So I just finished watching all 25 Eon Productions Bond films in just under 6 weeks. Previously I had only seen the 4 Brosnan and first 2 Craig movies. Some rambling thoughts:
As a whole, a pretty enjoyable series. It seems clear that they didn't intend them to be watched the way I did. Another friend of mine took like 4 years to watch them all; that's the smart way to go. And of course in release timeline; they expected people to take 40 years to watch them all. There's just so much similarity throughout the first 20 films that they really do blend together somewhat.
I didn't really get this until after the last one, but there's clearly 2 separate film series here. There's Bond, and then there's Daniel Craig's Bond, loosely based on the Bond series. Daniel Craig's Bond was as a whole overall well done, but it suffered plenty of writing issues. While not as bad as Star Wars 7-9, it definitely seemed to have some of the same issues where there wasn't a set plan for the 5-film saga, but rather each new director just did his own thing.
Even not counting Craig's Bond, the rest of the movies have a pretty big swing in overall tone and even genre. Especially noticeable when jumping from From Russia With Love to Goldfinger, but there are some other wild swings also. Similarly, the film quality shifts a fair bit. Sadly, these shifts often have an inverse correlation between quality and silliness. Goldfinger was really the only one that managed to pull off both high quality and high silliness. I say sadly, because I personally enjoyed the silly films more that the series films as a whole.
I'm not about to rank all the films, but I for sure have a list of my favorites and my least favorites:
Favorites: Goldfinger, You Only Live Twice, The Spy Who Loved Me, License to Kill, Tomorrow Never Dies, Skyfall.
Least favorites: On Her Majesty's Secret Service, The Man with the Golden Gun, For Your Eyes Only, A View to a Kill, The World Is Not Enough,
Honorable mention also goes to both Dr. No and From Russia With Love, as both were very good films. They just aren't on the list because I think I personally enjoyed those other 6 more. All the ones not mentioned were just fine.
Best Villain: Goldfinger, easy. "No Mr. Bond, I expect you to die" is absolutely the single best line from any of the films. But there were plenty of memorable ones.
Best Bond: Sean Connery. Maybe it's a cliché, but I just felt like all the others failed to quite measure up. Timothy Dalton takes second place, but I did miss the charm and humor from the earlier films there. Rogor Moore was a lot of fun to watch, but he was just too goofy to be great.
I loved all the opening music videos. Generally good music, and very interesting visuals. But also too similar for me to pick out favorites there. Oh, and the Bond theme is amazingly iconic and just a great piece. Bill Conti and Hans Zimmer stood out as having great versions of it.
