Craig has a wicked sense of humour, and showed it in Casino Royale and Quantum Of Solace, but he can't do the cheesy stuff that Moore and Brosnan effortlessly pulled off. It just looks out of place. And it's carried through the film in the decision to have Bond treat everything with levity - again, we're going back to the "golden age" of 007 here, but it removes all the threat and menace we've come to appreciate from the Craig era. Sometimes the humour lands - the word "stay" is put to excellent use - but only when it's not trying too hard.

Before long we're in Austria, where previous über-villain Mr White is hunkered down in his cellar, tossing himself off to rolling news channels. This is where we expect to find out the connection between Quantum and the mysterious new organisation, but it's inadequately explained. You'll know from the trailers that Spectre, and its boss man Franz Oberhauser, are responsible for all Bond's pain, but my god does that involve some clumsy ret-conning. "It's always been me", says Oberhauser in his later, inevitable monologue, but frankly we've only got his word for it. The facts don't really add up and nobody can be bothered to show their working out.

It's nice to see Q pop up in Austria, although how he got there is a mystery: remember in Skyfall when Moneypenny said he was afraid of flying? No, neither do the writers. Still, it's fun to see Ben Whishaw - along with MI6 engine roomers Ralph Fiennes, Rory Kinnear and Naomie Harris - get involved in a bit of the action; Fiennes, especially, teases out his M's military background in some of the film's classier dialogue. It's just a shame he has to keep arguing with Andrew Scott's government wonk about how vital the Double-0 section is, given that he spent most of Skyfall disagreeing with Judi Dench's M, who said exactly the same things he says here but with added Tennyson.

"I know a little Roger McGough, will that do?"

If it's Act III, it must be Tangier, and a decent stretch of good stuff plays out in a hotel room between Bond and Léa Seydoux's Madeleine Swann, which is then undone by a conversation on a train which draws inevitable and unfavourable comparisons with Casino Royale's superior Bond / Vesper train-based chinwag. Possibly the film's best action sequence follows, and it owes a huge debt to From Russia With Love, but even that is immediately dampened by an unnecessary coda.

And then, after about a hundred minutes, Christoph Waltz finally shows his face. Was it worth the wait? You guessed it. Waltz is wasted here, trying desperately to add some idiosyncracies to his two-dimensional villain but never being allowed to explore the character like we know he can. His scheme is depressingly low-key, and his personal beef with Bond means nothing and goes nowhere. He will, however, make you even more terrified of going to the dentist. Fortunately the final act picks up considerably, and contains a neat in-joke for hardcore Bond fans (hello, I understood that reference), but by then it's too late to save the film. Nothing we've seen has been especially new, exciting or unexpected, and in a post-Skyfall world that seems like a huge missed opportunity.

I know, man. I know. Let it out.

If you've made it this far, then I'm sorry for your loss, but let me just add one more personal thing: special mention must go to Spectre's chief villain, Thomas Newman, for whom a sauna in hell is reserved for his score. I found his work in Skyfall brilliantly up to date and innovative, different enough from David Arnold's preceding work but recognisably Bondian even without much of the James Bond Theme. It appears Newman felt the same way, because around half of Spectre's score consists of cues lifted directly from Skyfall. Almost every set-piece is scored by music I instantly recognised, and it repeatedly pulled me out of the film, making me more and more furious. That's unforgivable enough, but he also chooses to ignore the Bond Theme again, when it would have lifted so much of Spectre's action. God only knows what John Barry - who knocked out eleven distinct but connected Bond scores, all brilliant, and one of them in just three weeks - would make of it.

We're not dealing with Die Another Day levels of dreadful here, and there's plenty in Spectre to please casual Bond fans and unfussy cinemagoers. But I'm writing this review as someone who cares so much about these films it's embarrassing. I don't expect perfection and I can forgive a lot in Bond; I mean, I actually really like Quantum Of Solace. But Bond is at its best when it ignores what's going on around it and reaches further and pushes harder to be its own thing, to surprise and excite, and to tell audiences what they want to see rather than react to what it thinks they want to see. Spectre doesn't do that, but, you know, maybe Bond 25 will. James Bond will always return.

David Arnold: The Qs and the As

Unless you're blind or have just been ignoring me (understandably), you'll have seen me wanging on about doing a Q&A with five-time James Bond film score composer David Arnold at London's Prince Charles cinema last week. The evening came and went without any major disasters (although I wore a waistcoat in an attempt to smarten myself up and promptly spilled olive oil down it just before the interview, and that shit does not budge) and Mr Arnold was in fine fettle, spilling a small amount of beans regarding his work on Casino Royale - a screening of which followed the Q&A - and other films.

