Hacker Cinema
Casino Royale
2006 · Film · 144 min
Part of James Bond Collection
Directed by Martin Campbell
Le Chiffre, a banker to the world's terrorists, is scheduled to participate in a high-stakes poker game in Montenegro, where he intends to use his winnings to establish his financial grip on the terrorist market. M sends Bond—on his maiden mission as a 00 Agent—to attend this game and prevent Le Chiffre from winning. With the help of Vesper Lynd and Felix Leiter, Bond enters the most important poker game in his already dangerous career.
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36 comments on Hacker News
There’s Toy Story 1-4 on there and Star Wars Force awakens, but for popular films it doesn’t have the incredibles, no Star Trek (perhaps include ii), few/no bond films (Casino Royale?), few Miyazakis (Nausicaa, Mononoke), not many Tarantinos (hateful 8), not too many Burtons (Batman 2, Big Fish, Sleepy Hollow). Is there any Indiana Jones? Could include Starship Troopers.
Hey HN,
Two months ago I spent a weekend fighting "Google My Maps" just to share a “Casino Royale filming locations” with friends. It took hours. So I scratched the itch and built MapScroll.
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Under the hood MapBox + Geocoding API; GPT-4.1 mini; Next JS; Serp for Websearch Agent; Vercel for deployment.
Traction so far ~3000 maps made since last shared in r/MapPorn; history teachers and travel bloggers are the heaviest users.
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-Shekhar
Bond movies are in a perpetual cycle of reinvention, trying to update the franchise and keep it relevant. I'm not sure it's wholly succeeded in that. They've certainly done the sequel thing of adding more tech, more action, more globetrotting, higher stakes, more of everything. Bigger, but better? Of the Craig movies, by far the best was Casino Royale, because of how it stripped things back to basics. At least, compared to the lunacy of the previous film (an invisible car, really?).
I'd love for an Amazon Bond reboot to be a 1960s period piece. Keep the tech light, make him a spy again, put him in some tense situations. It could work!
https://www.businessinsider.com/mads-mikkelsen-daniel-craig-told-pull-back-casino-royale-scene-2023-10
> Mads Mikkelsen says 'Casino Royale' director told him and Daniel Craig to stop improvising during a nude torture scene
It turns out that the actors tried to advance the needle here, and make it into a psych torture and have it be more than just a basic rudimentary beating! But no, “it’s a Bond movie”, sigh, and so what could have been a deeply uncomfortable and memorable scene was neither.
The Daniel Craig Bond movies were a pretty significant reinvention, much welcomed and generally pretty good, with the highs much higher than the lows were low. I don't think it's fair or accurate at all to say that Casino Royale, Skyfall, or even No Time To Die were of a piece with the 60s movies in tone or style.
My take after reading those is that the films are generally better works, but the other thing that's worth remembering is that Eon was out of the business of "adapting" Fleming novels after _Live and Let Die_. The follow-up (_The Man With The Golden Gun_) shares a title with a novel, but little else, and after that the films are mostly just a pastiche of whatever's-hot-in-Hollywood (e.g., _Moonraker_ having a space battle) and story elements pulled from lesser Fleming works and short stories.
The exception obviously is the _Casino Royale_ with Daniel Craig, which most fans view as one of the best Bond films. I've forgotten the specifics, but that book was unavailable to Eon for decades due to some copyright and licensing shenanigans.
I'd argue this is less akin to calling Casino Royale "007's movie" but rather if you referred to the sequel to the Godfather as "Part II's movie". I suppose this is a bit of a philosophical question of whether the index of something is the same as the thing itself, but I think I fall in the camp that things exist distinct from the way we identify them, and names are just labels rather than some inherent part of the thing itself.
