James Bond fans I feel that we don't get to talk that often outside of the film reviews and yes there will be more of those coming. Well I thought that since we are now in the me too era and everybody gets offended by anything I thought it would be good to pose the question of if the film franchise needs to be updated in order to fit in with this new era and please note that this wasn't planned so it might be all over the place in terms of thought and content.
In order to under stand if the franchise needs to be updated we need to understand when and how the me too movement started and please note I won't be covering everything on how it started just a few key points. Now the phrase "Me Too" was actually first being thrown around in 2006 thanks to social activist and community organiser Tarana Burke and the phrase was used to promote empowerment through empathy and it was first being used on Myspace.
The phrase really did kick into high gear in 2015 and it's bee going strong ever since really with pretty much every high profile name being accused of harassment. So where Bond fits into all of this is the fact that it's fairly well known that he likes the women and has his own methods of getting the information that he needs out of them and with this new movement there would be alot of people getting offended over those scenes.
However the people who would get offended need to know and I will be bringing this up later that there is a line a Goldeneye which does kind of reference this but i'll get more into it later. Those people are also judging the early films by the standards that we have today which is something that you just cannot do since the film was made during a different time period and where society and what was deemed acceptable was different.
On the flip side of this we have characters like Xenia Onatopp and Fiona Volpe who both use there sexuality as I means to get what they want. Yet the people who follow this movement don't see to comment on this which I honestly feel that they should because there talking about equality and yet when there claiming that the franchise needs to be updated they forget about these characters in order to spin their own story.
Getting back to Goldeneye during Bond's first scene with Judi Dench's M She refers to him as a "sexist, misogynist dinosaur, a relic of the Cold War.". This right here is what I meant before when I said that referenced Bonds womanising ways and again it's something that does need to be taken into account when people ask the question if the franchise needs to be updated to fit into the Me Too era because in my eyes the Bond franchise was doing the whole Me Too thing before it was even a thing and Bond does have to win her trust and he does it not through forcing himself on her but by the fact that he saves the world.
If i'm being honest this is more of a question then anything else and as such I want to try and keep it open ended and not give you that much of what I think. However I do feel the need to add in the fact that the James Bond films are fantasy films that are based in reality I say that because the women can have this fantasy about this man who lives in a world of danger coming and being with them and the men can have this fantasy about these sexy women and so to update the franchise would also run the risk of loosing both of those elements.
I'm not going to lie there are scenes in which bond could have treated women better take for example The Man With The Golden Gun and the scene where bond twists Andrea's arm a scene which even Roger Moore didn't like. Given that the character of Andrea was going to turn on Scaramanga anyway he could have just asked her for any useful information and the scene would have worked better.
Now in a move which does come as a result of the Me Too movement was the announcement that Lashana Lynch was playing the new 007. This was something that did get alot of casual fans upset because in their eyes there is only one 007 and that's Bond however those people don't understand that 007 is a code number and Bond was just the current holder of it and since he's starting the new film retired it makes sense that someone else would have that number.
Yet every time when someone mentions the fact that 007 is just a code number and nothing more the casual fans would get upset about this it was like the die hard fans are somehow wrong. Even when the fans would mention that in the books there have been other 007's and reasons as to why this isn't that big of a deal they would still get upset these are also the same people that claim that they want equality and yet when there presented with facts proving that there getting upset over nothing they can't handle it and so resort to saying that the die hard fans are wrong because we don't agree with them.
Now while doing an interview with The Sunday Times to promote his new film Knifes Out Daniel Craig was asked a question about No Time To Die co-writer Phoebe Waller-Bridge but the interviewer seemed more focused on the fact that she's a woman. that right there is the wrong thing to do and i'm bringing this up because this up because it was rumoured that she was being brought on to make the script more diverse which right now no one knows if that's true or not because the film's not been released and so I do feel it was wrong of the interviewer to bring her up and Dan was in the right for defending her because out of the two only he would know what she's done with Bond.
I personally don't feel that the franchise needs to be updated to fit into the Me Too era because it's already been updated to fit in with that era and have been since 1995. It's the rest of the world that's now playing catch up to the franchise and they don't like that so the casual fans are now trying to find reasons to see that the franchise needs to be updated. I would very much like to see what you guys think about this and sorry if this post is all over the place it wasn't planned at all.
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