If you weren't among the many millions of people who crowded into the 285-seat auditorium that evening, I've handily reproduced most of what Mr Arnold had to say below; I had to edit out all the bits where he went on at length about how much he loves The Incredible Suit because it got embarrassing.

Your score for Casino Royale is a lot more organic and less electronic than previous Bond scores… That's correct. So how did that decision come about? Was that you, or the producers or the director? It was me. I think with Die Another Day, someone said that some of the music was a bit over the top, and I was thinking, 'would that be for the scene where the guy who was a DNA-changed villain who became Korean – no, he became western, he was Korean – tried to kill James Bond with a space laser operated by a remote controlled arm-device while they were escaping from a melting ice palace?' That film had levels of extremity of all sorts of things in it, and the music has to react to what we're seeing. Really can't see why people found this silly When I read the Casino Royale script we hadn't cast Daniel, so it was really interesting reading the script and thinking 'I've got no idea who James Bond is going to be'. With Pierce, you kind of knew the inflections, you knew his mannerisms and the style and you could kind of picture the way it would be. I was on set while they were filming Casino Royale, and [my music] was largely informed by the way Daniel moved. He's a very physical, alpha male James Bond, not as eloquent and educated – you know, the idea of knowing which wine would go with what sort of fish – slightly less of that, more that you believe that if he hit you it would really hurt. And he wasn't James Bond yet: obviously he had the name but he hadn't become the character, so it was really doing away with the comic aspect of it and trying to make it a bit more muscular, as he was, and to make it a little more aggressive, but organic, because the refinements didn't come till later in the film. So you couldn't write the same kind of music for Daniel as you did for Pierce? Well you sort of can in a way because he's still James Bond. This is part of the problem with coming back to the series again and again, it's the same character in very similar situations: there's conflict that he has to resolve, you know there are going to be chases, you know there are going to be fights, you know there's going to be action and even though you have to believe he's in jeopardy, you know that at the end of the film he's not gonna die. So it's a matter of trying to take what people know and expect of the character, moving it on a little bit and introducing other aspects of it, as the films do. The Bond theme is hinted at throughout Casino Royale but doesn't appear in full until the end credits. Was it hard to resist sticking the Bond theme in? I've always said that a James Bond film without the James Bond theme is just an action movie; there's something you're missing at the heart of the character. With Casino Royale, Sony were quite worried about not having the Bond theme in the score because they were worried it'd be like watching Star Wars without the theme: there's an expectation that you want to hear it. But my argument was that he wasn't James Bond yet, so if you play any of that music when he's doing any of the things he's doing – you know, he makes a lot of mistakes in this film – then he becomes the Bond that we know, but he hasn't done that yet so you can't get ahead of the audience. So there were a few sequences in Casino Royale that tried to create a balance we thought would work: every time he acquires something of the Bond canon that we knew and recognised, I put in a hint of the Bond theme to start sowing the seeds of it as we go through. So when he wins the Aston Martin DB5 in the game of cards you hear it for the first time; when he tries on the tuxedo in the hotel room and we see him adjusting himself in the mirror, that's the second time, and so on until you get the iconic phrase right at the end of the movie. By that time you're so ready to hear it at full pelt, that's when we cut to black and shabam, it seems incredibly exciting. In terms of the theme songs, how much say would you or any composer have in the choice of song or singer? Ideally the composer of the film would be involved in the composition of the song, because I think the DNA of the score should be in the song and vice versa. That's not always possible though; there might be an artist that says "I've always wanted to do this, I've written a song and this is what it's going to be," and that happens more often than not. But they let me have a crack at a couple of them. The decision about who does the song is made between the producers, the director and the studio but the composer does get involved. It's a bit like casting: I think you should cast the singer as you would cast the character, so it always felt like if we had people who could almost be in the movie it would work. In trying to find someone for Daniel's James Bond, I was thinking about male singers: was there a contemporary Rod Stewart, Bruce Springsteen, Robert Plant? Singers with bollocks really, people like Paul Rogers, who sound the way that Daniel was, that James Bond is in Casino Royale. Chris Cornell has a very masculine voice but also an incredible gift for melody and words, so it was a really easy choice to make. Also writing the song with him was really easy and quick; we sort of wrote half a song each. We met up and talked about it and I'd got some ideas and he'd got some ideas so we sketched our ideas out, and two or three weeks later we played each other our ideas and kind of went from one to the other. It sort of became the song without having to do much else. It's quite odd; we'd both written one half of the same song. Would you consider doing another Shaken And Stirred album? Because there are plenty more Bond songs that could be covered there. Well there was a bunch of songs that I ended up not doing: I did Goldfinger with Skunk Anansie and I started talking to Debbie Harry about doing it as well, and I did You Only Live Twice with Björk but didn't use it because she wasn't happy with it, she didn’t think it was better than the original. There are a whole bunch more songs - I mean there's been another six since that album came out - but I think that's a record perhaps someone else should make, because I feel like I've done it. You must have written a load of potential themes that never saw the light of day – you started a song called I Will Return for Die Another Day… Sometimes you don't always know if you're going to get the gig actually writing the song, but I always start off by writing a song, because I like to have some sort of thematic material to base the score on. Sometimes if another artist is writing the song, like in Die Another Day, I didn't hear it until I'd almost finished writing the score, so you've really got no way of incorporating it. I thought what would be interesting is that at the end of every James Bond film it says "James Bond Will Return", so I thought, well, how about calling the song I Will Return, basically saying that exact same thing. How far did that song get? It got a verse and a chorus written. The melody of it is in the [Die Another Day] score, the verse melody, and the bridge melody is in [a cue called] Peaceful Fountains Of Desire. [Audience question] Do you think your music has influenced current action scores like John Barry's music influenced you? Well this isn't false modesty, but I think whenever music appears in a James Bond film it ends up appearing in other films because they're so popular and the music is still a big part of it. The thing I hear more often than not is the electronic aspect alongside orchestral stuff. What's interesting with the sound of John's scores is because they were recorded in smaller spaces, and they were generally just stereo, not surround, there's much less competition for earspace in those earlier films. If I go to a dubbing theatre where Bond films are dubbed now, there are 15 or 16 ProTools stations: that one's doing dialogue A, that's doing effects 1, effects 2 – there might be hundreds and hundreds of tracks. It's incredibly easy to make a film loud, and there is an awful lot of loud in a Bond movie, whether it's cars or gunshots or punches or helicopters or building sites. So the competition for actual aural space is quite high, and John's exist in a place where there wasn't as much sound and they just allowed the music to play more out front. The tendency to do that has changed now, and music is sometimes required to perhaps energise the scene more than it was in the older films. I've listened to some contemporary scores and obviously you can hear bits of John's work and now bits of mine, but I'm really interested to see what Tom [Newman]'s gonna do with Spectre. I'm fascinated with that, as I am with the film. I've always been a fan of them and it's really nice now to be able to sit back and watch one and not worry about, you know, 'why did I do that?' [Audience question] To what extent are you constrained by the 1960s style of the Bond theme? Well the Bond theme, I think, has endured dozens of interpretations: Marvin Hamlisch's disco version, Bill Conti's and Michael Kamen's, Éric Serra did it just on timps, so it's obviously a very sturdy piece of music. There's something about that recording that John Barry did with quite a small orchestra which is so swamped with atmosphere, there's something about the energy of it and the essential ferocity of it which is impossible to match. It would be weird to think you were constrained by it, I've never wanted it to sound like it was from the sixties. I don't think my scores sound like John's scores; I mean obviously there are stylistic nods, combinations of instruments that evoke the character. It's what John created, it's the blueprint of it. It was the same when I did Shaft: Isaac Hayes created a blueprint for that character and I didn't want to ignore it, but you just sort of move it on a little bit, so I was really happy to take advantage of the brilliance of that and add to it and move along. You don't want to feel like you're treading water stylistically, so sometimes that means people really don't like it and some people really do like it, but… just keep moving. Éric Serra's score for GoldenEye is, let’s say, quite unusual – do you ever watch the film and wish you'd done it? I wish I'd done all of them to be honest! But not that one in particular, no. I thought that was the boldest move that's ever been made in a Bond movie and I don't think you can criticise him for that. You can not like it, that's fine; I do like it, I think some of that stuff was electrifying, and I know the reaction to it was mixed. Being selfish I was quite pleased, because if he'd have carried on I wouldn't have got a look in! It's really not that bad. [Audience question] Did you change the music for the increased violence of the newer Bonds? The thing with Bonds is that you never see blood in bullet holes or anything, so even though it's violent you won't see bullets going in or out or blood splattering from people due to the violence because they want to keep it a 12 certificate. So perception of what's violent and what's shown are actually slightly different things. I think the job of a film score is to kind of hold your hand and take you through the experience and hopefully explain and help to guide the film as we would like you to perceive it. The sequence where Le Chiffre has his knotted rope and, er, works James Bond's - you know - that's very violent, but a lot of that was cut, and in fact the sound of contact, the 'thwack', was turned down by about half because when we screened it for the first time it was excruciating. In fact the censors wouldn't let us have it, they said we had to turn that down because it sounds horrific. There's no score in that sequence, so the sound of James Bond's bollocks being battered was turned down because we didn't want to offend anyone's sensibilities in that respect. OK, I've got a round of quick-fire questions to finish with. They're based largely on your own tweets, so I'll warn you now, you've only got yourself to blame. Is it based on my Twitter feed or is this when you asked people to send questions in on Twitter? Because someone said "What’s the circumference of a cat?", but they spelled "the" wrong so I'm not going to answer that. [Yep] No, I've had to cut all those for time. So here we go: an OBE or a lifetime's supply of Skips? [Long, thoughtful pause] Skips. Drums or a drum machine? Drums. Benedict Cumberbatch or Martin Freeman? That's cruel. I think Martin's the heart and Benedict's the brains of that combination, I think without either of them that show wouldn't work. Martin is the way into Sherlock and I think the audience wouldn't find their way in without him; I think he brings so much humanity to that, it's absolutely extraordinary. The pair of them are rock stars now, it's amazing. So I plead the fifth: both of them. They're both brilliant. CD or vinyl? Vinyl. Shaken or stirred? [Thoughtfully] Stirred. Apparently you’re not supposed to shake it. No, you're not, that would be terrible. Biscuits with chocolate content or biscuits encased in chocolate? Encased. There’s a whole VAT issue around that that's very frustrating. Jaffa cakes: cakes or biscuits? Oh, they're cakes. The clue's in the title. That's that settled then Éric Serra or Thomas Newman? Oh, that's rotten! That's professionally rotten. I love the pair of them. The slide whistle in The Man With The Golden Gun: genius or madness? Madness! Along with the double-taking pigeon. And finally: are you doing Independence Day 2? I haven't been asked, is the honest answer. But would I if they asked me? I'd really like to see the script, firstly. Would you not just say yes, if they phoned you up and said there's no script but will you do it? [Pause] Yeah. But they would have to phone me up and ask me, and as yet that hasn't happened. Well I'll tell them you'll do it. David Arnold, thank you very much!

