Twenty-six films across fifty-nine years, six actors, and a formula that has been abandoned and rebuilt at least four times. Every one of them is reviewed on this site and every rating below is the one that review carries.
The ranking is mine and it is not the consensus. Casino Royale and Skyfall are the only two that earn a 10, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service sits in the top four despite having the least popular Bond in it, and Die Another Day is a 3.
What the full run shows, read in order, is a series that survives by periodically admitting it has gone wrong. Every good Bond film arrives immediately after a bad one, and every bad one arrives after a hit that nobody wanted to change.
1. Casino Royale (2006)
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"The only Bond film that treats the licence to kill as a cost rather than a perk."
Casino Royale is first because it is the only entry in fifty-nine years that treats killing as something that happens to the man doing it. The pre-title sequence is in black and white and shows the two kills that earn him the double-O, one of them a prolonged struggle in a toilet cubicle that neither party is good at.
That establishes the film’s whole method. The stairwell fight in Madagascar is a man who is fit and untrained against a man who is faster. The torture scene is not survived with a quip. Bond is beaten, poisoned, defibrillated in a car park, and the film lets the damage accumulate across the running time.
Craig was announced to open hostility from the fanbase, with a campaign website objecting to his hair, and answered it in twenty minutes. The performance understands that Bond is not charming, he is effective, and the charm is a tool deployed on people he intends to use.
It is also the only film in the series where the romance carries weight, because Vesper is written with her own problem, her own debt and her own reasons, rather than as an obstacle or a reward.
The film opens in black and white with Bond’s first two kills, establishing a man who has just qualified rather than one who has always been this.
The poker is played correctly and the film expects the audience to follow it, which is unusual and is why the table sequences carry weight.
Craig was rejected loudly before release, with campaigns objecting to his hair, and the reception reversed completely within a week of opening.
2. Skyfall (2012)
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"Roger Deakins shot a Bond film and it shows in every frame."
Skyfall takes the other 10 on two counts. Deakins photographed it, which makes it the best-looking film in the series by a distance, and the Shanghai sequence fought in silhouette against a moving LED billboard is the single most beautiful thing in fifty-nine years of the franchise.
The second count is the villain. Silva wants one thing, from one person, for a reason the film states plainly and which turns out to be legitimate. M traded him and he survived it. That is the only Bond antagonist whose grievance would hold up in an inquiry.
The structural move is stripping the apparatus. By the third act there is no MI6, no gadgets, no support and no backup, and the finale is a siege of an empty Scottish house defended with a hunting rifle, a bag of nails and the housekeeper.
Judi Dench’s M is the actual subject. The film is about an institution defending a decision it made, cannot admit to, and will not apologise for, and it kills her for it in a chapel.
Deakins shot it and the Shanghai fight staged entirely in silhouette against a moving advertisement is the best-photographed sequence in the franchise.
The subject is obsolescence, with a field agent and an analogue service being told they are no longer required, and the film agrees for most of its length.
Bardem’s Silva is a former agent the service abandoned, which makes him the only Bond villain whose grievance is institutional rather than financial.
3. From Russia with Love (1963)
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"The one that is actually a spy film rather than an adventure film."
From Russia with Love is the most straightforwardly excellent film in the series and it is third only because the two above it do something it does not attempt. Terence Young’s second Bond is a Cold War procedural about a defection and a decoder, with no scheme to hold the world hostage anywhere in it.
Robert Shaw’s Grant is the best physical antagonist the franchise has produced, and the reason is that he barely speaks. He follows Bond for half the film in silence, and the compartment fight on the Orient Express is close, ugly, short and fought with a garotte in a space neither man can stand up in.
It is the last film before the gadgets became structural. Q appears, Desmond Llewelyn’s debut, and supplies a briefcase with a knife and tear gas, which is roughly the level of assistance a real agent might have carried.
It is the least gadget-dependent film in the run, with a briefcase and a knife in a shoe, and the plot is a straightforward intelligence operation.
The train fight with Robert Shaw runs several minutes in a compartment too small to stand up in and was staged over weeks.
Kennedy had named the novel among his favourite books, which is substantially why the series reached American audiences at the scale it did.
4. Goldfinger (1964)
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"The template, and the film every later Bond is measured against whether it wants to be or not."
Goldfinger is the commercial breakthrough and the production that fixed the formula, which is why it is both essential and responsible for most of what went wrong afterward. Pre-title sequence, title song over graphics, gadget briefing, exotic location, a villain with a plan, a henchman with a gimmick.
