Suited and Rebooted

Perhaps someone can explain to me the point of an Alex Rider adaption in which 12 minutes into the first episode a character says of the eponymous child hero “He’s not a kid anymore.” I mean, hellooooo? He’s supposed to be a pint-sized James Bond - a purer, more fun version of Britain’s finest secret agent, with an additional dose of whimsical wish-fulfilment and a certain slightly subversive worm’s eye view on the world of international covert operations. Why have a kid Bond who's not a kid?

So the big problem with Amazon's latest Alex Rider reboot is simply that Alex is too... big. To be fair, Alex Pettyfer was too old back in the 2000s movie version. But Otto Farrant, although winning in so many other ways, is literally in his early 20s. As it happens, apart from that Farrant's version of Alex is generally speaking an improvement on Pettyfer's. His new Alex is clever and fun and likeable, and he has a certain based humanity that Pettyfer's lacked. Jack is important to him, even when he's "under cover", and he has a low opinion of "hippy bullshit". And in fact it's only every now and again that he slightly overdoes the gawky teenager schtick - wearing the sleeves of his Point Blanc yellow uniform tunic halfway over his hands, for example, or blundering about in a too noticeably oafish teenage manner even when supposedly on a paramilitary operation. The story too from time to time seems overtly at pains to make the point that he's s child, to such an extent that by the end of Episode 7 he's started to feel a lot like a passive hero - a Raiders of the Lost Ark-style glorified hanger-on in his own franchise. Of course that's pretty much par for the course in the age of woke heroism. (There are a couple of times when I wondered is this new Alex Rider's uncle had even taught him to fight.) But it also severely undermines the wish-fulfilment element of the whole premise.

Having said that, one of the franchise's "structural jokes" holds up surprisingly well. Alex thinks his uncle is boring even though he’s really James Bond, and it works on various levels. Obviously everyone is supposed to think that spies are boring anyway, no matter how dangerous and unpleasant their real work is. And of course, albeit on a slightly meta level, if Alex is supposed to have the makings of a super-spy it is mildly improbably that he never worked out for himself what his closest male relative did for a living. At the same time though children tend to think their older family members are boring just because. So if James Bond had had a family, what would they have thought of him? (No man is a hero to a valet. And when Mark Twain was a teenager he thought his father was the stupidest man in the world. And so on. My parents were both doctors, and for virtually the whole of my childhood I didn’t really know what that really meant. It's hard to imagine one's parents ever doing anything particularly interesting or important, and no matter how cool other kids think your dad is to you he's just... your dad. Such, I suppose, is the price one pays for telling the kid it's time for bed, or for not answering questions about sex.) 

When it stops being a joke, of course, we're supposed to find it tragic and moving that Alex Rider doesn't think his uncle's job was cool and doesn't want to follow in his footsteps. And on one level we can sympathise. Alex blames MI6 for is uncle's death, and sooner or later we're going to find out that he was quite right to do so. And of course it's worth bearing in mind that even the sorts of things that James Bond finds enjoyable (drinking and gambling, at least - let’s not mention the other thing) can be tedious to a teen who just wants to hang out with his mates. But it's also admittedly a bit of a stumbling block for the whole Alex Rider concept! He’s a fantasy character made to appeal to children, so why exactly doesn’t he enjoy doing what he does - in the same way, it has to be said, that Bond does (or at least Sean, George, Roger and Pierce’s versions of him did)? We can certainly imagine most teenagers in real life wold want to call it quits after one or two frightening and painful escapades. But at least since the time of Rudyard Kipling's Kim (not to mention Hergé's Tintin) most children, teens and adults have enjoyed fantasizing about having thrilling covert adventures. A young-but-not-that-young Bond, who Harry Potter-style has Bond-like powers from an early age without even speculating why, and who then turns out not actually to want to go to Hogwarts, just isn't quite so appealing as a character.

So what in fact does a likeable but slightly dull twenty-something version of Alex Rider bring to the spy-game table? The original Alex was supposed to be unobtrusive enough to masquerade as a child in a fake family (the plausibility factor) and un-threatening enough for his opponents to underestimate him (hence the wish-fulfilment!), not to mention small enough to fit up chimneys and down ventilator shafts (subverting and deconstructing the genre!). But what is the USP - either to children or, as an intellectual challenge, to a writer - of an Alex Rider who is quite literally old enough to do all the things James Bond can do, including smoke and drive, and who doesn't even want to do any of them? In the first episode he drinks an alcoholic cocktail - albeit a disgusting teenager one, which he doesn't particularly enjoy - and beats a man's face into a bloody pulp with his bare hands. I mean, OK. But so what? He's like Bond, only slightly more annoying and nerdy? Well it's a perfectly legitimate take on the genre, given that Fleming himself saw Bond as less of a hero and more of a morally compromised geek who just happened to be good at what he did. But is it really interesting? And is it even really Alex Rider?

