Hmmm… unless M does know Bond is already riddled with the stuff prior to touching Madeleine at Belmarsh, hence his reluctance to have Bond go there. That said, Nomi is also riddled with the stuff having been at the party as well and dropping in like Batman and grabbing hold of Silly Doctor From A Tonally Different Film who has been wandering about, and M’s perfectly happy for her to search Blofeld.
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The true consequences when your boss doesn’t bother to read your paperwork.
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I’ll have to rewatch NO TIME TO DIE to ponder this…
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It seems that officials in the intelligence service either don’t know or don’t care as much as one might sensibly think they do.
Allowing Bond to be reinstated at all seems like a weird mistake, especially since M was so adamant in the prior film to be very suspicious of him.
Then again, this M seems to be clever and cold but is revealed to be a softie with fatal idiocy affliction.
In that regard, oh, how these Bond films reflect reality. They really are five minutes into the future.
*As for ABBA, they do have a nasty defeatist undercurrent hidden in their bouncy songs: „The winner takes it all“, „One of us (is lying, one of us is crying in a lonely bed)“, „Money, money, money (must be funny in a rich man‘s world)“ - the list is endless.
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Thinking about this mcnanoguffin, isn’t the whole point of it that you needn’t be anywhere near your target, all you need is their DNA? No need to drink tea with the president of X to get rid of the bloody ghoul, no game of golf with other creeps, no snipers, no bombs, no special forces risking their lives to get at the powerful and well-protected cancer foci the world suffers from. The weapon unfailingly seeks its own target and all you need do is lean back and wait for your enemies to turn into statistical numbers.
Why then does Safin bother at all with that weird party stunt? Okay, it’s probably much more satisfying to watch your enemies dying all at once - and makes for a better film sequence - but operationally it’s utter nonsense and he’d have had the same effect with sarin or FX or plain old napalm.
Same with targeting Blofeld. Why risk contacting Madeleine when he can just as well touch any stranger on a London street and within three days - or at most three weeks - Blofeld is history.
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With those 2 I think Safin was point proving. He could’ve had the vacant cia agent in his employ tag a random mi6 contact and it would’ve made its way there. Hell, being in the CIA he could just tag blondie and it would’ve eventually got there but, in his motivations, Safin was still that damaged teenage boy who thought attacking a spectre assassin in his home was a good idea.
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This.
It’s the personal touch of a narcissist who does not logically think but only seeks reassurance of his dominance.
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I am not completely sure where I say “yes” or “no” to.
I say “no” to the last sentence:
“Have I misunderstood this as much as I have misunderstood the innocent intentions of ABBA?” Or is this not the question?
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I have to admit that the nanobotech virus thingy in NTTD is a MacGuffin that completely loses me. I know the very essence of a MacGuffin is that it just doesn’t matter, but unlike say OP, where the various plots and motivations don’t make much sense on a superficial level, NTTD’s nanotechbots don’t even add any "drive” for the plot when I watch. Again, I’m not quite sure who’s up to what in OP, but the momentum generated by it drives the film along nicely.
Which I guess is all very ABBA. I don’t really care who the dad is in Mama Mia but I will tap my toes when Dancing Queen comes on…..
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The nanokillerbots sound like that white supremacist scientist’s wet dream and possibly also useful for any kind of operator having to deal with monsters they can’t easily reach by other means. But for a macguffin they are maybe a bit too elaborate - get your target’s DNA, spread the virus over the world’s population to hit them - while their actual usefulness isn’t really shown. Killing Blofeld doesn’t really count, Bond might have done that before and wouldn’t need some sci-fi virus to do it.
Their main problem is their purpose isn’t strictly to drive the plot but to give the film an excuse to sacrifice Bond at the end.
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They mainly serve the purpose of isolating Bond more and more until they allow him to sacrifice himself with nobody accusing him of operatic grandstanding.
