Pierce Brosnan in ‘Casino Royale’: How Would Have It Worked?

Casino Royale was first published on April 13, 1953, only thirty-three days before Pierce Brosnan was born in Ireland. At this point, we all probably know about Brosnan’s long and winding road to becoming the fifth official Bond actor: his experience watching Goldfinger aged 11, how he lost the role in 1986 during his Remington Steele time, his marriage with For Your Eyes Only actress Cassandra Harris, and other things. But considering we have celebrated the 70th anniversary of both Brosnan and the literary Bond, let’s look at what a big screen adaptation of Ian Fleming’s first novel could have been with the fifth Bond actor.

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Ethan, We Are Counting On You! - 'Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One' Review

 

MILD SPOILERS

The first minutes of Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One will take you to the interior of a Russian submarine, the Sevastopol, navigating through the unforgiving depths of the Bering Sea. If you are old enough, nostalgia will soon kick in and you’ll be transported to the long-forgotten worlds of The Hunt For Red October, Tomorrow Never Dies, Crimson Tide or The Spy Who Loved Me. “They don’t do them like that anymore,” you probably said when rewatching those on Blu-ray or DVD. But now, right as you hear two over-confident officers with a marked accent taking pride in their state-of-the-art stealth navigation system before something goes terribly wrong, you will conclude that –after all– someone is doing them like that.

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Wishing a Happy and Glorious (00)70th Birthday to Pierce Brosnan

As a kid, when I was barely discovering what James Bond was –I say "what" instead of "who", because I'm referring to the phenomenon, not just the character–, I remember many adults speaking a great deal about Sean Connery or Roger Moore, just when these two actors were about to turn 70. Today... it is my Bond who celebrates its 70th birthday. So, in the name of the generation who grew up seeing him walking through the gunbarrel (or at least many of them), I wanted to dedicate a few words to the legendary Pierce Brosnan.

Dear Pierce, your legacy speaks for youself. As 007, you have resurrected a character that few people thought would have a leg to step on in the 90s and in a couple of years we were toasting for the new millennium with your first three films on the shelf, hoping for the fourth to come soon. While everyone was talking about Dragon Ball Z, we were talking about James Bond. When everyone was into laser sabres or galaxies far and away, we were urging our parents to buy us a suit or a tuxedo and took a sip of soda pretending it was a vodka martini shaken, not stirred. When in adulthood things didn't go as we wanted, we remembered the challenges you had to face, and we learned to rise victorious. We have learned of your strengths and your humility. You were, and still are, a role model for more people than you could ever imagine. For different reasons, we were left without the chance to see you as Bond for a fifth time. We also think you deserved a more dignified farewell of the role, and we are not referring to the quality of your final film, but to things that have to do with the institutional side of the question. But time will never erase the impact your great legacy leaves on all of us.

You have taught us to never surrender – as Bond, and as a man.

Happy birthday, Pierce. 

2023: Happy new year! (sort of) and small updates

It's too late to say "Happy New Year", but considering this is my first post of the year over here... well, Happy New Year!

After a stressful move and very difficult December and months to establish myself in my new home, I started working on an updated edition for The Bond of The Millennium. Expect new chapters, one dealing with how Casino Royale with Pierce Brosnan would have been, a restructuring of the original book with new information I have added and analyzed, and a couple of photos in color.

Hope to write some words on Pierce's 70th as well before the book is done and finished (on the revisions phase now, seeing what else I can add), but in the meantime almost my full focus is in there, and I really hope you'll like it.

Greetings,

N.

A Reappraisal of ‘Die Another Day’

There are plenty of reasons to like or dislike Die Another Day, Pierce Brosnan’s unexpected and involuntary swan song to the franchise. Scroll into a couple of forums and you’ll find all the reasons to dislike it, most of the justifications use the words “invisible car” or “CGI” quite a lot. This is why, as if my books Beyond The Ice: The Case For and Against Die Another Day and a couple of articles weren’t enough, I have decided to write this article. Let’s be honest – the most obvious excuse is the 20th anniversary this week.

I will start by saying that the Lee Tamahori film went up and down in my rankings. I remember loving it when I first saw it on the big screen (January 2003 in my native Argentina) and then disliking it quite a lot as it reached home video. Yes, the slow-motion effects and speed ramps felt a bit too much for Bond’s subtlety, and then there’s the overload of CGI. Yet again, in hindsight, I feel all of these tropes were very characteristic of the productions released during the first lustrum of the new millennium, films like Mission: Impossible 2 (2000) and Swordfish (2001). In almost every big action film I can recall Hollywood toying with computer-generated graphics and rubbing all these new technologies in the audience’s face, perhaps as a way to make it very clear that we were in a new millennium and there’s more technology out there than your Compaq Presario 2100 PC or your Nokia 3310 cell phone.

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‘GoldenEye 007’: James Bond’s Golden Game Turns 25

When cameras first rolled on Pierce Brosnan’s James Bond film debut GoldenEye on 16 January 1995, little did people imagine that this film would save the franchise at a time when many doubted Ian Fleming’s spy would survive the 1990s. But they were even less aware that, at that precise moment, the foundation stone was cast for a video game that would revolutionize the industry in unexpected ways.

Twenty-five years after its release, GoldenEye 007 is still regarded not only as the best Bond video game of them all but as one of the best video games ever made. This was a huge compensation considering that the game was made by a group of people who had barely worked in the video game industry (some had no experience at all) and that subsequent delays resulted in a release nearly two years ahead of the premiere of the film on which the game was based.  

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James Bond and Valentin Zukovsky: From Enemies to Friends

Scottish actor Robbie Coltrane died last Friday at the age of 72 and millions of Harry Potter fans waved goodbye to the corpulent man who incarnated Rubeus Hagrid in the big-screen adaptation of J.K. Rowling’s novels. However, for action movie fans, Coltrane will be best remembered as ex-KGB agent and arms dealer Valentin Zukovsky in two James Bond films starring Pierce Brosnan: GoldenEye and The World Is Not Enough. 

Released in 1995, GoldenEye marked Brosnan’s long-awaited debut as Ian Fleming’s secret agent. It was the first Bond film released after the fall of the Soviet Union, a geopolitical scenario few people expected the secret agent to survive or be useful to. Far from ignoring the new geopolitics, scribes Michael France, Jeffrey Caine and Bruce Feirstein explicitly placed 007 in the new Russia to fight the Janus syndicate, a mysterious organization tied to their mafia with a dangerous electromagnetic weapon in their hands..

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