007: First Light Should Have Had a Weirder-Looking James Bond

007: First Light Should Have Had a Weirder-Looking James Bond

Neither shaken nor stirred by this default-looking dude.

As long as a game is fun to play, it doesn’t really matter how it looks. So, just as Star Fox’s new taxidermy look won’t stop people from playing it, it doesn’t really matter what James Bond looks like in his new game. It’s selling faster than comically crooked false teeth at an Austin Powers look-alike convention, thanks in no small part to its ingeniously designed tutorial area, bold take on Bond’s humanity, and well-crafted gameplay loop. It also doesn’t hurt that there’s a deficit of Bond in the world right now, with questions of who will play the storied super spy in films lingering for years now.

I’m hoping that the wild success of the game doesn’t lead them to pick an actor who looks like Bond in 007: First Light. Because this guy looks like the default character model in an RPG where absolutely none of the sliders have touched—though they were brave enough to hit the “add scar” button before pressing save. It almost looks like the character designers on the game were afraid to give him any visual personality, out of fear that the highly opinionated Bond fanbase would band together and protest his face. But the lack of strong features actually goes against the casting of the longest-lasting and most popular Bond actors, while the more “standard” actors who have taken the role are more likely to star in just one or two films before falling off.

This is all opinion, of course, but I think it’s fair to say that Sean Connery and Daniel Craig are among the most handsome-but-unusual-looking actors to play Bond. Connery’s intense eyelids look both fishy and alluring at the same time, sort of like Peter Lorre with better teeth and a few years of muscle-enhancing supplements. Craig was even more buff, but with sunken cheekbones and a stoney stare that, even in his younger years in the franchise, made him look like a young man who’d been thrown into the deep end more than a few times. And by “deep end,” I mean he’s probably murdered people and/or been pummeled in the groin by international criminals who don’t fight fair. Hence why he murdered them.

On the other end of the Bond success spectrum, we have the extremely handsome-but-nondescript George Lazenby, who stopped by the franchise to play Bond for exactly one film. Then there’s Timothy Dalton, whose face is also structured per the textbook definition of “masculine-but-clean”, but with just a hint of extra mischief. He got two movies. And in the middle of the “boring-to-intense” Bond slider, we have Pierce Brosnan (dashing but fragile-featured and the star of four movies) and Roger Moore (who’s basically a better-looking-and-British Leslie Nielson, taking many of his movies to a place resembling self-parody). He starred in a whopping seven Bond films, the same amount as Connery.

None of this is exactly scientific proof that James Bond does better when he’s got at least a couple of unusual visual characteristics. But these thoughts can work as the foundation for an opinion that Bond in First Light, a 26-year-old baby-face who wears a white T-shirt and jeans to a dance club, is painfully outclassed in the memorability department by his finest live-action counterparts. Maybe instead of casting Lenny Kravitz (whose abs have looked too good to be real for decades) in the part of the villain, a slightly de-aged version of that chronically cool customer could have played the title character. Sure, a dreadlocked, tattooed, American Bond would have certainly upset “purists”, but again, as long as the game plays great, should it matter either way how Bond looks? If not, you might as well err on the side of new and interesting over safe and expected.

While they’re at it, they should add Oddjob’s MC Hammer-inspired attire from the James Bond Jr. cartoon. It doesn’t get much more interesting than that.