I personally don't feel there is that much to gain from having a female Bond. While I'm all for winding up the people it would drive up the wall by removing double 0's dick, it just feels like such a lazy cosmetic fix to whatever issues we may associate with the character. Maybe, as Stu suggests, if there was a clever or thoughtful way to retrofit this, it could have some value beyond the novelty. But, if this ends up being the case, it just seems more likely than not to be used as the canary in the coal mine that would justify studios not investing in making action oriented films with females as the protagonist. And, call me a pessimist, I think it's ultimate failure would be almost be baked in from the beginning (considering the studios would undoubtedly muck up the promotion, and journalists would muck up and chance for us to take it on its own terms) It is a brand which has almost exclusively pandered to the male gaze since its inception and I can't help but imagine this has made a lot of your average female audience members feel excluded from the franchise to the point that a woman in the role would do little to change their appetite for it. And, sadly, we probably know how a good chunk of the male audience is going to react. And so if (when) the movie fails, we know exactly what element is going to be blamed. And no one is going to give two ****s how thoughtfully it was done.
As always, the bigger question is why hasn't a female director been enlisted to helm a Bond film? This could potentially lend the film the interesting perspective Stu is talking about. And it skirts around having to fundamentally change a character that has by now become ingrained in pop culture, warts and all. Frankly, I think Katherine Bigelow would absolutely shame the last few entries if given the chance.
And talking about warts, it is also worth considering what James Bond even is without these elements. Remove the decades spent detailing his specific kind of sociopathology and unapologetic womanizing, is it really even Bond? Don't we sort of need to take the bad with the good for it to still qualify in any meaningful way. While you can argue if modern society needs this kind of hero anymore, I think the argument starts losing the plot when we say we still want to keep him around only to make him something more palatable for today's mindset. It's like removing the cannibalism from Hannibal Lector. Why not just start from scratch with a new character? One which will have their own quirks (which will no doubt be tut-tutted by audiences in the future), and who can at lest begin as a female, and not step into a character that already has generations worth of rape stink on his lapels.
As always, the bigger question is why hasn't a female director been enlisted to helm a Bond film? This could potentially lend the film the interesting perspective Stu is talking about. And it skirts around having to fundamentally change a character that has by now become ingrained in pop culture, warts and all. Frankly, I think Katherine Bigelow would absolutely shame the last few entries if given the chance.
And talking about warts, it is also worth considering what James Bond even is without these elements. Remove the decades spent detailing his specific kind of sociopathology and unapologetic womanizing, is it really even Bond? Don't we sort of need to take the bad with the good for it to still qualify in any meaningful way. While you can argue if modern society needs this kind of hero anymore, I think the argument starts losing the plot when we say we still want to keep him around only to make him something more palatable for today's mindset. It's like removing the cannibalism from Hannibal Lector. Why not just start from scratch with a new character? One which will have their own quirks (which will no doubt be tut-tutted by audiences in the future), and who can at lest begin as a female, and not step into a character that already has generations worth of rape stink on his lapels.
But I also do think there was more to James Bond than womanising etc. It’s hard to pinpoint, but I think it was about a particular take on espionage, a “one man army” narrative which this series just happens to epitomise more than the Bourne stuff et al, coupled with his charm/wit which was always more than breaking bones. I honestly think personality goes a long way and that despite different actors, Bond has always had a fairly consistent personality, even if it wasn’t always reflected in the writing of individual films/plot lines.
Bigelow would probably do a stellar job indeed, but to me it doesn’t feel like her kind of project - I imagine she’d want full creative control and her own characters.
Speaking of female audiences feeling excluded from the Bond world, I don’t know - maybe. Would depend on the individual females, as with anything. I never felt that way, not as a kid nor as an adult. If anything, I liked being in the “boys’” club with my brothers as I never seemed to have much of a liking for anything made with female audiences in mind. I imagine there are women whose attention in a film will be solely drawn to the ways in which women are depicted/presented/treated/stereotyped in said film, but that’s really alien to me as an idea and seems like a tragically reductive approach.