“Well, you can’t imagine Bond following super-villains on Facebook, can you?” I mean, really? I’m in my 40s and my parents use Facebook more than I do. What exactly does Horowitz (currently approaching retirement age) even think he knows about modern teenagers? (Do modern English teens use American terms like "grounded"? Do they still say "lame"? Do they panic when they lose their mobile 'phones? I mean quite honestly I don't know. But does Horowitz know more about them than I do? Alex and his friend are clearly supposed to be uber-retro (into Kurosawa, going double dating like in the 1950s, etc.), but even so... And how exactly is a teenager in the modern world of social media supposed to go incognito anyway? Indeed, why choose to set Alex Rider in the “real” world at all? Why not just kick off in some crazy fantasy spy school (some place like Rugby College, for example) and then take it from there, just making Alex the best of them, with his own dark and tragic secret, and then launch him into some fun screwed-up kid-Bond scenario?

In fact why the need even to give Alex Rider an origin story? Even the Daniel Craig Bond didn't (quite!) go that far. Whatever else you might think of Agent Cody Banks, at least they called that one right. So just kick off with Alex on a mission with a couple of adults. The adults screw up. Alex chases the baddy with desperate speed and ferocity. Adults poring over monitors yelling abort. Others saying who is this kid? Alex recovers the MacGuffin but the baddy escapes. The adults are all stunned by how good he is. Climax with hero shot, voice oov says "That's Alex Rider!" - and cut to Bond-esque opening credits. Main story opens with Alex being Bondishly arrogant and insubordinate to his (adult) superiors but also sweetly charming. Interestingly you’d actually have to have a bit more realism than you’d expect from Bond. (The adults would have to care about Alex in a way that M seldom does about Bond, and Alex would have to have a certain amount of vulnerability, which of course Bond tends not to have. But that’s a minor gripe.) And it could definitely be fun. After all, there are plenty of things a child secret agent could do that would be genuinely interesting. Why not have him infiltrate an inner-city child gang, or a slave racket? Why not a cult, or an army of child soldiers? Alex Rider chasing drugs mules and underage prostitutes could be genuinely gripping. Or just have him being a kid investigator nonchalantly picking up on clues that adults drop when their guard is down, and only occasionally going full Jupiter Jones or Hardy Boys.

There are times indeed when one starts to wonder whether the writers are actually trying to subvert expectations. Alex Rider being the shy late arrival at a teen house party? It's just not him. Actually Alex Rider being another lad's wing-man is just as bad. (In the books Bond was actually much more matey with his male colleagues than the unpleasantly and obsessively hetero-social character in the movies - he genuinely enjoys drinks at the club, a round of golf with Bill Tanner, etc. But he's still an alpha male and never just another man's support staff.) And we see that he's good at climbing drainpipes and opening locked drawers. So what about his other powers? It would be nice if he could turn up at a party and immediately recognise everyone there. More importantly, he needs to have a stiff upper lip when he hears about the death of his uncle. Alex blubbing just is problematic, and although over all Farrant does a competent job, it takes a long time to warm to the boy. He doesn’t have Alex Pettyfer’s chiselled good looks, nor indeed Daniel Radcliffe’s blinking prepubescent winsomeness. Come to that, he doesn’t have Nicholas Rowe’s vowel sounds or Tom Holland’s impressive physical assets. Soft brown eyes, a pudgy round friendly face, and the dorkiest hairdo this side of the last ten years (with a bad blond dye-job to boot). And he cycles. With a cycle-helmet. (And for all that this is supposedly a grittier, more realistic version of Alex Rider, it has a seriously fantastical fantasy version of London. Is this based on real life - or at least on the lives of the sorts of teenage boys who read books - or is it based on Hollyoaks?)

The death of Alex's uncle on the other hand is more realistic than the ludicrous scene in the film version with Damien Lewis hanging upside down from a helicopter. But it's also surprisingly grim for a series that is fundamentally still for children. And it does upset the genuine subversion of the opening line of the book of Stormbreaker. Fourteen years ago they were aping the vibe and conventions of the Brosnan films, mere months before Casino Royale would sweep them all comprehensively away. Now they seem to be out-Craiging Craig, and the contrast between Rider Sr's death and the silly slapstick death of the baddies' first victim in the opening pre-credits scene is jarring. MI6 meanwhile is located in a multi-storey car-park. (Echoes of the warehouse chic of 2011's pretentious but substandard version of Tinker, Tailor?) It's worth remembering that there's a difference between being gritty and morally complex and being actually realistic. In Episode 7, for example, MI6 start almost randomly murdering people on the testimony of a teenage boy. (I mean, WTF? And Horowitz self-identifies as a "liberal" - although he also writes for The Spectator. Natch!) In the end of course, although they're happy to murder the baddies' guards, they don't (so far as we can tell!) murder the clones. But then we don't find out what happens to them either.

