Casino Royale and the move towards Realism

This week a new James Bond film will be released. There’s a lot of hype around this movie, as a sort of “return to what Bond is about”. This new movie sets out to be more realistic and mature than the prior films in the series- films that at best took occasional artistic liberties with reality, and at worst had Bond chased on an iceberg by a beam of sunlight.

I’m excited about it, because I’ve always been a fan of the old Sean Connery films. Spy stories can be a lot of fun, but after Connery departed from the role Bond’s adventures grew more and more outlandish (fighting on the Golden Gate bridge, villains with razor sharp metal teeth, submarine cars…).

It’s interesting though, how entertainment more and more tries to mirror reality. Movies were more realistic than plays- and since the creation of the motion pictures the tendency has been to move further and further away from the absurd.

In the last five years reality tv has rose to power. The traditional sitcom has died off- NBC’s “Must See Thursday”, which had for twenty years dominated comedy with shows like Cheers, Seinfeld, and Friends, now has a program devoid of any laugh track. The popular comedy on tv, The Office is a single camera comedy based in a paper distributor’s Scranton office branch. If it was any more real it couldn’t be fiction.

James Bond isn’t the first franchise to get this treatment either. “Batman Begins” was released last year to wildly popular reviews. It too took a gritty, real world look at a character that had in the past been written as larger than life.

I think the change is good. The more like real life the stories become, the less people will care if their lives are like those in the movies. At the same time it’s getting easier and easier for people to create their own entertainment. Perhaps when these two movements intersect everyone will finally have their fifteen minutes.