I’m hoping to take my 93 year old dad to it when I visit him next month.
There’s a lot to process here, and much I want to address after reading your comments, but first off let me just thank the members of quarterdeck.commanderbond.net for the sense of community and safe space to discuss the events of NTTD. After watching many toxic reviews on Youtube, I am grateful to the forum members for discussing the film respectfully, and logically, among our varied takes and opinions. It’s so great to discuss CR, QoS, SF and SP among this community! And now NTTD. Not many of my friends understand my Bond OCD, but you guys (and girls) do!
Rightly or wrongly, NTTD is associated with the pandemic. Just as WandaVision was a reflection on remorse for loss and lost loves, so too will NTTD be forever inextricably linked with the pandemic. Whether its story proves a perfect metaphor for it, or a poor plot choice of unfortunate timing, NTTD will be a Bond film that people will reassess over time, much like OHMSS and LTK.
Felix Leiter: For the first time, I felt the filmmakers captured the fun of Bond and Leiter out drinking and socializing as in the Fleming books. Having rewatched CR afterwards, the line from NTTD that resonates is, “I had a brother. His name is Felix.” Brilliant.
Some critics have pointed out this is a movie about Madeleine, and not Bond. In a clever way, EON has put Fleming’s The Spy Who Loved me onscreen. A Bond adventure from a female perspective. If only Mathilde were named Vivienne, that would have sealed it.
Every decade give or take a couple of years, EON makes a sequel/homage to OHMSS. In 1981, FYEO opens at Tracy’s grave and gives us an older Bond, matured with experience (not bedding the teen Bibi) in a revenge story that should have happened in DAF. FYEO was originally the title of the Bond movie for 1979 (which became Moonraker.) In 1989, EON gave us Licence to Kill, a revenge movie where Bond avenges Felix’s shark maiming and his wife’s death. Ten years later came 1999’s TWINE where the references to OHMSS are so subtle as to be ignorable if you wish (“Have you ever lost someone, Mr. Bond?”). Elektra has a similar ski outfit to Tracy, Renard looks a lot like YOLT’s Blofeld, the title, The World Is Not Enough, is taken from both the OHMSS book and film.
And now we have No Time to Die, the most on-the-nose homage, reinterpretation of OHMSS yet. It uses its music, including vocal “We Have All the Time in the World,” beautifully. It’s a first for a Bond film to reuse one of its vocal song themes. It includes scenes from the OHMSS literary sequel, You Only Live Twice. It finally gave us a definitive Blofeld death. Seeing an angry Bond attempt to strangle Blofeld onscreen was such a thrill for me because it was in the novel YOLT. Of course, Tanner has to step in and stop Bond when he comes to his senses, but by then the damage is done. I almost wish Safin was actually Guntram Shatterhand at this point, not a pseudonym for Blofeld, but a fleshed out character with a Fleming name.
NTTD was the Bond film I always wanted to write. It had a female 00 character (though a woman is sitting in the chair of assembled 00s in Thunderball), it included Bond’s child (in YOLT’s pregnancy and Raymond Benson’s short story featuring Irma Bunt), and it had the Garden of Death. I would have left the ending more open ended, but EON still has options here.
Imagine Bond 26 opening with a new actor washed ashore with no idea of who he is. The audience isn’t informed either. We get the TMWTGG amnesia story where a brainwashed Bond is sent to kill M. This is an older Bond with no memory of his missions. Tracy, Vesper and Madeleine could still be part of his backstory. This isn’t a young Bond, or CraigBond, but an older Bond who’s forgotten who he is. For this to work, the MI6 team has to be recast–M, Q, MoneyPenny, Tanner. Craig’s Bond films can be a figment of this Bond’s imaginations just as you can interpret 1962-2002 Bonds as being a figment of Craig’s. It’s the only way to make everything canon.
EON has done this before. It’s ambiguous as to whether Connery in DAF is the widower from OHMSS. It could just as easily be a prequel. Likewise, FYEO is more a sequel to TSWLM or OHMSS than Moonraker. Brosnan’s Bond might be the same as Dalton’s but clearly not Connery’s. And yet Dalton’s Bond is Lazenby’s, who is also Connery’s. The continuity is fluid now that M, Q and MoneyPenny have been portrayed by different actors. It’s not the same person, but it is the same character.
And really, when did Bond die? He should not have survived the PTS fall in Skyfall. The song starts “This is the end.” Spectre opens with the tag, “The Dead Are Alive.” Some argue CraigBond died in Blofeld’s chair in that film, and Cary Fukunaga even pitched that idea to the Broccolis when he signed on. Others argue he may have died in the Aston Martin DBS in CR when his heart stopped. You can argue that CraigBond died in at least four of his five movies. The brilliant twist in NTTD is that the sacrificial lamb in a Bond movie, rather than a fridged female or a loyal ally, is James Bond.
And yet…James Bond Will Return. Long live James Bond.
