The creator of James Bond, Ian Fleming, wanted his hero to be "an anonymous blunt instrument ... with the plainest, most boring, most ordinary name I could find."
Bond's enemies were a different story altogether.
Starting from Le Chiffre in Casino royale, they all had big-sounding names, exotic origins, recognizable physical characteristics, and a wicked habit of telling people all about their gloriously impractical plans.
Then, when they moved from the pages to the big screen, they became even more vivid, which is why today the term "Bond villain" is synonymous with secret, technologically equipped hideouts and manic threats ("No, Mr. Bond, I expect you to die!") , whose fate is to be quoted as long as there are pubs.
However exaggerated these characters may be, however, they are never completely detached from reality.
There is always a thread that connects them to what the audience is most concerned with at the time or to other films they are watching.
Drugs, social media, nuclear missiles... Throw any of these into a Nehru-collared tunic and you have a Bond villain.
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"Soviet"
Roza Kleb (Lote Lenja), From Russia with Love, 1963
Stocky, frowning, fond of sloppy military uniforms and bulky, formal shoes with embedded poison daggers, the film's main antagonist From Russia with love was a propaganda caricature of women behind the Iron Curtain.
The twist is that Roza Kleb didn't actually work for the Soviets.
In Fleming's original novel, she is an officer of SMERSH, the Kremlin's most brutal secret service.
But the film producers did not want their series to be too politically colored and so on the big screen all SMERŠ operatives instead worked for the independent terrorist organization SPEKTRA.
Kleb is a classic example of this sly revisionism: depending on your sympathies, you can either see her as a stereotypically dreary and unfeeling Soviet or argue that she wasn't really a Soviet at all.
Nuclear threat
Orik Goldfinger (Gert Frebe), Goldfinger, 1964
In Fleming's novel, Orik Goldfinger hoped to steal every gold bar from Fort Knox.
The film adaptation is largely faithful, but Goldfinger's amended plan was not to steal the gold, but to irradiate it with a "dirty bomb", rendering it worthless.
In addition to being much smarter, this plan played into the audience's fear of atomic weapons: Stanley Kubrick's arms race farce Doctor Strangelove it came out the same year.
Subsequent Bond films visualized other threats to civilization (deadly solar-powered rays, killer viruses), but the one that recurred most often was that the atomic bomb would fall into the wrong hands.
Film makers Operation Thunder, The spy who loved me, Octopuses i The World is not enough they knew very well that nothing is more terrifying than a nuclear apocalypse and that nothing can calm you down more than seeing a charming secret agent prevent it.
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Space
Sir Hugo Drax (Michael Lonsdale), Operation Space, 1979
At checkout The spy who loved me from 1977 it was written that "James Bond will return in For Your Eyes Only".
But the producers did not count on another film that appeared in theaters the same year: Star Wars.
Its massive success meant that Secret Agent 007 would have to travel into space, so he did For your eyes only left on the launch pad, and it took off instead Operation Space.
Although Fleming's novel of the same name takes place on Earth, its title sounded futuristic enough to tickle the fancy of Luke Skywalker fans.
And the film was not a reaction exclusively to Star Wars.
In the real world, NASA was developing a reusable space shuttle and that's why the billionaire industrialist in the Operation Space Sir Hugo Drax produced exactly these aircraft.
According to Peter Lamont, the film's visual effects director:
"Operation Space was supposed to premiere the week of the Space Shuttle launch. Unfortunately, they had engine problems, which delayed the program for another two years.
"And so, instead of the film being science fact, it became science fiction."
Narco barefoot
Franz Sanchez (Robert Davi), License to Kill, 1989
Created in the fifties, it seemed as if secret agent 007 would not survive the eighties.
Stories about Russian spies seemed old-fashioned at the very end of the Cold War, and next to the new strain of laid-back American action heroes, Bond himself seemed like a hardened anachronism.
The solution of the producers of the series was to confront him with Franco Sanchez, a Latin American drug lord.
(Typically, they were tactful enough to say that this one came from the fictitious "Isthmus Republic" instead of some real country).
Sanchez was like Scarface.
He could smile just as mockingly at Mel Gibson, Bruce Willis or Eddie Murphy in one of their typical XNUMXs thrillers, or even at Don Johnson and Philip Michael Thomas in television Vices of Miami.
