Rob

I will say this, there has never been a bad M. Bernard Lee set the archetype; Robert Brown held the line; Judi Dench sharpened it, and Ralph Fiennes inherited the chair with the right dry gravitas. It helps that he was a teenage devotee of the Ian Fleming novels. The part demands a certain temperament, and the casting has respected it. This is opinion of course, people are free to disagree. Just like I disagree with the belief that an organisation like SPECTRE could never exist. The claim that organisations such as SPECTRE are unbelievable ignores real twentieth-century intelligence history. SMERSH was real: established in 1943 under Viktor Abakumov and answerable directly to Stalin. It was the Red Army's dedicated counter-intelligence service, tasked with eliminating spies, saboteurs, and "anti-Soviet elements." Its name Směrť Špionam meant Death to Spies. It operated with the ruthlessness one expects of a wartime Soviet security organisation. Another parallel to such an organisation is Operation Trust. Between 1921 and 1927, under Felix Dzerzhinsky's Cheka and GPU, the Soviets ran a fake monarchist resistance organisation that deceived White Russian émigrés and Western intelligence for years. It pulled in financial investments from the West, eventually drawing the Ace of Spies Sidney Reilly into the USSR to his death. It was controlled opposition at its most elegant. The apparatus already possessed the networks, the taste for deception, and the personnel. Operation Trust was unmasked in the spring of 1927, principally through the defection of Eduard Opperput. He disclosed that the Monarchist Union of Central Russia had been under GPU control from the outset. The revelation effectively ended the operation, and the Soviets shut it down. One need only imagine a shift from state service to private profit, an embezzlement, a few faked deaths, for something SPECTRE-like to appear. Unfounded, yet such a concept is structurally far from impossible. Ian Fleming's literary Ernst Stavro Blofeld remains the most convincing version of the character. Born in 1908 in Gdynia to a Polish father of German descent and a Greek mother, educated in history, economics, and engineering at Warsaw, he sold intelligence to both sides during the Second World War from Turkey before founding SPECTRE as a private criminal-intelligence syndicate. Its methods, terrorism, blackmail, extortion, and the sale of information, were those of a sophisticated criminal mastermind. No foster-brother gimmick was required. The films often simplified Blofeld and the Craig-era familial twist of a foster-brother unnecessarily strained credibility even further. The one credible aspect was the organisation's goal. In today's world, an organisation of SPECTRE's resources would seek to own the instruments of surveillance rather than merely evade them: the better to observe the observers and to corrupt the stream with omission and fabrication. In the film, Max Denbigh, portrayed by Andrew Scott, presses for Britain's entry into the Nine Eyes global surveillance agreement while campaigning to abolish the Double-O section. SPECTRE funds the merged Joint Intelligence Service and stages terrorist attacks to generate demand for the system, securing unrestricted access once it is live. In a profession defined by the absence of trust, centralisation multiplies the cost of a single penetration. Distributed agencies impose friction and compartmentalisation; a consolidated apparatus creates one high-value target. Operation Trust worked on the same principle, turning the opposition's own channels against it. Once the means of observation and the means of deception sit in the same hands, the distinction between the intelligence service and the criminal enterprise it is meant to combat begins to dissolve. It becomes SPECTRE. 🐙 That's what I liked about this film: that and it's the only Daniel Craig Bond film with a happy ending. #JamesBond #SPECTRE #DanielCraig #RalphFiennes