Casino Royale- Good and Evil

The movie, based on Ian Fleming’s Casino Royale, held a similar central message to the novel. The novel’s message seemed to be about the question of what the line is between good and evil. This line at first may seem black and white to some, but really appears grayer in real life. The book tackles this debate through the conversation between Bond and Mathis at the end of the book. They compare God to the Devil and how we represent good and evil through these two characters as the extremes of both sides (Fleming 136). Then he goes on to call God clear and the Devil undefined since there is no book of evil or even on how to be evil. So, no one character can truly judge another as purely good or evil because this is all relative creating more of a gray area.

The movie transfers this message and adds to it in order to make it clearer to the audience with M telling Bond to be careful with whom he trusts in the beginning. Then ending with saying he no longer trusts anyone and M replying that he has learned his lesson. Trust factors into this scale because Bond cannot only trust people that are purely good because no one is purely good; he must always be wary of others. So even at the end of the movie, Bond tells M that they should look further into Mathis and his background.

Bond, from the movie, even proves that no character is purely good because he does things often that could be seen as bad. Bond kills people, disobeys authority, sleeps with married women, and steals from others. But, when comparing Bond to the “bad” guys relatively he can be seen as good since he does not kill innocent people or help fund terrorism. 

The gray appears through characters like Vesper because she at first looks to be on Bond’s side, but really is a double agent for the communists. In both the novel and movie, she may appear to be good since she never kills anyone (excluding herself), helps Bond (the “good” guy), and works for M. Once her double agent status is revealed, Bond’s image of her is shattered since she works for the other side even though this makes her a gray character not completely evil. Bond neglects her prior actions and judges her on the soul fact that she works for the evil people. Working for the opposing forces automatically makes someone evil. This can be seen through Le Chiffre since throughout the beginning of the novel and film he never once kills anyone directly. Le Chiffre does not get his hands dirty, but instead has other people do his biddings. But since he works against Bond, he is automatically turned into the villain even while Le Chiffre at one point turns into the victim in the film while in his hotel room.

Casino Royale has two seemingly defined sides of opposing forces which makes the central message the difference between good and evil. It can be seen through the novel that these terms are relative, while in the film they mainly focus on the blur between the two and how these shades of gray can skew trust.