I was traveling when No Time to Die premiered and didn’t get a chance to see it until a week ago. I’m not sure why it’s taken so long to collect my thoughts, especially since I wasn’t able to get anything major done until I did. This is a film that gives you plenty of food for thought, and unlike its predecessor you can’t be indifferent to it. Apologies in advance for the length of my comments.
It’s certainly the best-directed Bond film in years. Skyfall had moments of style and Spectre had a stylish precredits sequence, but No Time to Die is genuinely stylish. And what is a Bond film without style? The compositions, camera placement and angles, and production design (by Mark Tildesley) are a pleasure. Cary Joji Fukunaga and Linus Sandgren can take a richly deserved bow and are welcome to return for a future outings.
The lengthy pre-credits sequence had more verve, excitement, and style than all of Spectre, though I wish Craig hadn’t speedwalked through the gunbarrel again. Michael Wood in the London Review of Books makes a fascinating point: this is the first Bond film to devote so much time to memory via flashback, and the flashback is within the memories of the female protagonist. When was the last time so much of a Bond film took place in the heroine’s head?
The pre-credits action sequence is also the most memorable in the entire film. The “Oh s%&*” moment when the Aston was surrounded gave real chills, while the machine gun donut is the sort of clever solution required to prevent action from growing stale (as it does toward the end). As Bond took on Spectre’s minions I thought back to Raymond Chandler’s comments on Bond in his review of Diamonds Are Forever: “I like him when he is exposing himself unarmed to half a dozen thin-lipped professional killers, and neatly dumping them into a heap of fractured bones.”
The film also succeeds in balancing sex appeal with the modern obligation for strong/"badass” female characters. Paloma is charming; her scenes are the only universally praised part of the film, perhaps because they have a lightness and playfulness that the remainder of the movie lacks. Finally, someone who’s really enjoying themself! As for new 007 Nomi, she gets to be competent and feisty without overshadowing or thoroughly one-upping Bond, as Wai Lin did.
However, I did find her switch in attitudes toward Bond sudden, as if a page had been dropped from the script. I didn’t think there was an issue with Bond not sleeping with Paloma or Nomi; the audience got to feast its eyes on the pretty ladies without having to worry about how awkward an aging Craig might look with them in bed. One thing that slightly bothers me: as several people have said, both characters could be excised from the script without major damage to the story. I wouldn’t want that, but it suggests the script wasn’t fully developed.
Many have remarked on M’s behavior, and how feckless and/or malevolent it looks. I think the film missed a trick by not giving M a chance to express his motivations. Presumably he thought he was saving lives, by avoiding messy drone strikes. The film also doesn’t stress that his scheme would have also made the double-O section redundant. More could have been done with this and the reaction of the double-O section if the movie wasn’t so focused on “Bond’s story.”
What’s the point of Tanner in these movies? What does he do that Moneypenny can’t? In the books he was Bond’s closest friend in the Service and a refuge from M’s coldness, a way of figuring out what the old man was really thinking. In these films he’s M’s lapdog, a boob of a bureaucrat. Get rid of the character or repurpose him. Moneypenny could have used his screentime.
Felix’s death was a shock. “How will they deal with this in the future?” I thought oh so innocently.
No Time to Die charges out of the gate and gradually slows and sags, especially in the third act. The action sequences become less inventive and more laborious; the shoot-em-up toward the end was something out of a bad video game and badly needed trimming. A film like this should tighten up toward the end.
Zimmer’s score is adequate, if not memorable. If I was doing the score I would not want to quote John Barry—that inevitably makes me the lesser presence. Bond’s death music was pretty but so generic I wondered if it was recycled from somewhere else too.
The Slavic scientist is way too broadly played, right down to his cartoon accent. He’s a refugee from another film and hamfisted comic relief. His vicious racist turn is out-of-the-blue and he might have been a more interesting villain if we’d gotten hints of its earlier. It’s like the film decided at the last minute to make an analogue of the trolls who whined about a black female 007. That would have been a good idea if explored earlier on. His death cues the corniest line in the film. I can take bad puns and wordplay–I liked “blew his mind” because it capped a truly violent death–but they have to be really good if they’re also going to reference the film title.