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Not really using cutting-edge technology to its fullest potential then……
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The obvious uses for a plot device like the nanobots in NTTD are so obvious that it’s actually impressive on some level that they managed to not use them at all over the course of the film. Perhaps they were taking a page from OHMSS, which is essentially the plot of NTTD but a step and a half down in scale, with trying to wrap Bond up in a potentially world-ending plot, but have the focus be entirely on his beef with Blofeld and his romance with Tracy.
The problem with NTTD, though, is that they didn’t include any of that. Blofeld is behind bars and is dispatched within a matter of a minute or so once he finally appears. The romance is lukewarm for most of the film. Safin is an even weaker villain than this version of Blofeld, despite his significantly higher screen time (although, even with that, he’s still absent for large stretches of the film). With all of that said, the only thing we were left with was the nanobots, and they’re not used. Like… at all. Their sole use in the film is to give Q the ability to tell Bond that they’re basically akin to a forever chemical, there’s no getting them out once they’re in, which sets up his death.
All of this is set against a backdrop that in theory exists, yet never shows up on screen. If this were actually happening, in real life, the panic that would engulf the globe would be staggering. The chaos itself would be just as dangerous as the nanobots. They act like they’re containing the “virus” by destroying the island, but it’s already running rampant around the globe before they even discover the island. Bond and Madeleine, at the bare minimum, have been spreading it, and everyone they’ve been in contact with has spread it, and so on and so forth. Granted, they’re inactive, but given that they’re nanobots, they can conceivably be programmed wirelessly, thus presenting a global hostage crisis once someone else comes along and cracks the code on the Heracles project that would make Operation Thunderball look quaint by comparison. Yet, at the end, they act like everything is back to normal and M is inexplicably allowed to keep his job.
Sidelining this world-ending plot once again for the Blofeld angle and the Tracy/Madeleine romance would have been fine if any of that was developed in any kind of meaningful way. But, it’s not, and what we’re left with is a dull film that squanders the small handful of moments that were either fun or brought something to the table that we hadn’t really seen before.
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Wow, reading your very fine discription of the NTTD plot and sceenplay I even find the film worse than I already thought it was.
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True. With Bond‘s death I completely stopped thinking about that.
Judging from political events around the world, this is exactly what would happen.
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It would be if M was higher up on the government org chart than he is. He’s low enough down the pecking order to actually get the accountability that the character would have completely deserved at the end of NTTD, even if the accountability was delivered just in a performative sense to make it look like something was actually done to solve the problem.
And given how upset Helen McCrory’s character was in SF about M letting the NOC List out in the open for a few weeks, I’d have to imagine that she’d be conducted round the clock hearings on someone in the same job letting loose a “virus” that ended up spreading to quite literally every single human being on earth and was more of a threat to the public than nuclear proliferation.
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It’s getting worse and worse! 
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September 7.
In You Only Live Twice, shortly before she’s dropped into the piranhas, Helga is confronted by Blofeld with the fact that Bond is alive, on the basis that Bond’s Walther PPK is the only one in the World, or something.
Agreeing with Osato’s assertion that Bond is dead, Helga adds that it was in all the newspapers. Indeed it was; we saw the big front page photo of Bond earlier in the film.
Why, then, throughout their encounters, does Helga maintain Bond’s “Mr Fishaaaaa” alias? Wouldn’t she recognise him?
Proper or Slopper?
- Proper
- Slopper
0
voters
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Isn‘t she just keeping up the Fisher charade to see what he is up to?
Such is the impact of Bond movies on my brain - I already forgot the details despite rewatching them all 19 months ago.
You never think twice, it seems, the title should have been.
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Slopper as if she’s high enough up the Spectre ladder to personally report to Blofeld she should at least know the facial features of one of Spectre’s main opponents (and suspect the ‘death of James Bond’ was a ruse). Probably fell through between one of the several script rewrites and nobody cared enough to fix it. Sixty years later it’s up to us Bond-archeologists to interpret this shard from the past. 
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