Review : No Time To Die

Having watched the preceeding twenty-four Bond movies, I feel duty-bound to review the twenty fifth. It would surely be silly not to. Warning, minor spoilers ahead.

In short, I liked it a lot. It follows on neatly from Spectre, so I would recommend watching at least that one first although it's certainly not essential. It ticks all the Bond boxes : action sequences aplenty, gadgets, silly one-liners, car chases, a supervillain bent on world domination with a gigantic underground base... yeah, this is definitely a Bond film and no mistake.

The action sequences are all very well done. As befits the genre, they're right on the edge of believability : they seem just about possible if the protagonist were very, very lucky - highly improbable, but never obviously violate physics. That's the principle sin of really bad Bond movies. It doesn't matter if the villain is an idiot or the plot makes no sense - if the stunts defy basic physical laws, then we're in the Marvel Universe, not the Bond franchise. Here they've wisely chosen to avoid making the stunts ever more outlandish and instead try different ways to keep the tensions : different, closer camera angles, and more atmospheric environments.

Gadget-wise this film is more sci-fi learning than at least the other Daniel Craig Bond movies. For the cars we happily revert back to the classics of machine guns behind the headlights and what are essentially tiny landmines, which is great fun. Q is still Ben Wishaw, who, though no Desmond Llewellyn, is nevertheless Ben Wishaw, which I count as a positive (he also plays a fantastic Richard II, which I doubt Desmond Llewellyn could have managed).

But it's the supervillain's evil scheme that dominates the gadget front. DNA-targeting weapons have featured in sci-fi before, and here their use is reasonably intelligently explored. Certainly they make sense as the weapon of an assassin. What's less clear, and what's possibly the movie's second biggest problem, is why you would want them as a weapon of mass destruction. The villain's acting is very good (though I still personally prefer Blofeld), but his motivation isn't at all clear. "They'll kill millions", say our heroes. Okay, but is there a plan to charge a ransom ? Apparently not : the villain just wants lots and lots of people dead. Fair enough, but which people and why ? Is our villain a neo-Nazi or something else ? This is a pretty big deal which would have benefited from an answer. A villain without a motivation is not great writing.

Against that, the rest of the characters are much more developed. Indeed, it's pretty rare you can even comment on character development in a Bond movie at all, but here I thought that if anything Bond was too emotional, and that's rare indeed. The secondary characters are also excellent : in particular, Ralph Fiennes' M becomes very much more interesting and morally complicated than in the previous films, and there's a nice young lady who is an unusual mix of hapless, nervous, and deadly all at the same time. Things are not quite perfect though, with our supervillain needing quite a lot more exploration in my opinion.

All the faults are minor. I'd say this is a first-rate Bond movie; not my personal favourite, but definitely a very good one. 8/10 ? Yeah, that seems about right. Go and see it in the cinema if you're comfortable going back to the movie theatre.

There is however one huge problem which this movie makes ever more necessary to address : continuity. As discussed last time, there are many options :

1. Each Bond actor represents a different continuity, with each Bond effectively set in a different universe. References to things that apparently happened to other Bonds are just coincidence. In this vein, there's a nice fan theory that Sean Connery's last outing as Bond is in The Rock.
2. Similar to (1), there could be a few different continuities, with, say, Connery, More and Lazenby all representing the same Bond; Dalton and Brosnan another incarnation.
3. James Bond is a Time Lord who regenerates. He has all the memories of the previous Bonds, and goes around in a series of different high-tech vehicles with clever gadgets defeating evil villains with plenty of attractive sidekicks. It makes sense.
4. Bond is a Goa'uld or Trill or other parasitic life form. The body is just a host, and each time it dies the real Bond symbiont moves to a fresh new one. As with (3), this means time passes in the movies as it does in real life, but easily explains why Bond doesn't age.
5. Continuity is treated in the same way as in The Simpsons : through magic. Clearly time and politics change, but Bond doesn't age because Reasons. In some ways this fits most closely with No Time To Die, but in other ways this would be harder to sustain.
6. Shirley's theory : Bond is a code name. The most direct evidence for this would be George Lazeby's statement "well this never happened to the other guy", but this doesn't explain the discontinuity between the Craig and pre-Craig era movies (especially the continuing presence of Judie Dench's M). Also, why have a code number and a name ? Seems excessive.
7. My theory : Bond movies take place in a compressed timeline, with movies from the 1960's set in the 1980's and those from ~2020 taking place in ~2000. This just about fits the technological and political changes and allows Bond to have a plausible career length and age, provided the movies stop in the not too distant future.

None of these fit perfectly. The ending to No Time To Die might possibly have painted the writers into a corner. I mean, I'm perfectly happy if they choose to just ignore the whole issue and get on with making Bond movies as long as they're good, but it's going to feel very strange indeed if they choose to ignore the issue. Still, with No Time To Die having been delayed so long, they've had a good long while to think about this. So we'll see.