The film does a fine job tying up and redeeming the loose ends from Spectre—whether that was worthwhile obligation is another matter—but gives shorter shrift to newer material. Rami Malek has a good creepy villain voice and demeanor but his character is an underwritten afterthought. His interest in Madeline and Matilde remains sketchy and abstract (as the film was afraid of just making him a pervert). He has to carry two plots—the destruction of Spectre and the exploitation of Project Heracles—and while his motivation for the first is simple and clear, the second is conveyed in a vaporous speech of convenience. It might have been better to just make him venal: he wants big bucks from selling the nanobot-virus and doesn’t care how many die as a result.
I wish Spectre and Blofeld hadn’t been introduced into the Craig era—introducing them in one film and killing them off in the next just wasn’t worth it. The organization and its leader were always meant to have more mileage. The first cycle of Bond films understood that, even with their shambolic approach to continuity.
I guess as an amateur Fleming scholar I should have been pleased by “Die Blofeld, die!” and the garden of death. But I’d rather see these elements not introduced rather than presented as sawn-off allusions. Don’t bother with the Garden of Death if you’re not going to do much with it. I don’t need or want Easter Eggs. If you can’t adapt Fleming without ripping sections out of context and drastically foreshortening them, you needn’t bother. Save the Fleming stuff for a later film. I’ll be satisfied if there’s material in his spirit instead of letter.
I was shocked to hear Bond say “we have all the time in the world,” then even more shocked to hear the song quoted on the soundtrack. And requoted. And then the end credits not merely quoted but recycled Louis Armstrong’s “We Have All the Time in the World.” I found this vampiric and cynical: the film knows older fans are predisposed to love this material and transfer its emotional weight to the film doing the quoting, while fans unfamiliar with OHMSS will immediately incorporate the borrowings into NTTD, possibly without realizing they were borrowed.
But the recyclings hammer in the message—this is Craig’s On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. It too will have epic length, an extra-emotional special story, and a stunning ending. The film is a going-away present for having the longest and most commercially (and probably critically) successful run of any Bond actor.
You can retroactively hear the wheels turning in the filmmakers’ heads: Let’s give Craig a big send-off, his very own OHMSS—the template for a special Bond film. That had Bond falling in love and getting married, but we can’t simply repeat that. Let’s raise the ante—Bond re-falls in love, gets a “wife”–and a kid! Now for the special tragic ending…well, we can’t just kill the Bond girl again, and killing the kid would be too much. And we can’t have Bond settling down with his family–that’ll leave people wondering if they’ll be in later films. Solution: Kill Bond. Don’t just kill him though, give him the complete heroic death, sacrificing himself for country and family. That’ll complete his personal arc!
The deck is stacked for death, what with Bond getting shot to pieces, having to staying behind to reopen the base doors, getting nano-poisoned in a way that threatens his new family, etc. Substituting Fleming’s YOLT ending wouldn’t work–it was already done in Skyfall and it would still leave Bond with a “wife” and kid out there. Bond’s genuine death signals a mandatory reboot and continuity wipe of his new family.
Spectre, structured to be Craig’s last film in case he didn’t return to the series, ended with him happily driving off into the sunset with his true love, his “personal arc” resolved. Craig’s return required restarting the “personal arc” machine because that became the formula of his tenure—Bond undergoing various stations of the cross. The second opportunity to bid Craig farewell meant he couldn’t just ride into the sunset again. Something bigger was needed.
So the Craig era wraps up in over-compensation. Bond re-finds true love! Bond has a kid! Bond dies the ultimate hero’s death! Bond cures cancer! (I might have made the last one up.) Sensing the grandiose contrivance behind this self-conscious self-apotheosis is part of what left me emotionally uninvolved by the finale. I wasn’t angry or outraged depressed…or tearful and happy. The problem is that I didn’t feel much of anything. I just thought, “Oh. They’re going there.”
