While I like Pierce very much in the Bond role, I think all of the basic ideas for his films would've been even better suited for Dalton. They all tried to, in a subtle way, shake things up a little (Bond fights his former buddy/colleague, Bond meets a woman he fell in love with again, Bond falls in love with the villain, Bond is captured and tortured for around a year). Having Dalton in the part might have made these excellent ideas being executed a bit better, more seriously and less concerned with sticking to "the formula", akin to Licence to Kill.
And don't tell me Dalton would have been too old to be Bond in 2002 when DAD came out.
I don't know. With GE I have little doubt the whole film would have worked better with Dalton, even if the plot had been exactly the same (unlikely). But somehow the later films to me give a strong indication of being tailored more or less on Brosnan's Bond. They would still work with Dalton, but I don't have that same feeling of 'this should have been a Dalton film' I get when seeing GE.
I think the plots of TND and TWINE could have fit Dalton well. Both films have fine ideas and basic stories, they are just not executed all that well. In my head it sounds logical they would have been executed a bit better with Dalton in the lead. The fact that he was an, um, untraditional cinematic Bond could have made the films feel less bound down by "the magic formula" and the filmmakers might have been more willing to actually do something with their terrific ideas, rather than drown them in explosions and machine gun fire.
Just imagine TWINE with Dalton's Bond falling in love with Michelle Pfeiffer's Elektra (fanboy fantasy, please bear with me). It would no doubt have been a much darker film than they dared to make with Brosnan, and while I think Pierce is excellent in the final film, I'd imagine Dalton would have blown him out of the water.
I know this is completely pointless speculation, but heck, I really enjoy it.
Slating Dalton was certainly Martin Campbell's modus operandi at the time.
Little did he know he'd go on to work with a Bond who owes a great deal to Dalton (same goes for Pierce, BTW, who tries to be quite Dalton-ish at times).
Yeah, I know. Die Another Day would not have happened the way it did with Dalton in the role. Makes the cut all that deeper...
What?! Can you really not imagine Dalton surfing a massive CGI wave?
(I'm sure he'd look as embarrased as Connery did while "disguised" as a Japanese fisherman in YOLT)
Edited by The Ghost Who Walks, 22 November 2009 - 12:09 AM.