No Time to Die
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Daniel Craig as James Bond in No Time to Die
It’s clear to me now why No Time to Die’s release was delayed so often and for so long—who, at any point last year, could have really enjoyed a movie about an invisible microscopic threat that originated in a secret lab, that spreads person to person by close contact, that could potentially infect the whole world, and that you can’t remove once it’s tainted you?
The lab, in this case, is not in Wuhan but in London, and the microscopic threat is not a virus but a nanobot technology codenamed Heracles.
The story
At the beginning of No Time to Die, as highly proficient and heavily armed agents infiltrate the lab with the aid of a turncoat scientist, Heracles is referred to only as “the weapon.” Only later does it become clear what the weapon actually is, what kind of damage it’s capable of, and, crucially, who is stealing it.
Following the breach of the lab, M (Ralph Fiennes) sends for 007—but he doesn’t mean James Bond. Bond is five years into a long overdue retirement, whiling away his days fishing and sailing out of a luxury bungalow on the Jamaican coast. He has dropped off the grid following the film’s cold open, a bifurcated tale that is one part flashback for erstwhile Bond paramour Madeleine Swann (Lea Seydoux, returning from Spectre) and one part resolution to Bond’s leftover affection for Vesper Lynd of Casino Royale. We learn some of Madeleine’s tragic backstory, and we see an attempt on Bond’s life by agents of Blofeld (Christoph Waltz) in the Italian town where Vesper is buried. Bond assumes that Madeleine had something to do with Blofeld’s men finding and almost killing him, so he puts her on a train and disappears from her life—or so they both think.
When we catch up to Bond he’s had an unexpected visit from Felix Leiter (Jeffrey Wright) and an even more unexpected visit from the new 007—Nomi (Lashana Lynch). Leiter wants Bond to help him find the missing scientist from the lab heist scene. Nomi wants Bond to stay out of it. Bond can’t resist getting involved, and so he’s off to Cuba.
In Cuba it becomes clear that much more is going on than a simple laboratory theft, and even clearer that Blofeld and SPECTRE are not behind it. Bond and his contact in Cuba, Paloma (Ana de Armas), walk into a trap, and after extricating themselves from that and swiping the scientist from Nomi, Bond and Leiter are betrayed.
From here Bond returns to London and M’s office—now wearing a “Visitor” ID badge—and applies himself to some detective work. He gains an interview with the imprisoned Blofeld but must be accompanied by Blofeld’s psychiatrist, who turns out to be Madeleine. Her discomfort at seeing Bond again after several years is not all down to failed relationship awkwardness. She has recently been approached by an ominous figure from that flashback in the cold open, Lyutsifer Safin (Rami Malek), who has a special request for her.
Events in London don’t end well, and so while Nomi tracks down a lead on a double agent, Bond is off to Norway to reconnect with Madeleine and learn more about the threat that is slowly and lethally revealing itself.
I can’t say much more about the plot without giving things away, but suffice it to say that the movie clips along brilliantly from Norway to its final destination, slowly gathering speed until the final confrontation and revelation.
The good
No Time to Die is a whole lot of movie. It’s two hours and forty-three minutes long but (mostly) keeps moving, helped along by a lot of traditional Bond globetrotting, energetic and well-staged action scenes, Hans Zimmer’s score, good performances, and a (mostly) intriguing plot.
The film is brilliant on the technical side. The costumes and sets look great, especially the concrete bunkers where Safin and Bond face each other down at the end, and the special effects and stunt work are outstanding. All of the action scenes are good, not only enjoyable but exciting. I particularly liked a fight in a foggy Norwegian forest, in which Bond is forced to improvised in much the way he did at the end of Skyfall, and the climactic sequence, set in a repurposed Cold War-era missile silo, feels like a level from GoldenEye for N64 in the best possible way. I really thrilled as the film approached the conclusion.
No Time to Die is also beautiful to look at, as it was shot on 65mm film and mostly in the real places where the film takes place—Italy, London, Jamaica, Norway, and finally the Faroe Islands standing in for “disputed islands” between Japan and Russia. The cinematographer, Linus Sandgren, makes full use of the format for Lawrence of Arabia-scale landscapes and beauty shots. The lab heist at the beginning, taking place high on a London skyscraper at sunset, is stunning.
The cast perform well from top to bottom, though I felt Ralph Fiennes could have used more screentime and Christoph Waltz needed either more or none at all. Like some others, I was worried about the direction the film would take Nomi as a “new” 007, but I was quite pleasantly surprised. Nomi’s got a big attitude, but after some genuinely enjoyable rivalry in the early going she and Bond learn to respect and work with each other. They even have some of the film’s best banter, with Bond often getting the last word. It’s also in this snipping back-and-forth with Nomi that we get the clearest glimpses of the Bond from the early Craig movies rather than the sleepwalker from Spectre.
And while I’ve seen a few people criticize Rami Malek’s Safin as a “weak” Bond villain, I disagree. I found him a real threat, and his first appearance since the cold open, in which he is masked, is genuinely menacing. What I do wish is that he had more time in the film and that his motivations regarding his ultimate plans for Heracles—moving from wiping out certain bad people to spreading it worldwide—were clearer. Is this a eugenics project? Racially motivated genocide—as his pet scientist hints he could do if he wanted? Pure nihilism? I’ve seen the movie twice and I’m still not sure about this.
The film also features some nice nods to previous films and even Fleming’s original stories. The porcelain bulldog willed to Bond by Judi Dench’s M in Skyfall shows up, for example, and Safin’s garden of poisonous plants comes straight from the novel You Only Live Twice.