He didn't want world domination, just to crack cocaine.
It was perfectly appropriate for Nancy Reagan's decade of "Just Say No" campaigns, but if a Bond villain doesn't dream of incinerating an entire continent with a giant space bazooka, something is missing.
The avenger
Alec Trevelyan (Sean Bean), The Golden Eye, 1995
One of many Bond villains who was the mirror image of Secret Agent 007 (the other three being "Red" Grant in From Russia with love, Francisco Scaramanga u To the man with the golden gun and Raul Silva in Skyfall), Alec Trevelyan was an MI6 agent - number 006, no less - who switched sides because his parents were lazy Cossacks.
Fighting on the side of the Nazis against Russia in World War II, the Cossacks surrendered to Great Britain.
But "the British betrayed them, sent them back to Stalin, who summarily shot them".
This repatriation, Bond admits, was not "exactly our most glorious historical moment".
Such confessions of guilt became common after the Cold War, with the implication that British government officials - and the British people in general - were somehow to blame for the troubles that befell them.
U The world is not enough, Elektra King blamed M for advising her father not to pay the ransom for her kidnapping.
U Skyfall, Raul Silva (see below) blamed M for selling him to the Chinese.
And in Spectra, Blofled blamed Bond for… well, being Bond (see below).
A tycoon
Elliot Carver (Jonathan Price), Tomorrow Never Dies, 1997
Evil criminal geniuses don't always hide in hollowed-out volcanoes; sometimes they hang around skyscrapers and elite horse races.
Bond villains who are at the same time pillars of the establishment - Hugo Drax u Operation Space, Max Zorin u They look at the murder, Gustav Graves d Die another day and Dominic Green in A grain of consolation.
They are polished and respected entrepreneurs who organize luxurious cocktails and rarely throw guests into pools with starving sharks.
The most believable, and therefore the most terrifying, of this subspecies is Elliott Carver, a media mogul inspired by Rupert Murdoch and Robert Maxwell.
Declaring that "words are the new weapons and satellites the new artillery," Carver (a British Bond villain, for a change) pioneered the field of fake news.
He wanted to cause a world war in exchange for "exclusive broadcasting rights in China for the next 100 years".
But these days, a super-rich businessman would never meddle in international politics in such a sneaky way.
Is that right?
Cyber attacker
Raul Silva / Tiago Rodriguez (Javier Bardem), Skyfall, 2012
Most Bond villains have a computer the size of a wall or two, and Alan Cumming played a hacker in Goldeneye.
But Skyfall put to rest all our fears about the Internet.
Shown between premieres Social media (2010), which dramatized the birth of Facebook, and Secrets of the Fifth Estate (2013), which dealt with the birth of WikiLeaks, the film starred Javier Bardem as Raul Silva, a cyber-terrorist who once worked for MI6.
He attacked former employers by uploading the identities of current undercover MI6 agents to YouTube, so it's lucky the good guys had their own IT expert.
The geeky young Q in this film (Ben Whishaw) boasted to secret agent 007:
"I reckon I can do more damage to my laptop in my pajamas before my first cup of Earl Gray than you can do in a year in the field."
Was that supposed to comfort us?
A family member
Ernst Stavro Blofeld / Franz Oberhauser (Christoph Waltz), Sepktra, 2015
The legendary head of SPECTRUM and Bond's staunchest nemesis, first as a shadowy genius who pet the cat in the From Russia with love i Operation thunder, and then as the main villain in You only live twice,In her majesty's service i Diamonds are forever.
How disappointing that when Blofeld finally returned to the franchise in Spectra, it turned out that he was Bond's half-brother, and that all of his villainous machinations were just a way to get revenge on the boy who was distracting their father.
Is there a greater pettiness than that?
This Austin Powers "retelling" reduced the adventures of secret agent 007 from the political plane to the personal.
Instead of being an anonymous blunt instrument, he became someone whose family intrigues resulted in global conspiracies.
The change may have been in keeping with most of today's fan five-paragraph stories.
In them, the plot is driven by the hero's friends and relatives, but we will feel relieved if the next Bond villain Safin (Rami Malek) wants to conquer the world just for himself, and not because he hates M or 007.
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