It cost about three million dollars and took roughly a hundred and twenty-four million, which is the number that made everything subsequent inevitable. Every convention the series later had to escape was either invented or perfected here.
Gert Fröbe’s Goldfinger also does something later villains stopped doing, which is explain his plan once, correctly, and then proceed with it. The Fort Knox scheme is coherent, the irradiation rather than theft is genuinely clever, and the film assumes the audience can follow it.
This is where the formula is assembled: the pre-credit sequence, the gadget briefing, the henchman, the laser and the line everybody quotes.
The plot is unusually sound, since Goldfinger intends to irradiate the reserve rather than steal it, which is the only economically coherent scheme in the series.
Gert Fröbe spoke almost no English and was dubbed entirely, which nobody notices because the performance is physical.
5. On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (1969)
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"The best-written Bond film, in the one nobody watched."
On Her Majesty’s Secret Service is fourth on this list and would be higher in almost anybody else’s, and the reason it was rejected for thirty years is that George Lazenby was not an actor and made one film.
It is the closest adaptation of any Fleming novel and the only entry that ends on a loss the character does not recover from. Diana Rigg’s Tracy is the only woman in the series written as Bond’s equal rather than his problem, the marriage is played completely straight, and the last shot is a man holding his dead wife and telling a policeman they have all the time in the world.
The ski sequences and the bobsleigh finale are still the best action in the series, shot for real at speed by Willy Bogner skiing backwards with a handheld camera, and the editing rhythm in them was fifteen years ahead of anything else.
Lazenby had never acted and was cast on the strength of a screen test fight, and the film is the best in the run despite him rather than because of him.
The skiing and bobsleigh sequences were shot at genuine speed with cameramen on skis, and one operator was seriously injured.
The ending is the only one in the series with a consequence, and the film cuts to credits immediately rather than letting anybody recover.
6. GoldenEye (1995)
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"A Bond film that asks what Bond is for now that the Cold War has ended, and answers it."
GoldenEye arrived after a six-year gap caused by litigation, with a new actor, no studio continuity and no obvious enemy, and solved all of it with one decision: make the antagonist another double-O with identical training and a better reason.
Sean Bean’s Trevelyan works because his grievance is specific and historical rather than megalomaniacal. He is a Lienz Cossack whose parents were handed to Stalin by the British, and he is correct about that.
Judi Dench’s first scene as M calls Bond a sexist misogynist dinosaur and a relic of the Cold War, which is the film pre-empting its own reviews and then spending two hours earning the character back. Famke Janssen’s Onatopp is the last henchman gimmick the series made genuinely unsettling.
It arrived six years after the previous film, after a rights dispute, into a world where the Soviet Union no longer existed.
The film’s best decision is having M tell Bond directly that he is a relic and a misogynist, which the series had never permitted anybody to say.
The tank sequence through St Petersburg was shot with a real tank on real streets, with the damage to the buildings being set dressing built for it.
7. Dr. No (1962)
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"Fully formed in the first hour of the first film, which almost never happens."
Dr. No had a budget around a million dollars and invented the gun barrel opening, the theme, the introduction, the vodka martini and the tone, and almost nothing about the template needed revising afterward.
Connery is the reason. The performance carries a suggestion of genuine menace that the novels have and later Bonds traded for charm, and the scene where he shoots Professor Dent in a chair after letting him empty a revolver into a decoy is not the behaviour of a hero.
The production is small and it helps. Crab Key is a location rather than a set, the lair is modest, and the film is a detective story for most of its length, with Bond doing actual investigative work before anything explodes.
It was made for around a million dollars, which is why Dr No’s base is largely a single room and the finale is over quickly.
Ursula Andress’s introduction is the image the franchise built sixty years of marketing on and was shot in a single afternoon.
Joseph Wiseman plays Dr No as almost entirely still, which is the correct choice and one the series abandoned immediately afterward.
8. The Spy Who Loved Me (1977)
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"The best of the Moore run, and the one where the scale works instead of collapsing."
The Spy Who Loved Me is enormous and mostly controls it, which no other Moore film manages. Lewis Gilbert’s production has a supertanker that swallows submarines, the Lotus that drives into the sea, and the ski jump off the Asgard cliff with a Union Jack parachute, done for real by Rick Sylvester.
