WHICH ONE IS THIS?: You Only Live Once
WHO’S IN THIS ONE?: Craig (Bond); Fiennes (M); Harris (Moneypenny); Whishaw (Q, now canonically gay); Wright (Leiter).
WHO’S THE BAD GUY, AND WHAT DOES HE WANT?: Some mask-wearing weirdo named Safin, who might be immortal, given that he is a full-ass adult in the prologue, and remains roughly the same age across not one, but two, subsequent time jumps. In a return to form for Bond baddies (a form which has been tamped down, for the most part, in the Craig era) Safin genuinely wants to wipe out the entire human race. Using a virus, no less!
WHO ARE THE BOND GIRLS?: There’s arguably only one: Ana De Armas as Paloma, a junior agent having a great time on her first mission, who breezes in and out of the picture in ten minutes. Then there’s Lashana Lynch… as 007!… who, blessedly, is never even hinted at as either a potential love-interest or bed-mate, but gives good spar with our Commander Bond. And in one of what will be several franchise firsts, Léa Seydoux is back as Madeleine Swann, and not just as a cameo (or a tombstone).
OPENING NUMBER?: Statues crumble, sand slips out of the hourglass, and DNA chains wrap around the digital world of Bond’s memories — which all makes enough sense in context, but feels a bit thin, not unlike Billie Eilish’s barely-there theme tune.
WHAT’S MEMORABLE ABOUT THIS ONE?: Well, theoretically it’s Daniel Craig’s last, which means we can now look at his five Bond films as a (quite fascinating, if I’m being honest) complete set. Also, I guess, it would be worthwhile to mark this review HEAVY SPOILERS FROM HERE. Cuz yeah: it’s memorable.
WHAT DO YOU RATE IT, OUT OF TEN?: I dunno, maybe a 5. It might be some kind of weird masterpiece, at the same time. Your mileage may vary; I gave Spectre an 8, and No Time To Die frequently made me think back fondly on how much I enjoyed Spectre. It’s also as direct a sequel to Spectre as Quantum of Solace was to Casino Royale. Like, I hope y’all enjoyed Spectre, or at least, watched it before watching this one, cuz you’re gonna need it.
We can have an entire conversation sometime about number/star ratings and whether they are a good idea or a horrible idea, but I’ll tell ya, one of the weirdest things in my entire relationship with that practice has got to be the 8 (or, ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️) I gave Spectre in 2015. I stand by it — partially because, when I wrote From A To Bond (in 2012), I really set my heart on the idea that the star ratings I gave each of the films were going to be fixed in stone forever, which is kind of nuts, but kept me from editing my Spectre review retroactively.
But I also stand by the Spectre rating because, as much as when I think about Spectre, I feel like I over-rated it, when I watch Spectre, I enjoy the hell out of myself. There’s something not quite right about that movie, I’ll fully admit, but whatever it is, it is not present for me in the actual act of watching the film.
No Time To Die might go the other way. I’ll candidly acknowledge that I did not much enjoy watching the film tonight… but I found it fascinating. I might watch it a bunch more times trying to unpack some of its weirder, more elliptical ideas. It’s trying to do some things that feel a step or two more evolved than anything that’s been in a Bond movie before; it’s also pretty drab, with interchangeable action beats and not even a whiff of a sense of humour. It doesn’t feel anything like any of the other four Craig movies, yet is also a definitive, concluding statement on his take on the character, and it connects and evolves the thematic intent of Craig’s whole Bond stint with what really feels like a summary argument.
If Spectre — weirdly, and not entirely successfully — dared to turn the Craig films into a single mytharc (“it’s all connected!” you can hear Charlie Day screaming), No Time To Die wants to talk about that mytharc’s themes. Image systems that have recurred throughout the pentalogy recur yet again (loved ones drowning; heroes getting trapped under a sheet of ice; people with colour-themed last names; Craig’s Bond going First Blood in a misty hinterland from which he darts and retreats like a wraith; blood as blood, and blood as more than blood). If classic Bond was “sex for dinner, death for breakfast,” Craig’s later Bond films have pushed time into the fore as death’s handmaiden — you can fuck all you want, but you’re getting older, and the end comes for us all.
Sex, death, time, life, and blood dance together in No Time To Die, not always successfully, but always purposefully. No wonder it took them (what feels like) a billion months to make this thing. It is as considered a film as this franchise has ever produced.
