Fantasy James Bond

This last week I spent less time reading in the evenings, and I actually watched all four of the Daniel Craig James Bond movies; one each evening Mon-Thur. (I don't count the fifth Daniel Craig movie. Not only do I not own it, but it was an ill-conceived movie to begin with, so I'll probably just ignore it completely.) I like the Daniel Craig movies, and I like the Timothy Dalton movies; I actually quite like the darker, edgier, and more grounded approach of them, compared to the gonzo movies that came earlier. Yes, even the Sean Connery movies are silly compared to those. I often say that if D&D 5e is The Avengers in fantasy, then Dark Fantasy X is the X-Files in fantasy. The reality, of course, is that the X-Files is just a long-running, drawn out thriller/mystery with a UFO and other supernatural stuff twist. Therefore, from a structural standpoint, any good thrillers are great examples of how to structure Dark Fantasy X games, even if the specific details may vary. A lich or corrupt Grand Duke (to use the Chaos in Waychester specific example) is really not much different than a Bond villain. Replace the cyber-attacks, or missing nuclear devices, etc. as plot devices with a supernatural equivalent of sorts, and you're good to go. And maybe limit the globe-trotting scope of many of these thriller stories (unless, of course, you're playing Eberron where that's a given for that setting too). And that isn't really necessary anyway. The Bourne Identity takes place in a fairly constrained part of Central Europe, after all.

Anyway, I've said this before, but I highly recommend watching and reading good thrillers, and paying attention to the structure, the villains, the twists, etc. because they make for good gaming fodder, and are easier to adapt than you'd think, even given the obviously different setting types.

That said... I'm not sure that I thought the Daniel Craig James Bond run was as good as I remembered it being. I've—for whatever reason—watched Casino Royale many times, but I hadn't seen Quantum of Solace, Skyfall or Spectre in a while and only probably once or twice ever. I'd also never watched them in order in a short time, i.e., one each every evening for four nights in a row. So here's where the post pivots to be a review of old movies that everyone's already seen.

First off, a few things. The change of the James Bond setting wasn't always welcomed. The lack of iconic James Bond elements, like Q and his gadgets, was even a part of the also darker and edgier and more grounded Timothy Dalton movies. Not having them here until partway through the third movie was probably a step too far.

The sex-swapped M was a big deal at the time, but Judi Dench was good in the role, and she was more like a "prequel" M with the whole point being to set up the more classic scenario with the new M in the final movie. The race swapped Felix Leiter and Miss Moneypenny was less irritating than I expected it to be, probably because they're such minor characters... although attempting to make Moneypenny a bigger character with a bigger role, and taking away her most iconic characteristic; her hopeless crush on Bond meant that she was essentially a totally different character anyway. These movies got flack from a lot of Bond fans for trying to be a more progressive "for modern audiences" Bond, but that didn't really metastasize into anything truly obnoxious until the fifth movie, which as I said, I'm completely pretending like it doesn't even exist anyway. Bond as the hardened nearly sociopathic alpha stereotype was mostly maintained (except in the fifth movie) and although some of the characters complained about it, whether it was intentional or not, it ended up serving him well. M called him a misogynistic dinosaur in the first movie, but then her own cumulative screw-ups required her to turn to Bond to try and fix her mess by the time Skyfall rolled around, for instance. If you only watch the first four Bond movies of this series, and ignore the fifth, you'll avoid most of the active wokeness. Given that the fourth one has a satisfying end, and the fifth one was an afterthought subversive epilogue feel, it's clear that when the fourth one was made that they considered that the end of the series anyway. Again; the fifth one was just ill-conceived in every way, including the idea that a fifth one should have been even made at all.

That said; how about the plot and structure of the films? Much to borrow here? I actually think that there are a few nearly crippling flaws that are more apparent across the four movies than they were when I just saw them individually separated by however many years it took to make them. First, I feel like a lot of the events that happen seem kind of disconnected, or at best weakly connected to any kind of plot. This is something that I think D&D type games in particular need to be careful about, because it's liable to happen anyway; that the action set-piece, or combats, or whatever it is, is a means unto itself, and it doesn't serve to advance anything, nor is it connected to anything. And don't get me wrong; red herrings and side quests, and asides for the sake of fun aren't wrong. But there should be at least some things that actually advance the plot. Here, I couldn't quite make it out quite often. Bond would be in a car chase or other big action set-piece, and it wasn't always super clear why. Hinting at big connected conspiracies is one thing, but the hints have to eventually pay off. Maybe I was a little too distracted occasionally while watching or something, but felt like the payoff was often too oblique, or out of left field. This is related to the second problem; the build-up was underserved. If, after four movies, you're supposed to be really invested in this conflict with the SPECTRE organization, it would help if you literally weren't hearing about it for the first time halfway through the fourth movie. You can't retroactively connect dots and have that be satisfying. The reveal of Blofeld as the secret mastermind that the audience had literally no idea existed was pretty flat. If you're going to have a big secret reveal, you have to build up to it sufficiently, and this series of movies didn't. Not only that, if Silva, Greene, White, and Le Chiffre were all supposed to be lieutenants or whatnot within his organization, they rarely suggested such. They all seemed to be independent operatives that only after the fact were linked. The hinting of the Syndicate in Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol and then the playing out of that Bond-type villainous organization in the next two movies seemed to play out better. For that matter, in a shorter format, check out HYDRA in Captain America: Winter Soldier. In the Bond movies, the connections between them felt stretched and reaching, and Blofeld's sudden appearance was... well, sudden. Not just this either; Bond's backstory, his connection to the Skyfall estate, etc. were hinted at, but not really explored enough for the audience to really understand why they were supposed to be important. There was a lot of just-so story to it; it was there because the plot demanded it, not because it felt verisimilitude-engendering.

