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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   1294 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for April 27, 2025

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The film is the only one of the Daniel Craig Bond movies I've seen. I rewatched it in January and found it held up quite well (Mads Mikkelsen, in particular, is magnificent). Curious how it compares to the source material.

That's pretty much why I chose it, I like reading the seminal pieces of genre fiction to see how they compare to their popular depictions.

Unfortunately the subsequent Bond films slowly regressed closer to the mean and I gave up on them entirely after watching Skyfall.

I thought the last Daniel Craig film, No Time to Die, was surprisingly quite good. Not amazing or anything but very solid, some memorable chase scenes and action, good actors, good enough plot. Some people hated it because Bond dies at the end but I thought it was a good send-off for the Craig series of movies.

It stays pretty close to the plot of the source material. The only major changes are geopolitics updates (LeChiffre is a terrorist financier rather then a KGB agent), and making up excuses to actually have action scenes. This makes it pretty rare among other Bond movies, which usually range between loose adaptations (Goldfinger), very loose adaptations (Moonraker) and “we just grabbed the title and made up our own plot” (most of the rest of them).

It's been years since I've read Casino Royale but FWIW, ISTR coming away from it thinking that the movie was a good overall adaptation of the book.

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