Warning: spoilers from the start
So let’s break up the text with a trailer...
M: I knew it was too early to promote you.
Casino Royale, 2006
Bond: Well, I understand Double-0s have a very short life expectancy, so your mistake will be short-lived.
“We have all the time in the world,” says James Bond with insouciance to his partner Madeleine Swann in the opening minutes of No Time to Die.
The line made my blood run cold. The world is not enough*.
There can be no happy ending for a Bond with “all the time in the world.” Every Bond fan knows that. So I watched the rest of the film with deep trepidation after six years of waiting, including 18 months delay triggered by the Covid pandemic.
No Time to Die is a terrific film, and it ties up the Daniel Craig Bond story arc way better than its predecessor Spectre, which began an unfinished story both for Blofeld and for Bond. But the spirit of Bond films isn’t captured primarily by their quality so much as their heritage. On this metric, NTTD is a letdown for this Bond fan. Essentially, it is not the film I wanted. It is a different film. So my struggles relate to my own criteria – criteria that the producers Barbara Brocolli, Michael G Wilson and Daniel Craig himself were not seeking to meet. This is my critique of a chicken madras on the basis is it too spicy, that it would have been better with lamb instead of chicken and with spuds instead of rice. I wanted a different meal, a different film.
The ending I wanted for Spectre would have seen Blofeld escape. It was not to be, and that’s in the past now. But that was salvageable, or so I thought at the time:
It would be implausible for the organisation depicted in Rome to have been brought to its knees so easily, despite Blofeld’s flaws. Let us see the tentacles of a truly powerful Spectre, headed as before by Christoph Waltz as Blofeld. Perhaps the pre-credit sequence could show the super-villain’s prison escape? Or a courtroom breakout at the point of sentencing?
World of Wad, 2015
Or, just as plausibly, he could have had his minions nobble the jury.
Instead Ernst Stavro Blofeld remains a powerful figure behind bars, somehow controlling his syndicate through his bionic eye. His influence pervades the whole film, but his character is inadvertently killed off by Bond part way through, after merely a few minutes screen time. Christoph Waltz is criminally misused in Spectre and under-used in No Time to Die. And you can’t just kill off Blofeld, notwithstanding that Roger Moore’s Bond dropped an unnamed bald man with a cat down an industrial chimney in For Your Eyes Only (the cat escaped). Blofeld is a reimagined staple of the Bond universe. He, with Spectre, is Bond’s greatest nemesis, and their reintroduction in the last film deserved to be so much more than a mere plot-point in this film from which to spawn another villain.
In fairness, it’s not as if the Bond series hasn’t mishandled Blofeld in the past, with three different actors portraying vastly different characterisations between 1967 and 1971. And then there were all sorts of legal issues that prevented the producers bringing him back until those were settled in 2013. It’s worthy of note that the Bond movie Never Say Never Again (1983) was in fact an official Spectre movie. It’s executive producer Kevin McClory held those rights and the rights to Thunderball which he had co-written with Ian Fleming and Jack Whittingham. EON Productions held the rights to the wider Bond franchise, but not to Blofeld, not to Spectre, until 30 years later. And in my view, when the opportunity finally landed they squandered it.
There is a story arc which runs from Casino Royale through to No Time to Die. And it’s a great character narrative which births Commander Bond into his 007 persona before tossing him about a bit and killing him off 15 years later. But frankly Casino Royale and Quantum of Solace work better as a two-film story. Skyfall is a great standalone Bond movie or a swansong for Judi Dench’s seven-film run as M (Olivia Mansfield). Spectre contrives, a bit oddly, to link itself, through Blofeld’s malevolence (“I am the author of all your pain”) to the previous three films, but it hangs together more naturally as the first of a two-film diptych with No Time to Die.
The path of this film divorces the Craig era from the rest of the franchise. And this is something that’s hard to reconcile with my firm view that Craig is the best Bond of the entire series. He breathed vigour and pathos into a character that will be hard for his successor to measure up to.
