Cary Joji Fukunaga
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On Her Majesty's Secret Service (1969)
Directed by Peter R. Hunt
influenced No Time to Die (2021)
Music
In a tribute to “On Her Majesty’s Secret Service” (1969), we get an Aston Martin DBS, a reprise of Louis Armstrong in the end credits, and, during a conversation between Bond and M beside the Thames, a gentle echo of John Barry’s electronic score.
The nods to past films in the franchise are inspired, none more so than the use of Louis Armstrong’s gorgeous “We Have All the Time in the World” (the theme song from On Her Majesty’s Secret Service ).
Other fan-satisfying nods include lots of lovely geeky touches (a car with inbuilt machine guns, bionic eyeballs) and On Her Majesty's Secret Service as a repeated reference point.
Now, there are two exceptions and perhaps It’s only fitting that No Time to Die references On Her Majesty’s Secret Service explicitly by borrowing the John Barry/Louis Armstrong song, “We Have All the Time in the World.”
Bond procrastinates on his confession, asserting that they “have all the time in the world” (you’d think he’d be a bit careful bandying around those words, given that they’re the last thing he said to his doomed wife in “On Her Majesty’s Secret Service,” a frequent reference point for the latest film’s music, themes and romance).
Perhaps that’s why they, Fukunaga and Waller-Bridge, more liberally reference On Her Majesty’s Secret Service , the 1969 entry starring George Lazenby that feels the closest tonally in the franchise to a contemporary film, not the least of which because it marks the only time before the Craig era where Bond let himself get semi-permanently tied down by the love of a good woman.
For the Bond fan, the film is simply a litany of fantastic references worked in (though the Garden of Death from Flemming’s You Only Live Twice novel is completely wasted).
That’s incredible in the context of Bond, even if the idea of a child is not a new one in series lore; in non-canonical book form, 007 has a child with Kissy Suzuki from You Only Live Twice, a story heavily referenced in No Time to Die ’s conclusion.
No , and by Donald Pleasence's Ernst Stavro Blofeld in You Only Live Twice .
That’s how you got 007 facing off against Blofeld in “You Only Live Twice” and then the two meeting for the first time in “On Her Majesty’s Secret Service” two years hence.
The setting, and the chem-lab ickiness, are very “You Only Live Twice,” but what’s so good about Malek’s performance is the obscene way that he inserts his presence into the drama of Bond, Madeleine, and Madeline’s young daughter, Mathilde.
Cary Joji Fukunaga (“Sin Nombre,” “Beasts of No Nation”) leans into that history, giving us a Bond adventure with a hint of “You Only Live Twice,” a whiff of “Moonraker,” bits of a couple of others and a heaping helping of “On Her Majesty’s Secret Service,” perhaps the most underrated film of the lot.
Tomorrow Never Dies (1997)
Directed by Roger Spottiswoode
influenced No Time to Die (2021)
Characters
Nomi most strongly recalled Michelle Yeoh’s Wai Lin in Tomorrow Never Dies, arguably one of the physically strongest Bond leading ladies to match the hero, but even she fell into his arms by the end.
It's true that he's your typical antagonist that wants to do something bad (in this case, kill millions of people with a bioweapon), but even a somewhat shallow character like that has allowed a lot of actors to have fun with it in the past, including Gert Frobe ("Goldfinger"), Jonathan Pryce ("Tomorrow Never Dies"), Sean Bean ("Goldeneye"), and others.
As such, it pointedly references and reprises the first Craig film, 2006’s “Casino Royale.”
While the heavy existentialism bogged down Quantum of Solace and Spectre , its employment in Casino Royale and series apex Skyfall feel fresh and inspired.
This is how long Daniel Craig has played James Bond: when Casino Royale was released in theaters, Billie Eilish, who co-wrote and performs the “No Time to Die” theme song, was 5 years old.
But even TV doesn’t work like that anymore, so the movie keeps calling back to Spectre , Skyfall , and the 15-year-old Casino Royale —although the references often feel less like the product of cumulative character-building and more like enticements to stream MGM’s back catalog.
What started with the excellent franchise-launching Casino Royale, slipped with the decent but definitely underrated Quantum of Solace.
Of chief interest here are the themes – of love, loss and trust – that have been brewing since Craig’s first outing in Casino Royale and the death of then lover Vesper Lynd.
There are no set pieces quite as stunning or visceral as the Madagascar free running in Casino or the siege of Skyfall Manor, but the Matera pre-credits sequence has perhaps the best use of the Aston Martin DB5 since Goldfinger ( Skyfall included) with a scene that drips Bond cool and excitement, and the climax evokes both You Only Live Twice and Tomorrow Never Dies in a pitched base battle—including a thrillingly shot last slice of close-quarter combat for Craig on a stairwell which almost matches Casino ’s staircase fight—which feel gloriously Bond in their construction.
Fukunaga dials in memories like stock footage from previous Bond movies, not all of them Craig's: A framed shot of a woman carefully draped in bedsheets matches that of the asphyxiated body of a woman covered in gold in Goldfinger .
The death of MI6 agent Strawberry Fields (Gemma Arterton), who drowned in oil, is a callback to Goldfinger that also functions as a crude reminder that oil is the true currency of the times.
The director of the 25th Bond movie, Cary Joji Fukunaga, caused a stir before its release by asking: “Is it Thunderball or Goldfinger where Sean Connery’s character basically rapes a woman?”
