The James Bond movies have been a few of the best spy movies ever created. And with the general improvement in the cinematography and budget, the ‘Daniel Craig Era’ stands apart from the previous James Bond eras.

Daniel Craig worked on a total of five films- Casino Royale (2006), Quantum of Solace (2008), Skyfall (2012), Spectre (2015), and No Time To Die (2021). During this period, he collaborated with various directors including Sam Mendes and Cary Joji Fukunaga.

There have been multiple movie reviews present for all these movies, so I thought of coming up with a few observations solely based on the movie dialogues and plotting some figures and graphs that could help covey the information. Let’s dive into the ‘Daniel Craig Era’ from a different perspective.

Part 1: Dialogues Vs Runtime

While pondering on how to approach a dialogue-based analysis, I came across multiple ideas. I began by counting the number of words used (spoken) in each of the five movies. (I could not find a dialogue dataset for it, so, I converted the subtitle files (.srt) to text format)

After a few steps of preprocessing, I counted the number of words spoken in each of the films and compare it with the corresponding movie’s runtime.

After a quick analysis, I realized that I was tokenizing unnecessary symbols (like ‘.’ or ‘?’). Such symbols, although necessary for sentence punctuation are not really spoken by any of the characters in the movies! This meant that the count of the ‘spoken words’ was a bit higher than the previously plotted values as such needless symbols were getting added to the total count.

So, after removing such symbols and keeping only the spoken dialogues in the data, here is how the graph looked:

Here the yellow triangles contain the previously unprocessed count of ‘spoken words’, while the blue squares contain only the spoken words in the movies (as ‘?’ or ‘.’ are not pronounced by the characters, they have been removed).

On observing the graph, we can see that there has been a parallel shift in the data points, meaning the symbols present in each of the movie scripts were more or less the same in number! Another point to note here (although quite obvious) is that- the longer the movie duration the higher are the number of words spoken.

The final count of the total words spoken in each of the movies is following:

Casino Royale: 6715 words

Quantum of Solace: 6426 words

Skyfall: 7417 words

Spectre: 7108 words

No Time To Die: 9477 words

Part 2: Frequently Occurring Words

The most frequent words can help us to identify and analyze patterns for a given context. With a similar intention of identifying patterns from the ‘Daniel Craig Era’, I plotted the most frequently occurring words from each of the five movies.

But instead of searching for the frequency list on plain dialogues, I removed the ‘stopwords’ from the input text. Stopwords are the most commonly occurring words that generally do not add value to the final analysis (e.g.- “the”, “is”, “in”, “for”, “where”, “when”, “to”, “at”, etc.).

Casino Royale

Quantum of Solace

Skyfall

Spectre

No Time to Die

On careful observation, we might find that each of these graphs has a similar pattern and all of them are exponentially decreasing! Further, looking at the x-axis, we might spot a few common words among them.

Part 3: Common Words

The x-axis of the previous graphs did have some common words. This observation motivated me to check if there was an interesting pattern forming up with the common and frequent words from the five films.

In the following graph, I have extracted the number of common words to all of the five films, from the top occurring words in each of the movie dialogue scripts. Simply speaking, if [‘well’, ‘know’, ‘bond’] occur in all the five films, while considering the top 10 frequent words from each of the films, (10,3) will be a point on the graph.

Interestingly, this graph is linear in nature! This means the number of common words in all films is directly proportional to the count of ‘most frequently occurring words’!

Here is are the common words from the top 100 frequently occurring words from all the five movies: [‘come’, ‘still’, ‘us’, ‘people’, ‘name’, ‘look’, ‘oh’, ‘could’, ‘let’, ‘like’, ‘find’, ‘back’, ‘right’, ‘tell’, ‘got’, ‘going’, ‘time’, ‘sir’, ‘need’, ‘would’, ‘thank’, ‘yes’, ‘go’, ‘man’, ‘get’, ‘think’, ‘well’, ‘know’, ‘good’, ‘one’, ‘bond’]

If you have recently watched any of the five films, you might realize that the above words have been constantly spoken throughout the movie.

For me, it was an interesting project to research and work on analyzing the dialogues of the ‘Daniel Craig Era’. I came across interesting patterns solely based on the dialogues of the films.

You can check out my work at Github

Thanks for reading 🙂