I’m not necessarily dead-set against the idea of Bond dying, and the idea of Craig’s era being a separate continuity that can be closed off with Bond’s death is indisputable. But since my allegiance is to the series as a whole, part of me still thinks no Bond actor should enjoy the privilege of portraying the character’s death, regardless of his personal issues. That said, I don’t think much of the audience will be confused or outraged by this—Bond is doing what plenty of superhero films and comics have already done. That’s part of my problem with the last act, but more on that later.
I’m still trying to figure out why I wasn’t moved and why the death scene didn’t strike me as the way for Bond to go. In scripts terms it seems overdetermined and schematic. Visually it consists of Bond waiting around for rockets to vaporize him while he holds last minute cellphone conversations. I was moved more by Bond cheerfully proposing to light a cigarette under the rocket in Moonraker. (“ ‘Cheer up,’ he said, walking over to her and taking one of her hands. ‘The boy stood on the burning deck. I’ve wanted to copy him since I was five.’”) It goes to the core of the character in all his incarnations.
Part of my problem might be that Bond’s new family is not one I find very involving. Craig and Lea Seydoux have more chemistry here than in Spectre, but not enough to make their characters’ relationship flame into life. Madeline still seems over-determined as Bond’s last and greatest love. Seydoux is recessive performer, without the charisma and inner fire of Diana Rigg or the siren presence of Eva Green. She looks perpetually uncomfortable, as if she was waiting to go back to arthouse films. There isn’t a deep sense of connection with Craig, whose own performance style is minimalist and closed-off; his rhythms and hers never meet. No sparks fly because their acting styles refuse to complement.
The child actress who plays Matilde is adorable, but the character doesn’t have much personality—she’s there to look innocent and wide-eyed and be symbolic. Bond getting a woman pregnant and walking away has been done; Bond acting as a full-fledged father, and having a child play a large part in Bond film, is unprecedented. And perhaps a violation of the character’s fundamental appeal. Much of Bond’s attraction lies in being an escape from the humdrum real world, including domesticity. It’s why children never figured in the books or films up to now. Fleming took Bond up to the threshold of domesticity in OHMSS–and then dashed the prospect at the devastating last minute, because domesticity is what Bond is supposed to be an escape from. NTTD crosses that threshold; now we see Bond preparing breakfast for his child, driving his family around in a Range Rover, guarding his child from supervillains, etc. I found something deflating in this. Turning a powerful fantasy character into yet another devoted dad and husband—one of us—brings him too far down to earth.
I also disliked how the film treats having a (de facto) wife and child as the apex of human existence, rather than an embodiment of the everyday world Bond—whether on film or on the page—is in perpetual flight from. Bond is a “man of war”; when not on the job he is bored and subject to accidie. He ceases to be interesting in the real world, including the world of domesticity. He needs his job to save him from boredom. He feels most alive when on the job, and the idea that a “wife” and child would really compensate for his job’s absence would be depressingly sentimental if true.
Every Bond story has to find a balance between fantasy and its emotional counterweight. In return for living a life of danger and hardship, Bond reaps the rewards of the high life. For that danger to ring true there must be moments when Bond’s emotions are engaged, when “death is so permanent” and suffering is real. The deaths of Tracy and Vesper are painful reminders of this. At the back of an effective Bondian fantasy there should a whisper of melancholy, which ultimately makes the fantasy stronger. But the whisper shouldn’t become a scream: the novel of You Only Live Twice has a chapter of outright depression, but it’s also the Bond novel with the most quips. The right balance gives the fantasy a seductive plausibility and emotional foundation. The wrong balance results in a Bond who’s a hedonistic, callow, fop–or a glum and joyless bruiser.