For convenience, I asked ChatGPT to create this table, which summarizes how many times each movie has been mentioned in this conversation so far. It got a few counts wrong (as usual), but it still gives a good sense of the frequency. I hope it can be useful to someone:
| Movie | Number of Mentions | |-------------------------------------------|---------------------| | The Matrix | 9 | | Lord of the Rings Trilogy | 8 | | Pulp Fiction | 8 | | Alien | 7 | | Fight Club | 7 | | Ghostbusters | 6 | | Die Hard | 5 | | Back to the Future | 5 | | Inception | 5 | | Star Wars Trilogy (original) | 5 | | Groundhog Day | 5 | | Terminator 1 & 2 | 5 | | Jurassic Park | 4 | | The Thing | 4 | | The Fifth Element | 4 | | Monty Python and the Holy Grail | 4 | | Ghost in the Shell | 4 | | Interstellar | 4 | | Casablanca | 3 | | Office Space | 3 | | Shawshank Redemption | 3 | | The Godfather Trilogy | 3 | | The Blues Brothers | 3 | | Blade Runner | 3 | | Mad Max: Fury Road | 3 | | Unforgiven | 3 | | Total Recall (1990) | 3 | | The Crow | 3 | | The Princess Bride | 3 | | Akira | 3 | | The Big Lebowski | 3 | | Guardians of the Galaxy | 3 | | American Psycho | 3 | | Indiana Jones Trilogy | 3 | | Kiki’s Delivery Service | 2 | | Ratatouille | 2 | | A Clockwork Orange | 2 | | Mission Impossible (various) | 2 | | Casino Royale | 2 | | Skyfall | 2 | | Ferris Bueller's Day Off | 2 | | Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan | 2 | | Apocalypse Now | 2 | | The Shining | 2 | | Groundhog Day | 2 | | Donnie Darko | 2 | | Dune (2021) | 2 | | Gladiator | 2 | | Predator | 2 | | Seven/Se7en | 2 | | The Dark Knight | 2 | | Snatch | 2 | | Prometheus | 2 | | Schindler’s List | 2 | | The Wolf of Wall Street | 2 | | Dr. Strangelove | 2 | | Silence of the Lambs | 2 | | Kill Bill | 2 | | Real Genius | 2 | | Top Secret! | 2 | | Tenet | 2 | | Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy | 2 | | The Adjustment Bureau | 2 | | The Expanse | 2 | | Pulp Fiction | 2 |
Dr. Strangelove or how I learned to stop worrying and love the bomb
Casablanca
The first Sean Connery James Bond films, Casino Royale with Daniel Craig
The Matrix
Django Unchained
The Wolf of Wall street
Ctrl-F Casino Royale
During the film, the terrorist financier Le Chiffre uses a Ugandan warlord's money to short-sell stock in Skyfleet, thus betting the money on the company's failure. The banker plans to bring about said failure by destroying the company's prototype airliner. After his original bomb-maker is killed by James Bond in Madagascar, another is hired to complete the job. The bomb-maker infiltrates Miami International Airport and steals a fuel tanker; attaching a keyring-sized bomb to the vehicle. As he attempts to blow up the prototype with the truck he is intercepted by 007 and a fight ensues on-board. Eventually the terrorist is forced from his vehicle and Bond narrowly prevents the truck from colliding with the plane. With his plan foiled, Le Chiffre is left with a major financial loss and is forced to set up a high-stakes poker tournament at Casino Royale in Montenegro.
Not sure if it's diabolical genius, it was literally the opening plot point of the bond film Casino Royale
If you are going to mention Skyfall, I have to bring up the opening sequence of Casino Royale (my favorite of the Daniel Craig Bond movies). The fight scene is pretty brutal:
https://youtu.be/I4fTKmbtu8E?t=68
The whole siege of the house is one of the only bits of the daniel craig era, excepting maybe casino royale ( I only saw it once but I remember enjoying it ), of bond I can stand. It's not 'bondian' though, bond movies have kind of always been this way. If anything bond has become somewhat less campy in the recent era.
Casino royale was a remake of an older bond movie with the same name, using a rather well known actor at the time. Could've been a nostalgia cash grab but ended up being so great he's still the only James bond some people have known.
That was a risk taken and it pulled off greatly. Can we ever imagine seeing billion dollar studios taking similar risks?
The two co-writers on No Time to Die that you keep praising were the people responsible for such trash as Johnny English, Die Another Day and The World is Not Enough, which says pretty much all you need to know about their screenwriting "skills" and their contribution to Bond history.
