When I was a kid we’d watch TV and there’s be these weird Frenchmen wearing banana hammocks and watch caps traveling the world in a rusty cruiser and pestering penguins and petrels alike. They went everywhere and did everything and took movies of it.
We’re all Jacques Cousteau now.
There’s always these evil overlord villains and their henchmen doing all these crazy stunts and holding everyone for ransom and whatnot. Nowadays, your average douchebag with a GoPro camera and a spare snowmobile beats anything Ian Fleming’s got.
I have no idea how to portray a Bond villain to a contemporary audience — one that lives in a world where Vladimir Putin runs Russia, and got elected. I guess a contemporary villain would throw recyclable plastic into a regular trash can, or pour his waste motor oil into a storm drain, or maybe buy a puppy at a regular pet store instead of rescuing some neurotic greyhound left over from the track.
But drive a snowmobile off a cliff and parachute away? Hell, that’s just regular folks.
Some surf on ten-story buildings made from water, for instance.