Barbara Bach’s Anya Amasova is a Soviet agent with her own mission and a personal reason to kill Bond, which the film keeps live into the third act rather than dissolving in the second.
Richard Kiel’s Jaws is the henchman the series never bettered and the reason is that he is not funny yet. He is a silent seven-foot problem who cannot be killed, and the comedy arrives in the next film and destroys him.
The Ken Adam supertanker interior was the largest sound stage set ever built at the time and required a new stage at Pinewood.
The ski jump off the cliff was performed by Rick Sylvester in a single take with one chance and cameras on the mountain.
Barbara Bach’s Anya is the first Bond counterpart given equivalent competence and a personal reason to kill him, which the film then drops.
9. For Your Eyes Only (1981)
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"The correction after Moonraker, and it is a hard one."
For Your Eyes Only is a deliberate reversal of everything the previous film did, and it overcorrects, which is the right instinct. John Glen’s first film as director has no space, no comic set pieces, and a plot about a sunken ship and a missing targeting system.
Moore is given material he had not been asked for before, including kicking a car containing a man off a cliff, and he is visibly uncomfortable with it, which works.
Carole Bouquet’s Melina is driven by revenge for her murdered parents and the film lets her keep it rather than talking her out of it. The climbing sequence at Meteora is the best suspense in the Moore run because it is slow, physical and almost silent.
It was made deliberately as a correction after Moonraker, stripping out the gadgets and returning to a straightforward retrieval operation.
The pre-credit sequence disposes of Blofeld down an industrial chimney, which was a legal manoeuvre as much as a creative one.
The Corfu and Meteora locations are used properly, with the monastery climb performed with real rigging and genuine exposure.
10. The Living Daylights (1987)
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"Timothy Dalton played Fleming’s Bond and was punished for it."
The Living Daylights is the most underrated film in the series and Dalton is the most underrated Bond. He arrived with the novels in hand and played a man who is tired, irritable, professionally cold and not enjoying himself.
That is the character on the page and the audience of 1987 did not want it. The performance was received as insufficiently entertaining by people who had spent fifteen years with Moore, and Dalton got two films.
The plot is a genuine intelligence story about arms dealing and a defector who is not what he claims, and it holds together better than anything in the preceding decade. Maryam d’Abo’s Kara is a cellist rather than an agent, deliberately, and the cello case sledding down the Austrian border is the only levity the film permits itself.
Dalton played Bond as somebody who dislikes the work, which is closer to Fleming than anything since Connery and was not what audiences wanted.
The cello case toboggan is the one comic set piece and the rest of the film is a straight Cold War defection plot.
The Afghanistan material has aged into something the production could not have anticipated.
11. Licence to Kill (1989)
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"Bond resigns and goes after a drug lord, and the series briefly has stakes."
Licence to Kill is the darkest entry until Craig and the only one where Bond has no institutional backing at all. Felix Leiter is maimed by a shark, his wife is murdered on their wedding day, Bond resigns and conducts a private revenge campaign in Central America.
MI6 opposing him is what makes it work. He is hunted by his own side throughout, which removes the safety net the formula normally supplies and forces every problem to be solved without resources.
Robert Davi’s Sanchez is the best-motivated villain of the pre-Craig era because his organising principle is loyalty, and the plot turns on Bond weaponising that against him rather than outfighting him.
It is the first film not to take its title from Fleming and the first to have Bond resign and operate without sanction.
Robert Davi plays Sanchez as a businessman whose only genuine value is loyalty, which the plot then uses to destroy him.
It was cut for certification in several territories and its commercial underperformance effectively ended Dalton’s tenure.
12. Thunderball (1965)
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"Beautiful, expensive, and about forty minutes too long underwater."
Thunderball was the highest-grossing entry of the 1960s and is the least rewatchable of the Connery run, which is a useful pair of facts to hold together.
The underwater photography was genuinely groundbreaking and won an Academy Award for visual effects, and the problem is the final battle. Two groups of divers in similar suits fight at length in blue water, and no viewer can tell who is winning or who is who.
Adolfo Celi’s Largo and the SPECTRE hijacking of a nuclear bomber are a solid spine, and the Junkanoo sequence in Nassau is the best-shot material in the film.
The underwater battle runs a long time and was genuinely difficult to shoot, using a large number of divers and a purpose-built rig.
It was the highest-grossing film in the series when adjusted, and the legal dispute over the story ran for decades afterward.