For all of the Craig Bond films, other writers had to be brought into to make their scripts filmable (Oscar winners Paul Haggis for Casino Royale and QoS and John Logan for Skyfall and Spectre, Emmy winners PWB and Fukunaga for NTTD).
They didn't bring her in to salvage the script at all. They brought her in to do polishes of dialogue and to give them some ideas about how things could go and they'd take what they wanted. What about this reads salvaging?
The WGA has strict rules about screenwriting credits. If she got screenwriting credit for a major blockbuster, she didn't just "polish" a little bit of the script, she wrote significant portions of the script that made it into production. And given their historical backgrounds, it's clear that she and Fukunaga were responsible for the serious elements of the film, since that's not a capability that Purvis and Wade have demonstrated in any of their prior films.)
except its about lesbian/bisexual bait so it wins awards. in my opinion because they were looking to add female writing credits
And suddenly your agenda becomes clear...Most people aren't so open about being misogynists.
Remember the James Bond movie, “Casino Royale”:
I think Adam Neumann is the real life version of James Bond setting billions of dollars worth of Mohammed bin Salman‘s money on fire (by way of SoftBank).
I used to fly over to the US a couple of times a year for family holidays (from the UK) and almost always went on a 747, the difference in comfort was massive.
We often flew with a small little airline called 'Travel City Direct' who have since been merged into Virgin Atlantic. They leased two 747's from a charter company, one of them was all dolled up in their own livery, the other was just white and a looked super ropey on the outside...but inside it was still night and day a better experience than anything else.
We were fortunate enough to be in the 'bubble' on that one so had a great upstairs view - it was still only economy, but felt more like premium.
I later found out that the blank white plane we flew on so many times ended its days as the white 747 you used to see at Dunsfold - where Top Gear is filmed. Yep, that 747. The one they modified and used in the 007 film Casino Royale and Quantum of Solace to be the Skyfleet S570.
Shakycam is the worst. Casino Royale (2006) was loaded with it. It was so bad I couldn't parse what was going on in an action scene. In a James Bond film, which is supposed to ride on its action scenes.
The shakycam trope can probably be traced back to The Blair Witch Project, but for the action/thriller genre it really comes from the Bourne series. It's an easy way to add verisimilitude to a fight/chase and lets you skimp on the fight choreography because the fighters can't be seen very well. But personally I find it disorienting, and it took me right out of what everybody says was an excellent Bond film (and might've been if they committed to smooth reasonable action shots rather than shakycam).
I came up with a fun game that’s along the line of your snarky movie game. I call it Mixed Up Movies, where you have to create a movie title and description that combines two separate movies into one. You write the description and provide the real actors and the other folks have to guess the name of the movie.
For instance:
Hilarity ensues when a mild-mannered suburban family adopts a troubled San Francisco homicide detective.
Clint Eastwood, John Lithgow, and Margaret Langrick star in?
Dirty Harry and The Hendersons
Or:
A retired English butler reminiscences about his time in service to a Lord’s estate while also trying to convince his fellow townsfolk that recently arrived aliens come in peace.
Keanu Reeves and Anthony Hopkins star in?
The Remains of the Day the Earth Stood Still.
Or:
The boss of a Los Angeles crime syndicate enlists the help of a top British Spy to help recover a stolen briefcase by going undercover at an exclusive high-stakes poker game.
Ving Rames, Daniel Craig, and Samuel L Jackson star in?
Casino Royale With Cheese
> Studies, surveys, anything at all to back up your claim. Sounds like there isn't (use of absolutes in your statement was probably the problem).
Most people are generally capable of reading that as an opinion absolute statement.
Like, if I said 'Casino Royale is the best James Bond movie of the Daniel Craig era' that's an absolute statement but the reader can intuitively understand that its not going to be objectively provable and that it's clear its an opinion.
Now, if I said 'It's a fact that....' it'd be fair to ask for evidence. But I didn't.
> Depends on one's perspective and a bunch of other factors. You might be surprised about how many people carry guns in various professions (medical workers, mental health worker, various first responders, the general public, etc). The vast majority of people never have to fire their weapon. Most never even have to use their weapon. It's utility isn't solely based on being fired.
