Worth Mentioning - Life Is Far Away from Fair

We watch several movies a week. Every Friday, we'll talk a little about some of the movies we watched that we felt were Worth Mentioning. 

Cody gives some preliminary thoughts on the new James Bond film, No Time to Die. 

NO TIME TO DIE (2021)

For twenty years, my appreciation and enthusiasm for the James Bond franchise was through the roof. I watched the movies repeatedly, I read all the books, I was really excited every time a new movie was on the way. But then 2015's Spectre really deflated my fandom. That was the first time I wasn't hyped to see the latest entry in the series, because I didn't like that the character Blofeld was being brought back into the mix - and then when I saw the movie, I thought his reintroduction was very underwhelming, and elements of it were downright bad (the fact that they gave Bond and Blofeld a childhood "foster brothers" connection, just like Austin Powers and his Blofeld spoof nemesis Dr. Evil). While the first three films in the Daniel Craig era - Casino Royale, Quantum of Solace, and Skyfall - had gone in new directions and explored fresh ideas, Spectre was just a mediocre rehash of the past. For the "50 Years of 007" article series, I wrote about every one of the Bond films through Skyfall, and when Spectre was released in 2015 I fully intended to have an article on that one ready in 2016. But I had so little desire to give that movie the time and attention required to put one of those articles together, I still haven't written it six years later.

I started dreading the follow-up to Spectre the moment the end credits started rolling on that film, because I feared the franchise had gotten so enamored with the idea of rehashing the past that we were going to get some kind of On Her Majesty's Secret Service remake. At the end of Spectre, it looked like Bond had given up the spy business to pursue a relationship with Madeleine Swann (Lea Seydoux), the daughter of his late enemy Mr. White - and everyone (except Seydoux herself, apparently) seemed certain that we were going to see Bond and Swann together again in the next movie, even though Bond movies usually end with him spending time with women we never see again. And despite the fact that Spectre did not sell their relationship very well. If she did return, I could easily imagine them doing a version of OHMSS all over again after the Blofeld fiasco.

In the early days of my fandom, we could expect to see a new Bond movie every two years. Those days are gone, so now the Spectre follow-up has finally come along after six years (to be fair, the last year and a half of that wait was due to the pandemic), and thankfully it's not just another version of On Her Majesty's Secret Service. It does have a bit of an obsession with that movie, though. Some of the score is mixed into the new score composed by Hans Zimmer, Bond speaks the famous line "We have all the time in the world", and the Louis Armstrong song from that film is also featured. But it's not about Bond getting upset because Blofeld causes the death of his beloved.

No Time to Die... a title I really don't like, because the word "Die" has been used too much by this franchise over the last couple decades (Tomorrow Never Dies, Die Another Day, the QoS theme song "Another Way to Die", now No Time to Die)... misses the chance to use the long gap between films as an excuse to ditch Madeleine Swann, and instead picks up right where Spectre ended, with Bond and Swann going off to spend a happily ever after together. Of course, happily ever after is impossible for Bond, so their relationship is over by the time the title sequence plays out, accompanied by a Billie Eilish song. At least they both survive. Then the story jumps ahead five years, just like five years passed in the world between movies, and just like Avengers: Endgame had a five year time jump early in its story. This wasn't the last time I was reminded of Avengers: Endgame, either. I was also reminded of Logan. The Bond movies have always liked to align their ideas and styles with recent hits.

One thing that I have found frustrating about the Craig era is how little dedication Bond has shown to his job at MI6 over these five movies. He was going to quit at the end of Casino Royale, then after he was injured at the start of Skyfall he was missing and presumed dead for a while, then he quit at the end of Spectre. After breaking up with Swann, he didn't go back to work, either. He has just been hanging out in Jamaica for five years when his old CIA buddy Felix Leiter (Jeffrey Wright, becoming the first person to play Leiter three times) shows up and asks him to help retrieve a scientist who has been abducted by Spectre, which is still active even though Blofeld (Christoph Waltz) is imprisoned in London. Bond just left that mess for others to clean up, and they haven't. In the early Bond films, the name of the organization SPECTRE stood for Special Executive for Counter-intelligence, Terrorism, Revenge, and Extortion, but apparently the name doesn't stand for that in these new movies, so we don't need to capitalize SPECTRE anymore. It's just Spectre.

