As I teased at the end of the last post, I decided to blog about the last Daniel Craig Bond film, No Time to Die, which opened in the US this weekend. There will be full spoilers after the jump down below, but I have some other items to cover before I get there.
If anyone possibly remembers the old, now defunct blog I did from roughly 2005 to 2019 (Jamais Vu), they would probably remember that I used to blog about Bond films all the time, especially since Casino Royale (which is still probably in my top 2 or 3 favorites of the franchise) debuted in 2006, right around the same time that I started hopping on the blogging bandwagon. I even co-hosted a 2008 Bond Blogathon in the run up to the release of Quantum of Solace (who knows if any remnants of that still linger out there on the webs).
My one print publication on Bond was a narratological analysis of Casino Royale around this time in a collection of academic essays on the film. I recall being quite proud of that one--it was my Bond cinephilia in its heyday, but honestly I don't remember much about it now. Back then, I also wrote a Barthesian-wanna be love letter to On Her Majesty's Secret Service (1969), which probably still remains my favorite along with Casino Royale (and I'm not sure how I feel about the homages to it in this most recent one).
I know it seems like a hipster thing now to say these days, but I was saying OHMSS was the greatest Bond film ever long before it was cool to say so.
Aside from just growing up a huge Bond fan, Craig's peak as Bond (2006-2012) also seemed to coincide with that period in my life when I was still most invested in blogging. And I do think there's a legitimate argument to be made that--as someone who grew up on old Connery films and remembers with great fondness watching Dalton in the theatres as a kid--Craig is the greatest of all the Bonds (but, that may also be because the stories themselves have generally been so much better too). Towards the end of the old blog's lifespan, I think one of the few times I set aside a moment to get back to it after a couple years of inactivity was to post thoughts on Spectre after its release in 2015.
One of my very earliest memories of blogging was actually on my birthday in 2005, when I made a point to see Layer Cake at the Highland Park Renaissance Place Theatre (which was also where I'd first see Spectre a decade later) specifically only because of the rumor at the time that Craig might be the next James Bond. Not to brag, but I came away quite positive way back then that he would be a good one. He had the confidence, energy and presence needed for the role, while also feeling like exactly the kind of perceptively unconventional choice the part needed by then.
So, there was always something for me about blogging and Craig's Bond, and I felt obligated to continue the tradition--not only because I've blogged about each of them during the week of their first release, but also because this is the last one, and it is truly the end of an era. I've been thinking a lot about the last 15 years of my life recently, and it seems apt that Craig too is moving on.
Full spoilers after the neon cowboy below:
I saw No Time to Die at a drive-in in Oklahoma City. This is not a random side note as I'm still not willing to sit in a room full of people during what is hopefully the tail end of a pandemic--or I should say, I'm not willing to do it yet for a movie that is basically three hours long, for Daniel Craig as Bond or otherwise. I do lament that I won't get to see the extensive IMAX footage in its proper format, but such is life.
I mention the current historical moment in part because it is impossible right now to perceive this film outside of the crazy long delay it took to finally hit theatres. I had been completely amped for this movie since the trailers first started appearing in the fall of 2019 (in retrospect, I probably watched too many trailers too often, for reasons I will get to later). And that, I think, contributed to the added sense of the film as a considerable letdown. I guess, how could it not feel like a downer after so much anticipation--finally getting to the end (hopefully) of the pandemic, on top of finally getting to the end of the Craig era.
I'm trying not to over-react to my first viewing--for one, I'm only blogging about the movie in the first place because of that sense of commitment and responsibility I feel, as mentioned above--not out of some deep frustration that I need to find an outlet for. In my old age, I don't typically get worked up about such silly things in life (movies, sports) like I did when I was younger. And when I do its more with a playful angle than any serious investment.
For another, my first reactions to Spectre--as I blogged about back then--were pretty negative, but that movie actually grew on me considerably over the years. In fact, I'd even go so far as to take the contrarian position that's its a better Bond film than the (excessively) acclaimed Skyfall. The first time I saw Spectre I was so annoyed by the way in which the Blofeld twists were handled that it blinded me to how much I appreciated that the film felt much more like a true sequel to the others than Skyfall's bizarre and slightly pretentious soft reboot did (lest I be misunderstood, I still like Skyfall, but I find it the least satisfying of all the Craig ones--and it may just come down to the simple fact that its the only one of the four sequels that seems to ignore completely the crown jewel that remains Casino Royale).