Thirdly, in particular in Spectre, they tried so hard to make it personal and have the pictures all over the walls of people Bond had killed, etc. This felt really corny. I remember liking this movie when I first saw it, and one of my sons not liking it nearly as much. I wondered why, but watching it again last night, I though it was clearly trying too hard to be emotional and it came across as very silly. Bond movies have always had a bit of silliness to them. Not just the Roger Moore ones either; I mean are we really supposed to take Oddjob seriously as a villain? And not everything needs to be silly. But there's fun silly and roll your eyes silly, and Oddjob is the former; Bond seeing pictures of Silva and Vesper, etc. while running through a building to save someone is the latter.

I still recommend thrillers for DMs to make them better DMs. Not sure that the Bond movies are really the best examples, though.

UPDATE: I really like a good action/thriller with overtones of espionage, skullduggery and maybe a heist plotline. Part of the reason I really liked the new D&D movie, since it was basically a heist movie. Although James Bond ended up disappointing me just a bit, I'm also watching the three newest (and best) Mission Impossible movies now; I watched Ghost Protocol yesterday evening, and I hope to catch Rogue Nation tonight and Fallout on Wednesday. Not only will this prepare me for the release of Dead Reckoning in July, but like I said, I'm trying not to just watch the movies and enjoy them, but also pay attention to how the plots are structured, and why they work.

In addition to watching these movies, I also found a used copy at a great price of the Ludlum Triad, which is a heavy hardbound doorstopper with three novels omnibused into a single volume: The Holcroft Covenant, The Matarese Circle, and The Bourne Identity. All three were published in the years between 1978 and 1980 originally; the last of which was obviously adapted into a successful film franchise starring Matt Damon in the earlier 2000s—although based on the last entry from a few years ago, I'd suspect that that's done now. I've read a copy of this exact same omnibus back in the 90s from a library, but those three novels in particular struck me as particularly well written and well-structured. Two of them have been adapted into very successful movies, or in the case of Bourne, an entire movie franchise, although as my father-in-law bitterly remarked when we saw the first movie, it isn't a super faithful adaptation, really.

In my mind, the prototypical D&D campaign isn't really very much like sword & sorcery literature (ironically) and it differs for the most part in significant ways from your typical high fantasy literature, although it at least attempts to mimic that genre. My games in particular are probably equal parts 1) Robin Hood, 2) westerns, and 3) thriller/horror/crime stories. The first two are more about the setting, but the third is about what the characters do and what kinds of plots I have my villains engaged in (which obviously is a mirror of sorts to what the PCs will do.) People may be surprised to see westerns in there, but I think almost all D&D games that I've ever seen have a lot of the western in the setting. The idea of being on a frontier, of being the rough, nomadic ronin-like heroes who defend small settlements and homesteaders from violent hostile "indigenous" peoples, etc. The micro-setting, i.e., the actual details on the ground right where the game actually takes place, usually resembles the Old West more than it does the Middle Ages, although there's a patina of Middle Ages superficial stuff thrown in over a much more modern society, in most senses. That may sound disparaging, but actually I quite like it. I don't dabble in fantasy because I want historical reenactment; there's historical fiction for that (and sometimes I read that). I actually want a hybrid of our society and a romanticized past, and I think that's the draw of fantasy overall to almost all creators and audience for the genre. As the famous expression goes, "the past is a foreign country; they do things differently there." Go too far into the past, and you don't understand what people are doing or why, because the whole structure of their society is based on values that you don't recognize. I can't imagine very many modern fantasy fans really "getting" the whole concept of feudal duties and obligations, or the superstitious nature of Medieval religion and belief, and even basic concepts like hospitality duties and obligations. We want a romanticized version of the past, but a big part of that is projecting our own values and beliefs on to the past. 

As an aside, this is the fundamental disconnect which angers people about the woke and their censorship of the past. They're trying to force their values to be projected onto products like movies, books and games, but we don't share their values. So "sensitivity readers" censoring Robert E. Howard, H. P. Lovecraft, or even more innocuous writers like Ian Fleming or Roald Dahl kinda pisses people off, as does the rampant race and sex swapping of characters (unless they're villains) away from being white and into being brown, yellow, black, red or whatever. Nobody is enjoying Peter Patel and Blackerbell and black girls as Lost Boys, or Black Little Mermaid, or "strong independent wammen" Tiger Lily, or any of the other projections of woke values into our entertainment. Because people want their entertainment to reflect who they are. Hollywood was at its most successful when it was part of the American mainstream (more or less) in an America that was racially homogenous because minorities (other than blacks, who often had their own entertainment geared specifically towards them anyway) were too small in number to challenge the majority consensus of how society was to be structured. 

Turns out that even though Hollywood was still specifically American, up through the end of last century at least, and even beyond, that it was still universal enough to have mass appeal among other nations anyway. This woke crap, that uses as a shield the idea that everyone needs representation, on the other hand, literally appeals to no one except woke western women and the men who are indistinguishable from them.