There are two MacGuffins that are seriously over-used in spy movies: nukes and viruses. Blog contributor Priscilla doesn't even like to watch spy movies because they have shown her the "have to stop the nuke or virus from falling into the wrong hands" scenario too many times. No Time to Die takes the virus route, with the sci-fi twist that this virus is delivered by nanobots that can be programmed to only infect someone with their individual DNA. So the virus could be released into the public and it would only kill the one person whose DNA the nanobots are targeting. But they're being coded for a whole lot of individuals.

Spectre isn't the wrong hands Bond has to worry about, the main villain is actually a fellow named Lyutsifer Safin - really, they went ahead and named the villain in this movie Lucifer Satan. Played by Rami Malek, Safin is no fan of Spectre, but is a fan of the idea of global domination, and he has a link to Swann that goes back decades. So she and Bond are eventually reunited as he sets out to stop Safin from killing millions of people with his nanobot virus. There had been a lot of speculation that Malek would be playing Dr. No in the movie, which I wouldn't have been surprised by since the franchise is dredging up the past now, but thankfully that wasn't the case. I'd much rather take his bland Lucifer Satan over an unnecessary revival of Dr. No.

Written by Bond regulars Neal Purvis and Robert Wade, along with script doctor Phoebe Waller-Bridge and director Cary Joji Fukunaga, No Time to Die draws inspiration from the Ian Fleming novels On Her Majesty's Secret Service and You Only Live Twice while telling its own original but familiar story. It boasts some terrific cinematography (courtesy of Linus Sandgren), has some exciting sequences, and some amusing moments and lines. I've always liked Craig's Bond, it was great to see Wright back as Leiter, Ralph Fiennes, Naomie Harris, and Ben Whishaw continue to be great as M, Moneypenny, and Q. We meet some fun new characters - Lashana Lynch as the replacement 007, Billy Magnussen and Ana de Armas as associates of Leiter's... but overall, I found that it made for a rather dull and dour viewing experience. With a running time of 163 minutes, that experience went on longer than it should have. 

At one point, Danny Boyle had been attached to direct the Spectre follow-up, which seemed perfect since he had directed the Bond short that opened the 2012 Olympics. Boyle and the producers ran into creative issues - he wanted to make a movie that was more "tongue-in-cheek and whimsical", while the producers wanted to end Craig's Bond run with a more serious film. One that went along with the ending they had in mind. So Fukunaga was brought on board to make something serious, and he certainly did that. And it all builds up to an ending I hated.

Up until Casino Royale, fans could imagine that James Bond had actually lived through all of the adventures in the previous twenty movies, using the idea of a "floating timeline" to explain how a spy could be operating over that long of a period and never age too much. Even up through Skyfall, some discrepancies could be disregarded to make it work. But with Spectre and No Time to Die, it has become very clear that the filmmakers don't intend for the Daniel Craig movies to have any connection to the previous films, which makes it a bit confusing when his Bond goes driving around in vehicles that come from movies that predate Craig's tenure. I hear this era is now referred to as its own "mini-series" within the series... and Fukunaga really cleans house to make sure it won't have any connection to future movies, either. Whenever we see Bond again, it definitely won't be the continuing adventures of the character as played by Daniel Craig. We're also done with Jeffrey Wright's Felix Leiter and this bungled version of Blofeld and Spectre. Now I don't know whether to anticipate the next Bond movie or not. I would love to see them go back to being fun, "business as usual" adventures that can tell their own stories each time out instead of repeating the past. If future movies feel the need to build the Bond character from the ground up again and rework any more past villains - worst of all, yet another take on Blofeld - then I really am past my days of being excited about new Bond movies.