No Time to Die (2021 James Bond film). May include spoilers!*

James Bond's Gravestone Appears on Faroe Islands After No Time to Die - Variety

 

Oscars supposed to commemorate 60th anniversary of Bond.

 

Let me know as I stopped watching that trash some years back.

 

Yes it went way downhill. I stopped about 5 years ago .
Maybe I'll try to tune in a little but no idea when this will be on so probably will just catch this online .

 

Just wanted to toss this review in here as I think Chris did a good job of covering many different aspects of the movie fairly (all without giving spoilers somehow). Do you agree or disagree with his points?



I've recently dove into the world of YT film and TV reviews as well because I watch a lot of TV and love Anthony Fantano music reviews so figured I'd find the platforms most famous film reviewers. They all love the Bond franchise too (Chris Stuckmann and Jeremy Jahns) and I was surprised to find their reviews were actually quite poignant and not pandering....something to be said about the integrity of opinion online these days especially from content creators.

 

A lot of them are -they could be fun to watch- but being vicious draw audiences. It is always easy to criticize other people's work and use it as a way to draw attention while piggy backing on someone else's success. I am not saying flaws should not be pointed out but the word integrity does not come to my mind.

 

Any good new Bond?

 

Quite true! I'm skeptical of similar vibes in reviewers as well as I want someone who can understand and respect the process/ full context of a film, such as No Time To Die. I was happy to find those two guys as, although they have a large fan base to appease and entertain, I feel they did a good job at being fair, knowing their place, and knowing how to accurately qualify their opinions. All just goes to say, if there's any "Bond content" I'm slurping it up!

 

Calvin Dyson runs a great Bond YouTube channel. He's always entertaining and has a real love for the series. There are a few great Bond-related channels but his might be the best.

 

I like that one too. He does run a solid fan content page.

 

I just watched this last one, I liked it, definitely the most dramatic and emotional Bond ever

 

I watched all the Daniel Craig Bond films. The others I'd seen before, and this latest one I saw for the first one. Generally it's a steep downhill for me after Casino Royale and my biggest problem is the writing - character development and plot. They all seem (after Casino Royale) to rely on someone random coming out of the past, and that's not storytelling, just the cheapest kind of mechanism. That's what the plots are too: A to B because of X, Y, Z without any real motivation. But enough about that. What I liked about the latest was that it does have genuine character development. So it's an uphill bump on the downhill, I guess. It's hard to rate after just one viewing.

I wasn't sure what to expect beforehand. Had I heard that Bond dies in this one? Was there supposed to be a new 007? Nevertheless, in the end he seemed like a different character. I think a lot of that was on Craig himself. A sense of acceptance. I liked that. And I think the style of the film reflected that. The action scenes had a touch of realism and a documentary feel at times. Which is funny because at other times it made me think of a dream sequence whenever it went into action. I look forward to seeing this one again some day and be able to appreciate the cinematography more.

I thought the line "We have all the time in the world" felt cheap in the beginning (here we go, here's another dead lover, I thought), with the accompanying musical cue, but by the end of it, I loved hearing the song. (Why not call the film that, or some variation of it...? "No Time to Die" makes little sense to me.)

I wondered if it would say "James Bond Will Return" at the end, and it does. But it'll feel natural for that to be a different kind of James Bond.

 

With a Mind to Kill:

007 -- With a Mind to Kill

 

I think what you're hitting upon is the villain characters. The series really struggled with this because of course Bond is a cold-war spy story as conceived by Fleming, and so that ship sailed. They also couldn't do a realistic terrorism arc for reasons of political correctness, so they tied it to Spectre and Mr. White from the start. Le Chiffre was a strong villain. I also found Green to be strong, but I understand why others may not. And I liked White being a common thread throughout all the films except Skyfall. Speaking of which, I found Bardem to be the weakest villain of the Craig run. All the acting nuances and evil demeanor that made Bardem an excellent villain in No Country for Old Men were missing in Skyfall. He was a silly, effeminate sort of weirdo starting right when he's intro'ed with that anecdote about "last rat standing". That was ridiculous, as was the blimp assault on the secluded estate in the Lake District with Boom Boom. Complete nonsense. Yet that seemed to be the most popular 007 Criag film. Bond fans seemed to not like Blofield's emergence in Spectre, but I thought it was far better than Skyfall. Rami Malek--I had no complaints in No Time to Die.