The pace is the problem, since underwater photography slows everything and the film has a great deal of it.
13. You Only Live Twice (1967)
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"Ken Adam’s volcano set is better than the film around it."
You Only Live Twice abandons the novel entirely and replaces it with a rocket that swallows spacecraft and a hollowed-out volcano containing a monorail and a heliport. Roald Dahl wrote the screenplay, which is the most interesting fact about it.
Ken Adam’s volcano cost around a million dollars, roughly the entire budget of Dr. No, and is the reason the film is remembered. It is also the set every subsequent lair in any franchise has been imitating.
Donald Pleasence’s Blofeld is the first time the character is seen and established the template for every bald cat-stroking villain since, including all the parodies. The sequence disguising Bond as a Japanese fisherman is where the series stopped worrying about plausibility and it never recovers.
Roald Dahl wrote the screenplay and has been open that he discarded almost all of the novel.
The volcano base is Ken Adam’s most famous set and cost more than the entire budget of Dr No.
The sequence disguising Bond as Japanese is the element the film cannot survive, and Connery had already decided to leave.
14. Live and Let Die (1973)
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"Moore’s debut, a McCartney theme, and a boat chase that goes on for a week."
Live and Let Die introduced Roger Moore by deliberately making the character lighter, wryer and less physically threatening, which was a correction away from Connery rather than an accident.
The film’s engagement with blaxploitation is of its moment and has not aged into anything comfortable. Yaphet Kotto’s Kananga is well played and the surrounding material is not consistently on his side.
The Louisiana boat chase is the sequence everybody remembers and Sheriff Pepper is the reason it runs twelve minutes longer than it needs to. Geoffrey Holder’s Baron Samedi is the best thing in it and the film has no idea what to do with him.
Moore’s first film leans entirely into the blaxploitation cycle that was running, which is the most dated decision in the series.
The boat chase through the Louisiana bayou held a world record for a jump and runs considerably longer than it needs to.
Paul McCartney’s title song is the best in the run and was nearly rejected by the producers, who wanted it re-recorded by somebody else.
15. Tomorrow Never Dies (1997)
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"A media baron manufacturing a war, which was a better idea in 1997 than anybody realised."
Tomorrow Never Dies has the most prescient premise in the series. Jonathan Pryce’s Elliot Carver wants a war because he owns the channels that will report it, and the film is explicit about the mechanism rather than gesturing at it.
Michelle Yeoh’s Wai Lin is the best-matched partner Bond has been given, arriving with her own agency, her own mission and better fight choreography than the lead. The handcuffed motorcycle sequence through Saigon is the strongest action in the Brosnan run.
What holds it back is that the film keeps stepping away from its own idea. A villain who fights with information is killed by a sea drill, and the third act is a conventional siege on a stealth boat.
Jonathan Pryce plays a media proprietor manufacturing a war for broadcast rights, which was a sharper idea in 1997 than anybody credited.
Michelle Yeoh is the most physically capable counterpart in the series and performed her own stunt work.
The film was rushed into production against a fixed release date and the screenplay was being rewritten during shooting.
16. Octopussy (1983)
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"A genuinely good Cold War plot with a clown costume in the middle of it."
Octopussy has a real story underneath it and sabotages itself in the last act. A rogue Soviet general plans to detonate a nuclear device on a US airbase in West Germany, disguised as an accident, to force European disarmament. That is coherent and frightening.
Louis Jourdan’s Kamal Khan and Steven Berkoff’s Orlov are both playing it straight, the Indian sequences are well shot, and the pre-title Acrostar jet is one of the best openings in the series.
Then Bond puts on a clown suit to defuse the bomb, having earlier swung on a vine to a Tarzan yell, and the film destroys its own tension at the exact moment it needs it most.
It was released against Never Say Never Again in the same year, which is the only time two competing Bond films opened together.
The circus setting and the clown costume are the film’s low point and the Faberge auction is genuinely good.
Louis Jourdan plays Kamal Khan with actual charm, and the plot about a Soviet general acting without authorisation is more interesting than the execution.
17. The World Is Not Enough (1999)
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"Sophie Marceau is playing the best villain in the Brosnan era and the film will not admit it."
The World Is Not Enough has an unusually good idea at its centre and wastes it. Elektra King is a kidnapping victim who sided with her captor, and the reveal reframes the entire first hour into something genuinely unsettling.