Before Casino Royale, there are really only a couple of movies that stray markedly from the typical Bond formula. The first is On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, which sees Lazenby’s Bond marry and then lose his wife Tracy. The second is Licence to Kill, in which Dalton’s Bond resigns his 00-status in pursuit of vengeance for his friend Felix Leiter who has lost his bride and his leg to a shark, at the behest of drugs baron Franz Sanchez. A couple of the Brosnan movies shake things up a bit, but on the whole, there is precious little narrative to link the films together. With the exception of Sylvia Trench (Dr No/From Russia with Love) no Bond woman (I’ll save ‘girl’ for later) survives the narrative from one movie to the next. In OHMSS there is some back reference to the earlier movies, to show that Lazenby’s Bond and Connery’s are, essentially, the same person. ‘James Bond’ is not a code-name, but a real person, a Royal Navy veteran, orphaned as a child, with psychological scars as you might expect, sacrificing his own humanity for Queen and country. In For Your Eyes Only Moore’s Bond visits Tracy’s grave. And in LTK, Leiter tells his new wife Della that Bond “was married once, but it was a long time ago.”
These moments aside, it’s really not until Casino Royale when the standalone adventure formula is booted into the long grass, the scars are explored, and the character arc becomes significant.
The death of Felix hit me hard – harder than Bond’s later demise. M & Q are office-bearers who can die, retire and be replaced. Felix can’t. He’s a forever professional associate of Bond and friend. The closest he has to a brother, excepting that doomed foster relationship with Franz Oberhauser (Blofeld). If you can kill off Felix Leiter, and indeed Blofeld, then frankly anything else is possible.
But Bond is the nearest thing we have to a listed character. You can’t tear down a listed building, even if you own it. My argument is that you can’t just kill James Bond even if you own the character. Sorry Barbara, sorry Michael, he belongs to all of us.
James Bond shouldn’t die. It’s a key attribute of the character that he doesn’t. He’s a man called James Bond who gets into exceptionally dangerous scrapes and doesn’t die… Everything else is subject to change: his appearance, accent, the extent and nature of his misogyny, his choice of gun, his favourite car. They’ve had him drinking Heineken for the last couple of films and it just about holds and we all understand it probably buys us a couple of extra car chases. Fine. But if you make him die, you might as well change his name to Eric. I wouldn’t have minded a film about someone called Eric Bond who died. Instead of the dangerous scrapes, it could be a family drama about the scourge of cancer.
The climax of the film is riveting and tragic, but it’s not just Craig’s acting or the film’s direction that gives it its power – we are moved because of the vast hinterland of warmth and nostalgia we feel for a character we’ve been watching all our lives. The current film-makers are wantonly expending emotional capital the vast majority of which was earned by other people. A precious resource has been squandered in one attention-grabbing and ultimately miserable moment.
The Guardian review, David Mitchell
I guess, like buses, dead Bonds come in threes. We lost Roger Moore in 2017, Sean Connery last year and now Bond himself. Auric Goldfinger’s hopes (“No Mr Bond, I expect you to die!”) are finally fulfilled.
But I am getting ahead of myself. The denouement is yet to come and I did say the film was terrific.
The story hangs together well and follows on coherently from Spectre. It is exciting and the narrative moves at quite a pace, so the 2 hour 43 minute running time feels 30 minutes shorter. I would have liked a bit more exposition. I found the Heracles plot-line and Safin’s ambitions a little hard to follow. There were times they might have let the film breathe a little more, even at the expense of some of the action. A couple of minutes more on Madeleine Swann’s relationship with Bond, and later with Felix too, would have been worthwhile, especially given the fates that they later suffer.
I wasn’t wholly convinced by the Bond/Swann love story by the end of Spectre. Given his history (Vesper Lynd), and what we already know about his character, would he so easily have quit the service for a new life with her? Probabilities aside, he did. It’s likely the relationship didn’t last very long before he cast her into the cold, onto a train in Italy, clutching her midriff, signposting to later developments. With hindsight, it seems she knew then of her pregnancy. It helps explain her keenness for Bond to sort out his demons, and then, at a moment of acute crisis: “there’s something I need to tell you.”
I really enjoyed the action in Matera, I loved seeing the Aston Martin DB5** doing all of what she does best. And the underlying drama between James and Madeleine moves the plot along. By the end of the film I fully buy the relationship – his profound regret that he has punished her due to his own trust issues, and the knowledge of their little girl Mathilde make the sense of loss more palpable, however limited the initial relationship.
