Bond #25: NO TIME TO DIE

i was like damn they filmed this two years before covid and it’s got intense covid themes

SPECTRE is now out, so they will be replaced in next film by the Socialist Humanist Autonomist Radical Troops

4th film: ... a division of SPECTRE Enterprises

Nah it'll be some sort terror plot via radioactive NFTs.

Anyway my favorite 'where the fuck IS this' moment was the first shot of the coastal island highway and then when the film revealed it was Norway I was all "Oh...that makes sense."

yeah that highway was wild

i wanna ride it
oh my fjord

the one downside to Billy Magnusson being in any movie is you always know if he's playing a good guy he's going to wind up being an actual bad guy.

007 is a black woman? bond is fighting AGAINST her?

Actually, Commander Bond gave her the lead, sir

that was a CIA vs MI6 thing and Bond only took the CIA's side because he was appalled at M allowing the development of the nanobot techonlogy

i know. but in the film it’s just a plot mechanic. seems like it would merit more “wtf”ness, deal-making, atonement… something

something else about these (that i'm sure i'm not the first to mention) is that they nearly always seem to want to put about 5 movies worth of location and circumstance into the same movie. the boat, the red lights, the short, ugly fight, felix... all that was beautiful and incredible. santiago, the vibe there, the federales, the rooftop escape, ana de armas.. man i would have liked a whole movie of that.

the running bit of every female spy going “no, I am NOT trying to seduce you, Bond!” was subtle enough that it played, imo

the running bit of how we should care what his agent number is was dreadful

so dumb. especially the "I bet you thought they'd retire it." uhh yeah he thought he was so great that they would permanently reduce their entire workforce by 11% in order to... make up for not having him anymore?

cute enough 1 time but they returned to it a bunch of times lol

idk i feel like there are plenty of numbers xp

it's not necessarily 11% there's an 0012 mentioned in one of the books

tho, ngl, i was annoyed not to know Bond's new, temporary number

0069

oh hell yeah

“No fade” is a great nickname for that guy xp

ty mark - turns out this was 0011, in Moonraker

I hated this but loved Ana De Armas

do they ever determine if there was any time to die?

Around 2:45pm EST

big doings are just barely acknowledged. 007 is a black woman? bond is fighting AGAINST her? the bioweapon was actually developed by MI6? bond finally gets the baddie? (several times?) any of these things could have been the organising principle for great moments of high leverage and difficult choices but they just.... happen.

i couldn't disagree with this more. i hate it when movies dwell on big doings, i really appreciated how they just kept this one moving along like its nbd

yeah same. especially in Bond

lol guys i’m not talking about making everything weepy and “meaningful” like skyfall i’m talking about basic dramatic techniques for generating suspense and interest

nope sorry yr overruled

lol

I saw this last night and really enjoyed it. My first theater experience since Invisible Man. I rank it just below CR in the Craig Bond canon.

I do have some nitpicks to mention:

- The ineffective bomb followed by the ineffective assassins -- another of Blofeld's harebrained schemes I guess. Too similar to the random hotel assassins they added to the Connery/Moore movies for my taste.

- Lucifer Boat's plan changing from the thematic targeting of families, to being a standard Bond villain.

- Bond conveniently running into a dangerous place instead of spending a few extra seconds to walk around it.

- The movie saying it's really Bond's child around 3 times, and expecting it to be a big reveal the third time.

i forgot to mention another thing my 12-yo said that i had to stifle a laugh at. at the beginning where we see lea seydoux and bond in the water, at the beach, we pull out for a wide shot and he goes “wow, great colour grading”

Another nitpick: the Swann/Safin connection didn't amount to anything. Bond already had the Foxdie in him from the birthday party.

i thought that was a different strain cooked up by obruchev on safin’s orders that just killed spectre agents (not sure how the dna part of that is supposed to work unless spectre is all related to each other…)

Foxdie

Thank you I was thinking about this the whole time

looking forward to watching this on my phone and complaining about the dialogue

ffs they showed the little nano bot programming rig being loaded with all the spectra agents’ profiles (after a not too subtle switch from the one containing only Bond’s profile) when our socially inept Russian scientist was in cuba

the one red herring that went nowhere was the kid, at the beginning of the scenic auto chase, saying something about mosquitos. I was thinking for a minute “wait, is the kid actually Blofeld’s or a spectre agent’s? is she going to get sick because she’s Mr. White’s granddaughter?” but that went nowhere

so russian guy put every spectre member on it, except for blofeld? why

Blofeld was in prison and wouldn't be at the party. They had a separate plan for Blofeld and it worked

xpost yeah mh i thought the mosquito bite meant she’d been poisoned - maybe they took out that storyline bc too dark or something

Just finished it. I don’t know. Did this feel like a Bond film, really? Even taking the Craigverse into account? I haven’t made up my mind yet, but I kinda feel it just playacted as one.

