Review: 007: No Time To Die

In Daniel Craig's final stint as Bond, we reflect on 007: No Time to Die and ask questions about the future of the super-spy (major spoilers follow).

James Bond films have always explored contemporary matters. In the same year that the USA conducted 23,000 drone strikes, Spectre (2015) was released where C, the Director-General of the Joint Security Service played by Andrew Scott, encourages the usage of drones, wiretapping and other digital covert tactics to be the primary resources of Her Majesty’s Secret Service. M (Ralph Fiennes) disagrees, saying “you can find out all about a man, track him down, keep an eye on him. But you have to look him in the eye. All the tech you have can't help you with that. A license to kill also means a license NOT to kill.”

007: No Time to Die also tackles the contemporary. On the backdrop of a global pandemic, the film’s moral axis hinges on a biological weapon that makes blood leak from your orifices before bringing it’s victims to an inevitable, agonising end. This weapon is composed of nanites that efficiently infect and destroy a genetically specific target. The true insidiousness of this weapon is that, whether airbourne or concentrated into liquid form, once the nanites come into contact with your skin they remain there forever. Furthermore, anyone directly related to the genetic target is also susceptible to dying from the nanites. If I touch your father with nanites on my fingers, and he dies, and I touch you with the same hand, you will also die. And there’s no way for me to ever get those nanites off. If I want you to live, I can’t touch you or anything near you, ever again.

Despite these high and microscopic stakes, No Time to Die retains all the familiar charm of a classic Bond film. The quippy banter between Q (Ben Wishaw) and Bond, a suave, martini-shaken-not-stirred entrance into a high class soiree, energetic car chases with gadget-ridden Aston Martins (the first being a DB5 which many will remember from Goldfinger) and villains with fever-dreams of global domination. The script’s strength resides in the punchiness of it’s dialogue but also in the execution of its restraint. The whimsical post-murder wordplay is kept to a very surprising pun of one–its solitude in an otherwise pun-less film almost elevating it from a groan worthy wisecrack into actually… being hilarious. And although the runtime drags a little long (I was ready to call it quits around the 2 hour mark) I can appreciate the thoroughness and attention to detail given to Daniel Craig’s farewell.

Storywise, it’s also very compelling. The film begins with a young Madeleine Swann (Coline Defaud) watching her mother (Mathilde Bourbin) being murdered by a masked man. She runs over the frozen lake near their remote cabin, falling through the ice into the fatal water below, only for this masked killer to save her life. We are flung into a future where Madeline (Lea Seydoux) and James are shooting for a semblance of a ‘happily ever after’ as they muse over the emotional density of secrets. This is promptly disrupted by Primo (Dali Benssalah) a one-eyed assassin who finds Bond in the midst of his passionate, hideaway life with an order to kill him. Thinking that Madeline had given him up and giving her no time to explain herself, he takes her to the train station, puts her on a train and vows to never see her again. The emotional backbone of this film is Bond’s capacity to love, to be in love, and to be heartbroken–something previously unexplored as the world’s most famous womaniser.

For 2 hours and 43 minutes, we continue to see a kinder iteration of Bond, one whose heart is heavy with loss, who almost dies to save the life of his friend, Felix (Jeffrey Wright), and one who is willing to die for the ones he loves.

None of these empathetic adjustments to his character change the fact that James Bond feels like a relic of a bygone era.

In the film’s opening sequence, when Bond believes that he’s been betrayed by Swann, the previously tender man from scenes before becomes cold, callous, reckless and forceful. He pulls her by the arm and puts her on a train, saying that she’d never see him again. The scene felt uncomfortable, not only because it evoked in me a pantomime-like urge to scream at the screen “give her a chance man, damn!” but because of how his excessive manhandling of her, and the suddenness of his pivot into it, felt like witnessing an abusive situation.

James Bond’s universally renowned swagger is inseparable from the misogyny that has embalmed it, and I don’t think any amount of literary reworking or expert penwomanship from Phoebe Waller Bridge could divorce the man from the cyclone of symbols that he represents. However, the film does a great job trying–by having him team up with, and rely on, a wonderful cast of highly capable women to make a statement: No Time To Die is trying to “get with the times”.