No Time to Die makes sense because Bond had just found out he was a father, and in that respect it was not a good time for him to die. That's my interpretation anyway. The Louis Armstrong song, with that sort of weary Satchmo voice toward the end of his career and the sappy string arrangement, was a great choice.

Unless they can solve the villain problem, I'm really not interested in another 007 reboot. Even if they find the best Bond, the films will be rubbish without compelling villains in the spirit of Ian Fleming's books. The best idea would be a period-piece type of reboot that is true to the cars, weapons, geopolitics and technology of the original Fleming character. But no studio would greenlight that kind of yesteryear project without turning it into a video game type of production like Kingsmen.

 

The Craig films lacked a truly memorable villain. Bringing Blofeld back was a cool idea but it was handled so poorly that it felt like parody at times. Silva had potential but I never felt he was as great as some say. Much like the Joker, he was able to get away with things that were all up to coincidence and it didn't match the more realistic tone of the film.

I just hope they can get the series back into more fun territory again. I'm not asking for Moonraker or Diamonds Are Forever levels of of camp, but another film in the style of Golfinger, The Spy Who Loved Me, or GoldenEye would be more than welcome.

 

I think Le Chiffre, Blofeld and Mr. White were as memorable as any villain in other Bond films, if not as motivated or over-the-top.

 

Finally saw this on Amazon Prime and it was awful. I can't quite believe they had the villain spout that over-familiar "we're the same, you and I" stuff to Bond, let alone that toe-curling "poisoned...by heartbreak" line (as if we might have missed the symbolism - fat chance, the writer(s?) took the marching band approach to symbols: things you bash together so you can't miss them). Bond meets his fate carrying a cuddly toy, having got in touch with his inner child/nurturing instincts/both: blah. They took an entertaining bastard and made him into a thoroughly drab figure. Trying to piggyback onto the emotional resonance of "We Have All the Time in the World" just seemed cynical (as well as inadvertently highlighting how inferior this was to one of the weaker Bond films).

Hopefully Bond returns in a markedly different form. It might be fun to see it done as a period piece, perhaps. Less scope for grating Nokia product placement then, I suppose.

 

Craig’s legacy is two great films - Casino and Skyfall, one ok one - Spectre, and two garbage ones - Quantum and No Time. Not much of a legacy. Wouldn’t have been so bad if they weren’t spread out over fifteen years. What a waste.

 

Agree with this except would flip Quantum and Spectre.

 

Yeah it was "okay." But OHMSS is still the best-written/acted one imo.

 

It is very good but maybe a bit overpraised these days? The "allergy research institute" stuff is very Austin Powers. I'd take From Russia or Casino Royale over it.

 

They were okay, but can they really compete in the pantheon that includes Goldfinger, Scaramanga, Hugo Drax, Max Zorin, Jaws, and Red Grant? I would say no. The Craig era really needed a good villain and/or henchman and that just never happened. Having Blofeld and SPECTRE come back should have been a slam dunk; unfortunately the writing was so sloppy that neither truly felt like a viable threat. They had all the pieces in place to return to classic Bond and couldn't pull it off.

 

For me the Craig era is a textbook example of diminishing returns. Casino Royale was fantastic, Quantum ok, Skyfall meh, Spectre bad and No Time To Die worse than Die Another Day horrible. I hated all the personal and past connections between flipping everyone in the last three films, the attempts at emotional depth… when the real world has more memorable villains than the films, it’s time to pack it in or try harder. These made me nostalgic for invisible cars.

 

This is definitely Craig's era biggest sin. 15 years for 5 films, and one only that's truly great; God bless Martin Cambell.

4 years between Qos and Spectre, and 6 years between Spectre and NTTD? Jeez! What a major waste of time.

 

Craig's legacy is garbage. his Bond films are utterly without
merit. He was the worst choice for Bond, and a completely
clueless actor. So dumb he doesn't even know when his
character is being insulted and rejected on the screen.

The virtues of Casino Royale were put there by Ian Fleming,
what little survived the DNA change and deconstruction.