I don’t understand it: an alpha male with always good lines who gets every woman he wants drives the newest and most expensive car and saves the world.
Something completely realistic, right?
It’s like producers know what make men insecure and cater to this audience, but if I’m right there are several millions of men feeling like losers looking for something to compensate.
Suddenly I feel only incels watch this.
Maybe some women like these movies for some other reasons?
Man, you miss the entire history of it, the history and tropes of spy fiction, all of it and Moore.
You’d scraping the surface of Bond and wondering why you can’t see bone.
Bond goes back to the post ww2 era, and the cold war. Without an understanding of that era, it won’t make any sense except maybe the Craig era Bond.
Gentlemen spies, using their wits as much as their guns to keep their country safe. It’s action and intrigue mixed with stunts and (eventually) sci-fi level gadgets. It’s escapism as much as Conan the Barbarian is. As much as d&d is.
Tbh, go back and read the first two or three books. Then rewatch the first few movies. It’ll hit totally different.
Late Connery era and the Moore era got a little cartoony for sure, and that diverged from book Bond a lot. But those early films were much more about the kind of spies that started in the OSS and SOE during ww2.
It evolved from there, but without understanding the origins of Bond, the Ian Flemming Bond, it’s hard to see how even the silliest movies were a reaction to changing times, and still rooted in the idea of gentlemen serving their country by doing the dirty, ugly jobs that no one else could.
The women and cars and guns were window trappings, not the meat. They came about as a generation that had largely left the cold war behind as a fear saw the action as fun escapism. Bond was the first action hero franchise.
Is there some of the misogyny of that era still in there? Absolutely, and it makes some scenes hard to watch now. But the rest of it is standard action movie in any given era. It’s not meant to be realistic any more than a Michael Bay Transformers movie is. Or something like the A-Team, or True Lies.
Bond was not only a heavily influential action franchise, he was an example of the competent hero that fell out of popularity. Flawed heroes barely surviving is just as valid, but a competent hero surviving with grace is more fun, it changes the stakes a little.
That’s what you’re missing, that there was an evolution to it all, and it seems weird if you didn’t have a shared cultural background to view it with. Us old fucks that grew up watching Connery and then Moore, we had grandparents that survived the era that led to Bond existing in the first place.
Which is fine! It isn’t for everyone. You aren’t obligated to enjoy it just because others do. But that’s what most of us enjoy: the escapism and flash of it. Very, very few people think of Bond as a role model, or want to be him.