The baddies for their part initially show a good deal of promise. Point Blanc itself has a surprisingly cool creepy Overlook Hotel vibe to it (with maybe a touch of Agatha Christie) - which is (presumably!) clever, given that it is (apparently!) deliberate. Is the main baddie a Malthusian? It's one of the oldest Bond villain tropes in the manual - going back to Stromberg and Drax (not to mention Richmond Valentine in Kingsman). Alex (finally, albeit briefly!) gets his shirt off - for a medical examination. And the episode closes on a Prisoner-esque brainwashing montage! And there's an implicit promise that over the next few episodes we're going to see something clever and "psychological".† So suffice it to say that the eventual cliched rubbish about Nazis and human cloning is a big, big let-down. Even the dramatic double double bluff with the Alex clone in the last episode - with the dangled possibility that the real Alex was left behind at Point Blanc and the duffers at British intelligence have inadvertently rescued his clone - doesn't last very long, with the clone giving himself away almost straightaway when he bludgeons a Swiss motorist to death. (It's classic movie nasty Naziness, apparently!)

In fact it's in the final episode that the whole thing genuinely starts to fall apart. The theme song for one thing is still terrible. (The lyrics are one of the few things that aren't a patch on the 2000s version, despite being tediously ear-wormy.) And by the end the writer has given up even trying to make any of it make any sense. How did the clone find Alex's address, for example? In any other genre it wouldn't really matter, but this is a spy series, where ultra-clever operatives follow clues and dropped titbits, so even "in genre" we ought to have the right to know. And Alex keeps a spare school uniform at home. (Really? I'm quite sure I've never met anyone who did that.††) Still, on we plod! The arrival of the clone at the school is very Terminator. (They reprise the same vibe in the disco scene. "I'll be back!" Yeah, cheers love, but we get it. As with the Overlook Hotel atmosphere of the middle episodes, one presumes that directors know what they're doing when they do things like this. In fact even the car park stuff is reminiscent of the sort of thing we used to see in an earlier era.) And are we even supposed to know which Alex is the clone and which is the real one? And if so how? (To be honest, it would be more interesting if the real Alex was a bit of a dick, but we know that's not going to happen even in a "modern" and "edgy" teens' TV series - even on the Internet.) We then go on to discover that Yassen Gregorovich is far more bad-ass in this version of Alex Rider than he was either in the books or when he was played by Damien Lewis. Mrs Jones brandishing a takeaway coffee at the end just put me in mind of Aidan Gallagher - seven years younger than Otto Farrant and umpteen times cooler! (Alas, even in post-Potter 2020, British telly (even online telly!) still can't bring itself to cast minors in even semi-adult dramas.) And to round off, of course, we have "The book was better." (Post-modern? Moi?)

So, what did everyone else think? The Grauniad reckoned it was "escapist". (Subtlety and cultural complexity aren't exactly their strong suits.) NME were correct that the series didn't (even!) identify its target audience.††† (To be fair, that may go for a lot of Amazon's original output. Who else watched Man in the High Castle? Or the new Tales from the Loop series, for that matter?) And The Indy thought the series caught the books' "momentum" - which is a little bit perverse, given that I could have read Point Blanc several times in the time the series took to tell its version.

And finally, of course, how does the new version of Alex compare with the old one?

Well, personally I was never entirely sold on Alex Pettyfer, who once again was himself much too old to play Alex Rider (when he eventually did, that is - Horowitz tells the story of how he spotted his perfect Alex whilst watching a TV-version of his own alma mater's literary finest hour). Alex Rider with the nervous energy of a twelve-year-old Christian Bale would have been electrifying. Alex Rider as a languid teenager was less so. But Alex Rider as a twenty-something pretending to be a languid teenager just felt slightly... deadening. There's nothing really wrong with Otto Farrant's take on the character. But he is too darn old.

Interestingly I didn't even notice the almost total lack of gadgets in the Amazon version. Yes, I know this is Craig-ification. But clearly I didn't miss them. The gadgets were always the most child-friendly element of the Bond films anyway, and it's slightly gauche of a an actual children's author to rely on them too much. Yes, I know Roald Dahl had them. But if you look back on his Bond work it's surprising how few even he actually used. (Who needs pen guns or magnetic watches when you've got spaceships and ninja?)