Thanks to Oliver Holden-Rea for the top photo.

Ghastly self-promotional blog post disguised as public service announcement

In an unlikely and quite possibly ill-advised turn of events, I find myself in the position of preparing to conduct a Q&A session with five-time James Bond score composer David Arnold this weekend. This will be the second time I've done a Q&A, the first being memorable primarily because I got the guest's job title wrong and ended up looking like an amateur who knew nothing about the subject matter in question, which definitely might not have been the case.

In order, therefore, to avoid looking like a clueless dolt in front of one of my genuine heroes and a room full of people, it would be great if anyone out there has any Qs they would like me to pose to David Arnold for him to A. I ask this not because I can't be arsed to think of my own questions, but rather that crowdsourcing might result in fewer instances of me asking David Arnold why he is so great, why his scores are so great, why his shoes are so great and so on.

If you'd like to come along and thrust a Q at David Arnold yourself, then feel free, which conveniently brings me to the public service announcement part of this thinly-veiled advertisement for my own unique Q&A-hosting skills. (Oh, you want me to do a Q&A with all the Bond actors / Ryan Gosling / Kristen Wiig in a bathtub? I'm sure I can make myself available, just get in touch!) The venue for this meeting of minds is London's sexually devastating Prince Charles Cinema, and it will take place this Sunday, June 14th, just after 8pm. Through a miracle of planning synergy, the Q&A is followed by a screening of Casino Royale (the good one), for which Mr Arnold wrote some well good music, and some may say the film is an even better reason to buy a ticket than the Frost/Nixonesque episode which precedes it.

You can buy tickets for the screening and Q&A here, and you can post questions in the comments below if you like. Don't suggest anything that might compromise my integrity as a professional asker of questions because that integrity is pretty goddamn fragile as it is and I need every last shred of it.

The Casino Royale Titles: Daniel Kleinman's Early Designs

Following yesterday's interview with Daniel Kleinman, designer of six James Bond title sequences (including the forthcoming Skyfall), here's a bunch of "rough electronic sketches" that he produced while creating the titles for Casino Royale. Some of these images have never been seen before outside Daniel's computer, and I'm eternally grateful to him for allowing me to publish them on The Incredible Suit, not to mention somewhat inappropriately aroused.

The first twelve images are scans of an annotated storyboard of the first part of the sequence; the notes are Daniel's own. The rest are sketches intended to convey the visual ideas he wanted to put on film.

All images are reproduced with the kind permission of Daniel Kleinman.
All images are © Daniel Kleinman.

Don't forget, all images are © Daniel Kleinman. I'm not mucking about here.