Where have all the good old Bond film preheating days go?

It's almost 22 years since I became a James Bond fan in January 1998. And I'm sad to say I don't feel identified with the Bond fandom of today, at all. Mind you, this has nothing to do with my love to the character. I love Bond in every media, particularly films, video games and books, even the comic books. Sorry to say it, but, should I have the chance to go to Great Britain in April (something impossible to happen due to my miserable finances), I can count with the fingers of one hand those I would really look forward to meet.

The preheating season of No Time To Die which is currently taking place, I'm sorry to say, has been one of the most disappointing of all. Even more so, the most disappointing of all. I sorely miss the days of Casino Royale or Quantum of Solace where the return of Bond was a party and not a "let's see what happens" challenge among fans. This was caused, primarily, by the tabloids. And secondly, for the ones believing them.

You can argue that the tabloids have always been there, since a long time ago. You're right, I remember one day of 1999 when I was excited because Posh Spice would be a Bond girl in The World Is Not Enough. That was, of course, because the news got to a newspaper of my country. And I wasn't a Spice Girls fan, but I was just happy to get some news on the 19th Bond film. Naturally, these were all rumors. And while researching for The Bond of The Millennium I confirmed that that piece of news was fallacious. Sharon Stone had been suggested, but they went for Sophie Marceau and Denise Richards.

From that point on, maybe later, let's say 2002-2003 when I properly started to "care" about Bond news, I stopped believing in everything the tabloids said. I simply disregarded them unless it came from a trustworthy journalism or other source, but still, the full stop came when EON confirmed the news. It has always been like this with me.

Flash forward to 2019 and the tabloids are back with their clickbait-ish headlines. That is expected, but what it wasn't expected to me was how many Bond fans do get carried away by whatever they say and particularly when it's so apparent that the news are getting twisted.

Yesterday, a No Time To Die Heineken commercial appeared, where Daniel Craig is seen in tux, under the context of a James Bond film, ordering a "Heineken 0.0", an alcohol-free variant of the Dutch beer. Today, Screenrant is already saying that "Bond will drink an alcohol-free beer in the movie", and fills the blanks of a dull and uninteresting article by calling the action scenes of the movies "absurd", plus noting that this is a way of "steering the Bond character away from the old-fashioned template".

With this, I got the feeling someone will start raining on our parade by saying that "Bond is over" because "now he has become so woke that he drinks an alcohol-free drink". It hasn't happened yet, but I know it will happen. In the same way I've seen people doing videos on how "Bond 25 (sic) is in TROUBLE because Dan Romer is fired" or people even commenting my Facebook and Twitter posts to tell me "they should better kill off Bond because he can't still stand these times" when films like GoldenEye and Casino Royale proved the exact opposite.

Back to the Heineken ad, I think anyone having experience in marketing or media, or at least anyone following the franchise for years, would know that the Heineken ads are basically spoofs of the film, with Daniel Craig playing a satirical version of James Bond as John Cleese played a satirical version of Q or Eva Green a satirical version of Vesper Lynd. The "James Bond" from those commercials isn't the actual James Bond from the film. And in 23 years that Bond is tied-in to Heineken, he only took a sip from the green bottle in Skyfall and SPECTRE. And all we saw was the bottle from a distance, with no indication of what kind of beer from the Dutch company he drank. So... much ado about nothing.

Concerning the other rumours, I personally don't believe an inch of the Nomi 007 thing and even less of Safin being Dr. No. It may happen that Lashana Lynch's character has Bond's 00 code for a while but you don't use the 007 logo so big in a film where James Bond isn't 007. It makes zero sense. As for the other rumour, I find it even more ridiculous. Dr. No is a one-off character, rebooting him would be as silly as the Die Another Day homages. Dr. No was only meant to appear in no other film than Dr. No, Blofeld, on the other hand, was a regular Ian Fleming villain and that's why it had sense to be rebooted (as Leiter, Moneypenny, M, Q, Tanner...)

I can't stop thinking that had all of this happened in 2006 or 2008, we would have moved on. Tabloid was another word for crap. We would even laugh at it. Now? We're taking them far too seriously. And the moral judgement of the character from journalists, podcasts and even Bond fan sites deserves another chapter. I'm really, really, but really fed up of that. I'm not even saying all you see in a Bond film should be applauded or imitated but, do you see the video games your kids play with? The music they listen to? The series they watch? I think you'll probably find the content in those productions far more disturbing than anything you ever seen in a Bond film. I'm happy with the character being as he is and has always been, in the same way I never cared for the level of "violence" in Tom and Jerry or The Three Stooges. More than that, I play GTA games as any other mortal so I'm not horrified for any of these things.

As for No Time To Die, all we have to do is wait and see. I already had someone telling me "Bond fans will not watch this movie because it's gonna be woke". I don't think so. I saw no evidence of that in the trailer and all the "world's moved on, Commander" line feels kind of light-hearted to me. So it's all jumping into conclusions for what the tabloids say. I am extremely excited for the movie as pretty much everyone is and once it's out I'll give my thoughts. And, most importantly, I'm happy that James Bond is back in action again.