So I caught the new 007 movie – Casino Royal – this weekend. If you haven’t seen it yet (although box office receipts suggest you have) you definitely should. Why? Because Bond has been thoroughly renewed, remade for those of us living in the 21^st century.

By my estimate the Bond series had come to an impasse. Bond was always over the top, a fantasy series with overblown villains bent on world domination, not a true movie of the spy genre driven by suspense and action.

As a result the series seemed to suffer from two problems. First, with each movie the plots, villains and gadgets become increasingly fantastic and the series risked becoming a parody of itself. Maybe Bond could have stayed the course… But when Mike Myers thoroughly dismantled the series – essentially making Austin Powers one running joke of how dramatically out of date Bond had become – it became difficult, even with a perfectly cast Bond like Pierce Brosnan, to take it seriously.

Second, and interrelated, is that audiences moved on. Bond’s treatment of women and, let’s face it, anyone non-western, belonged to another era. But above all, Bond’s villains were out of date. During the 60’s and 70’s, in the shadow of the cold war, megalomaniac enemies that could outwit the superpowers had their charm. Moreover, competing (and even at times, cooperating) with our allies or ‘real’ enemies against these megalomaniacs was at worst fun, and at best uplifting. Unfortunately, the reason this was fun was, in large part, because the idea of megalomaniacs bent on global domination and/or destruction were so laughable. Today we actually have megalomaniacs bent on destroying the world (or at least dramatically reshaping it). Somehow imagining a traditional 007 like Sean Connery or Pierce Brosnan taking on religious fundamentalists doesn’t seem like a winning script.

So Bond had to change. Specifically, the series had to import the ideas and values it could from the original idea, update into the 21st century what couldn’t be imported wholesale, and jettison the rest. This is (more or less) what they’ve done. The result is a much grittier Bond, although still flush with fantastic action sequences, interesting villains and beautiful women. Alas, I don’t think we’ll be seeing a female 007 anytime soon (imagine that!) but at least we once again have a Bond grounded in fantasy reflective of today’s world.

It was all a fantastic risk, and good on them, because it worked.