It feels like things are coming up Bond right now, and the news that John Logan has signed on to write two back-to-back Bond films that tell one complete story is incredibly exciting.
When you see “Skyfall,” you’ll see how carefully they have set up the James Bond series moving forward and how several elements that were previously missing in the series have now been dropped in. One thing I liked a lot about “Casino Royale” and “Quantum Of Solace” as a double-feature was the idea that they were both about a shadowy enemy organization that Bond was going to start dismantling piece by piece. That story thread appears to have been dropped almost completely in “Skyfall,” and that is one of the few things about the film that saddens me. With the work that “Skyfall” does to set all of Bond’s support system in place, though, it makes me wonder if they’re planning to get back to it.
Or does Logan have something else in mind? After all, this isn’t unprecedented in the world of the Bond movies. Blofeld was a presence in many of the early films, and SPECTRE was a thread that tied the world together at first. It felt like they were starting to build towards the unmasking of a big SPECTRE-like organization. Maybe Logan would rather build his two-film arc around a particular villain or a particular plot, though. All I know is that I love the notion that this Bond is being built with this kind of thinking. Instead of approaching each film in a vacuum, I would much rather see things handled with some sense of continuity, with an overall story that progresses in each film and with Bond actually accumulating a sense of experience. In “Skyfall,” we see him progress as a character, and we see what results there are from the experiences of “Casino” and “Quantum.” He is no longer in permanent stasis, and having one screenwriter handle the next two films, particularly if it’s an original story that the writer came up with and pitched to Michael Wilson and Barbara Broccoli, sounds like a major step in the right direction.
The big question now is can they get Mendes to return for another film, something that hasn’t happened in a while, or can they find another filmmaker whose sensibilities will be as sharp a match to the material as it was for Mendes? Now that the Bond films have been proven to be this potentially great, I feel greedy about it, and I’d hate to see them take a step back.
It sounds like an intense timetable, and my guess is the rest of this creative team will have to fall into place quickly if they’re going to want another movie out in late 2014 or even the summer of 2015.