No Time to Die (Web Exclusive)
Reviewed by Jonathan Murray

Produced by Barbara Broccoli and Michael G. Wilson; directed by Cary Joji Fukunaga; screenplay by Neal Purvis, Robert Wade, Cary Joji Fukunaga, and Phoebe Waller-Bridge; cinematography by Linus Sandgren; editing by Tom Cross and Elliot Graham; production design by Mark Tildesley; costume design by Suttirat Anne Larlarb; music by Hans Zimmer; starring Daniel Craig, Léa Seydoux, Rami Malek, Lashana Lynch, Ralph Fiennes, Christoph Waltz, David Dencik, and Ana de Armas. Color, 163 min., 2021. A Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer release.

In one of the entire franchise’s best-remembered exchanges, Auric Goldfinger (Gert Fröbe) and James Bond (Sean Connery) disagree over whether the former should “expect” the latter “to talk” or “to die.” The latest 007 movie, No Time to Die, splits the difference and has Britannia’s previously indestructible human shield do both. The result ties a bow on both actor Daniel Craig’s time in the tux and the idea of a series reboot popularly associated with his tenure. On one hand, the film’s proffered pleasures therefore involve a sense of completism: Craig’s Bond movies exhibited far more commitment to narrative seriality than their predecessors. But if No Time to Die aims to bring the Craig era to a conclusion, that fact also prompts us to ask what we might conclude about the period and project in question. Did the Craig Bond films constitute an aesthetically and/or ideologically coherent reinvention of what had, in the early 2000s, looked an increasingly elderly blockbuster franchise? Or, ultimately, were they a mere cosmetic refresh that preserved the Bond universe’s longer-term postimperialist, phallocentric prejudices? [See this author’s article, “I’ve Been Inspecting You, Mister Bond: Crisis, Catharsis, and Calculation in Daniel Craig’s Twenty-First-Century 007,” Cineaste, Vol. XLI, No. 2/Spring 2016]

No Time to Die’s plot picks up where that of its immediate predecessor, Spectre (2015), left off. SPECTRE kingpin Ernst Stavro Blofeld (Christoph Waltz) now detained at Her Majesty’s indefinite Pleasure, James Bond (Daniel Craig) has left the British Secret Service to pursue a relationship with returning love interest, Madeleine Swann (Léa Seydoux). But this founders when Bond narrowly escapes assassination by SPECTRE. All-too-easily persuaded that Swann has been a SPECTRE operative all along, he separates from her and goes to ground permanently.

Five years later, Bond is enticed back into active service when SPECTRE steal a DNA-based bioweapon, code-named Heracles, that has been illicitly developed by M (Ralph Fiennes) and a Russian scientist defector, Obruchev (David Dencik). Bond’s true foe, however, is revealed to be Lyutsifer Safin (Rami Malek), the only surviving member of a family of SPECTRE operatives poisoned decades before by Swann’s father and at Blofeld’s behest. Safin’s revenge unfolds at length: having assassinated Swann’s mother in front of Swann when the latter was a child, he now recruits Obruchev to customize Heracles in order to successfully eliminate Blofeld and all SPECTRE operatives in a single pass before proceeding to mass produce it for global genocidal ends.

Forcibly reunited with Swann because of his investigation, Bond belatedly discovers her innocence regarding SPECTRE’s failed attempt on his life, her childhood link to Safin, and that she and Bond have a young child, Mathilde (Lisa-Dorah Sonnet), from their previous relationship. After Safin kidnaps Swann and Mathilde in a deranged attempt to form a new surrogate family, Bond tracks the villain to the latter’s Sea of Japan island lair and destroys it and him alike. The twist in that standard-issue conflagration’s course, however, is that Safin irreversibly infects Bond with a specific strain of Heracles designed to render any physical contact from him lethal to Swann and Mathilde. Personal hopes thus shattered, Bond leans one final time on the crutch of Queen and Country, sacrificing his own life to ensure the destruction of Safin’s Heracles manufacturing plant.