So what are the other pros and cons of the earlier version? Well Alex Pettyfer did at least look like Alex Rider, albeit too old and quite obviously the wrong side of a teenage growth-spurt. (And his eyes were the wrong colour, but then so were Daniel Radcliffe's.) But on re-watching one notices Ewan McGregor albeit briefly injects a surprising amount of warmth and humanity into Ian and Alex's man-boy relationship - something painfully lacking in the new version. Horowitz's gimmicks - the BMW in the car-crusher (in a nod to Goldfinger) - may have seemed fun to him at the time. But plot-wise they're pointless, and on re-watching they seem gimmicky without being fun. The fetishization of modern London is a peculiarity that both versions share, and one wonders why. The beginning of The World is Not Enough was actually quite a good in-joke for long-term Bond fans. (And let's face it, every red-blooded Englishman is, deep down, a Bond fan.) Back in the late 1970s and early1980s we saw Bond cause chaos all over Europe (Venice in Moonraker, Germany in Octopussy, Paris in A View to a Kill, etc.). So bringing the carnage home to dear old London Town was genuinely fun. But transmogrifying Bond into a teen riding a bike (with or without a helmet) over Albert Bridge or past the Shard really is just... lame.

Back in the 2000s version, Bill Nighy as the M character clearly thought he was doing a straight-up Bond spoof - and to be fair Bond spoofs have been done plenty of times before and since. To this day though I'm still not entirely sure what the point of them actually is, Bond himself so often having been a send-up of himself. (You may as well try to satirise Donald Trump.) So for example Nighy apparently decided to make Blunt gay. (And if he's not, why does he have the statue of a man's nude torso in his office?) It's a bit of a bum note by anyone standards, given that even Dumbledore didn't officially come out until after the first series of the Warner Bros films was finished. So needless to say his more down-to-earth equivalent in the new version is a vast improvement. In fact generally, the darker, more cynical tone of the new version - not to mention its quite on-the-nose observations about the nature of an over-mighty and unaccountable state bureaucracy, complete with intrusive immigration and child protection services - is far more rewarding than the smug jokiness of Nighy and Stephen Fry in 2006.

The Indy's woke snigger about the cast now being more "diverse" was on reflection especially ill-judged. Mrs Jones is now white (again), whereas in the film she was black. But to be honest I can't say it's much of an improvement. Sophie Okonedo played her as a one-dimensional callous bitch, and frankly that was all that was required. Conversely, in the new version Alex has two black females thrust in his direction, but the only girl he shows any serious interest in is the surprisingly attractive white girl who wasn't even in the books.

One does slightly despair of the Army's replacement of the Navy in British popular culture's representation of the Armed Forces. And the fact that Alex is very clearly not a little kid is particularly painful in the scenes in the Pettyfer version where he's dropped in with real soldiers. (He's actually taller than Wolf. Was everyone just too polite to mention it?) Indeed there are plenty of 16-year-old heroes in basic training in real life and no one (except perhaps the buffoons of Amnesty International or Human Rights Watch) thinks anything of it. And, er, why is he doing basic training in a Special Forces camp anyway? And, er, why is he doing basic training anyway, when it's already been established that his uncle trained him to within an inch of his life? How is running around in DPMs with a rifle and doing the sort of assault course that kids in the CCF do for fun (Think about it...!) going to help him be a secret agent? One is left with the distinctly uncomfortable feeling that the writer and director simply needed a 1980s-style "training montage" to cover the dramatic caesura between Alex Rider the slouching schoolboy and Alex Rider the hardened superspy. So happily all this nonsense is missing from the new version (even if it is nice to reflect that in 2020 blacking up have would be seen as "problematic").

On the cod training front, now that one comes to think of it, Dap is similarly painful in Ender's Game - the subtle, complicated pedagogue of the book reduced on film to the most toe-curling cliché of a drill sergeant, and wince-inducingly realised at that. And in truth what the film version of Stormbreaker has in common with that of Ender's Game is that they're both similarly well-meaning and surprisingly honest attempts to adapt their source material: they just fail, albeit for different reasons. Ender simply found it impossible to translate a moral that Hollywood wasn't ready to hear into a modern kidult sci-fi movie. (Also, the problem of making a big-screen roman a clef about a child soldier in space between the ages of 6 and 12 was never going to be one any director was ever going to be seriously interested in solving.) But with Stormbreaker one just got the feeling that no one really thought ahead. Horowitz knows how to make great British telly. Why exactly did he trip over his own feet making the leap to tinsel-town? (It must be said though that thanks to a comparative lack of time constraints there is actually space for subtlety and depth on the telly that there simply isn't on the big screen.)