The bad
I’ve hinted at a few misgivings about the movie. I’m not completely sure the plot involving Blofeld leading SPECTRE from prison makes sense. I got more of it on a second viewing—for example, how one of Blofeld’s henchmen wound up working as one of Safin’s henchmen later in the film—but I think the plot moves quickly through this to conceal its basic implausibility.
Unusually for Bond, he is also prone to speechifying in this film. Two scenes stand out—one about halfway through in which he opens his heart to Madeleine, and one in which he berates Safin as an “angry little man” who is “playing God.” Bond can care deeply about women he loves and loathe a hubristic enemy, but this has seldom been something laid out for the audience in soliloquy. This is not a big problem, but an oddity of the writing and one that doesn’t jibe with what we know of Bond. (The movie overexplains things elsewhere, too, as when the scientist, having gone rogue, says to himself what is happening, or when Q’s computer announces “Blofeld’s bionic eyeball unlocked,” a system message that deserves to become immortal.)
No Time to Die is overlong, and it is overstuffed. Its fast and well-managed pacing doesn’t fully resolve either of these problems (I’ll have a lot more to say about that below). When I write that M or Safin could use more screentime, I’m not arguing for a longer movie but a re-proportioned one, one that trims away or removes some sidestories and subplots that, while contributing to the plot, also add to the sense of bloat and diffusion.
And I think I know why this is, but I can’t examine that without giving things away. So if you’ve seen the movie, feel free to continue into the spoiler territory below.
My biggest misgiving—spoilers ahead
I need to set this complicated but ultimately rather mild criticism up with two spoilers: Bond and Madeleine have a five-year old daughter, Mathilde; and, at the end, Bond, infected with Heracles nanobots that would target and kill Madeleine and Mathilde if he so much as touches them, dies stopping Safin’s plan.
I think No Time to Die missteps by bringing Madeleine back from Spectre—and in giving her and Bond a child. The film would be shorter, tighter, and—in Bond’s death—more powerful without Madeleine.
Some of my criticism is purely practical. With the exception of Sylvia Trench, who disappeared after the first two Connery films, Bond has never had a girlfriend carry over from one movie to another. It’s out of character.
Furthermore, Madeleine being the daughter of Mr White requires the audience to recall who Mr White is and some of what he’s been responsible for if they want to understand Safin’s motivation. This is a tall order for casual fans. (My wife, for instance, was mystified by the connection.) While there have always been some continuities in the Bond series, the films mostly stand alone—for a reason.
(Also: I’m not usually the type to make internet neckbeard arguments about believability, but I did have to question the wisdom of Her Majesty’s government in clearing Madeleine to meet regularly with Blofeld, given that she’s the daughter of a known terrorist financier with ties to two other terrorist leaders. There are surely other psychiatrists in London.)
It also seems like the screenwriters never quite decided what to do with Mathilde, Bond and Madeleine’s daughter. After Safin kidnaps her, he uses Mathilde as a powerful bargaining chip, manipulating both Madeleine and, in one of the film’s tensest scenes, Bond. But when Mathilde becomes even slightly inconvenient he abandons her. Thereafter, Mathilde becomes what TV Tropes calls The Load, a helpless human cargo for the hero to heft along while also fighting the bad guy.
And that, the conclusion, with Bond facing his death, is the root of my biggest misgiving. As Bond, wounded and bleeding out and also infected with Heracles, calls in a missile strike to obliterate Safin’s stores of Heracles but that will also surely kill him, too, he has a tearful conversation with Madeleine by radio. She confirms that Mathilde is his child. He tells her he loves her. He smiles. The missiles home in and Bond dies a glorious death.
And it doesn’t quite work—at least not for me.
What the movie gets right is that Bond can’t grow old and harmless, withering into senescence in retirement. If Bond is ever to die, it must be in the line of duty, because it has always been duty—Queen and Country—that drives him, and he has always endured, with a stiff upper lip and a wry comment, as a result. Men like Bond come and go but England is forever, even with the collapse and irrelevance of the Empire. A brief exchange between Safin and Bond nails this. Called “redundant” by Safin, Bond begs to differ: “Not as long as there are men like you around.”
What the movie gets wrong is its diffusion of our investment in Bond’s sacrifice. Are we pulling for Bond to succeed and weeping at his sacrifice because he’s defeating an enemy of Britain and saving the world? That works. Are we pulling for Bond to succeed and weeping at his sacrifice because he’ll save but never again see Madeleine and Mathilde? That also works. Either of these things could have been fine, but not both together. Ironically, by bringing Madeleine back and giving her and Bond a child, presumably to give Bond a more intimate, personal stake in the plot, the screenwriters actually lower the stakes. This might have worked, because Skyfall did it—and did it better, because there the personal and the patriotic were united in the figure of M. Here, the two halves of Bond’s motivation are separate and distract from each other.
Trimming these subplots, especially replacing Madeleine with another character with no tie to the events of previous films, could have untangled some of the middle of the film’s plot complications and, in the conclusion, allowed the audience to focus solely on Bond’s confrontation with Safin.
The result, ultimately, is a fast-paced but overcomplicated plot that also doesn’t quite work tonally or in terms of Bond’s character.
Conclusion
That’s a lot of explanation about what I think doesn’t quite gel in No Time to Die, but there I’m minutely examining the difference between a B+ and a B- movie. Most of the film works, and works well. I just think it could have been even better. Even if long, slightly overcomplicated, and taking one too many missteps in the conclusion, its fast pace, excellent action, and great performances will keep the Bond name alive for a long time to come. It’s a worthy conclusion for Daniel Craig’s run as Bond.
I’m going to miss Craig as 007. For me, No Time to Die ranks below, but not too far below, the two masterpieces from his tenure—Casino Royale and Skyfall. I don’t know what will come after Craig, but I’m hopeful, and I appreciate what he brought to the character for fifteen years.
Thank you, 007. That’ll be all.