If that excess of plot sounds interminable—at 163 minutes, No Time to Die becomes the longest entry in the Bond franchise to date—that’s because the plot in question is excessively into the idea of termination. As the aforementioned 2016 Cineaste article noted, Spectre had already taken conspicuous and self-conscious pains to punctuate the Craig Bond cycle with a definitive full stop. But, like Sean Connery and Roger Moore before him, the actor then discovered that the 007 franchise’s financial politics make opportune leading man exits easier to imagine than execute. In many ways, No Time to Die faces head-on the social and psychological awkwardness that any false ending has the capacity to create. Running the tonal gamut between comic, manic, and tragic, multiple scenes and subplots center on uneasy, because unlooked-for, reunions with former bosses, bros, and bêtes noires: Bond and M; Bond and Felix Leiter (Jeffrey Wright); Bond and Blofeld; Bond and Swann.

But while the tonal treatment of these relationships varies, No Time to Die adopts a scorched earth policy toward all of their respective arcs. Even before he is killed off, Bond can no longer respect M, resuscitate Leiter and Blofeld, or reach out to Swann. It’s perhaps no accident that Safin’s villainy is figured as essentially nihilist (“people want oblivion… a few of us are born to build it for them”) in nature. Like the work that contains him, Bond’s latest antagonist views obliteration of the established order of things as a legitimate end in itself. Existing in order to finish off Spectre’s job second time around, No Time to Die aims to buy the Bond franchise breathing space to regroup and recommence. Indeed, given the film’s abundant plot machinations in that regard, Bond/Craig-as-Bond’s climactic demise might even feel like a redundant, rather than radical, act. After all, before that narrative juncture, No Time to Die has already delivered a fate to actor-as-character that seems similar to the one Blofeld lays boastful claim to earlier on in the story: “I didn’t need to kill you: I’d already broken you. I wanted to give you an empty world.”

Alongside its plot, the film also prosecutes its calling of time on the Craig years and project at the level of character portrait. The earlier Craig films leaned heavily on the idea of his Bond’s body as an almost impossibly sturdy and self-regenerating personal resource. But No Time to Die privileges diametrically opposed corporeal motifs. Images and ideas of masculine degeneration and decrepitude proliferate throughout: the movie’s opening sights and sounds involve the permanently mutilated Safin wearily, wheezily dragging his poison-ravaged body toward the location where he will murder Swann’s mother. And Safin’s is far from the only neurotic-cum-necrotic frame on display among the film’s male antagonists. Bond’s infiltration of a SPECTRE conclave, for example, looks and feels very different from the analogous sequence within Spectre that constituted the Craig cycle’s central plot reveal to that point in time. The earlier movie’s unsettling figure of mutely murderous Übermensch Hinx (Dave Bautista) is replaced by a series of aging mid-managerial types decked out in Bond villain-themed fancy dress—banana republic generalissimo; Mitteleuropean nightclub roué—a move that leads a distinctly underwhelmed 007 to muse that he’s stumbled into “SPECTRE bunga bunga.” Meanwhile, secondary antagonist Obruchev is less awe-inspiring J. Robert Oppenheimer-style angel of Armageddon and more a stereotypically Slavic-accented, weasily laboratory nerd of the sort the Bond movies last had recourse to with Goldeneye’s Boris Grishenko (Alan Cumming) in 1995.

More telling still is the fact that many of the movie’s male protagonists also receive comparably short shrift: No Time to Die understands its preferred vision of The Problem with Men to be as readily transmissible as its hazily defined Heracles MacGuffin. If Safin is the only figure who literally conceals inner discomfort and dysfunction by presenting a pristine, porcelain-thin mask to the watching world, many of the film’s other men do something similar in figurative terms. M’s dabbling in covert biowarfare, for example, renders him a notably diminished figure compared to the patrician-yet-potent-and-principled éminence grise of Skyfall (2012) and Spectre. Bond explicitly underscores this fact when asking whether his former boss’s office desk has “got bigger or have you got smaller?” But 007 himself is not presented as immune to analogous difficulties and disappointments. Blofeld (“two old men in a hole trying to work out who’s playing tricks on us”) and Safin (“I could be speaking to my own reflection”) claim existential kinship with Bond in ways clearly intended to convince him and the viewing audience far more than previous series villains’ comparable jibes. Moreover, if Bond repeatedly provokes recognition within No Time to Die’s male antagonists, he just as often elicits ridicule or rejection from the movie’s female protagonists. After outright failing the opening test of trust with Swann, he goes on to partially flunk ones of thrust and lust associated with the MI6—Black British Nomi (Lashana Lynch)—and CIA—North American Latinx Paloma (Ana de Armas)—operatives who cross his path. The self-confident inheritor of Bond’s vacated 007 codename, Nomi dismisses her predecessor as an “old wreck,” while neither she nor Paloma display any interest in Bond as sexual object.

