As befits a spy thriller, everything about the new James Bond film, Spectre, is being kept under wraps.
Such secrecy, of course, fuels speculation. There are indications, for instance, that Bond – played by Daniel Craig in his fourth outing as 007 – will rewind to a chapter from his past. Others are claiming that Bond will go back to basics: hunt, kill and thrill. A brief conversation from the film trailer between Dr Madeleine Swann and Bond seems to support this. When Swann asks Bond whether what he really wants in life is to live in the shadows, hunting and being hunted, he replies with a dismissive, “I don’t stop to think about it.”
Despite the uncertainty, one thing is for sure. And that is that any Bond recipe will include the usual ingredients of a closed text: a bit of good, plenty of evil, a female lead who sides with the baddies, and an explosion of gadgets.
As Sam Smith sings, the writing is on the wall and, from the hints given by the film’s official trailer, it seems that we’ll be getting plenty of that and then some more. The helicopter barrel roll seen in the trailer is especially spectacular and begs the question, is that real?
In Bond films, that question applies to anything that comes with a screen, steering or wire. Because while Bond and his girls get the main credit roll, it’s Q who keeps us glued to the screen, with his arsenal of seemingly innocuous objects that at the push of a button, are transformed into deadly gadgets: cue killer umbrellas, a camera that shoots lasers and exploding toothpaste.
So, back to the original question: are those gadgets real? To date, there have been 23 Bond films – excluding Spectre – and most of them star futuristic, funny and lethal gadgets. Most of them are too fantastic to be real. However, a surprising number of them have made the leap from silver screen to the real world.
Take lasers, for instance. In the 1964 Goldfinger, Auric Goldfinger’s weapon of choice was a laser strong enough to cut steel. Back then, it might have seemed an outlandish technology – nowadays, such lasers are used by various industries. The same goes for the fingerprint scanner in Diamonds Are Forever. In 1971, when the film was released, a device that could scan your fingerprints was the stuff of fiction – nowadays, fingerprint identity sensors are used on smartphones.
Modern wearable technology is also something which Bond dabbled in way back in the 1980s. in A View to a Kill, released in 1985, Bond uses a ring camera to identify guests at Zorin’s chateau reception. Nowadays, you don’t need to be a spy to have that kind of wearable technology. As for that most outlandish of gadgets, the jetpack that Bond used in Thunderball, NASA had already developed it in the 1960s.
So, what gadgets will Bond use in Spectre? That’s not an easy question to answer because the trailers have only allowed us a brief glimpse. Bond’s Aston Martin DB10, which was built for Spectre by Aston Martin’s special projects team, is attracting a lot of attention. And so it should because this is really a special car. Behind the hand-stitched leather and carbon fibre is probably an arsenal of secret gadgets, including a confirmed flamethrower.
Other than that, who knows what Q – played by Ben Whishaw – has in store for Bond? It’s probably something big because in one particular scene, Bond asks Q to do one more thing for him.
“What do you have in mind,” Q asks.
“Maybe disappear,” Bond quips.
And that will need some serious technology.