Most of the infernal devices never existed in the original Ian Fleming stories. “Our only excuse for using them” says screenwriter Richard Maibaum, “is that such devices are available and cry out to be buckled onto James Bond’s back.”

Interestingly enough, while most of the tech found in Quantum of Solace can possibly be made, Thunderball's $500,000 budget imagined up a whole slew of inventions that had never been seen before. Have movie goers become addicted to portrayals of Bond more rooted in reality, or are our gadgets so advanced now that we don't have to make them up? [Modern Mechanix via Neatorama]

To start with, real multitouch makes a stellar appearance with a giant Microsoft-Surface-style table which Judi Dench—the head of MI6—and other agents use with ease, simultaneously. In fact, the user interface on the table—albeit adorned for the required Hollywood eye candy—actually makes sense and is extremely attractive, gestures included. Everything on it is doable with current technology, even the part in which they place a dollar bill and it gets automatically scanned and identified.

There's also the huge video wall at M's office. Unlike the multitouch surface, this is a CGI effect. However, with enough money and the use of transparent OLED technology and gesture recognition, the video wall is also perfectly doable. In fact, I saw something similar in my visit to Philips Labs last August, although that transparent video wall—a simulation of a glass storefront—used projection rather than OLEDs.

Only a couple of technologies were exaggerated. One was Bond's cellphone camera capabilities—with 007 taking pictures of faces with 3D depth of field information from a very long distance. The other was the speed of data transmission between the cellphone and MI6's headquarters. However, you can perfectly imagine that all that may be real in the military world and just not available to consumers, specially looking at some of the latest camera and communications research.

But what really makes this movie is not the technology. Yes, it plays an important role: Bond gets geolocation information on the baddies, and he uses his camera to get some of their pics, which then are analyzed and cross-referenced by MI6 databases. But none of it is a gimmick. There is no magic zippo lighter capable of launching kinetic rocket fire balls and save the day at the end of the movie. The technology in Quantum of Solace is realistic and it integrates naturally into the film, it flows with the plot.

What makes it the best Bond movie ever is what makes an action movie good. The script to start with. Serious, but also witty, and with the right amount of reality stretching. It even has an underlying social theme, which is interesting and relates to the current world's political climate. Marc Forster's direction makes you wish he directed Indiana Jones IV. His movie runs like clockwork, with the action scenes being masterfully choreographed and filmed, and painting a deeper, much more complex portrait of not only Bond, but also M, who gets a lot more presence in this one (and is Judy bloody Dench. I rest my case).

And then there is Bond himself. Daniel Craig really makes the movie work with his presence alone. He's a badass, but feels absolutely human. He has flair and a taste for luxury—wait until he arrives to Bolivia to see what I mean—but he gets gritty and dirty all the time. He could be a psychopath, but you can see that he has heart. He can seduce a women into bed like the best Connery would do, but you can actually see that he cares about her. You can feel that he is a hopeless romantic below the cold surface. A guy consumed by the need of vengeance and the contradiction of being betrayed by the love of his life. Yet, at the same time, he still loves her to the point of risking everything, even while she is dead.

And he likes cocktails.

Yes. Go. See it. Now.

James Bond without Q is like toast without butter. Over more than three decades, Q’s work amazed audiences and saved Bond’s life. Q’s inventions confounded Bond’s adversaries and inspired engineers at the CIA—really—to stretch the limits of physics and adapt the most advanced technology to espionage needs. I used to run that department, the CIA Office of Technical Service.

“Q was an inspiration,” a long-time technical officer once told me. “When a new Bond movie was released, we always got calls asking, ‘Do you have one of those?’ If I answered ‘no,’ the next question was, ‘How long will it take you to make it?’ Folks didn’t care about the laws of physics or that Q was an actor in a fictional movie—his character and inventiveness pushed our imagination.”

Former Soviet intelligence officers have commented to American counterparts that Bond movies were carefully analyzed by KGB technicians. The Soviets believed that Q’s gadgets telegraphed the Western technical capabilities that Soviet counterintelligence would eventually face.

But Q’s devices, unlike those available to American cold war spies, always worked exactly as they were designed.

The late Richard Helms, former Director of Central Intelligence, noted this contrast with Bond in writing, “[Our] operational plumbing…included…versions of some of the gadgets James Bond always had at hand. It sometimes seemed the more impressive a device appeared in the workshop, the more fragile it was. It took some experience before case officers learned not to fling these prima donna utensils into the back seat of an automobile, but to treat them with the delicate hand they required.”

By the mid 1990’s digital technology was revolutionizing technical espionage just as the integrated circuit had done three decades earlier. IC’s made possible tiny bugs for clandestine audio, electronic communications devices and new sensors for collection and detection. But by 1999, software code—visually unexciting strings of ones and zeros—buried in a computer or a PDA, rather than sleek concealments, tiny bugs and miniature cameras, had became the heart of spy gear. In QoS, fast cars, exotic weapons, brilliant explosions and smooth seduction apparently remain, but the inestimatible Q and his amazing gadgets are gone, possibly forever.

Robert Wallace, a retired CIA officer, is the former director of the CIA’s Office of Technical Service and author of SPYCRAFT: The Secret History of the CIA’s Spytechs from Communism to al-Qaeda. Having appeared on Gizmodo many times in the past, he may be reached at www.ciaspycraft.com.

Gawker Media polls require Javascript; if you're viewing this in an RSS reader, click through to view in your Javascript-enabled web browser.