It’s easy to dismiss all this as gender-political window dressing of a kind the Bond movies first grudgingly conceded the commercial need for as long ago as The Living Daylights (1987). But a recurrent aspect of No Time to Die’s visual style—the film’s predilection for isolated, sometimes borderline subliminal, elements of red mise en scène—gives pause for thought. Think a retooling of William Blake’s famous The Sick Rose poem (1794) in which the titular “crimson” flower replaces the “invisible worm” concealed within its petals as the symbolic harbinger of unacknowledged vulnerability and imminent (self-)destruction. The movie’s numerous red-inflected compositions typically work to suggest the idea of internal hemorrhaging that male authority figures, actual or would-be, instigate, then ignore at their peril. Two helpfully literal-minded instantiations encourage viewers to get—and get with—the idea in question. Obruchev’s bloodied nose occupies center frame as his onanistic fantasies about “extermin[ating] an entire race from the face of the Earth” provoke Nomi into executing him. Earlier on, the usually unflappable Bond frets that the soon-to-prove-fatal gunshot wound sustained by Felix Leiter has produced “a lot of blood.”

But for the most part, this chromatic symbolism is more covertly prosecuted. A nonexhaustive list includes: red lab coat-wearing scientists in the Heracles facility stormed by SPECTRE and Moneypenny (Naomie Harris)’s red blouse when news of the theft quickly reaches M (his rarefied sense of individual entitlement lays the ground for a worldwide public health disaster); the nightclub singer’s red dress at the SPECTRE conclave (Blofeld’s monomaniacal hatred of Bond sees him manipulated into unwittingly destroying his own life’s work); the pinpoint of red light visible behind Bond when Blofeld reveals how easily he framed Swann as a SPECTRE agent (Bond’s refusal to trust others renders him an untrustworthy romantic partner); the two red oil barrels that litter the otherwise pristine landing bay through which Bond and Nomi penetrate Safin’s island lair (Safin’s belief in his own invulnerability will prove his ruin).

This running motif’s cumulative effect is to make No Time to Die feel sincere in its apparent conviction that all heteronormatively conceived or achieved forms of masculine virility and authority fatally wound any man who pursues such things: as a practicing psychiatrist, Swann would surely have a field day with M’s decision to choose Heracles as his bioweapon’s code name. Thus, when Bond taunts Safin with the assertion that, “all you’re really doing is standing in a very long line of angry little men,” the line seems intended to resonate in terms over and above the standard-issue coolness under pressure that viewers are conditioned to expect within set-piece face-offs between 007 and his latest foe. Rather, No Time to Die views heteronormative patriarchy itself as just such an identification parade, a ‘long line’ in which most of the movie’s male characters, Bond included, are arrayed alongside Safin.

Long before literally consigning him to the grave, then, No Time to Die tries to bury Craig-as-Bond in an equally definitive way, constructing him as possibly the most bathetic masculine archetype of all: Yesterday’s Man. Clearly minded to follow Swann’s life lesson that “you can’t keep looking over your shoulder,” the film deliberately raises the question of where the franchise might venture next and instead. In that regard, we might look beyond No Time to Die’s ostentatious multiple quotations of the cinematic On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (1969): several uses of John Barry’s celebrated compositions for that film’s soundtrack; reproduction of the older film’s title-sequence iconography within the new one’s counterpart; Bond’s misplaced confidence that he and Swann “have all the time in the world.” More suggestive instead is the film’s analogous repurposing of elements from the literary You Only Live Twice (1964): Safin’s island-based poison manufacturing plant and death-cult mentality update Blofeld’s equivalents in Ian Fleming’s novel. Like No Time to Die’s creators, Fleming used that book to acknowledge the possibility that his version of Bond had reached the end of its popular cultural and political lifespan. The literary You Only Live Twice kills Bond off psychologically rather than physically: its conclusion has him as a brain-damaged amnesiac heedlessly wandering into the Soviet Union in search of his lost identity. Fleming’s death the same year in which his novel was published prevented him from exploring at length if and how his Bond might reattain any kind of ongoing real-world resonance. The plot of the final 007 novel, the posthumously published The Man with the Golden Gun (1965), sees the rescued but uncertainly recuperated spy placed on probation.

