🎮 What Bond Films Can Learn from 007 First Light

A View to a Kill: 007 First Light Sets a Solid Future for the Bond Franchise

Re-releases and cheap mobile titles notwithstanding, it’s been 14 years since James Bond last starred in a video game, with 2012’s 007 Legends. A clumsily executed tie-in to that year’s Skyfall and the 50th anniversary of the film series, the critical and commercial reception to 007 Legends was so lackluster that Activision ended its licensing agreement with the cinematic property early. Fortunately that long gaming drought will end on May 27 with the arrival of 007 First Light. Developed and published by IO Interactive, the title launches in a pivotal point in the overall franchise’s history.

Video games haven't been the only other form of media where James Bond has endured a lengthy dormancy since its last project. Outside of the 2022 reality competition television series 007: Road to a Million on Prime Video, Bond has been conspicuously absent from screens since 2021’s No Time to Die, officially closing out the Daniel Craig era for the movie series. With plenty of behind-the-scenes changes involving creative control of the cinematic franchise, 007 First Light serves as a potential guiding signal for how the inevitable next movies in the series should proceed.

007 First Light follows a 26-year-old James Bond who is still very much just starting out his espionage career with the British government’s MI6. Working alongside franchise mainstays like M, Q, and Miss Moneypenny, Bond takes on a globe-spanning mission that will grant him the agency’s elite 00 Agent status. This includes Bond working closely with his veteran mentor John Greenway, one of the game’s major original characters, against the megalomaniacal villain Bamwa, played by Lenny Kravitz.

In contrast to the bulk of James Bond video games since GoldenEye 007, the gameplay for 007 First Light isn’t a first-person shooter experience. Instead, drawing from IO Interactive’s experience crafting sandbox titles like the long-running Hitman series, the game is a third-person adventure, where strategy and subterfuge are just as, if not arguably more, important than gunplay. That isn’t to say the game doesn’t bring high-octane action, but there’s a greater emphasis on the cloak-and-dagger intrigue that the literary character embraced under the shadow of the Cold War rather than just weapons-hot gameplay that defined the video game series for decades.

Even the personality of Bond has subtly evolved to match the times, something that has admittedly advanced with the Pierce Brosnan and Daniel Craig cinematic eras to a degree. While still maintaining a devil may care attitude and cracks plenty of one-liners and observational witticisms, this is a character whose more outdated traits, including a misogynistic streak, has been tempered to match contemporary audience sensibilities. This isn’t to say that the Bond of 007 First Light doesn’t have his own character flaws or penchant for vice, but they largely exist within the boundaries of modern societal norms.

What this can mean for the eventual new cinematic James Bond is a tonal template for the movies to follow with their 007. It’s a cinch that a younger actor will take on the secret agent role and likely be younger than Craig was (38) in his first Bond movie, 2006’s Casino Royale. It’s also likely that owing to modern sensibilities, this incoming Bond will be less overtly sexist though hopefully not overly sanitized either. And though the Bond of 007 First Light isn’t afraid to get his hands dirty, there is a more cavalier sense of fun to him that was missing in the more self-serious Craig movies that the new actor would do well to keep in mind.

Most importantly, 007 First Light remembers that James Bond, for all his flaws and the moral ambiguities of his work, is a hero. This distinction was something that the Craig era movies tried to downplay since Casino Royale, really emphasizing the soul-consuming cost of 007’s lethal profession. Bond may regularly kill as an extension of his job, but the movies saliently illustrate that those in his crosshairs are decidedly wicked people endangering the fate of modern civilization, something that 007 First Light makes quite clear too.

But beyond its depiction of Bond himself, 007 First Light presents an intriguing direction for the cinematic series to potentially follow. The spectacle strikes the delicate balance between being bombastic while avoiding being over-the-top, ranging from grounded fisticuffs and stealthy infiltration to explosive action that speaks to the scale without distracting from the story. Jury’s out if Lenny Kravitz would work as a big-screen villain for the tone that the movies are going for, but that does feel like Hollywood-level casting on par with Christopher Walken and Christopher Lee.

At the time of this writing, the casting process for the next James Bond movie has only just officially begun, with the Denis Villeneuve-helmed project still very much in pre-production. But with Amazon Games co-producing 007 First Light alongside IO Interactive and Amazon MGM Studios under one corporate roof, it stands to reason that a little creative synergy may be in the cards. But given how well the upcoming game reintroduces James Bond for a new generation after a lengthy hiatus, this overlapping strategy may not be the worst thing in the world.

— Sam Stone, Den of Geek contributor

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BONUS LEVEL

GoldenEye Is No Longer James Bond Games’ Golden Calf

Another breath of fresh air for 007 First Light is that it’s not yet another James Bond game that worships at the altar of GoldenEye 007. The Nintendo 64 title caused the video game series to pivot to one largely encompassing first-person shooters, with the occasional exception, like 2004’s James Bond 007: Everything or Nothing. Bond games were so confined to the GoldenEye legacy that it actually remade the game from the ground-up in 2010, replacing Pierce Brosnan with Daniel Craig, and creating an odd spinoff, GoldenEye: Rogue Agent featuring a disgraced MI6 agent with a literal golden eye.

I love the N64 game as much as the next guy, but sometimes you just have to move on…

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