My take on the whole thing is that, I feel the newer Bond movies are great movies, they just ain't great BOND MOVIES to me. They don't have the ingredients that fascinated me and kept me longing for a new James Bond movie back in the 80s and 90s. I see the new Bond movies with Daniel Craig as great espionage movies, with great plot and action, but not just great bond movies.
Below are 8 reasons why I prefer older James Bond movies to the newer ones.
8. The Exotic Cars
In Skyfall, they had to use the same Aston Martin that was used in Gold Finger (1964). The Daniel Craig movies don't really have the exotic cars in them. It doesn't give it that James Bond feeling.
7. The Futuristic Look
The reason why I can watch Moonraker, or The Spy Who Loved me today and not feel like I am watching 1970s movies is because they were very futuristic movies for when they were released.
6. The Gadgets
Come on! The pen that fired bullets. The car that could fly. Or is the one from The Spy Who Loved Me that turned to a submarine when it went underwater (by the way, that's the picture of the car above). The gadgets were always something to look out for in every James Bond movie whenever he visited Q. But you had a movie like Skyfall where the young Q gave James Bond a simple handgun and a radio. Boring!
5. The Girls
Yea. The girls were abundant, and they didn't have to be able to handle machine guns or jump off trains. They just had to be beautiful and maybe diabolical, but not on some G.I Jane sh&t. Yea, shallow, but I don't care.
4. The Smoothness of James Bond
You would see James Bond (being played by Sean Connery or Roger Moore) about to die and he would still be cool, calm, and collected while letting the villain expose all his plans. That's one thing I always loved in the older Bond movies which is missing in the newer ones.
3. The Humor
The classic English man humor is another ingredient that made old Bond movies so enjoyable. Craig cracks jokes too, but his mean demeanor doesn't allow for the jokes to get across as really funny to the audience.
2. Bigger Villains
I think Skyfall had a big Villain with (played by Javier Bardem), but generally speaking, you can't compare the villains in the newer Bond movies with those of the older ones. The older ones were bigger and fiercer. Talk about Oddjob in Gold Finger, or Scaramanga and Nick Nack in The Man With the Golden Gun, or Jaws in The Spy Who Loved Me and Moonraker...I can go on and on.
1. No Original "Q"
Yea, if you don't know who Q is/was, then you can't understand why I feel this way. Q was/is the guy that gives James Bond all his gadgets in the Bond movies. He (the original Q- Desmond Llewelyn) came on board with the third James Bond movie in 1964 (Goldfinger), and ended up appearing in a total of 17 James Bond movies, till he died in 1999. The man appeared in more James Bond movies than any actor that played the James Bond character. He was in Bond movies with 5 Bond actors- Sean Connery, Roger Moore, George Lazenby, Timothy Dalton, and Pierce Brosnan. Through the 70s, 80s, and 90s, he became a recognizable face in the Bond movies, and when he passed in 1999, the people that handle the franchise didn't take his part serious till Skyfall (2012), and his replacement was very uninspiring.
With all that said, Daniel Craig's portrayal of James Bond is said my movie critics to be the closest to what Ian Fleming had in mind when he was writing the James Bond movies, so I am sure Craig has set the standards for what Bond movies would look like in the future. I am just a lover of the old James Bond movies and the nostalgic feeling I get whenever I watch them. So, if you totally disagree with me, it is cool.
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