No Time To Die feels, I think intentionally, like late Fleming — You Only Live Twice or The Man With The Golden Gun, maybe, or the first of the non-Fleming follow-ups, Colonel Sun. A lost novel, where franchise mainstay screenwriters Purvis and Wade (bolstered by director Fukunaga, and incongruously, Phoebe Waller-Bridge) assigned themselves the thought experiment of archaeologically reconstructing what a true, “final” Bond novel from the author might have looked like, had the author lived to provide one. The writing is taking some wild swings, grasping at straws, using up more and more energy to find the juice. It needs a brutal edit that it’s never going to get (all the more ironic in the film’s case, given the extra 20 months they had to do so). The lean potboilers of the early novels are far behind, and perhaps the pen is getting heavy in the author’s hand, and the inevitability of time and death is colouring everything. (Novel) Blofeld’s Garden of Death is refashioned here as Sarin’s poison garden, a Sino-brutalist meditation oasis in the middle of a lost island lair, halfway between Russia and Japan (natch), where the villain is concocting his doomsday weapon with an impossibly large, impossibly dedicated army of faceless workers. The current 007 (Lynch) and the O.G. (Craig) plunge into this dreamspace to find a lost bride and a lost child. So much of this feels straight off the last page from Goldeneye, Jamaica (where Bond is hiding out when we find him, earlier in the picture).
The other obvious referent is On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, still one of the finest Bond films ever produced and the one that the really cool Bond fans (like me) scramble over one another to proclaim as their favourite. Hans Zimmer quotes the OHMSS score more than once here — not just the love theme, the other theme too; though he (like his predecessors) does not locate the sack to include John Barry’s “007” theme, alack! — in what is clearly the equivalent of an aural threat. After all, Bond has all but married Madeleine at the start of the adventure, and the filmmakers really want us to think that those winding Italian roads are going to prove as dangerous to her as they did to Tracy di Vincenzo. On Her Majesty’s Secret Service was not about death, but it built to a murderous exclamation point about cost; Craig’s Bond has interrogated the cost of all this more than once before, so death feels like too easy a solution to the Madeleine story, and No Time To Die reaches for something else.
More than a handful of times prior to our arrival at the Poison Garden, No Time To Die reverses the franchise-built expectations on us, the Star Trek Into Darkness of it all. It uses our knowledge of what’s come before to force itself to answer its own questions in different ways. Not only does Madeleine not die horribly, but when she reappears in Bond’s life five years later, it’s with a 4.5-year-old in tow; and not only is there an island chemical weapons factory to obliterate, but the chemical weapons in question are DNA-based; and not only is there a madman in a kimono at the heart of the Poison Garden, but he’s carrying the Bond-family-unit-coded poison in a blood vial.
It’s fairly clear where this is all going from the moment Léa Seydoux gets the god-light I’ll-see-you-on-the-boat-in-just-a-minute shot, and like many of the things about this film, I guess your mileage will vary by how on-board you are for the emotion at the moment when one of cinema’s great heartless cyphers does, indeed, decide to give everything to save (his) world. It’s not quite the last of the film’s firsts, but it is the big one: No Time To Die aims to refashion On Her Majesty’s Secret Service by sacrificing the other newlywed in the car, the one that should have died the first time. This time, it’s about death, not cost. The girl gets away, and so does her mother, and Bond gives them all the time in the world.
I said Bond’s death wasn’t quite the last of the film’s firsts. The last one isn’t a real first by any means but, indeed, an upholding of lengthy tradition: the final words on the screen, as usual, are “James Bond will return.” I call it a first, though, because I’m quite sure this is the first James Bond film to, if not quite canonically, certainly metatextually, acknowledge that the James Bond series is not a story. James Bond cannot return; we just saw him die, and it wasn’t the kind of death you slip out of via a submersible coffin in the Sea of Japan.
And yet of course he will return, because the James Bond series is not a story. It’s a series of discrete parcels of story; even in an era like this one, where it has bent over backwards and then some to insist upon an ongoing narrative that doesn’t really need to be there. I still maintain that the first, best way to watch any James Bond movie is to treat it as a stand-alone adventure: there, and then done, as disposable as Bond’s eons (pun intended) of fuckbuddies.
Except, for good or ill, this was the one where you’re not just out to sea if you don’t know a lot about how things went down in at least 2 of the preceding 4 films; it’s also the one where, I think, the accrued heart of the thing just ain’t there without the storytelling world that the previous entries built up. It’s the one where the authors dare suggest that there is a heart of the thing. You can do what you want with that: you can examine how Craig’s mission throughout has been, to one extent or another, to build out 007 as a character with complexity equal to his novelistic antecedent; or you can pull apart the film’s sentimentality as the inevitable grandstanding of a team completing its final curtain.
This is Craig’s fifth, and last; it’s also the 25th in the line, and I’ll be damned if I didn’t see Sir Sean grinning at me from somewhere near the bar, when Bond walked into the birthday party in Cuba. These films aren’t just films anymore, if they ever were. They’re an accretion of fragments, gestures, meanings, image systems, memories, intentions, smiles, stupid little jokes, echoing backwards across decades and forward into who knows what. Weirdly like a life.