This article discusses plot details from throughout 007 First Light. 

Think about Sean Connery as James Bond. Think about his easy confidence, in full tuxedo or short sleeves and shorts, in Nassau or Tokyo or Istanbul, as he moves through a world that seems to relax itself into whatever shape suits him best. He fits easily into different clothes and different rooms. He is perfectly at home in every situation.

There have been a lot of Bonds over the decades, but Connery’s muscular, sardonic charm seems to embody the character at his essence. A British secret agent, sent like an ambulatory missile to thwart the nation’s enemies, who doesn’t balk at inserting himself into foreign lands and foreign affairs, who views himself as the natural arbiter of our planet’s fate.

Connery first played James Bond in 1962’s Dr. No. A decade earlier, Bond was introduced in the novel Casino Royale, with elements of the story and now-famous cast of supporting characters drawn from author Ian Fleming’s experiences in his former career as a member of the UK’s Naval Intelligence Division during the Second World War.

Bond was born of the postwar period, of an era that saw the rapid ascent of the United States as the dominant Western superpower and of the beginning of Britain’s imperial decline. In the following years, the character and the empire he represents formed something of an inverse relationship, magnets pushing against each other as Bond grew in cultural status and the once-overwhelming power he embodies faded. If the sun now sets on the British empire, that contracted power needs to keep some kind of light on through the maintenance of its premiere movie star.

With this in mind, it isn’t surprising that the choice of a new Bond actor has taken on an outsized importance ever since Connery left the role behind. In the time I’ve been alive, I can remember Daniel Craig’s casting, which was given so much fanfare in contemporary media that it’s easy to imagine what it would’ve been like to hear the news that a new Holy Roman Emperor was elected. Everybody has an opinion about a new Bond. Everybody wants the perfect person to play him.

So: 007: First Light. By scale of production, IO Interactive’s game is the biggest Bond-media outing since Daniel Craig’s version of the character was retired in 2021’s No Time to Die. Where, in decades past, a Bond videogame would be a minor kind of thing, often pegged to a new movie as a tie-in, the molasses speed of big budget videogame releases and the slowed, post-Broccoli production paranoia of the Amazon-owned Bond era has given First Light a bigger-than-expected heft as a cultural object.

Set in modern times, with the chronology cast backward so players see the origins of the character reworked and restated, First Light initially seems like a proud attempt to reclaim Bond—to shed the baggage and get at him from the very beginning. Bond is introduced here as a humble Navy aircrewman, diminutive next to the SAS squad he’s accompanying on a covert mission to Iceland. A few explosions later and he’s given an opportunity to prove his grit, demonstrating the sort of outsized courage and moral fortitude that catches the eye of MI6 and its recently rebooted 00 program.

First Light lays out its priorities quickly. The other 00s are, like so many film Bonds, comfortable in their role as increasingly honed, politically privileged agents of the state. Young Bond, played by Irish actor Patrick Gibson, works for his arrogance, then seems a bit abashed of his newfound self-possession as a series of vignettes unfold showing him trained in spy craft and combat. He doesn’t seem altogether comfortable until he’s on proper missions, when something snaps back from his memory of Iceland and he remembers why he was picked out by MI6 in the first place.

It’s by setting out into the wider world that Bond starts to become the secret agent we know from film. He and his 00 cohorts train in Malta, which is a sunny flipside of grey London, but also an extension of his home. He learns the tools of his new trade in a nation that has, for millennia, been a possession of empires on the rise and decline—of the ancient Carthaginians, Greeks, and Romans to the medieval Arabs and Normans and the modern French and British. Bond comes to it in its current form, as an independent republic and member of the Commonwealth.

This is a portentous beginning for young Bond. He forges himself anew in a graveyard of history, learning to sneak and shoot and fight in a sort of moon pool for the sprawling world that awaits beyond British influence. (It’s no wonder that the tone of the 00s training scenes, in Malta and back at their shared residence in London, resembles university days, right down to their ‘graduation’ mission taking place in a nightclub.) Once Bond is properly sucked into the machinery of MI6, well-blooded by a tragedy that makes the British government’s concerns his own, he sets out across the world, to a pirate society built out of a ship graveyard in Mauritania+ and an ultra-luxury resort in Vietnam.

