#Spectre cyndicate series

It would be pointless and self-defeating for the producers to use terrorism as the substance of villainy for just one film. Bond cannot afford to antagonise Muslims. Regular Muslims are as repulsed by terrorists as any other human but they do not watch a film to be constantly reminded that their faith is a very compelling backdrop to portray realistic villains of the times.īond, like the rest of commercial cinema, is political because anything that takes money from hundreds of millions of people is political. Islamic terror is, to borrow an expression from the film As Good As it Gets, “Just a little too much reality for a Friday night.”Īlso, there are hundreds of millions of Muslims who are among the fans of Bond and the producers may not wish to annoy them.

#Spectre cyndicate series

Deaths and hints of torture are as dark as the Bond series wishes to get. The franchise prefers to be a parody of a farce than a grim reminder of reality. Yet, there are good reasons why James Bond does not fight Islamic terror. Bond’s denial does make him look obsolete. Reality today is as cinematic as cinema and the modern villains are known to all of us, or we deeply believe so. The new Bond is under pressure to accept that he is obsolete in the modern world and his only defence is that he is not a dinosaur but a tradition, hence of value.īut what has not changed about Bond are his villains. He appears to respect women and the women he is entangled with are seldom helpless damsels. There is much that has changed about James Bond. The closest that a Bond has ever come to terrorists is when Timothy Dalton forms an alliance with Afghan Mujahideen in a naïve age when the Mujahideen were not called terrorists but allies.

And what puts terrorists on top of the hierarchy is that they have a powerful reason to die, a reason that a mere criminal syndicate headed by an insane man with a trace of activist altruism does not possess. It is not that there is no other serious criminal syndicate in the world other than religious terrorists it is just that the hierarchy of brutality and villainy is now set in public perception. James Bond, on the other hand, is fighting a comic band of European men in fine suits, fantasy villains who are in the genre of zombies and Lord Voldemort. His suicide squads were insane men in modified SUVs who believed they were pursuing a moral goal, and they charged across a desert with nothing much to live for on Earth - they were the Islamic State (IS).įury Road does not devote much time to explain the history or the psychology of the desert kingdom because we know exactly what is going on - a handler who wishes to live well, women slaves who wish to escape, male suicide squads who wish to die, all entrapped in a delusion.

The arch villain of the story was a brutal chieftain who could delude his men with drugs and faith to kill themselves for a chrome afterlife. That was the wisdom George Miller’s Mad Max: Fury Road possessed. A superhero might be a farce but a superhero who is not fighting Islamic terror is a parody of the farce. Spectre looks silly because it tries to escape the fact that the greatest terror of our times is terror in the name of Islam. Spectre, like many recent Hollywood movies, tries to achieve darkness of plot through dim-lighting, while darkness is often an effect of stark truth, as evident in, say, Body of Lies. (Such a lame scene compared to kissing, according Pahlaj Nihalani, that he has let kids watch it.) The boss of the syndicate sits in the shadows - he is in the shadows from every angle even though the room is lit. Members of the Spectre syndicate sit around a long table and discuss business, which includes a woman saying something to this effect - “We’re doing well, we’re winning”.Īt some point in the discussion a large man gouges out the eyes of a smaller man. As an acronym from the Bond lore, it is even less terrifying, in fact a bit amusing as though it is a real job description in some Indian television news channels - Special Executive for Counter-intelligence, Terrorism, Revenge and Extortion.

Spectre is a beautiful and ancient word that could once frighten the discerning, but in these times, in the age of visuals, when the most gruesome reality is available for viewing any time, ‘spectre’ just means something low-res with a British spelling.

As they are in the latest, Spectre, a film that wishes to terrify without offending anyone. The evil that James Bond fights is always secular and that somehow means the Bond villains are usually Christian.