SPOILER: 'Royale' Plot Revelation
WARNING: PLOT SPOILERS AHEAD
Director Martin Campbell has stated on several occasions that Casino Royale — the 21 James Bond film which sees the début of Daniel Craig as 007 — will remain basically true to the original 1953 Ian Fleming novel. But that doesn’t mean there won’t be some necessary plot changes in order to update the film for 2006.
As CBn revealed last month, gambling will remain central to the Casino Royale plotline, but instead of Baccarat, the game will be poker. Now CBn has another plot revelation to share with those who are not spoiler sensitive.
Daniel Craig as 007 battles terrorism in Casino Royale
As in the novel, money won and lost at the gambling tables will have deadly implications for the Western world. In the novel the villain Le Chiffre is gambling with funds spearheaded for covert Russian Soviet spy activities via SMERSH. But in the film version, Le Chiffre’s winnings will be used to fund a very contemporary threat…
TERRORISM.
Yes, James Bond joins the “war on terror” in Casino Royale.
However, the terror organizing will not be Al Qaeda, nor will any real-world country be implicated. Le Chiffre will be a part of a new SPECTRE-like terror organization backed by a fictitious country. This new terror organization may become a recurring threat in future James Bond films as SPECTRE was in the early films (because of a history of legal issues, Eon continues to avoid the use of SPECTRE — even the new EA Bond videogame, From Russia With Love, changes SPECTRE to “OCTOPUS”). As revealed at last Friday’s press conference, Purvis and Wade are already at work on Bond 22.
The idea of a fictitious “enemy nation” is not new to the world of Bond. The South American country of Isthmus was created for Licence To Kill (1989), and the Caribbean island of San Monique for Live and Let Die (1973), both because of the implications of institutionalized drug smuggling.
But this doesn’t necessarily mean Casino Royale will be set in this fictitious country. As in the Bond classic From Russia With Love (1963), Bond will most-likely be playing his deadly cat and mouse games with enemy agents in a real-world locale, although it is still unclear exactly which real-world locale this will be.
As first reported on CBn, Casino Royale was originally scheduled to film largely in South Africa, but problems securing locations forced a change to The Bahamas and Italy.
Casino Royale begins shooting in January and is due for release worldwide on November 17, 2006.
