No Time to Die: A Farewell to the Craig Era of Bond
James Bond (Daniel Craig) has retired from MI-6 and is enjoying a peaceful life with Madeleine (Léa Seydoux). To finally let go of the past, he visits the grave of Vesper Lynd (the girl from “Casino Royale,” played by Eva Green), only to find it is booby-trapped. An explosion, shrapnel, dust in his eyes, and now a shell-shocked Bond is fleeing from pursuers, jumping off bridges and speeding away on a motorcycle. He believes Madeleine betrayed him, puts her on a train to an unknown destination, and hides in Jamaica.
But even there, he is found. This time, his old friend from the CIA, Felix (Jeffrey Wright), asks him to intercept a Russian scientist, Valdo Obruchev (David Dencik), who defected to “Spectre” with a dangerous new weapon: nanobots that enter the bloodstream and are transmitted like a disease, airborne, ensuring a fatal outcome for anyone whose DNA is encoded into their program. It soon turns out that “Spectre” has nothing to do with it. Behind everything is a certain Lyutsifer Safin (Rami Malek), a billionaire with a disfigured face who has a personal score to settle with Madeleine, Ernst Blofeld (Christoph Waltz, the villain from the previous installment), and, it seems, the entire world.
The long-suffering 25th installment of the “Bond” franchise has finally arrived in theaters after a torturous production, during which the director and the entire concept were changed (Danny Boyle was originally supposed to direct the film but disagreed with the producers), after two years of postponements and failed attempts to sell the franchise to some streaming service for exorbitant money. It was as if the entire universe was against Daniel Craig leaving the role of Agent 007, and until the very end, it delayed the moment of his on-screen farewell to the character.
And “No Time to Die” is precisely that: a farewell film, a swan song for the “new Bond” who, from the great opening of “Casino Royale,” immediately began playing by his own rules. Movies about Agent 007 have always tried to capture the spirit of the times, and Craig’s incarnation captured his perfectly: first, on the wave of Jason Bourne’s popularity, he “grounded” the spy, and then, as if anticipating the widespread fascination with big narratives and cinematic universes, he decided to build a franchise within a franchise. After all, if you think about it, the “Bond” films of Sean Connery or even Pierce Brosnan are more like a set of separate films connected by a common aesthetic (and not always) and the title character: not so much a person as a myth, someone like the Man with No Name or Mad Max. Craig’s Bond is still just a mortal. Craig’s “Bond” is a single, complete story.
The Evolution of Bond
Yes, within it, there are successes and failures, strictly in order: after the excellent “Casino Royale” comes the dubious “Quantum of Solace,” after the impressive “Skyfall” comes the indistinct “Spectre.” “No Time to Die” does not betray the tradition and ends the story of Craig’s Bond—a poignant tragedy of a hero out of his time—on a rather high note. The elegant past once again collides with the terrifying future, forgotten characters return to close their arcs (we haven’t seen Felix since “Quantum of Solace,” Vesper Lynd has been a heavy shadow over the hero since “Casino Royale”). Bond unsuccessfully tries to escape fate and find love in a world where, as Secretary Moneypenny puts it, “everyone has tried to kill him at least once.” Now he is more vulnerable than ever: in love, old, having lost everything possible—even the classic call sign “Agent 007” has been given to the impudent recruit Nomi (Lashana Lynch). James Bond of “Skyfall,” with trembling hands and a broken sight, did not evoke such sympathy as this one.
Old vs. New
Moreover, if in “Skyfall,” the hero stuck in the past had to fight a deliberately “modern” hacker villain, then in “No Time to Die,” the relationship between old and new is reversed by 180 degrees. The antagonist here is a classic crazy megalomaniac with ambitions to destroy the world “just because,” with his own island and phrases from a worn-out villainous quote book. But Bond is already hopelessly “new,” too grown-up and serious to engage in such nonsense. He just wants to live, love, and finally overcome his own psychological traumas, while they force him to jump on roofs and build traps in the remote forests. They slip him a “Bond girl” with a neckline down to her waist (a short but effective appearance by Ana de Armas), but the agent is not interested in her. Blofeld tries to rub in another mysterious nonsense, and all James wants is to strangle the bastard to hell and go home.
The horror of Craig’s Bond is that he simultaneously does not fit into the modern agenda, but you cannot call him retrograde either. He seems to be outdated, but the world still needs him: it is not for nothing that Nomi eventually gives him the call sign, as if accepting the supremacy of the old methods. Updated, but too late: while James was digging into himself, the world was captured by heroes of a completely different kind. “No Time to Die” has everything in perfect order with action scenes—there will be motorcycle jumps through narrow European streets, and trucks taking off in the forests, and a one-shot battle on the stairs with choreography in the spirit of some “Atomic Blonde”—but at the same time, director Cary Fukunaga does not even try to hide that the film is not at all about explosions and beautiful stunts. First of all, it is an existential drama of an “unnecessary” person. And the action is just a beautiful backdrop.
In fact, Bond’s personality overshadows everything else so much that it sometimes even hinders the film. For example, the villain with the idiotic name Lyutsifer Safin is not needed here at all—anyone could have been in his place, and nothing would have changed at all. The storyline with Blofeld also sticks out like a strange crutch: it also obtrusively reminds of “Spectre,” which, frankly, I would like to forget as soon as possible. All the small and big mistakes, however, are justified by the mighty finale, which for the first time in the history of the franchise puts a bold point in the story of the eternally rushing agent. So bold that it will be impossible to continue the “Bond” franchise without a complete revision. But, as the hero said in “Skyfall,” resurrection is, in fact, his hobby.