This attempt at de-misogynising James Bond doesn’t take into account, or understand, or even particularly care about the wider, social impact of his character or the cinematic and cultural casing that he’s inalienably wrapped in. Making Bond treat women better is an appeasement that, if you take it as a serious and meaningful step, means taking a serious and meaningful step away from all the ways that James Bond is problematic.

Every villain is facially disfigured, leaning into an outdated ableist trope that reinforces a dangerous and prevalent prejudice of “things that are conventionally unattractive are evil”. Physical attractiveness dictating morality is something that action films have reproduced time and again, with Bond being one of the chief perpetrators.

Every villain noticeably speaks distinctly with non-British accents, as if to reinforce the sanctity of British nationalism by consistently acquainting their otherness with criminality.

These things aren’t actively harmful promotions but they are insidious demonisations that the franchise doesn’t, and maybe can’t, address because they are woven into the genetic make-up of “the Bond film”. Furthermore, Bond’s inability to address or be unravelled from the historical impact of the British empire he defends contributes heavily to the reason why this film marks, for me, what needs to be the natural demise of Bond.

In the familiar villain-hero confrontation between James Bond and Safin (Rami Malek), Safin says, “We both eradicate people to make the world a better place. I just want it to be... tidier.”

I agreed with Safin, but not for the philosophically dramatic reason, I’m sure, the film intends.

James Bond was shaped to be a hero but actually represents a maintenance of the status quo. He’s a figure who is only able to change incrementally and cosmetically but fundamentally, he’s glorified law enforcement with the international jurisdiction, bravado and the clearance to get away with mass-killing, justified because he is attractive, culturally aspirational and because he murders on behalf of queen and dominating country. He defends a world structure where his nation has ensured themselves a superpower through might and domination and when his villains are driven to desperate, one dimensional lengths because of that cruel world structure, and come to the conclusion that they can only attain might and domination on a global scale by the same violent means, he is dispatched to make sure those villains don’t succeed. Bond’s villains aren’t right. And Bond isn’t right either.

When the newly appointed 007 agent, Nomi (Lashana Lynch) is trying to take Obruchev (David Dencik), the designer of the biological weapon, as a prisoner while avoiding the gunfire of Safin’s henchmen as they cross over a toxic pond, he threatens to wipe out the entire Black diaspora in front of her. She kicks him into the toxic pool.

It is intended as a moment of anti-racism triumphing. The symbolic, gruesome death of a racist bubbling in front of us by the hands of a capable, bad-ass Black woman. But when you consider that the biological weapon at the centre of this film was secretly commissioned by M, the director of MI6, this kick, in the grand scope of the film, is nothing but performative.

When Bond presses M about why he employed Obruchev to make such an insidious weapon in the first place, M simply huffs that he did it for the good of his country. It is meant to sound valiant and heroic. But when you follow the narrative thread of this, it becomes quite harrowing. What does it mean that a country with an extensive history of imperialism is making a biological weapon that literally wipes out the bloodline of anyone who it comes into contact with? What does it mean that they employ a racist geneticist to fulfill that task? A symbolic, cinematic kick for the Black struggle is meaningless when you consider how close this film conceptually teeters on a Black genocide.

No Time to Die is a fitting end for Daniel Craig’s tenure. He brought an emotional depth and complexity to the role that hasn’t been explored before him. But his tenure also ends at a time where society is changing, and trying to rectify the social harms of the yesteryear and considering drastic steps such as abolishing the police. James Bond mobilises when a villain decides they want to uproot the existing superpowers. But against the banality of everyday evil–of a climate change that is threatening the future of our entire species, of income inequality that leads to mistaking overpopulation with over consumption, of a white supremacist world structure that has split the world into 1st and 2nd place, of ableism that discards those who aren’t in peak physical condition and attractiveness as unproductive and immoral, and so many other ways that the world is battered and broken–Bond is largely ineffectual. And in the slow march towards a new world, is there a place for a super spy or a culture that venerates him? Can a more woman-friendly reformation redeem him? Does the status quo he has upheld for so long, need upholding? As twilight descends on this Bond, there’s been a lot of conversations about who should or shouldn’t be Bond. Should Bond be a Black man? Can Bond be a woman? And as Latasha Lynch, a Black woman, ends the film holding the 007 title, I feel like there is a much more important question to ask is–does Bond even need to exist at all any more?