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Comment by vouaobrasil | Hacker News Reader

Moore was unrealistic but the OP does not imply that we need to keep the style on the level of Roger Moore.

OP is saying that the old Bonds (Connery, Lazenby, Moore) were suited to male tastes that haven't changed since, thus the attempt to modernize Bond is misguided at best.

What I'm saying is that my (male) tastes have modernized, that the male tastes that made old Bonds popular are tastes I find gross and unrealistic today, and I don't feel like I'm alone.

I think the specifics are less important than the general tastes in this case, men still want to be highly trusted international "spies" gallivanting across the world fighting evil with women lusting after them every stop of the way, it's just that the details as to what that looks like have changed.

I think the Craig movies are the high point so far of the series for a variety of reasons. They still have the swaggering machismo of Bond, but with more varied and interesting consequences. Bond still gets laid, but it's not treated as a mid-mission diversion (or post-mission reward) to which Bond is entitled. Craig proved there's lots of modernizing that can be done without touching the core conceit of being a 00 agent.

I agree! Whatever else they are from a critique standpoint, I absolutely love how they’ve modernized the Bond-the-slutty-sociopath role into something that’s actually plausibly what I would expect to find in today’s reality. They did beautiful work with that aspect of modernization and the Craig movies are most memorable of all of them to me now (though I will always hold a fondness in my heart for LASER BEAMS IN SPACE).

They did not do so well with modernizing any of Bond’s skin color, gender, or bedroom scene co-stars; nor did they portray him assaulting women for information like he would men.

I guess you're probably not.

I seem to remember on one of the special features on the DVDs that they needed to change to a lighter more comic style with Moore because of the reaction to the Vietnam War.

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