The action throughout the film is well-handled. I especially liked the whole Cuba sequence with quirky CIA agent Paloma. And the Toyota Landcruiser chase scene in Norway – no Q-branch extras this time.
Nomi 007 is a great inclusion in the cast, a worthy riposte to those who say the next James Bond should be a woman. She is not a ‘woke’ caricature. There’s no reason at all that a Double-0 can’t be female, or black, and I’ll happily enjoy watching a James Bond of Colour in future. But no Jane Bond, thank you. The rapport between 007 and her predecessor was great, well conceived and nicely scripted.
I’m undecided about Safin. I loved Rami Malek in Bohemian Rhapsody – a real tour de force. Here, the character just didn’t do much for me. But his backstory is certainly motivating, and his nanotech plans are quite something.
We both eradicate people to make the world a better place. I just want it to be a little… tidier.
Lyutsifer Safin, No Time to Die
The Bond films are so often a reflection of the anxieties of the current era… The Cold War themes of the 1960s and 80s. The energy crisis of the early 70s (The Man with the Golden Gun), the space race themes explored in You Only Live Twice and Moonraker, the drugs war recounted in Licence to Kill. It is eerily prescient that the key threat in this film is tantalisingly close to a pandemic, one that claims some lives more than others, one that we’ve even wondered was it (Covid-19) born in a lab, like Heracles. Kudos to the filmmakers for exploring this theme in such a timely way. And if you reshot some scenes in the past 18 months, then fair play!
I think Bond knew Mathilde was his before I did. I just took Madeleine’s word for it. Just as with the deaths of Blofeld and Leiter, the presence of a Bond girl (the first, let’s face it) shakes up the format irretrievably. Can you imagine Bond whiling away his time in a soft play?
But of course he would give his all for his daughter. In the closing moments of the film James Bond is infected with a Heracles formula destined to kill both Madeleine and Mathilde. He can never touch them. It is the ultimate social distancing imperative. His very existence threatens their lives. His own time is short. It is fitting that he wastes little of it on Safin – three gunshots and he turns his attention to his family, while he awaits the incoming friendly missiles.
Bond’s death horrified me rather than saddened me. In the final scene, Madeleine says to their daughter: “Let me tell you a story of a man named Bond, James Bond.” John Barry’s evocative score from OHMSS is unanswerable, so it is here that I shed a tear, not for Bond, but for their loss. Mathilde is just a little younger than my own daughter Chloe.
Leaving the cinema, my primary feelings are of anger, towards the filmmakers. “You had no right,” I’m thinking. And yet, here we are. Rumour has it Daniel Craig insisted on this finality to take on the role one last time. I can forgive that judgement.
The Bond who burst onto our screens in 1962 ceased to exist in 2002 (Die Another Day). Sean Connery, George Lazenby, Roger Moore, Timothy Dalton and Pierce Brosnan all inhabited the same character, before he was reimagined in Casino Royale. Different actors, but the same Bond. And while he did not die, he is no more. The Casino Royale reboot births Craig’s Bond into a different universe. While he may be finished, so too is his universe.
And as the credits roll, we are promised – James Bond will return.
Bond: Everybody needs a hobby
Skyfall, 2012
Raoul Silva: So what’s yours?
Bond: Resurrection
* The World is Not Enough is not just the title of Pierce Brosnan’s 1999 Bond flick, but the family motto (in Latin, Orbis non sufficit) of Sir Thomas Bond, a 17th Century aristocrat, from whom James Bond’s own motto is derived, first referenced in Ian Fleming’s book On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, and later in its film adaptation.
** This retired Bond still has custody of a Q-branch DB5. He won an unambiguously different DB5 at a poker table in Casino Royale and later drives (and destroys) a DBS in the same film. Nostalgic cheers go up in the cinema when he unveils the Goldfinger DB5 (BMT 216A) in Skyfall, to drive M to his childhood home in Scotland. It’s destroyed at the end and rebuilt by Q’s team in Spectre. Then he drives off with it at the end. And that’s apparently fine with Q. Later in NTTD, we see the Aston Martin Vantage (B549 WUU) first seen in The Living Daylights.