James Bond - in the Service of Nothing

First-some background info. The guy behind this (awesome) short is Adi Shankar. Yes, it’s the same guy who created Power/Rangers, that other badass short film about old and miserable (super) heroes.

Now, let’s break this down.

First, we see a chase that’s so classic for any Bond movie: whether it would be the 60’s classics or the modern ones - Bond chases a bunch of bad guys, successfully disposes of them and then destroys their ship. Classic Bond fare.

Then, however we fast-forward to the modern day and BAM. No more action. Only a desperate miserable Bond, who accepts a hit from some random guy from France, while talking about his cultural identity and who he was and how the world has changed, walking through a club where everyone is using SPECTRE-brand smartphones (nice detail there – they didn’t conquer the world with violence, simply used smartphones) While killing the guy he experiences some hallucinations about how this kill actually looks like the adventures he had in the past.

I believe that this is the most acute representation of the modern spy movie we will ever get, be it on a small screen or on a big one. Despite modern movies like “Quantum of Solace” or the Bourne trilogy believing themselves to be a spy-movie in the modern times (and we want to believe them), they always bring back one ingredient that would be out of place in the modern world.

The big bad. The mastermind behind all your suffering. The ying to the yang of the snappy dressed, sociopathic and violent main hero.

Despite us firmly believing that such a thing/man exists even now (at the moment it’s the president of the U.S.A) it is an outdated concept. The charismatic and crazy villain we used to see in classic Spy flics would simply not work in the modern world.  He doesn’t have henchmen  or a giant lair or a white cat to stroke. Everyone knows that after the Cold War there could no longer be a villain in a lair who purely relied on his network of henchmen to nuke everyone. James Bond himself even became obsolete ( M calls him a dinosaur, a relic of the cold war) for a while, until he got fresh breath in Casino Royale.

Btw – fun fact. After the failure of the last Brosnan film one of the considered options was a period piece set in the 1960’s. Just to show you how obsolete Bond was considered to be back in the early 2000’s.

Times had changed and so had the villains. Even before the globalization and the obsession with technology of the 2010’s people already saw that the classic antagonist was outdated. Look at the Matrix, where the villain was a literal virus. Or American Gods (the book and the series) wherein the main antagonists were Media and Mr.World.

Our villains are the ones hiding behind computer screens. Bond understands this, actually – there is a reason (and a damn good one) why in Spectre, the latest installment of the JB franchise , Blofeld wanted to use  computers and a global defense network to further his nefarious deeds .

Why the most lavish and crazed up villains in movies and series usually use modern technology as an end to their means. Remember Moriarty and how he used phones and camera’s to torture Sherlock ? Or that Charlize Theron chick from the latest Fast and the Furious ?  (Of course you don’t. No-one remembers what the fuck actually happens in those films. It is almost like Transformers, only with less Megan Fox and giant robots.) Even in Kingsman, one of the few movies that plays  (along) with the classic James Bond tropes (even inserting a reference about a radio in a shoe), the villain uses mobile phones to achieve his end-goal (which is, for once, not global domination – kudos for that). This is even visible in tv-shows – remember the second season of Fargo? There was a criminal who fought the entire season to get a promotion, only to realize that the promotion resulted in him typing documents behind a desk.

The world became mobile, the enemy became invisible and the plan to take over the world using a satellite or a missile would simple not work anymore – ‘cause hey, the world is wireless and as a result we can hack into the systems of the main bad guy from our home computers (which is, by the by, exactly how Fate of the Furious solved their plot.) And because of that, Bond and people like him are an outdated and unnecessary concept. When we had Bond, we always had a treat that could be felt, seen, whether or not it was a crazed kgb-agent, an obsessed businessman or a international terrorist.
Those villains did not hide behind desks, they were there, often even on the frontline. Blofeld was there to kill the wife of Bond. One of the villains in the Brosnan-era was an ex-MI6 agent. And to battle those villains, we needed gentleman spies.  The last time we had such a threat was with Al-Qaida, but their leader was unceremoniously axed off by the military and inside info revealed that things looked less like a terror treat and more like the Office by the time Bin Laden died. Right now there is I.S.I.S but it is not clear what the fresh hell is actually going on there.

Currently the military has an army of geeks battling another army of geeks in a war that is fought from behind an office desk and behind computer screens.
There is no need for a gentleman who seduces a woman, takes a cool car and destroys the lair of a villain killing over a dozen henchmen in the process.
No.
There are a dozen Sheldons battling a dozen Leonards trying to convince millions that Drumpf/Rocket Man (scrap needed) is evil using Facebook and Twitter. There are Troll farms dedicated to online propaganda.

And what happened to the spies of day’s past? Did they disappear? No. We had an dozen perfect killing machines on the service of the country. They didn’t have a moral compass, they had a license to kill and they had everything they wanted. And they also had an addiction to that lifestyle. If you are addicted, then you cannot keep your addiction under control. You need to supply it. So, they became killers. The modern James Bond is Hitman. Silent assassins without rules, preforming any kill for money. The current James Bond will not be the good guy. No. He will be the bad guy. Desperate to get back to his classic lifestyle and in desperate search of adrenaline he will do anything for anyone. (side-note. The modern JB books deal with this, introducing him as a contract mercenary working for various spy organizations around the world.)

And basically, this is what the short is about. It's about how our hero, not able to cope with the progress, not able to cope with how he was replaced by Q, became a contract killer.