Omega seamaster 007 casino royale edition

In , Ian Fleming produced a treatment for the first proposed James Bond film. He annexed a set of notes explaining the main characters. “James Bond is a blunt instrument wielded by a government department,” he wrote. “He is quiet, hard, ruthless, sardonic, fatalistic.” As the franchise progressed, this became increasingly less true. Bond morphed into a charming playboy and then into a send-up of himself. But to readers of the novels, he had never been anything like the “real” James Bond in the first place.

Ian Fleming’s Bond was a cipher. The author told the Manchester Guardian in that, “Exotic things would happen to and around him, but he would be a neutral figure  – an anonymous, blunt instrument.” There, that phrase again. Indeed he was blunt: blunt in his dealings with others, blunt in his cruelty, blunt in his addictions. And in that bluntness, there was edge.

When EON Productions embarked on Casino Royale (), the company made the decision to jettison the smile-and-a-wink idea of Bond and reimagine the character more in the spirit of Fleming’s novels. It was a resoundingly successful strategy. Daniel Craig played as a compunctionless soldier more than a peacocking ladies man; the film won plaudits and the franchise a fresh set of coordinates.

And so to the new watch. James Bond has been wearing Omegas since GoldenEye () and while these have never been flashy pieces, they have had embellishments: coloured dials, mirrored surfaces. Strap on the No Time To Die watch and it is striking how free it is of anything that could be considered jewellery-like. It is ruggedly, self-assuredly no-nonsense. It is Daniel Craig’s (or should we say Ian Fleming's) Bond all over.