No Time To Die

Yesterday I saw the latest 007 movie No Time to Die. I have no intention of reviewing it as such. I do, however, want to jot down a set of observations to remind me of what I saw and how I felt. In no particular order:

1. Daniel Craig acts a lot with his arms. (See this post for further details.)

2. The film contains no “woman in distress”. That trope has completely gone. The film has four female characters and three of them prove deadly in both armed and unarmed combat. The fourth one, Miss Moneypenny, gives the impression that only circumstance prevents her demonstrating her own skills.

3. Daniel Craig had announced that this constituted his final Bond film before shooting started, and the film seems determined to acknowledge this. It amounts to a homage to his version of Bond.

4. This means that it offers all sorts of allusions to previous movies and previous tropes.

5. Bond has retired (maybe he did this in the previous movie?). The number 007 has a new occupant, a black female agent called Nomi who acts as Bond’s equal throughout the movie.

6. Blofield and Spectre reappear, as does James Bond’s buddy from a previous film. His lover from a previous film reappears as a key part of the plot.

7. We could fairly describe the plot itself as convoluted. In the end it pulls off a variant of Scream’s “Motive? We don’t do motive!” by having M describe the villain’s motive as “the usual world domination thing”. (I paraphrase here because I didn’t sit there taking notes.)

8. The film contains multiple allusions to Bond lore. He drives the iconic Aston Martin. He references Roger Moore in a broef scene in a bar. They recreate the scene from the computer game of Golden Eye where Bond has to climb the stairs in a tower defeating Spectre agents as they rush from doors on each level. He glances at painting of Judi Dench as M.

9. The score by Hans Zimmer references various past Bond themes every now and then.

10. Bond dies at the end. Of course they can resurrect him because we don’t see his body after the incoming missiles have destroyed the villains base where he stands accepting that this time he didn’t get away with it. They can also choose to go with a new film about 007 rather than James Bond.

11. Bearing this in mind we might notice that the movie posters do not mention James Bond only 007.

For the record, I thought it worth watching.