I thought it was a great one. Though I had the feeling you describe with Skyfall, which felt more like The Dark Knight or something.

It was the most Bondy of the Craigs in some ways - gadgets, quips, villain with ridiculous lair.

finally got to this last night, liked it...okay. didn't really feel the length, which is something. agreed that it was well-directed and looked great. the story was somewhat disadvantaged by my multi-year efforts to forget I watched SPECTRE and my general disinterest in the forced continuity of these films. all pathos relating to Vesper (how long were they even together???) and Madeleine was thus wasted on me. i also just tune out all these nano-bot/magic blood/database-of-everybody plot elements. i've seen em all and man they're all the same.

all of the Bond grunting at M about his bad decisions etc etc, the new 007 character, etc, all seemed like filler almost. like they're all gonna end up on the same side in like 15 minutes, so it seems kinda pointless. but i'm kind of a classicist, and my expectation is that M doesn't need a storyline; M is the person who sends Bond on a mission and chuckles/rolls eyes when Bond celebrates victory with a tryst and a double entendre.

Malek was extremely generic despite all the makeup and the barely-used mask gimmick. he should have tried harder to have an over the top voice or mannerisms... like kept wanting him to talk like Eddie Redmayne in Jupiter Ascending. his poison factory lair was a little too vague spatially to work for me as a setting tbh, though i liked the individual spaces a lot. couldn't Q have walked the team thru a 3D model of the island, gesturing at visible things --- "this tower, here, was used to control the blast doors when this place was a missile silo..." a line of dialogue making clear that the Hercules nanobots are carrying little drops of this "farmed" poison might have helped... felt like they couldn't really commit to this concept. also if they are nanobots wouldn't they be vulnerable to things like a wristwatch EMP?

I, too, could have done with a little less killing, or at LEAST less machine-gunning at random in public places. i want my heroes to try and lead the fight out of town to protect people, or at least acknowledge that the bad guys are endangering bystanders by starting a shootout. aside from that, the opening battle in Matera (i believe?) was fantastic and definitely the highlight of the film for me. Havana was also great, though a little harder to follow. i would have appreciated one more big action scene in a beautiful location, rather than all the office tension with M.

funniest action movie logic moment: two bad guy cars are coming to find Bond at Madeleine's childhood home. they see him pass them and turn around; at some point he swerves off the highway and leads them way off on a dirt road chase; after some high speed driving in the woods, he's defeated these two cars, and then instantly like three more plus some motorcycles burst out of the woods and race downhill at them. um... were those guys just waiting up there in case this happened? if only Bond had picked a different random road to turn off on, the entire kidnapping scenario could have been avoided...

so what worked for me? um... the visuals, for sure. craig's intense, battered, convincingly exhausted performance. most of the action scenes. i like Whishaw as Q even though i'm so over movies like this having to do "hacker" scenes. i like Harris as a spy even though being Moneypenny doesn't give her much to do. i like James Bond movies.

What's with all the booze all the time? Are all Bond movies like this and I'm forgetting?

That seemed like it was written to contrast Bond's boozeshaming of M with his own constant boozing, but then not presented onscreen as the two being related in any way

Bond has always been a heavy boozer! It's just in recent films that it's been commented on as a flaw.

https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2013/12/13/250474378/if-you-drank-like-james-bond-youd-be-shaken-too

Dr. Indra Neil Guha, a liver specialist, and his colleagues at Nottingham University Hospital in England spent a year poring over Ian Fleming's James Bond books and tabulating how many drinks the suave spy drank a day.

Their conclusion? Even just steadying his Walther PPK might have been difficult for Bond.

On average, Bond consumed about 45 drinks a week, or six to seven a day, the authors wrote Thursday in the Christmas edition of BMJ, formerly the British Medical Journal. That's way more than the amount considered risky for men by the National Institute of Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism.

It wasn't just chronic drinking that roughed up Bond's liver. He also went on some mean benders. In Casino Royale, Bond knocked back nearly 20 drinks before going on a high-speed car chase, getting in a wreck and then spending two weeks in the hospital. "We hope that this was a salutary lesson," the authors wrote dryly.

"This man clearly consumed what are considered to be harmful amounts of alcohol," says psychiatrist Peter Martin, who directs the Vanderbilt Addiction Center. "There are data that show that drinking like this, about 100 grams of alcohol a day, is highly likely to be associated with liver cirrhosis and also cognitive deficits." It would also be likely to increase risks for depression and sexual dysfunction, conditions that would not be very Bondian.

nonsense, surely Ian Fleming drank like that, and he lived to the wise old age of *checks notes* fifty-six

never mind