People who are tired of the franchise idea should not work on it. It's that simple. We've seen this before with killing off Superman, killing off Batman, killing off whoever.
Bond exists in a parallel timeline, where he can be played by Connery, Lazenby, all those other dudes across decades, and still be a Bond for today. There was absolutely no reason to kill him. One of the great joys of Bond is that he can't be killed. He always escapes. He always ends up winning. He always does it looking cool, too. That is Bond.
This was something else. "Let's take Bond, denature him, take away his invulnerability, get rid of the fantasy elements of being the world's greatest secret agent (or was that Danger Mouse?), create a new 007 who has zero charisma and zero screen presence, and then come up with some cockamamie plot line that Bond (or his associates at MI6) would never have been able to check in on his very-public ex-girlfriend and tell him the news. The new agent with the 007 designation is the anti-Bond: female and black. The filmmakers here were trying to make an anti-Bond film, but the question is why?
In "Goldeneye" we meet Alex Trevelyan (Sean Bean), who is 006. There is simply no reason to reinvent Bond the way they did it. Leave Bond as Bond, and they should have introduced the new 007 as being the new 008 (or any of the double 0 agents). The Broccoli family really wants to open up the "Bond universe" and has hired someone to write a bunch of new stories in the Bond universe but not featuring Bond. I'm actually surprised they have never exploited the other 00 agents' stories. Idris Elba was mooted at one point as a Bond actor, why not make him a 00 agent and give him his own story and mannerisms? There were myriad ways to freshen up Bond without cutting his balls off, putting a leash on him, and finally killing him.
Sometimes franchises need new life breathed into them, and Bond was no exception. After the silliness of the later Moore films, and the gadget tomfoolery of the Brosnan films, they brought the story back to earth with Casino Royale. Bond was a brute, a trained killer, but charming as feck. It's okay to reinterpret part of who Bond is, like, I could never picture Roger Moore winning a fist fight, or doing parkour, or any one of a million things that Craig did better. The Bond franchise itself had become dusty and smelled of mothballs. They tried addressing this with Judi Dench calling Bond a dinosaur (or even casting Judi Dench in the first place), because the makers were uncomfortable with the Frankenstein's monster they had made: Bond is a killer, Bond shags lots of women, Bond is the ID writ large.
Now Bond is supposed to be a sensitive daddy something something.
I was very disappointed with Fukunaga's directing, and/or PWB's writing. This script was charmless. The dialogue was flat. The sci-fi nanobots thing was stupid. Why ground all of this in a reality similar to our own and then do this? It's about on par with Pierce Brosnan's invisible sports car. Just stupid.
Killing Bond at the end was a bad decision. He was already retired and out of the game when the film started. That plus the specific nanobot curse where he can't touch anyone related to him just smacks of someone having an agenda against Bond in the first place.
I personally don't like superhero movies. If I made one, I would probably try to kill the superhero, take away all of his/her magical powers, and create a secret movie within the superhero movie that would appeal to me. I feel this is what happened here. If you don't love Bond, don't make a Bond film.