It isn’t long before First Light’s true villains are unveiled, and it turns out they come from close to home. At the heart of a vast conspiracy is a sophisticated AI called THEIA and its creator, the fabulously wealthy and highly respected founder of the company responsible for its creation, Sir Nicholas Webb CBE. Webb and his son Damien work to patch the holes in their faulty AI’s output—which has become integrated into the British government’s national security programs and MI6’s intelligence pool— by hiding its mistakes. The understated comedy of this is the manner of their solution: Damien, a mercenary, works alongside a hired army to stage individual killings and terrorist attacks that force THEIA’s faulty predictions into coming true.

The obvious, loud criticism of modern LLMs, so-called “AI,” works without needing to grab it by the nose, but the core of the theme extends outward from a different source. First Light sees the proper Bond villain, in 2026, as Western cultural and political rot. Webb is the inheritor of an arms manufacturer whose money was made on selling death in conflicts as far back as the empire-splitting First World War. He’s a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (motto: “For God and the Empire”) and both he and his son are descended from a family fortune, feted by the government for the contributions of their tech company to the national output. While Webb Sr. resembles the Silicon Valley class of the United States, able to present himself in officialdom with some credibility, Damien is a deranged mess of hereditary privilege. To make clear the parallels to demented princes of empires past, he slaps on a gold mask emblazoned with laurels as he goes out on violent missions, a self-proclaimed Caesar with a private army behind him.

While neither Webb nor Damien, despite the latter’s affectation, are colourful enough villains to truly stick in the mind, their goals end up buoying First Light’s sometimes dull action. There’s too much blandness throughout the game for its thematic thrust to pierce as deep as it should. Part of this comes from its cast—M and Q are flat and underdeveloped rehashes, the sanded-down versions of the characters’ Brosnan-era archetypes. More of it comes from granular design choices, like the repetition of problem-solving sequences where Bond eavesdrops and hacks appliances to gain entry to new areas. These segments are too nakedly mechanical to really capture a capable agent’s savvy and spontaneous capabilities, even if the ramshackle, beautifully animated gun fights are exciting, and excellent set pieces, like Bond chasing after an escaping airplane are thrilling enough, to carry the game forward.

There is a lot, ultimately, to admire in First Light. If the audience might ask what place Bond, the smirking Brit, the humane servant of empire, brought to you by zero-caffeine Coca Cola and Land Rover, has in modern culture, the game has an answer.

It seems impossible to think of a character like Bond working now. The calls for a more politically correct Bond are understandable, because he’s a figure larger than his origins now, but they're also misplaced, since, no matter how charismatic—and without a rewriting so total that he might as well be a new character—Bond only works as an agent of the country that employs him++. He has to be a bit scummy, a bit unlikeable, a bit arrogant. But he also has to possess some kind of moral centre that makes audiences want him to win.

First Light succeeds by showing us the hardening of a new Bond’s shell as he learns to display the confidence he and his employer no longer enjoy as a natural right. More important, it locates its enemy within the diseased heart of modern Britain, easily extrapolated to an international ideology of self-interest and ruthless futurism. It sets Bond on a mission to thwart his own country’s worst impulses, and it does so without preaching or recasting its protagonist as a tortured antihero.

While those in charge of the future of his movies wonder what Bond should be now, so many decades on from his beginnings in the postwar era of Fleming and Connery, First Light offers one viable path forward.

***

+ The pirate town is run by an African warlord played by Lenny Kravitz, who dresses just like the real Lenny Kravitz and, despite growing up on a different continent, speaks with the same East Coast American accent as the real Lenny Kravitz, too.

++ At almost the exact time I wrote this sentence, long-running fan favourite casting choice Idris Elba was quoted about the eternal rumour that he would play the first Black Bond. “James Bond was written how he was written for a reason,” he says, for a reasonable start, eventually concluding with the more puzzling: “Bond is so unrealistic, so a hint of reality is good, but let’s not try and make it woke. I think you’ve got to be pure to what it is: escapism.”

***

Reid McCarter is a writer and a co-editor of Bullet Points Monthly. His work has appeared at Kotaku, The AV Club, GQ, Kill Screen, Playboy, The Washington Post, Paste, and VICE. He is also co-editor of SHOOTER and Okay, Hero, co-hosts the Bullet Points podcast, and posts on Bluesky.