Dynamic director Denis Villeneuve can breathe new life into flagging James Bond franchise

Irish Independent

3 days ago

Yesterday morning, the blockbuster auteur behind the Dune films and Arrival was announced as the director of the 26th Bond film, which remains − for now − untitled and un-cast.
These two further puzzle pieces will doubtless slot into place soon enough, though Villeneuve's appointment offers a tantalising glimpse of what the future direction of 007 under his new owners at Amazon might be, as well as granting the tech giant's handling of the franchise a much-needed PR boost.
After Amazon's acquisition of Bond cost them $9.5bn (€8bn) and a creative falling out with Barbara Broccoli's Eon Productions – the keepers of the Bond flame since the Sean Connery years – the stakes have never felt higher for appointing the right director.
Securing Villeneuve hushes complaints from every direction imaginable – this is a director whose work has screened at Venice and Cannes, is a four-time Oscar and five-time Bafta nominee and has taken almost $2bn at the global box office.
His two Dune films alone grossed just over $1.1bn, despite the first being semi-nobbled by Covid.
It's also a move that Broccoli herself could have never taken issue with, since she tried to do the same around 10 years ago during the search for a director for No Time to Die, the last instalment in the Daniel Craig run.
Villeneuve is known to be bloody-minded when tangling with executives
Back then, Villeneuve recused himself as he was busy with the first instalment of Dune − and indeed he's currently consumed with part three, Dune: Messiah, which is expected to shoot later this summer then land in cinemas by the end of next year.
This means that even with a Ridley Scott-like work ethic, we won't be seeing Villeneuve's Bond until the summer of 2027 at the earliest.
Yet Broccoli's smartest directorial hirings were always journeymen rather than visionaries – think Martin Campbell of GoldenEye and Casino Royale and Sam Mendes of Skyfall and Spectre.
These were filmmakers who would bend to Bond's will, rather than vice versa.
Villeneuve is quite a different kettle of fish and known to be bloody-minded when tangling with executives on stylistic matters.
The first major scenes he shot for Dune: Part Two were nightmarish monochrome infrared sequences, which led to frantic calls from studio heads who wanted to 'put the colours back in' in the edit. Because Villeneuve had shot them on infrared cameras, this was impossible.
Nor is he the type to take a gun-for-hire approach when working on an established movie brand.
The last – and only – time he hopped into a franchise mid-stream was Blade Runner 2049, a film whose cold visual magnificence, dreamlike texture and tone of mounting exist­ential disquiet was wholly in keep- ing with his earlier, self-authored work.
And that suggests his take on 007 is unlikely to appease the sizeable Make Bond Fun Again cohort − if Timothee Chalamet's Paul Atreides and Ryan Gosling's Nexus-9 replicant K are anything to go by, his 007 will be a pre-institutionalised pretty boy who bridles at the system that dispassionately puts him to use.
You could say the same, in fact, of Emily Blunt's FBI agent Kate Macer from his chokingly tense 2015 cartel thriller Sicario − presumably the film that offers the most clues as to how a Villeneuve Bond might look and move.
Meticulously staged, strikingly shot action scenes are a given, as well as a commitment to realism, or at least plausibility: in other words, no invisible cars or tsunami kite-surfing ahead.
Even the Dune films, with their bizarre technology, costumes and rituals, presented all of that spectacularly designed strangeness without explanations or excuses.
The result may be the strangest Bond film ever made
I remember Villeneuve once telling me that in order to make Dune's spacecraft feel truly cinematic, he had to force himself to shoot them as if they were ordinary cars, using atmospheric effects like mist, rain and dust to force the audience to crane in, rather than flaunt them like crisp 4K tech demos.
All of the above suggests that Bond 26 will be a film that doesn't fall over itself to make the world love it – which, at this make-or-break juncture, is exactly what the franchise needs.
Amazon will have surely made this decision with one eye on their tepid and muddled Lord of the Rings prequel series, The Rings of Power – without strong direction, prestigious acquisitions can become corporate humiliations fast.
After the Broccoli rift, 007 had to be taken firmly in hand, and the hiring of Villeneuve represents a stern summons to Whitehall for a rigorous briefing.
True, the result may be the strangest Bond film ever made, but if the alternative was to be 12 hours of Blofeld: Origins on Prime, we should all be glad of it.