Touché.
The one point I'd say Craig has one up on Owen is brute physicality. While both look like they can fight, Craig looks like he has fought. I almost half-expect to see he has 'cauliflower ears' that are commonly seen in boxers due to injury to ear cartilage. He's definitely the most physical of the Bonds, and that's one area he doesn't need to act. Owen can do similar, but for him it's more like an otter underwater as compared to Craig's Pike.
As for Moonraker - I have the entire Bond collection up to Skyfall, and I am proud to say I have never brought myself to watch Moonraker. I have tried, but sadly (fortunately?_ to no avail.
Back to Craig. The more I think about him and Owen the more I realize that they are somewhat interchangeable. Maybe not like to like (i.e. not lion/tiger, where it doesn't matter much since beneath the skin the beasts are similar enough as not to matter) but more like a wolf/coyote (or jaguar/leopard), where they look similar but are actually different in many ways. Again, I'm not sure who is the wolf and who is the coyote between the two, but they are definitely both canids. Also, even though Craig is the bigger box office draw, that is as a result of the Bond movies. It is very possible that had Owen gotten the gig he could also have done well given the same exact scripts and timing.
Both of them, after all, follow the same 'realistic' trend and thus would have produced very similar outcomes.
As for this movie. I have watched it, and apart from it being a tad too long (actually, too long at 2.5 hours) it was an enjoyable movie. Was it better than Skyfall? Absolutely not, but then again there was little chance for ANY follow-on Bond movie to be better than Skyfall. Skyfall was simply a movie too good to follow, in much the same way that the third Batman movie (The Dark Knight Rises) by Nolan was NOT a bad movie, but because it followed The Dark Knight it seemed to be a 'bad' movie. It doesn't matter who produced/acted/directed the Spectre ...or what the script was or may have been ...it was never going to shine bright right after Skyfall.
I enjoyed the movie, and while I see some of the points some of the critics raised, I believe that even if those points weren't there the critics would still have found more.
The same fate awaits the sequel to Avatar.
Alas, we won’t get the chance to see how Owen would’ve done with the part (and how much the script might’ve been altered to fit him). Of course, I similarly wish we had had the opportunity to have seen George Lazenby and Timothy Dalton given a few more rounds. Dalton should’ve been a big star. It’s funny that he passed on the Bond role 18 years earlier in 1969 when given to Lazenby, citing his being too young (early 20s, which would defy reason as a ranked Naval Commander - maybe if they had altered it to ‘Leftenant’).
Alas, both of them, had they carried on into the ‘70s, would’ve been saddled with the “silly era” of films, which at least Rog Moore dove into with aplomb (had he been as Craig, those films would not only not have had an element of humorous enjoyability as high camp, they’d have been outright miserable outings). I probably should be grateful that my father passed on taking me to the release of “Moonraker” in 1979, because when he took me to my 1st in 1981 (FYEO) I wouldn’t have been asking him why JB wasn’t still up in space having laser battles like in Star Wars and Star Trek.
As for Craig’s sheer physicality, that could point to why it would’ve been better to have had him play a henchman (although again, he still lacked for charm — look at how the magnificent Robert Shaw could turn on a dime as Red Grant, between psychotic killer and charming dinner companion in “From Russia With Love”). Bond was never supposed to be, as far as I know, a gym rat. What with all that rich food (pâté de foie gras) and high quality liquors (Martinis, Vodkas, et al) sloshing around in his belly, nevermind his liberal appetite for tobacco, that would seem a bit counterintuitive (if the latter not being outright counterproductive). He was a man unlikely to make it out of middle age (much like Ian Fleming).
When you get right down to it, the single biggest flaw with respect to Bond is that he’s really a man of the post-WW2 era up through to the mid 1960s at the height of the Cold War. Allowing him to move past the time into an era where he is viewed (as Dame Judy Dench sadly put it), “a misogynist dinosaur”, may have been a terrible mistake. Perhaps keeping him, and the films, set in that 20+ year period where he was in his element was a better idea. Come up with another character or characters appropriate for the more unfortunate post-1960s crude and classless era we are trapped in today.
As for the Batman films or “Avatar”, I’d have to yield to more hard-core fans as to their appropriateness (or lack thereof) to source material. I’ll watch them once and shrug my shoulders. I’ve never been a comic-book person (beyond reading Garfield or Peanuts or whatever daily strips appear in the newspaper), so I can’t render a truly informed opinion on that subject. I am a Star Trek fan going back to early childhood in the 1970s, and have voiced my extreme displeasure with the recent remakes, which I abhor with a singular disgust.
Addressing “Avatar” one last time, I do feel pity for those fans who are so caught up in it that they are loathe to return to their boring and miserable lives, who suffer from enormous withdrawal symptoms. Such is the culture we live in today that is so debased and downbeat that many have little to nothing to look forward to other than fantastic fantasy films. This is so terribly wrong. Contrast it with 55 years ago when almost everyone was looking forward to the future and the space age and the wonderful things it would bring in reality. It’s like we fell down into a giant dark pit. Hopefully soon this will change, though too many dark forces like it just as it is.