Believe it or not, of all the movies I’ve seen over the years, I’ve never seen a James Bond movie.
So perhaps it’s appropriate that the first one I did see was Casino Royale, which ostensibly reboots the franchise as if the other films had never happened.
Here we see a still-raw Bond’s first kills (which earned him double-oh status), how he won his first Aston Martin car in a poker game, and how he learned not to trust anyone.
Thankfully, the film doesn’t play like an origin story or make such things cute; rather, these elements are simply part of the story at hand, and only have significance because we (or rather, longtime Bond fans) know what they mean to the character. Continue reading