Craig’s Bond is obviously keyed to an age where everyone is working through trauma and mental health issues. But his films have occasionally strained the fantasy they were ostensibly made to project. The relentless insistence on Bond being broken and neurotic, in need of healing, the ponderous approach to these issues, the bloated running times and awkward plot structures, the heaviness…
The fact that numerous screenwriters have tried giving Bond a child and making him a father perhaps points to a sense of exhaustion. There’s a limited number of novelties that can be wrought upon the character’s personal life. What’s left? Nor is giving him a child a step into uncharted territory. The trope of a cold-hearted protagonist discovering his humanity through a lost child has been done everywhere from superhero films to TV shows like The Blacklist. Bond’s death will also seem a familiar trope to anyone raised on comics and fantasy-based films. It’s what you do nowadays when your series has played itself out. Kill everyone off, then return with new actors, crew, and continuity a few years later. (Some critics have also compared NTTD’s ending to that of Armageddon.)
“I want to tell you a story of a man. His name was Bond, James Bond.” This sounds less like plausible dialogue between mother and daughter than high-flown self-mythologizing. Tom Sawyer got a laugh out of enjoying his own funeral. The franchise gets Christopher Nolan-style self-importance.
NTTD is less an organically-germinated story than a series of objectives around which a story was built—Bond must complete his “story arc” and “personal journey”, enjoying his apotheosis and glorious finale. I grant that NTTD closes out Craig’s “personal arc.” Though I sometimes ask which personal arc? The one resolved at the end of Quantum of Solace? Skyfall? Spectre? How many endings does this arc require? Is he having one in the afterlife as we speak? So many personal journeys. And now he’s journeyed into having a partner and child, which means journeying out of being James Bond. I don’t want to see a personal arc where James Bond learns how to be ordinary. I don’t think it adds anything to the character to know that he would sacrifice himself for his family. Who among us wouldn’t, aside from deadbeats? It was more unusual and special to have a hero so ready sacrifice himself for his country.
Comic book & comic book film continuity is less a floating continuity—that of the old Bond films, where Roger Moore could briefly reveal he was the same character Lazenby played and then get back to fighting Jaws—than a thousand continuities. Hard reboots are profitable, attention-getting, and easy to find excuses for. You can start and restart stories ad infinitum. Just bring in the new talent and start a new timeline. Batman rides off into the sunset as Christian Bale but returns a few years later as Ben Affleck in a different world from an entirely different creative team and vision. Now we do the same thing with Bond actors, except that the next Bond film after NTTD will be produced by the same people (even if Michael G. Wilson stands down, his son will take over). I wouldn’t be surprised if Purvis and Wade returned either.
If the next actor to play Bond is popular with the public and appears in several well-regarded films over the course of a decade of more, he’ll probably get his own death and apotheosis too. And if later actors enjoy the same luck, fans 60 years from now might be comparing Bond’s deaths the way we compare Bond’s cars. The door’s been opened.
I know that floating continuity started collapsing with Casino Royale, but its maintenance had kept Bond different from other action franchises. Those had to have complete reboots because each really was a separate series, whereas Bond was a family affair stretching back to 1962. Bond’s death in NTTD marks a full admission that the comic book/ comic book film approach to continuity and death has prevailed.
But just as floating continuity gave plenty of opportunities for starting over, so does NTTD, which has taken the Craig approach as far as it can go. (A glorious apotheosis or a dead end, depending on your mindset.) And I hope when the series returns it rely less on cannibalizing its past (OHMSS will forever remain unique for being the first “personal” Bond story and being the least self-conscious about it) or repeating tropes set by bigger-grossing franchises. I would like Bond films to stand on their own merits again. How long has it been since a Bond film set the trends for action/adventure films? Not just in content but in style. Moviegoers went out of something like Goldfinger thoroughly dazzled—there was nothing else like it on the screen. Now I go out of a Bond film thinking about all the tropes it’s emulating. You don’t need ever more elaborate personal problems to wring emotion out of Bond–a well-told story can do that instead. It’s time for the series to ensure first and foremost that it’s delivering sophisticated, dazzling thrillers.
Congratulations to Daniel Craig on all his achievements as James Bond. No Time to Die won’t dethrone Casino Royale and Skyfall as his finest outings as 007, but third place is still an honorable one. On with the next Bond and the inevitable–and much desired–series course correction.