Not dependent on the vision and input of a single artist, the cinematic Bond franchise of course lives to die another day: No Time to Die’s end credits incorporate the traditional promise that “James Bond Will Return.” Less clear, however, is how this might be engineered. The collective precedent the Craig quintet sets raises several more and less interesting possibilities. The most obvious, and perhaps underwhelming, would be to simply repeat Casino Royale’s opening gambit in 2006 of resetting the series timeline with a new bit of bankable beefcake upfront. No Time to Die’s Nomi gestures towards that possibility when she unexpectedly returns the 007 designation to Bond, explaining as she does so that, “it’s just a number.” More intriguingly, however, various expanded universe possibilities exist for a franchise whose main contemporaries-cum-competitors are no longer the Jason Bourne or Mission: Impossible movies of the late Pierce Brosnan/early Daniel Craig years, but the mushrooming Marvel and Star Wars cycles of the present day. M, Moneypenny, and Q (Ben Wishaw)’s significantly enhanced narrative agency and visibility since Skyfall had already rendered them potential spin-off material. No Time to Die’s introduction of 007 mark II Nomi and, particularly, Paloma—Bond signs off the latter’s high-kicking, high camp extended set-piece appearance by noting, “you were excellent”—feels designed to widen the franchise’s options in this regard.

Considered in that specific light, the film’s lengthy pre-opening credits sequence—at nearly twenty-four minutes, easily the longest in the franchise’s history—feels at least as radical a move as its climactic kill-off. This is because that sequence actively instantiates a potential expanded universe future of a kind that Ian Fleming’s writing had occasionally suggested decades earlier. The future in question is a Rogue One (2016)/Rise of Skywalker (2019)-style affair in which Bond becomes a secondary (or even off-screen) protagonist who nonetheless constitutes the enabling connective tissue for a storyworld that benefits from his name even as it becomes less predetermined by his face and fame. Fleming’s 1962 novel The Spy Who Loved Me and 1966 short story “Octopussy” both explored such a possibility, narrating stories from which Bond is absent for extended periods. While providing the traditional expository preamble, No Time to Die’s pre-opening credits sequence also self-presents in this less familiar way—as the cinematic equivalent of a free-standing novella defined by the situation and sensibility of a protagonist other than Bond. Swann’s recreated memories open the mininarrative and her present-day physical point of view concludes it, while Bond’s final contribution involves a promise to withdraw from prominence (“you’ll never see me again”).

Rabbit hole-opening as such speculation might be, it’s also good to remember that what any story tells is in significant part defined by who gets to tell it. No Time to Die clearly knows this: if the movie starts by narrating Swann’s story on her behalf, it ends with her, ensconced behind the wheel of a moving car, starting to narrate the now-deceased Bond’s on his: “I’m going to tell you a story about a man: his name was Bond.” Granted, the detailed mechanics of the Craig quintet’s story and screenplay origins are tough to objectively unravel: all five works are credited to varying constellations of three or more writers. Far clearer, though, is the fact that, until No Time to Die, all the writers in question have been men and so have the films’ respective directors. Without being able to pinpoint the precise nature and extent of English actor and writer Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s screenwriting contribution to No Time to Die, it, set alongside the movie’s attempt at a more progressive form of gender politics and Swann’s associated symbolic prominence with the work’s opening and closing scenes, feels suggestive. As discussed above, the latest Bond film devotes significant cinematic energy and running time to a critique of heteronormative masculine striving for potency and primacy. For that reason, the most compelling franchise future of all to extrapolate from a swansong to Daniel Craig’s time in front of the camera perhaps involves a Swann-song in which female creative leads at last have the chance to break their male counterparts’ decades-long monopoly behind it.

Jonathan Murray teaches film and visual culture and the Edinburgh College of Art and is a Cineaste Contributing Writer.

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