Robert Carlyle’s Renard cannot feel pain and is dying from a bullet migrating through his brain, which sounds like a gimmick and is played as a disadvantage he is racing against. He is losing his senses and knows it.
The film discards both. Denise Richards is cast as a nuclear physicist, the third act becomes a submarine set piece, and the character work of the first half is abandoned for the machinery the franchise expected.
Sophie Marceau’s Elektra is the first female principal antagonist in the series and the reveal is the best thing in the film.
Robert Carlyle plays a man who cannot feel pain, which is a strong idea the film uses for almost nothing.
The casting of the nuclear physicist is the element the film is remembered for and not for any reason connected to the plot.
18. Quantum of Solace (2008)
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"The writers’ strike is visible on screen."
Quantum of Solace went into production without a finished script during the 2007 writers’ strike, with Craig and Forster rewriting on set, and the result is a ninety-six minute film that is mostly chases.
It is the only direct continuation in the series and the continuity with Casino Royale is the best thing in it. Bond is grieving, the film treats his competence as a symptom rather than as an asset, and M’s line about not being able to tell the difference between a man doing his job and a man settling scores is the whole picture in one sentence.
Olga Kurylenko’s Camille has her own revenge plot handled decently, and the action editing is cut fast enough that several sequences are illegible.
19. Spectre (2015)
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"The opening in Mexico City is superb and the rest is a retrofit."
Spectre opens with a single-take Day of the Dead sequence through a crowd, into a building, out of a window and along a ledge, and it is the best four minutes in the Craig run.
Then it decides Blofeld is Bond’s foster brother and has been personally responsible for every loss in the previous three films, which converts three separate stories into one man’s grudge and diminishes all of them.
Christoph Waltz is given almost nothing to do with it. Dave Bautista’s Hinx is a good silent henchman in the From Russia with Love tradition and has about nine words, and the third act is a countdown in a building.
Mendes returned and the pre-credit sequence in Mexico City is a genuine long take through a crowd, a hotel and onto a roof.
The retroactive connection of every previous Craig antagonist to one organisation is the decision that damages it.
The Day of the Dead parade in the film did not exist in Mexico City and the city created one afterward because tourists arrived expecting it.
20. Diamonds Are Forever (1971)
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"Connery came back for the money and it is on screen."
Diamonds Are Forever brought Connery back for a fee that made him the highest-paid actor in the world at the time, which he donated to a Scottish charity, and the disengagement is visible in every scene.
The film’s first act disposes of Tracy’s death in a pre-title sequence and never mentions it again, which throws away the strongest thing the series had done two years earlier.
Las Vegas is the most dated setting in the franchise, Charles Gray is a third actor playing Blofeld with no continuity of characterisation, and the moon buggy chase and the elephant at the slot machine are the level the film is pitched at.
Connery returned for a single film for a fee that was a record at the time and donated it to a Scottish educational trust.
The Las Vegas setting and the comic register are a deliberate correction after the previous film’s ending, which the film ignores entirely.
The moon buggy chase is the point where the series first becomes something it cannot easily stop being.
21. The Man with the Golden Gun (1974)
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"Christopher Lee is excellent and the film keeps interrupting him with a car horn."
The Man with the Golden Gun has Christopher Lee as Scaramanga, an assassin who considers himself Bond’s professional equal and charges a million dollars a contract, and a duel structure the film genuinely earns in its final sequence.
Everything around him works against it. Sheriff Pepper returns for no reason on holiday in Thailand, the three-hundred-and-sixty-degree corkscrew car jump, a genuinely remarkable stunt calculated by computer, is accompanied by a slide whistle, and Britt Ekland’s Goodnight is written as an embarrassment.
The funhouse showdown on Scaramanga’s island is the film the rest of it should have been, and Lee was Fleming’s cousin.
Christopher Lee plays Scaramanga as a professional who admires Bond, which is a good idea the film keeps interrupting with a slide whistle.
The corkscrew car jump was computer-modelled in advance and performed in a single take, and the sound effect ruins it.
Hervé Villechaize’s Nick Nack and the returning sheriff character are the two elements the film cannot defend.
22. Moonraker (1979)
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"Bond in space, because Star Wars made money."
Moonraker exists because Star Wars had been released two years earlier. The end credits of The Spy Who Loved Me had announced For Your Eyes Only as the next film, and the producers changed it to chase a market.
