No Time To Die — Review Thread

I echo Neverending: I would totally be down for a Paloma spinoff.  I so wish she was in more of the movie, cause she was a delight.

We. Are. Aware.

It was well publicized the director wanted to bang her and cast her in one scene. This is the man that gave the world naked Alexandra Daddario. A legend in SnoBorderZero’s eyes.

Scrambled to get my thoughts in before the weekend and everyone else's reactions to the film did not disappoint. Seems like we're all on relatively the same page.

No Time to Die(10/8/2021)

On November 17th 2006 the movie Casino Royale came out to great critical acclaim and popularity. As a James Bond fan I should have been thrilled about this but I wasn’t; as a Bond purist this film did not give me what I was looking for because it gave the franchise something that in my eyes it never should have had: a beginning. Whatever other merits that movie had, and it had many, it was impossible for me to get behind a movie that was messing with the fabric of nature by rebooting the James Bond franchise. So, as the James Bond franchise continued for the next fifteen years through the Daniel Craig era of the series I had to keep having these awkward conversations that came down to “I get why you like these movies, but I can’t” all while sounding like an unreasonable raging fanboy… which maybe I was. It’s now 2021 and after a protracted COVID fueled delay we’re finally getting what is maybe the logical end of the mess that Daniel Craig (or more specifically the writers during his era) started: the Bond that gave us a beginning is now giving us an ending and I have the same mixed feelings I’ve had from the start.

The film begins sometime after the end of the last James Bond film Spectre in which Bond (Daniel Craig) rather uncharacteristically makes a much stronger connection to his latest “Bond Girl” Madeleine Swann (Léa Seydoux) than normal and it was strongly implied that he would not be discarding her in his normal fashion. Indeed, this film opens with Bond and Swann on vacation in Italy when Spectre unexpectedly strikes back at Bond. Thinking Swann was in on this he abandons her at a train station and runs off to retire from MI6 and live in relative solitude in Jamaica. But five years later he is visited by Felix Leiter (Jeffrey Wright) and another American agent named Logan Ash (Billy Magnussen) who tell him that there’s a major issue in the world, one that involves Spectre and which the Americans and British are somewhat at odds over. They want him to go to Cuba to infiltrate what appears to be a Spectre party, but once there he will need to contend with a new British agent named Nomi (Lashana Lynch) that has inherited his 007 number and is attempting to deal with this issue separately. Eventually Bond will find himself in a high stakes chase for a weaponized virus called Heracles and a sinister villain named Lyutsifer Safin (Rami Malek) that wants to use it.

No Time to Die is perhaps notable in being the only James Bond film to be made knowing for certain that it would be the last outing for its star actor. The rest of the Bond actors could be said to have gone out with whimpers with Sean Connery and Roger Moore simply hanging around until they aged out of the role and other actors like Geoge Lazenby, Timothy Dalton, and Pierce Brosnan having been rather unceremoniously dropped after making films that were considered to have under-performed. Of course in many ways a “poignant sendoff” is not exactly what I want from a James Bond movie; pretty much from the beginning of the Craig era I’ve been on my soapbox about how Bond movies should be episodic and Bond should be an immortal 30-40 year old man who only references back to previous adventures on the rarest of occasions. Given all the buildup that this would be “the last” Craig movie I was fairly sure this era of Bond wasn’t going to suddenly transform into what I’ve been wanting from it at the last minute so to some extent I had made peace with this and wanted to go in just appreciating the film as an action movie and to some extent I was not let down.

After a well shot but probably unnecessary flashback prologue and a bit of domestic catching up we’re treated to a very nice opening action sequence with Bond trying to outrun pursuers in the city of Matera in Southern Italy which makes use of one of Bond’s gadget-laden cars better than most of the chase scenes the series has given us in a while. So far so good. Soon after we get a pretty good heist scene on the part of the villains and it’s not long before we get a very fun shootout sequence in Cuba where Bond works with a CIA agent played by Ana de Armas, who I thought was really fun and who I was disappointed to see kind of disappear from the movie after that. Later the movie transitions to a really beautiful segment in Norway, including a tense chase and fight in a moody woods. The location scouting in general in this movie is top of the line and Linus Sandgren’s cinematography is probably the best one of these movies have looked in this whole sub-series of the franchise, which is saying something given that we were just handed a pair of bangers by Hoyte van Hoytema and Roger Deakins. This is the largest scale movie that director Cary Joji Fukunaga has worked on to date and more than makes a good bid for himself as the maker of large scale Hollywood blockbusters. The film runs a bloated 163 minutes, which is unnecessary but I ultimately didn’t really have too much of a problem with it as it’s pretty well paced throughout.

All that having been said, there’s a glaring weakness at the center of this, one that I think will bug Bond fans and casual moviegoers alike, and that’s the villain played by Rami Malek. It’s not so much Malek himself, though he does give the character a strange scratchy voice and incorporates some makeup (kind of inconsistently) that almost makes him seem like a parody of a Bond villain rather than a true Bond villain. But the bigger problem is just that this character’s background and motivations seem generally half-assed. We’re told early on that he’s motivated by revenge against Specre, which probably shouldn’t put him in conflict with Bond but it does and early on. Then later on he suddenly turns into a more typical megalomaniac who just wants to kill vast numbers of the world’s population for nebulous reasons that aren’t really explained. He has some sort of relation to Madeleine Swann that leads to her doing something very strange about halfway through the movie but this doesn’t really go anywhere either. Adding insult to all this injury is simply the fact that the movie positions this guy as some uniquely dangerous foe to Bond that will get under his skin in a unique way and he just does not seem remotely worthy of this.

I’m going to try to stay spoiler-free here but the film ends in a way that’s rather unconventional for a Bond movie, and it’s unconventional in much the same way a lot of Craig’s Bond films have been… which is to say I don’t like it. But at the same time I’m not sure I really have it in me to get worked up about it at this point, my various rantings about the heresies of the Daniel Craig era have mostly gone unheard and unheeded and on some level I’m sick of ranting about it. This ending is part and parcel with the direction they’ve chosen to go in the last five installments and on some level I feel like this die was cast way back in 2006 and Casino Royale’s original sin of rebooting the franchise in the first place. The Daniel Craig era has basically gone out the way it came in, with a well-crafted action movie that was seemingly tailored to annoy the hell out of a particular kind of James Bond fan of which I am a member. So all I can say is, I guess you guys made a pretty good movie, but fuck you for making it. Good riddance to this iteration of James Bond, all I can do now is hope they have the good sense to swing back in the other direction and make something more to my liking with the next Bond.

*** out of Five

There was a sequence towards the end where Bond was mowing down a bunch of henchmen, as he went up a few flights of stairs. May have even had some first person camera (?), but it felt right out of Call of Duty or something along those ways.

That was cool.

thebtskink’s favorite website trying to MeToo Cary Fukunaga


jezebel.com/acclaimed-director-cary-fukunaga-accused-of-grooming-yo-1848900384

Is it grooming if the women are of age? It's just another older guy being a creep and some sexual harassment - certainly not a good look but criminal or on par with other me too stories... I dunno. But it's just a guy using his position and power to try to coerce women into having sex with him.

A tale as old as time really. The inappropriate touching is the more 'shocking' revelation than the alleged grooming of women over 18 (which, again, isn't grooming - it's just taking advantage of a power imbalance and using lies, deceit, and experience to have sex with someone - of which happens daily).