Fans of James Bond are on tenterhooks. It was eons ago (pun intended) when No Time To Die was announced as Daniel Craig’s swan song. Over five years later, and we are still to hear who will take up the coveted role of Mr Kiss Kiss Bang Bang. And there’s another big change – that of 007’s guardians. Barbara Broccoli and Michael G Wilson have cashed their chips in. The entire operation now has Amazon MGM Studios at the helm. Quite where it will go under their stewardship is the million dollar question. Actually, make that a billion dollars. We have promise in the form of a director (David Villeneuve) and writer (Steven Knight) – and, perhaps, that Amazon MGM backed the return of The Night Manager. The season 2 finale showed they are happy not to play by the numbers.
One of my deepest hopes for the resurrection is that a little more care and attention is paid to the cyber MacGuffins, plot coupons, or whatever your favourite derisive term is. The storylines in the Craig era tended to rely more and more on technical fantasy as the series progressed. Now, I don’t want to be that guy. Bond films are an escape, two hours of high-octane fun. They can’t be completely realistic. For a start, Bond should have (spoiler alert) died well before No Time To Die. No one is that lucky. But we accept that. It’s only when a scene goes too far, breaches what we find acceptable, that we shift in our seats. Something isn’t right, and it might even cause us to ‘wake up’ – that sudden realisation we are not at 007’s side, but in a cinema or on the couch at home.
Let’s make a case study of a scene in Skyfall. Silva (the bad guy) is incarcerated deep inside MI6’s emergency base (because he blew up the main one).
Q is analysing his laptop, hot in digital pursuit, trying to crack a whole heap of tech from the cyber bingo card 1 [this and further footnotes are for the more adventurous reader]. Then Bond chips in – “stop”. Amid the flurry of bytes on the screen, he has spotted something. Well, fancy that. Good for you, James. What’s that you say? Granborough 2.
Bond tells us Granborough Road is an “old tube station on the Metropolitan Line, been closed for years”. I definitely want him on my pub quiz team. Bond suggests using “Granborough” as “the key”. A map of subterranean London materialises, and then all hell breaks loose 3. Off camera Silva’s cell is unlocked and he escapes underground…
Footnotes aside, the big howler for me is Bond’s incredible – that is, not credible – discovery of ‘Granborough’. Admittedly, Silva wanted this trail to be found. “He wanted us to capture him,” Q later realises, “he wanted us to access his computer. It was all planned”. But when Silva escapes, Bond picks up his trail from the hatch Silva leaves open (on purpose). Granborough is just the ‘trigger’ which fires Silva’s digital weapon. What purpose does Granborough really serve? It’s just a tenuous link to ‘the underground’ that serves the ensuing chase sequence 4. I could go further 5.
Skyfall was very successful. So who cares, apart from a small percentage of the audience with a technical background (and, shh, maybe even a few spies)? Well, I’d wager a decent number still glaze over in these moments – “OK, do what you need to do to move to the next bit, I just want to see something blow up”. Why not aim to keep the audience in the moment, every moment? Significant amounts of time, money and effort are spent on so many aspects looking, sounding and feeling just right. Why not extend that care and attention to the technical elements of the script?
I fully recognise the importance of striking a balance. It’s why there are footnotes in this article. A scene or story line may be realistic, but too much exposition and complexity can have the same jolting effect as the plot hole they were trying to fill in the first place. I think some writers fear this and, dare I say, are content for their technical adviser to be Google or Chat-GPT. But a proper technical review can not only help with accuracy, it can raise new plot and character elements that are dramatically interesting. As for the Granborough muddle, the solution is simple: cut it. Silva’s attack could launch automatically when Q starts to analyse the laptop 6. More KISS than Bang needed – Keep It Simple, Stupid.
If you’re writing a story with some tech/spy elements and would like some input, get in touch.
These notes are a little more technical, and take the discussion down routes which the busy reader may not wish to explore.
1 Plenty to unpack here but I’ll just pause on Q’s comment about “security through obscurity”. That’s usually a derogatory phrase about a weak level of security. It’s pulled out as an umbrella term to cover a multitude of different weaknesses. But Q uses it in his explanation of Silva’s digital defences in a way that doesn’t ring true.
2 Granborough appears as ‘Granb0r0ugh’ on-screen. Everything else is in ‘hex’. I won’t go into detail here, suffice to say the hex ‘alphabet’ is composed of the numbers 0 to 9 and the letters A to F. So quite how G, R, N, U and H got in there I don’t know. Or is that the point? Did Silva make this stand out as a trail to follow? Well, Q would have spotted the anomaly for sure. This could have been resolved if the bytes had been interpreted as characters on-screen, just as they are on this page you’re reading right now.
3 Why did Q connect a laptop, whose origins are about as trustworthy as the Devil himself, to the internal MI6 top secret network? This is super smart Q, who has just boasted about being the inventor of one of the safeguards Silva is using.
4 The real Granborough Road wasn’t even underground. It was in rural Buckinghamshire, miles away from the action of the film which centres on Temple and Embankment.
5 Why does Silva need to take such a convoluted route to M’s inquiry to confront her? After escaping, he ends up in exactly the same part of the tube as the general public. Given he knew the location, date and time of M’s inquiry, why not stay in a nice hotel and get a cab? Admittedly, this would be less exciting, even if there was heavy traffic. But what if we turn the whole thing on its head? What if the disused tube network wasn’t Silva’s way out but his way in? He attacks the main MI6 HQ, knowing they would retreat to an underground base that runs close enough to an abandoned tunnel from which he can drill through…OK, fair enough, this is quite a re-write!
6 Q is still not off the hook from footnote #3. It would be reasonable to handle the laptop in an isolated network, but then how could Silva’s attack work? One option is inside help (“we have people everywhere” said Mr White in Quantum of Solace). Or the source of the attack could already be there, planted in the main systems from Silva’s first attack – a dormant cyber bomb woken by a signal broadcast by the laptop. Too much? Add a single line to acknowledge it (“how the hell did he jump the air gap?”) even if the answer is left hanging.