Story of james bond the american actor//the movie james bond//history of james bond//biography on james bond

 

Even as the rockets homed in on him, as he said goodbye to Madeleine and the MI6 crew at the end of No Time To Die, it felt like James Bond might find another rabbit to pull out of the hat.

Surely – surely – Bond couldn’t die, right? e survived having his spine stretched like Play-Doh in Thunderball. He survived having his memories drilled out of his skull in Spectre. He survived bringing down the Millennium Dome in The World Is Not Enough. He could have dodged a few missiles and been back in Blighty in time for supper.

But no: James Bond is definitely dead. Director Cary Join Fungal confirmed to Empire that the ending of No Time To Die was constructed to be as definite and conclusive as possible on that score.

“I wanted to be clear with it. We didn’t want that shot in Terminator 2 where you see Sarah Connor turning into bones,” he said. “But we wanted to show that he wasn’t going to jump down a sewer at the last second. So that wider shot of the island being pummelled was a mixture of macro and micro. The full effect is, ‘Yes, he’s gone, but he succeeded in making sure none of that weapons would go on into the future.’”

Just to recap that ending: after a scrap with Rami Malek’s Satin in which the genocidal creeper smashed a vial of nano bots on Bond’s head and Bond snapped Safin’s arm in half with his bare hands, Bond was left with the realization that he couldn’t leave Safin’s island. The  were programmed to kill Madeleine and his daughter Mathilde; as soon as he touched them, they’d die.

He says a final farewell to Madeleine: “You have all the time in the world.” Madeleine tells him Mathilde has his eyes. He knows. He stares at the sunset. He gets by HMS Dragon’s rockets. Q cries.

(A slightly overlooked aspect of Commander Bond’s death is that he was killed not by any freakish henchman or meticulously crafted master plan, but by his Royal Navy colleagues. Having done its very best to help him die by throwing him into hopelessly dangerous situations for 60 years now, it’s fitting that the British state finally got its man. It was always for Queen and country, and in the end gave him the death he clearly yearned for with a Sea Viper to the face. Thank you, ma’am.)

Video: Diamonds Are Forever (1971) Official Trailer - Sean Connery James Bond Movie HD (Esquire (UK))

Yet in another sense, Bond isn’t dead. That Bond is dead, for sure. Daniel Craig ain’t coming back. The MI6 crew – Ralph’ M, Naomie Harris’ Moneypenny, Ben Whishaw’s Q, Rory Kinnear’s lesser-spotted Bill Tanner – are, essentially, dead too. They’re not coming back.

But James Bond will, as ever, return. Quite what happens now is up in the air, and it’ll be a lot easier to imagine how all this pans out when we know who’s picking up the keys to the next.

There’s a fair bit of yearning among some Bond fans for a one-off period piece set in the early Cold War years which Ian Fleming’s spy first strode out of. That feels like extremely wishful thinking, though.

While a hard reset seems most likely right now, given the financial juggernaut which Craig’s Bond films turned into was driven by the head of steam it built up over five interconnected films it’d make sense if Eon wanted another multi-film saga fronted by one Bond.

Barbara Broccoli, the head honcho of the Bond franchise, has described making Bond spin-offs with peripheral characters as being “like making Hamlet without Hamlet”. But any new Bond has to be a new chance to build out an extended, Marvel-style universe. The MI6 family could, this time, be allowed their own spin-offs.

Bond’s death feels almost quaint; the kind of rug-pull ending which only the truly gigantic blockbusters get to pull, and which are deemed so important that it’s not immediately spoiled on the internet. But in other ways, it’s hard to imagine the character being able to pull off the dead-but-not-dead thing  being Schroedinger’s state-backed hitman – at any point in cinema history other than right now.

Nobody dies in mega-franchises anymore, unless they’re Harrison Ford. The whole architecture of the modern blockbuster franchise is designed to keep as many characters as possible in play for as long as possible, whether via diverging timelines, bubble universes or your common-or-garden time-jumps and prequels.

That’s not to say that there’s a multiverse at play in the SIS building on the south side of Vauxhall Bridge, but the ease with which audiences can hold multiple conflicting and contradictory story-worlds in their heads within the same franchise does make it easier to just rip things up and start again.

And at any rate, this is kind of the thing Bond has done since 1962. So James Bond is dead – properly dead – for the first time. It feels weird. But you’ll partition off the Craig years in your head just like you did the Bro years, the Dalton years, the Moore years, the Laze year.

