As an avid Bond fan since being little, it was with some excitement that when I heard that Daniel Craig had been given the part of the legendary agent that I knew straight away that we were heading in a different direction with the franchise. That is not to say that Pierce Brosnan was not a good Bond, he was. Unfortunately he was let down by the poor scripts and the insanity of gadgets that kept snowballing to the extent of the invisible car in Die Another Day.

To survive, the next Bond film had to be different, in fact it had to be completely different to anything that had come before it and it is on the level of reality that this Bond film works. A similar approach had been done with Batman as well, in fact Batman Begins stripped away the comic book invulnerability of the main character and added a healthy dose of reality into the story in such a way that it was truly believable. Also with the Jason Bourne trilogy of films that were competing against Bond it was necessary to bring the story back down to Earth and effectively reboot the franchise.

The one remaining novel by Fleming that was left was Casino Royale. Now for the purists out there the 1967 film starring David Niven and Peter Sellers was not an official film as that was done by someone else other than EON Productions, so it doesn't count as a proper Bond film, and besides that was done as a comedy co-starring Woody Allen. Casino Royale was the first of the Fleming novels and was first issued in 1952, thankfully the film stays loyal to the novel in characters as well as story and plot.

At the beginning of the film, you notice some slight changes that make you wonder if you are actually watching a Bond film. There is no gun barrel sequence at all. Why? Simple, Bond has not truly become 007 yet as he has not performed two assassinations. Also there is no colour at all till the opening titles; everything is in black and white. A bold move indeed, but also one that does genuinely add to the suspense of the pre-title sequence,where Bond is sent to kill an informer within MI6, the scene is interlaced with Bond fighting the insider's contact in a public lavatory. This is a very vicious and savage fight and manages to show off Craig well in his first scenes as Bond. By the end he has his two kills and is given promotion to Double O status. Throughout the film you get to see Bond not quite being the usual sharpest tool that we have seen him in the past, that is not to say he shows a level of thickness

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