Bond gadgets still breathtaking
“NAW, they’re just plastic. They fall apart when you touch them,” Pearce Brosnan told me when I asked him about Bond’s famous gadgets. My heart broke.
With five other film reviewers, I had saved my one question, however facetiously and light-heartedly, to ask about the gizmos that every boy had grown up dreaming of owning. I was looking for another angle instead of the usual “Bond is back” or “the first Irish Bond” as was the current hype, but his throwaway line ruined more than my intro.
Brosnan had just made his first Bond film and was in South Africa to promote it. But it was a seminal moment when I realised that the most famous spy with the most famous gadgets was truly all about willing suspension of disbelief. Of course we all knew it, but I had expected him to rave about how cool it was to play with cutting-edge new gadgets, or at the very least, to be infused with enthusiasm for how his character got to push the boundaries of science, or just the miniaturisation of technology.
I’d grown up, like every other little boy, wanting to be Bond. James Bond.
As much as I realised that Bond’s gadget allure was mostly make- believe, I was struck last week when I saw a premiere of Quantum of Solace that my lot in life is not to be Bond. My destiny is to be Q.
Worse still, Q doesn’t even feature in this movie, as he didn’t in the first Daniel Craig film.
Bond’s gadgets are no longer dispensed by the wise-cracking: “Now pay attention, 007” and “Oh, do grow up, 007!” quartermaster. Craig already has them and just waves around sophisticated gadgets (he uses the Sony Ericsson C902 to take pictures that are uploaded in real time back to MI6’s headquarters, amongst others) but he still uses cutting-edge devices like GPS chips embedded in business cards.
Most of these are still improbable applications of technology, albeit partly true. For instance, the touch screen computer at MI6 is not dissimilar to the HP TouchSmart or Sony Vaio LT computers you can get now. But it’s too Minority Report to be believable.
Bond has arguably done more to promote the modern culture of trinkety gadgets — you know, those strange toys that do very little. When I grew up, they were things like compass cufflinks (which I still think are very cool, but only because I have a thing for compasses, the original adventurer’s must-have necessity. I use a compass whenever I travel internationally, and while my fellow travellers often laugh at me, we never get lost in foreign cities).
We live in the age of consumer electronics, in which the beautifully designed Apple computers are seen as market leaders, even when Microsoft has 90-something percent of the computer market. Find me another industry so bizarrely skewed.
But Bond, Apple, Sony and the cellphone industry have made technology that we all lust after: beautiful devices with multiple functions that are not only sought after, but irreplaceably useful.
I define a gadget as something that does two or more functions well. There are more than enough examples of that in every issue of Stuff, but it was Bond’s hidden features that we all loved as children. Lasers hidden in his Seamaster watch, a sports car that turned into a submarine, exploding pens and so on.
Luxury watchmaker Jaeger- LeCoultre makes the AMVOX2 DBS Transponder timepiece that works with Bond’s Aston Martin DBS to open and lock the doors, a very real (and expensive) application of this Bond principle.
You’ll have read enough reviews about the latest film. Amongst its failures is the decision to fiddle with the one plot feature Bond was unique for: Q. It’s a pity they didn’t listen to Q’s famous admonishment: “Try not to break it, Bond.”
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