Michael Lonsdale’s Drax has a genuinely repellent plan involving a nerve toxin and a selected master race repopulating the earth, and the film treats it with roughly the seriousness of a pantomime.
Jaws returns, is given a girlfriend, and switches sides, which is the point at which the series had nothing left to escalate to. The next film is For Your Eyes Only and the correction was total.
It was made because Star Wars had happened, which the producers have confirmed, and the novel has nothing to do with space.
The free-fall pre-credit sequence was shot across dozens of genuine parachute jumps with a cameraman filming in descent.
Michael Lonsdale plays Drax with real dryness and is the best thing in a film that ends in a laser battle in orbit.
23. Never Say Never Again (1983)
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"A legal artefact with Sean Connery in it."
Never Say Never Again is not an Eon production and exists because Kevin McClory held rights to the Thunderball material from a legal settlement, which is why it is a remake of that film and why it opened the same year as Octopussy.
Connery returned at fifty-two and is the best thing in it, playing the age honestly in a way the official series would not attempt for another thirty years. The title was reportedly his wife’s joke about his previous statement that he would never play Bond again.
Everything else is absent. No gun barrel, no Monty Norman theme, no Q as written, and a flatness to the production that Connery cannot cover. It is the clearest demonstration that a franchise is a set of assets rather than a character.
It exists because of the Thunderball rights dispute and is not part of the official series, which is why it looks and sounds wrong throughout.
Connery was fifty-two and the film is honest about it, with the plot acknowledging that he has been out of the field.
Klaus Maria Brandauer is a genuinely unsettling Largo and the video game sequence is the strangest thing in any Bond film.
24. No Time to Die (2021)
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"An ending the series earned and a film that cannot decide what tone to reach it in."
No Time to Die runs a hundred and sixty-three minutes and is carrying fifteen years of continuity plus a new double-O, a daughter, a nanobot weapon and Blofeld in a cell.
Craig is excellent and Linus Sandgren’s photography is the best in the run after Skyfall. The Matera opening and the Norwegian forest sequence are both first rate, and Ana de Armas is in the film for fifteen minutes and steals it entirely.
The problem is tonal. The film alternates between outlandish and solemn without transition, and the ending, which is the boldest thing the series has ever done, is telegraphed far enough in advance to blunt it completely.
It runs a hundred and sixty-three minutes, the longest in the series, and was delayed repeatedly across two years.
The ending is the only one of its kind in sixty years and was the reason Craig agreed to return.
Ana de Armas appears for about ten minutes in Cuba and is the best thing in the film, which is a problem for the two hours around it.
25. A View to a Kill (1985)
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"Roger Moore was fifty-seven and the film pretends otherwise."
A View to a Kill is the worst-cast film in the series. Moore was fifty-seven, older than Tanya Roberts’s mother, is doubled in most of the action, and has said since that he was only about four hundred years too old for the part.
Christopher Walken’s Zorin is doing something genuinely interesting, playing a psychopath produced by Nazi medical experimentation with real unpredictability, and Grace Jones’s May Day has more presence than anybody else on screen.
The Silicon Valley plot is coherent on paper, the Golden Gate finale is competently staged, and none of it survives the central miscasting. Moore knew and retired immediately afterward.
Moore was fifty-seven and has said he was appalled to discover he was older than his co-star’s mother.
Christopher Walken plays Zorin as genuinely unhinged and is operating in a different and better film throughout.
The Golden Gate finale is well staged and the Silicon Valley plot is the most dated premise in the series.
26. Die Another Day (2002)
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"An invisible car, a CGI para-surf, and the end of a whole approach."
Die Another Day is the bottom of the series and the first forty minutes are genuinely good. Bond is captured, tortured across the titles for fourteen months, traded, and returned as a liability his own service will not trust and immediately suspends.
That film is then abandoned entirely. What replaces it is an invisible Aston Martin, a gene therapy plot that changes a character’s actor, an ice palace, a satellite weapon and a computer-generated sequence of Bond parasurfing a tidal wave that no viewer has ever defended.
It was the fortieth anniversary film and stuffed with references to every previous entry, which reads as a series with nothing left to say. Four years later the franchise rebooted completely.
The first forty minutes, with Bond imprisoned and traded, are the best material Brosnan was given.
The invisible car and the digital surfing sequence are the two elements that ended the era, and the producers have effectively acknowledged it.
It was the fortieth anniversary film and the density of references to previous entries is the clearest sign the series had run out.