The norm in most of the world is that unarmed people respond to most issues. If you think mental health workers are carrying guns on the job, you are just extremely uninformed on this topic.
>You talk about armed personnel being more expensive. That's not exactly true. People become expensive based on the level of training they need/have.
So it is exactly true then isn't it? Not only do you have to pay the increased cost of training and certifying , you actually pay them more hourly too to carry that gun too.
>You could still use police as responders for mental health issues with some level of training while waiting for existing social workers or medical professionals to arrive.
Why would you though? Police have no real training in mental health, the week long classes they take are really not useful. Remember that actual mental health professionals generally need a minimum of six years of education. Why in the world would you want someone with no training and gun to be the first responder to someone having a mental health crisis?
> How so? Or is this another case of using the wrong words
No, they are unqualified
> If it's a matter of training, it may be cheaper to provide police with additional training rather than hire additional forces an incur all that overhead of benefits etc.
It isn't though. Police are by far more expensive than people who are more qualified, which in many ways is sad, but it is what is. The idea that you can train police into being mental health professionals just shows the lack of understanding about what it takes to be a mental health professional. When it comes to lower level calls, why would it be better to send a more expensive employee to handle a call a less expensive can handle? Is that what your work does? Send the most expensive labor possible to handle simple problems?
> ou seem to accept that violent situations require police response, so would be qualified for that.
It's the only thing they are somewhat qualified for, yes. They do need much better training and weed all the 'killology' cops.
> It sounds like the quality of life stuff are generally easy tasks that police are qualified to handle (you even mention a police report for a stolen bike).
Sorry, they are unqualified to handle most of their calls, but that is an example of one where they are overpaid to handle that call.
>The mental health situations depend on the level of training. Relatively few departments have adequate mental health training. I think this could be handled with training on how to approach those situations and talk people down while the social worker or mental health professional arrives.
Mental health is a professional degree. There is no amount of week long trainings that will make police officers good responders to mental health calls.
You of course have spent a lot of time talking about how armed police could do all these jobs, but you really haven't talked about why they should.
What's the point of spending tons of money getting a cop even moderately good at responding to mental health crisis when we could just hire someone who is better trained and cheaper to respond to mental health crisis?
You are locked into this idea that an armed police officer should be the first responder to every issue which gets back to my original point, you want police because that's the law enforcement construct you grew up with. Why in the world would you send an armed person to handle a bicycle report? You want to spend tons of money to try and maintain the status quo, which isn't going to improve things, rather than reallocating money to people who are significantly more qualified.
When was James bond perfect? He gets caught, betrayed, tortured, outsmarted in many movies before Casino Royale. He is deeply flawed as well.
I actually think James Bond doesn't work in a realistic setting. It just becomes a random action movie like what we've seen during the Craig's Era.
I just finished a full rewtch of the 25 movies and it's crazy how enjoyable the "old" ones were compared to the reboot. I remember my wife telling me during Quantum of Solace "I guess now it's more Jason Bourne than James Bond".
I highly recommend this "Let's Read" thread on James Bond from SomethingAwful : https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3861448
My takeaway on Bond is that he's way more interesting as a flawed protagonist, much in the same way Fleming himself was. Through the movies, he became symbolic and idolized in a way that I don't think Fleming intended.
The Casino Royale movie reboot was pretty great IMHO. The direction Bond is going now is pretty hit and miss. I'm guessing every few decades we'll need to tear down the mythology and start over with something better grounded in reality, and give a reminder of how imperfect Bond can be.
If by "they" you mean big-studio Hollywood, then there've been about 1500 of those movies in the last 15 years. There are another 600-700 or so non-major-studio films that see a wide release per year, which I think includes foreign films with US distribution, but also US productions outside the major studios.
Yes, at least a few of those 1500 major Hollywood studio movies are quite good.
Looking at the last few years of MGM's output, Creed and The Cabin in the Woods were both good. I didn't like Skyfall but mine seems to be a minority opinion, and AFAIK it's considered one of the best Bond movies by many people (for whatever that's worth). Stretching back closer to the 15-year mark... The Mist is pretty good. Casino Royale sneaks in right at the 15 year mark, and it's really well-regarded.
