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Monday, April 2, 2012

Cost Effectiveness in the Spy Business

While I have always enjoyed the James Bond franchise (except the last Pierce Bronson movie, it was literally action scene, witty one-liner, action scene, witty one-liner over and over again, in fact, I don't think Pierce had any real dialog during the entire film), but I've never understood how any government can afford such a organization.  An operative like James Bond has to be trained to excel in how to kill in a multitude of ways, use a variety of firearms, stunt driving, extreme conditions survival, pilot aircraft/boats/submarines, evade tails, tail people, seduce women (?), withstand torture, pick locks, skydive, fight someone while wearing a tuxedo, and many other skills that don't immediately come to mind.  All of that training will take years and years to perfect and will cost millions of dollars (or pounds).  Now imagine that instead of making his first kill in the bathroom scene at the beginning of Casino Royale, he is shot and dies.  All of that training and money was just thrown down the drain because the bad guy got in a lucky shot.  That is a hell of a financial risk MI6 is making on a guy that could have been killed just as easily as he could have completed his very first mission.  And that doesn't even take into account that James almost died about a thousand more times in that movie (which was chronologically the first in the franchise, so the write-off would have been that much larger) or the million other times he put his life at risk in the other 21 films.  What I'm trying to say is that the risk and reward for recruiting, training, and activating spies does not seem remotely worth it.

On top of that, there are all of the gadgets that are made specifically for James that must have cost a pretty penny to develop.  Over the years, Q has developed a laser watch, a magnetic watch, a 2-way radio watch, a watch with a bomb in it, an underwater jet pack, numerous guns hidden in everyday items, numerous rocket guns, X-ray glasses, a ring that can make a slot machine hit jackpot when activated, grappling suspenders, a grappling belt, a grappling watch, and hundreds of other stuff that can explode or take pictures.  Think about how large of an investment it must have taken to make these things only to have James use them once.  Oh, and don't forget about the all of the customized cars that could fire rockets/torpedoes/landmines/lasers, had hidden machine guns, had ejector seats, could release oil slicks, spray water jets, convert to a submarine/boat/ski-mobile, drive itself, turn invisible (so stupid), self-destruct, and were all bulletproof.  Each one of those cars must have cost around a million bucks and how many of them did James destroy only to have Q make him a new one?  I would say James drove home in the same car he left in maybe once every eight times he left the garage.  This further proves that running an efficient spy organization like the one in the James Bond movies is a waste of money that could be used on things that would actually benefit that country's taxpayers.  Then again, the James Bond universe was filled with evil masterminds and if James didn't stop them, that world would have been run by a crazy dictator (maybe even Jaws, that guy was awesome).

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