The pretence that this is the same guy, with the same car, was never really the point. It’s the constant change and renewal that has made Bond work as a film franchise. And now it’s happening all over again.

Prosecutors asked a simple question of Marcella Sandoval on Thursday during the trial of her youngest son, Jean-Joseph Danger Le: "Ms. Sandoval, who killed your husband?" 

"I believe it was Joseph (Lee)," Sandoval said. 

When asked why she believed that, the Sandoval responded, "because that was the plan." 

Le, 57, of Colorado Springs, is accused of first-degree murder — among several other charges — in the death of his father Gilbert Sandoval, 83, on June 22, 2020. 

The plan referred to by Marcella Sandoval was one hatched by her and Le — who changed his name from Patrick Joseph Sandoval in an ode to the James Bond villain from "Casino Royale" —  to kill Gilbert Sandoval and take his inheritance money, according to Marcella Sandoval's testimony.

According to Marcella Sandoval, Lee learned several months before the killing that he had been entirely cut out of his father's will.

"He was very upset," Marcella Sandoval said in response to a question about how Le felt about being removed from the will.

Being cut out was the spark that eventually resulted in the plan to kill Gilbert Sandoval, she said. 

Le and his mother planned to lure Gilbert Sandoval to one of the family's homes, where Le would kill him and Marcella Sandoval would tell police that she was attacked, and that she killed her husband in an act of self-defense.

This was all in a plot for Marcella Sandoval to acquire her estranged husband's inheritance and split it with her son.  

The prosecution painted the picture that to enact this plan Le and Marcella Sandoval preyed on Gilbert Sandoval's desire to get back together with his estranged wife. Both Marcella Sandoval and a friend of Gilbert Sandoval, Steve Long, testified that he had a strong desire to rekindle their marriage. 

"Gilbert wanted to get back with Marcella," Long said to the jury. "He wanted to change ... He wanted to pull it back together." 

Gilbert Sandoval had a restraining order filed against him by Marcella Sandoval in May 2019, court records show. Marcella Sandoval told Gilbert Sandoval months before his death that she would like to do away with the restraining order, according to Long's testimony. 

Long testified that Gilbert Sandoval initially wished to meet at a local park to sign the paperwork, but Le asked to instead meet at a family home located on 518 Custer Ave. 

On the day of Gilbert Sandoval's death, Long drove his friend to the house where he met with Marcella Sandoval before leaving the two alone to give them space for an hour. 

"He was very excited," Long testified about how Gilbert Sandoval felt before he left. "It seemed like everything was going well."

When Long returned a little over an hour later he found Marcella Sandoval on a futon attempting to bandage a wound on her hand, and Gilbert Sandoval dead at the bottom of the stairs leading to the basement. 

The prosecution showed the court photos of Gilbert Sandoval's body at the bottom of the stairs, and a bloody baseball bat lying next to him on the floor.  

According to previous reporting from The Gazette, Marcella Sandoval initially went along with the story constructed by Le, but later walked it back and became a witness. 

In Marcella Sandoval's testimony on Thursday, she claimed that she offered to give her husband a tour of the home, which eventually led the pair to the basement. Before heading down the stairs, Marcella Sandoval said she tapped some piano keys to let Le know they were about to head downstairs, which is when he allegedly attacked. 

Marcella Sandoval claimed that she and Gilbert Sandoval were both pushed down the stairs by Le, and he then attacked and killed his father. Marcella Sandoval testified that she didn't see the attack happen — specifically noting she never actually saw Le during the entire incident — but that she heard her estranged husband's final word, asking his attacker, "why?"

Gilbert Sandoval was declared dead at the scene by emergency responders. 

Despite not seeing Le during the encounter, Marcella Sandoval would go on to testify that she believed "it was Joseph (Le)," who killed her husband because "it was the plan."

Court records show that Marcella Sandoval pleaded guilty to accessory to murder and was given two years' probation. 

Le pleaded not guilty to all charges filed against him, but faces life in prison if convicted of the first-degree murder charge.

James Bond has been a mainstay of cinema for over 60 years, but author Ian Fleming's spy has also been in his element when it comes to video games. A charismatic hero foiling world domination plots concocted by diabolical villains made for a perfect video game recipe, and once you factored in Bond's talent for witty one-liners and his unmatched skill in getting rid of colorful henchmen, Britain's finest export found his place in the interactive entertainment scene--to varying degrees of success. Not every Bond video game has been good, but that's the case with almost all licensed video game franchises. The spy has gone on a number of successful missions in the world of games, though.