007 First Light Justifies Both James Bond and Itself

Early on in GoldenEye (1995), the newly-recast James Bond has his first sit-down meeting with the newly-recast M. Judi Dench plays M as someone who's habitually forceful, brusque even, in a way that feels calibrated as a defense against the casual misogyny of the world she inhabits. She's there to leave no doubt as to her ability and authority, because she can't count on being taken seriously by default. The scene acts as a thesis statement for her version of the character.

But it also acts as a thesis statement for the whole 007 franchise from there on out. She explicitly calls out Bond as a misogynistic dinosaur and a relic of the cold war. The implicit question looms over all of the Pierce Brosnan films and, then, over Daniel Craig's as well: What is Bond for, now that the Cold War is over? Why would the world need him?

The idea is itself a bit of a construct, of course. In the old movies, Bond is never really a cold warrior himself. The conflict is a backdrop, a justification; the actual antagonists are not the Russians, but instead flamboyant madmen with supervillain aspirations. The question sticks, because the world of 1995 is so drastically different from the world of 1989. And then when Daniel Craig rolls around, the world of 2006 is once again drastically different from the world of 1995.

This question—What do we need Bond for?—gets answered over and over again in the movies, with varying levels of success. The Brosnan movies themselves go back to the old Bond well of a villain trying to ignite the cold war twice, in spite of the theoretical end of the cold war, by invoking China (in Tomorrow Never Dies) and then North Korea (in the inimitably terrible Die Another Day). The Craig movies briefly flirt with applying a Global War on Terror coat of paint to the old Cold War hulk, but opt instead to dive into a mire of comic-book mythologizing.

Right now, the Bond franchise—long an idiosyncratically-run British family business—is being digested by Amazon, to become part of their ever-growing "IP portfolio". It feels almost as if Jeff Bezos grabbed it in the impulse buy aisle before checking out The Lord of the Rings.

Of course, the question still looms: What do we need Bond for? I can't imagine that whatever Bond movie comes out of Amazon's bowels will give as satisfying an answer as IO Interactive's 007 First Light.

The game has to carry this burden twice. Once, for the Bond franchise, and once for the AAA action-adventure game itself. These kinds of huge, lavish video games have become so expensive and so slow to make that every one is not only an event but a sort of argument for the form itself. Never mind Bond; what do we need Nathan Drake for? An almost unimaginable amount of human labor—and often, human misery—goes into building these digital cathedrals.

Do audiences still care about seeing all that money on the screen any more? We live in an era of plateauing graphical fidelity. The PlayStation 5 is six years old; a putative PlayStation 6 not even on the horizon yet. And PS5 games don't really look all that much better than PlayStation 4 games, they just load faster. Nowadays I look at the delicate hair physics in the trailer for God of War Laufey and think: That's at least 20,000 more copies they need to sell just to pay for the hair.