For what it's worth, my own feeling is that wish fulfilment simply works better in children's heads than it does on the big screen or on the small. Bond only works because adults when they watch him are normally sufficiently well lubricated to enjoy him. And even Bond in any "real-life" military context is problematic. It's taken for granted that the 00 agents are better than than the SAS (who are in turn better than the Paras, etc.). So the military themselves can only ever form the background to Bond (as they do, for example, at the beginning of The Living Daylights). He can pop on his old uniform from time to time for nostalgia purposes, but he cannot really be on active duty with them.

The biggest problem with the film of Stormbreaker once again is that it genuinely didn't know whether it was supposed to be funny or not. In fact the problem with tone is THE problem par excellence. The books were supposed to be a straightforward children's James Bond, with the added bonus that an adult would get the knowing deconstructionist angle. The film, unfortunately, is just another knock-off spoof (like Teen Agent and Spy Kids and Cody Banks - and, for that matter, Young Sherlock Holmes, Robin Hood Jr, etc. etc.) of a film series that (at the time!) was increasingly becoming a spoof of itself. And let's face it, a spoof has to be clever not to make the average viewer not want simply to turn off and watch the original. Again, thankfully, that's a problem that the new version has dealt with quite definitively. 

There is of course a fundamental problem with Bond himself as a character. Basically he's just a nerd who's good at what he does: he's fit, he's clever, he's competent. In every other respect, he's barely a hero at all: he drinks like a chimney, he smokes like a fish, and he bangs like a shithouse door. He also lies and murders for Queen and country. In order even to root for him as a character, implicitly we have to enter the morally ambiguous world that he inhabits. He's not someone you'd take home to meet your parents. He's not someone you'd expect to see in Heaven.

Horowitz for his part factors all this in, but in taking care of Alex's morals he also (once again!) makes Alex less fun: what's the point of indulging juvenile fantasies if at the same time you're implicitly wagging your finger at them? More to the point, how exactly is the average juvenile reader supposed to sympathise with Alex Rider when he spends all his time chafing at authority and kvetching about all the exciting adventures he's forced to have? (Would J K Rowling's stories really have worked if Harry Potter hadn't wanted to be a wizard?)

I suppose it remains to be seen how Horowitz eventually finishes his series and how he completes Alex's character arc. It's quite hard meanwhile to imagine how much longer Amazon can carry on making a surprisingly watchable TV-version of said series with a lanky adult playing a child in the lead role. But then there is also time for them to iron out a certain amount of early episode weirdness and continue, at least for a couple of years, with a series that so far has shown a good deal of genuine promise.

*One actually wonders if JKR's secret entrances for the Ministry of Magic were really inspired by the film version's highly questionable photobooth entrance to MI6 in Liverpool Street Station. (The film of Stormbreaker - complete with Alex's slightly out-of-order "Hogwarts" snark, which made it into the trailers though not the final cut - came out at about the same time as Rowling was writing Deathly Hallows.)

†Teenagers are "rebels" who hate their parent, school teachers, legitimate authority, etc. And so are Bond villains. So is that how they get "turned"? (It's a familiar moral to anyone who's read up on how the Nazis "seduced" young men in the Hitler Youth. But it's also bollocks. In real life teenagers just want their parents' approval, and only become frustrated when it's not forthcoming, when they feel confused and frustrated about others' expectations of them, etc. - and of course at the intrinsic and extrinsic physical limitations of their current states in life. They aren't per se anti-authoritarian, rather than simply expanding their ego boundaries.) But are they going to turn him not against his undercover parents but against the service itself?

††As it happens, the decision to go with school uniform (and a "realistic" London academy-style comp) was definitely the right way to go - vs. the cool fantasy (Sex Education-esque - because this is Amazon, so suck on it, Netflix!) American-style school in the Pettifer film. The only slight problem of course is that it feels as if it's compensating for the fact that all the series "child" actors are basically adults. And whereas once again one despairs of a kid-version of James Bond having "romantic" interests (becuase, once again, what's the point?), Kyra is actually an "interesting" person, and whereas in the books Alex is fourteen, here he's twenty-three. So can we expect kissing in future seasons? I hope not, but then this is the 2020s.

†††In fact towards the end I very much started wondering just who else was actually watching this? Were American and Korean teenage girls swooning over Alex's bangs? Were shitty London neo-corporatist "academy" schools going to be the new Hogwarts? Were beanie hats going to be retro nerd Bond-spoof sidekick cool? (Again?)