They are in order, and Bond evolves based on his experiences in previous books. I would start with the first, Casino Royale and go from there. Bond of the novels is a more complex and less hero-worshipable character than his movie equivalent. My personal favourite is On His Majesty's Secret Service - I also loved the short story A Quantum of Solace (which has nothing to do with the movie of the same name).
And while I personally enjoy the novels, I will say that some of them have not stood up to the test of time as well as others, and now read as very dated. Not discouraging you from reading them, just be forewarned!
In the new series, at the beginning of Casino Royale Bond literally 'earns' his 00 by killing 2 people.
He's not a spy, he's a thug, and the movies aren't really confused about that.
On the other hand, I read the book before seeing the film and wish I had done it the other way around. Same case with The Martian too - I found myself distractedly comparing notes (in my head) too often while watching.
Perhaps the one book-then-movie reading/viewing sequence I'm happy with was Casino Royale. It was a good faithfully-gritty adaptation.
> where is [...] the spectacular but not unrealistic script, etc ?
It's much more realistic now, but that's part of the problem.
The Bond we remember is a remnant from the 60s (I know it's older), with that era of geopolitics, scifi (and sex-/racism), complete with razor frisbee hats, cyborgs, zero gravity laser battles, and a super villain dying through floating up to the ceiling and popping like a balloon.
I loved those movies too, and while I didn't like the direction at the time, GoldenEye was a perfect update to that genre (at the time). While I think Casino Royale was a great movie, it was not a great Bond movie.
I have yet to see the new one, but the first Kingsman movie is the best Bond movie since GoldenEye, by bringing the elements that make a Bond movie to modern filmmaking.
Isn't this analogous to buying property insurance on your neighbor's home and then posting instructions for breaking into it on the Internet? Or shorting a bank stock and then posting instructions for electronically stealing millions from it? I'm not sure this is a good thing.
Potentially, it's a slippery slope from making it easy for others to attack a company, to encouraging others to attack the company, to actually attacking the company... to benefit financially from a fall in the company's stock price.
At the extreme, this reminds me of the character Le Chifre in the Bond movie "Casino Royale," who at one point purchases put options on an airplane manufacturer and simultaneously hires a terrorist to destruct the company's new prototype airliner to profit from the declining stock price.[1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_Chiffre#2006_film_biography
Casino Royale - It's kind of jarring how different the book and film versions of Bond are.
Learn You a Haskell for Great Good! - partially read it before online but couldn't get into it, bought the book and hope to nail it this time.
> Are you actually trying to imply that having a DVD quality leak come out far before the actual movie even hit theaters isn't going to have any effect on the box office results?
I'm saying that it is demonstrably negligible. For instance before the Casino Royale bond movie made it to cinemas leaks appeared and preemptively the studios made a fuss about this hurting box office figures. Somehow it managed to be the biggest bond release ever.
In fact I would state that the only thing really hurt by leaks are mid level movies that are not good enough to provoke people to go to the cinema.
Further to that I would assert, as others have, that people who often pirate often visit the cinema and would under no circumstances part with money for these mopvies so it economically changes nothing.
Well, it's been a common enough movie plot (cf. Casino Royale where the Antagonist engineers terrorist attacks on high-profile companies whilst short-selling their stocks).
The first movie I saw in HD was Bond's Casino Royale. And somehow I noticed something I've never seen before. Every new shot I had the feeling you could read the expression on the actors face of an "aaand action!".
So maybe too real isn't fun to watch unless it's an documentary?
The gulf between homage and derivative work is quite wide. Consider a few examples of famous derivative works: Baz Luhrmann's Romeo + Juliet, Alice in Wonderland, Apocalypse Now, Muppet Christmas Carol. Right now there are no less than 3 different ongoing adaptations of Sherlock Holmes (the movie series, the BBC series, and CBS's Elementary series).
