Ever since they started writing James Bond screenplays in 1999, Neal Purvis and Robert Wade have been trying to give James Bond a meaningful injury to overcome. They have endeavored to give Bond a meaningful setback that might have Bond and the audience wondering if he is up to the challenge this time around. Their earliest attempts in The World is not Enough and Die Another Day were not fleshed out in any meaningful ways. Once they got to Skyfall, they were able to execute their previous ideas for injuring Bond, both physically and psychologically, to perfection. In order to work our way up to Skyfall, we must first start with their earliest attempts to create setbacks for Bond.
Purvis and Wade’s first James Bond Script came in the form of 1999’s The World is not Enough. In this offering they attempt to create a setback for Bond by having him injure himself physically. In the pre credit scene, Bond chases an assassin by boat to the O2 arena and jumps onto the hot air balloon she is attempting to escape on. Yes indeed you read that correctly, the assassin does in fact attempt to escape by hot air balloon. When she realizes how terrible a plan this was and blows up the hot air balloon (and herself), Bond falls onto the roof of the O2 arena and badly injures his collar bone. We are told as much when an MI6 doctor gives him a checkup in a following scene, telling him he could be out of action for weeks!?!? But all is good, because Bond seduces her into giving him a clean bill of health so he can return to active duty. This sets up a very interesting opportunity for a Bond movie, after all, we have never seen Bond set out on a mission with any sort of physical setbacks. But the movie fails to deliver on that promise. It only ever comes up again when the main baddie has captured Bond and presses on the injury, tipping Bond off that an ally may in fact be a foe. But nothing else comes of the injury. There are no physical feats that his is not able to accomplish, no situations where the injury actually hinders him in the completion of his mission.
Purvis and Neal’s second attempt to provide Bond a meaningful setback came in 2002’s Die Another Day, but this time it was more of a psychological setback. In the pre credit scene of this movie Bond is captured and tortured for more than a year. When he is finally released in a prisoner exchange, he is declared compromised and unfit for duty by Judy Dench’s M. This had so much potential in terms of creating a meaningful psychological challenge for Bond. He was tossed aside and assumed to be useless after faithfully and loyally serving Queen and country, and perhaps most importantly, M. Instead of exploring how this issue might have effected Bond, he quickly shaves, gets his job back and gets down to business as usual. And, unfortunately for the audience, the rest of the movie occurs, complete with ice palaces, invisible cars, rocket sleds, cgi parasurfing and all kinds of ridiculous nonsense.
The subsequent to movies in the series are excluded from this conversation, each for their own reasons. 2006’s Casino Royale introduces us to Daniel Craig’s James Bond, who is raw and at the very beginning of his career as a 00 agent, as he only earns his designation as 007 in the pre credit sequence. Casino doesn’t have to give Bond any sort of injuries because it already delivers on the character arc of how this raw agent becomes the James Bond we are all familiar with. The next movie in the series, Quantum of Solace, gets a pass on this issue as well, because it mainly deals with Bond being out for revenge for the loss of Vesper Lynd in Casino Royale, and because it was greatly influenced by a writer’s strike in Hollywood at the time.
Finally we get to Skyfall. This film is the culmination of previous ideas that were only partially executed in previous movies. Purvis and Wade set out to create injury for Bond, both physically and psychologically, taking ideas from both The World is not Enough and Die Another Day. But this time those ideas have real implications for James Bond through the course of the movie. In the opening sequence of the movie Bond is in pursuit of a henchman who has a list of all undercover agents embedded across the world. During the chase, while on top of a train, Bond is accidentally shot by his teammate Eve, who is aiming for the henchman. Eve fires under the orders of M, which Bond hears in his earpiece. The shot hits Bond in the shoulder, knocking him off the train, plummeting to a raging river below, an opportunity he uses to disappear.
When we rejoin Bond after the title sequence, he is hiding out on some beach in some unknown location, licking his wounds, drinking, taking painkillers. He is a shell of his former self. The bullet, we learn, is still lodged in his shoulder. And M telling Eve to take the shot, knowing it wasn’t a clean one, still firmly in his mind. Not only does the bullet still lodged in his shoulder create an issue for him physically, but having let himself slide in his time away from MI6. He is not able to pass any of the physical tests to be reinstated into service. The bullet causes tremors in his shooting arm, which causes him to completely miss the targets. Later, when he is in following a henchman, he hangs onto the bottom of an elevator and loses his grip in the hand of the shoulder that was shot. These are the physical setbacks for Bond in Skyfall. The psychological setbacks for Bond are just as, if not more severe. He grapples with the idea that M ordered Eve to take the shot, which obviously hit him instead of the villain. And he suspects, if not knows, that he did not pass any of his physical tests. But M clears him for duty anyways.
In The World is not Enough and Die Another Day, the physical and psychological setbacks have very little impact on the stories or Bond himself. They are ideas that are put forward and then forgotten almost as quickly. But in Skyfall these physical and psychological damages have very real repercussions for Bond throughout the movie. Bond’s physical injuries and condition have both Bond and the audience seriously question if he is up the task this time around. Bond knows he is not in the same physical condition he is normally in before he goes off on a mission. He knows that M ordered the shot hit him in the shoulder. He also has a pretty strong suspicion that M hid his test results from everyone else, including him. He doubts himself because he knows he is not as strong as he usually is and he knows that M possibly doubts him as well, but still sees fit to send him off on his mission. There is a sense that M has betrayed Bond.
Skyfall is interesting because it is the first time that screenwriters Wade and Purvis have been able to deliver on an idea that they had been working to develop since they first became screenwriters for the franchise in 1999. It is the first time that both the audience and Bond himself are left wondering if Bond is actually up to the task. It creates a real sense of character development because Bond must resurrect himself from the ashes and rediscover who he is and why he does what he does. Through the course of doing so, the film makers showed that Bond can still be fresh and relevant 50 plus years after his big screen inception in Dr. No.