So, anyway, I'm trying not to put too much stock in my first impression. That said, I found it to be a kind of depressing movie, to be honest, and not so much because they killed off Bond at the end (and in an almost comically over the top, superhero kind of way). I'm fine with that bold creative decision in and of itself--especially since Craig has made no secret of his desire to move on, and if they are going to reboot with a new actor anyway, why not? (also, I've assumed--ala Harrison Ford in Force Awakens--that Craig probably only agreed to do one last one on the condition that they promise to kill him off--well, that, plus $30 million dollars and a piece of the back-end gross, which actually might not be much these days).
No, it was kind of a downer even getting there. I was heartbroken when they killed off Felix Leiter (Jeffrey Wright) earlier in the film--not only because he was one of my favorite parts of both Casino Royale and Quantum of Solace, but because it had long been a source of frustration to me that his character disappeared over ten years ago--whether it was Wright's desire or the filmmakers', I don't know. And when it was announced they were finally bringing him back--honestly--it was about as exciting a development as I heard in the pre-production news.
And then they kill off Blofeld a little while later (we hardly knew ye). I was less upset about that (and the scene itself unfortunately was actually kind of predictable from the start). But, as I was thinking about it more this morning, I realized that this whole movie felt a little like the last season of Game of Thrones, or Battlestar Galactica--meaning, everyone knows this is the end so why not just start killing off important people? I mean, why not?
To be clear, my criticism in general here in not that I have a problem with killing off all these iconic characters in and of itself (though I really would've liked more Felix over the years first--it's clear they only brought him back just to give him a goodbye) so much as it feels ironically like there's no dramatic stakes to doing so. They're not doing it to build suspense or real tension for the future--they are simply playing with house money, going for broke because narratively there are no consequences. The producers will wake up in 2022 and start fresh.
Lest I sound overly negative, I do like that the film takes chances--I like that they continue to develop the relationship with Madeleine. I like that they give him a family and greater stakes. I don't know that it all works--a lot of the movie seems to hinge on how convinced you are by the relationship the couple begins to forge in the second half of Spectre. Certainly, if Vesper was still around, a similar ending with her would've had much more weight. I also appreciate that the film makes Spectre even more consequential for the franchise as a whole as a result.
(I promise to stop picking on the film some day but I do think there's something to be said about how the soft reboot of Skyfall probably hurt some of the catharsis and pathos this new film might have been going for as a coda to the era as a whole).
At the same time, the attempts to make the whole franchise interconnected feels even more convoluted this time around--one of the things I wrote about in that Casino Royale essay over a decade ago was how I loved the new attention to world-building in the Bond universe (and this was pre-MCU). Mr. White, not LeChiffre, turned out to be the real villain, and, damn, what an ending that was.
But I think in the end they overdid it. Mr. White killed Safrin's family, Safrin wants to kill his family now, Bond wants to kill Safrin because he threatened Madeleine, who is still the daughter of Mr. White, the guy who sent Vesper to betray Bond, who is still the step-brother of Blofeld, who is a rival of Safrin . . . meanwhile the Brits and the US are kind of in a tense rivalry (which I'm guessing there was a Trump commentary intended there originally), but not really ultimately, I guess . . . honestly, I think part of what lost me in the movie early on was l lost track of who all was invested in what, plot-wise.
I'd hear some buzz in the last week about how it wasn't a bad film so much as it wasn't a "Bond film," and I think I might better appreciate what was meant by that. No Time to Die reminds me more of a independent film (not counting the massive budget of course) in the sense that it feels like a movie where they wanted to cast Craig as a retired secret agency to knowingly riff off of his Bond persona, not to actually play Bond but to do an interestingly revisionist, implicit take on the Bond formula. And I say this not only because of the plot developments (what if Bond was retired? what if Bond had a family?) but because of the really serious and somber tone that almost the entire film takes (you realize in the first 15 minutes of the movie that this isn't going to be a film really invested in the action)--much more of a straightforward and heavy drama ultimately than a classic adventure with dramatic elements. One of the reasons why I lament watching all the trailers is because there's not much else action-wise in the movie if you have seen them already--save one impressive long take sequence in the finale, which felt more like a self-aware gimmick by the time we finally get there.
So yeah it was kind of a depressing movie--not just all the iconic deaths and the "end of the Craig era" angle, but also the general tone of the movie, as well as oh by the way the whole virus wiping out the world plot, which is unfortunate these days (probably another reason the filmmakers preemptively jumped the gun in early 2020 on postponing the release). Also, Safrin is a pretty dour villain as well--not just a bleak fellow with a lack of much personality but also a lack of much in the way of compelling motivation as a villain. By the time I got to the end, I felt like what it seemed like Craig felt--just ready to move on.
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