These are works that would be patently illegal if the source material were not in the public domain. This isn't just about "remix culture", it's about being able to adapt and interpret what's out there, fully and without restriction. Clearly there is value to allowing such artistic freedom once a work has grown sufficiently old. However, today that age has grown quite impractically long. A movie such as War of the Worlds (a 110+ year old book) can be made without seeking a licensing agreement, but movies such as The Hobbit (a 75 year old book), King Kong (79 years), The Chronicles of Narnia (62 years), Casino Royale (59 years), or The Dark Knight Rises (73 years) still require licensing.
And the sad part is that even in the next 20 years when, say, the Superman IP will be pushing 100 years old and Mickey Mouse even older it seems likely that such things will still require licensing.
The fact that the current IP laws have not utterly destroyed creativity or the productivity of creative industries is not a ringing endorsement. The fact is that they are stifling and they have been responsible for creating an industry which is too heavily controlled by a small group.
> I have the feeling that Craig and Brosnan are just too much.
I know what you mean but I have to say I increasingly hated Brosnan's Bond movies and when he was captured, tortured and then went on in a ridiculous DC-Marvel-esque superhero tech-fight it was over for me - and "Casino Royale" was a MUCH welcome relief after that; really a "back to the roots" but set in a modern world, a modern James Bond with THE classic story. I really liked Daniel Craig's take on the character. Unfortunately then came "Quantum of Solace"; let's hope "Skyfall" will have a better story.
> We don't have to talk about Lazenby and Dalton. Moore and Connery were just perfect.
I could not agree with this more! I never cared much for the movies with Lazenby and Dalton; I hate to say it but they just looked silly.
Thanks for the really useful tool. Great implementation of infinite scrolling too, but perhaps the small footer bar could be fixed in the viewport so we can click the links without more films loading and pushing it down?
This is also a bit off-topic, but what with Skyfall coming out this month, I wanted to watch Casino Royale on my Apple TV - only to find out that none of the James Bond movies are available on iTunes - not to rent, not to purchase. I know there are always issues with licensing and copyrights in the film and TV industry but does anybody know of any specific reasons why one of the most popular creative franchises of all time isn't available from the biggest digital media distributor out there?!
> And here’s something no one has stopped to consider: Maybe making movies is too damn expensive. Or rather, far more expensive than it needs to be.
Hmm. I went to the theatre (first time since a long time as the experience feels antiquated and overpriced) with friends to see Sherlock Holmes, and the opening scene perfectly exemplifies the point: for about ten second you see a shot of the cathedral of Strasbourg. Half of it consists of a CGI explosion. I live there, and to produce this shot, they locked this part of the city for one week.
Ten seconds. One week. A whole team plus equipment. To the other side of the world. Seriously.
When seeing the scene I found that downright shocking, especially given the 10€ hole burning my pocket.
By comparison it takes Turn10 Studios three days[0] locally to gather enough information on a track to subsequently work on for one year. That's a full-length, five kilometer track.
I know this is not the same, and various other things come into play, but I just can't help but have an alarm bell ringing when I see movie production costs. See for yourself (budget in $):
- 2001 and Star Wars: 10 million each - Independence Day: 75 million - Transformers: 150 million - Kill Bill 1+2: 50 million - Jurassic Park: 65 million - King Kong: 200 million - Blues Brothers: 30 million - Fast & Furious: 90 million - The Fellowship of the Ring: 100 million - Harry Potter: ~150 million each - Full Metal Jacket: 15 million - Jarhead: 72 million - Apocalypse Now: 30 million - Black Hawk Down: 90 million - Terminator: 6 million - The Matrix: 60 million - Terminator 2: 100 million - Casino Royale: 100 million - Quantum of Solace: 230 million - Sherlock Holmes: 125 million - The Godfather: 6.5 million
I know those $ do not mean the same across time, but still, you can see going from simple to double produces crap (CS vs QoS), or produces twice the length at arguably the same 'quality' (whatever that means) for a significantly smaller cost (LotR vs HP). I don't see either why F&F costs thrice as much as BB, and almost twice as much as KB.
Bottom line: MAFIAA, please produce non-crap and control your costs instead of blaming piracy.
[0] http://forzamotorsport.net/en-us/underthehood4/