Although my first encounter with British secret agent James Bond was seeing "Goldfinger" at a drive-in -- which, let's be honest, is the only place outside of the home that a one-year-old should be present for a movie -- my first recollection of 007 was the character being played by Roger Moore (and thus a sentimental soft spot for that portrayal in movies such as "The Man With the Golden Gun" and "Live and Let Die").
My own moviegoing history with Bond started with Roger Moore and the inarguably racist and inarguably popular “Live and Let Die,” at age 12.
(Like when Bond discovered blaxploitation in “Live and Let Die.”) Young people like to write essays saying these movies “age badly,” but I think that’s what makes them such fun time capsules.
Roger Moore had a Rolex Submariner in “Live and Let Die” fitted with an electromagnet that could deflect a bullet, and the watch bezel was a spinning saw.
(It’s a perfect choice for Craig’s last fling as Bond since the location also was used memorably in Connery’s first film, Dr. No, as well as Moore’s first, 1973’s Live and Let Die and was the locale where Fleming penned all the novels).
In some of these sequences, “Jane Eyre” recalls another gothic romance, Hitchcock’s “Rebecca,” in which Joan Fontaine plays the bewildered, fragile child-bride of Laurence Olivier.
And it includes the elements that have enlivened stories from “Rebecca” to “Dark Shadows.”
This Brontë celebration was accompanied by Hitchcock's classic treatment of Rebecca, Daphne du Maurier's homage to Jane Eyre, starring Joan Fontaine as an unnamed narrator, and we tend to conflate her two performances in our mind.
While the heavy existentialism bogged down Quantum of Solace and Spectre , its employment in Casino Royale and series apex Skyfall feel fresh and inspired.
But even TV doesn’t work like that anymore, so the movie keeps calling back to Spectre , Skyfall , and the 15-year-old Casino Royale —although the references often feel less like the product of cumulative character-building and more like enticements to stream MGM’s back catalog.
On the downside, director Cary Joji Fukunaga, who co-wrote the script alongside Neal Purvis, Robert Wade, Phoebe Waller-Bridge and Scott Z. Burns, forgoes the cinematic beauty of latter films such as Skyfall , substituting that movie's ace cinematographer, Roger Deakins, for the less inspired Linus Sandgren.
The film is right up there with Casino Royale and Skyfall .
No Time to Die is the apex of what has been built ever since 2006’s Casino Royale, and picked up again as Skyfall attempted to recalibrate things after Quantum of Solace‘s failure.
Big routines include the raid on the scientific facility (which perhaps knowingly echoes the flashy glass-and-neon sequences of Skyfall ), a chase through a Norwegian forest, and the climactic episode on a distant island somewhere between Russia and Japan.
“No Time to Die” is deeply derivative of the “Mission: Impossible” and “Fast & Furious” movies, which themselves owe so much to old James Bond pictures there’s a pleasing ouroboros effect.
Despite the pretense of Fukunaga’s drama Beast of No Nation , bemoaning third-world political savagery, here he replicates trite, Bondish violence (killings for killing’s sake) without social or moral principle (only interoffice squabbling with Ralph Fiennes at MI6) and without the panache that Chad Stahelski brought to the John Wick movies and that Tom Cruise oversees in his Mission: Impossible films, which have assumed Bond-movie expectations.
The truth is that so many elements of what the Bond films originally brought to cinema have been incorporated into other film series — the “Mission: Impossible” films, the “Bourne” films, the “Fast and Furious” films — that to create a first-rate Bond adventure, something more is required.
In scope and stunts and hype, the Bond series has started to blur with the other big action franchises: The Tom Cruise “Mission Impossible” movies, the “Bourne” series with Matt Damon — even the never-ending “Fast and Furious” saga.
At times, the director seems to be leading us on a journey through the non-Bond action landscape — a Dark Knight sequence here, a Fast & Furious sequence there, a Fury Road sequence there, a Hanna sequence there, to say nothing of the Mission: Impossible style teamwork that we get when the two 007s start working together.
That woman with the braids on her head, struggling to walk through lashing rain, falling in the mud, determinedly fleeing we don’t know what – in the dramatic opening of Cary Joji Fukunaga’s new film, she could be any fiery 19th century heroine, from Tess of the D’Urbervilles to Cathy in Wuthering Heights.
The problem with Jane Eyre has always been that Jane and Rochester are thrown together by narrative contrivance rather than by inevitability - Charlotte's sister Emily did a far better job of presenting a convincing relationship between two people who just don't make any sense together with her Wuthering Heights.
The story includes elements of the Gothic hauntings of a Mary Shelley (Frankenstein); the engaging war of wits of a Jane Austen (Pride and Prejudice); and the super-charged romantic melodrama of Brontë sister Emily (Wuthering Heights).
Films of Brontë novels have been arriving in pairs at regular intervals these past 70 years, as if a production of Emily's Wuthering Heights demanded an accompanying production of Charlotte's Jane Eyre .
Directed by Cary Joji Fukunaga, the first American to helm a James Bond feature, “No Time to Die” improves over “Spectre” in terms of scale but drowns in dull side characters (Billy Magnusson?), an underwhelming villain (Rami Malek), and a routine “save-the-world” narrative that puts our hero in the same sticky situations he always ends up in.
Memory has never been a prominent theme in the series, and the mood of this instalment is different in many ways, even if the concerns of the plot and most of the main characters come from Spectre (2015).
No Time to Die is a direct sequel to 2015’s Spectre, starting with a flashback to the childhood of Lea Seydoux’s Madeleine Swann, before rejoining her and Bond on a romantic vacation in Italy.
After their drably decorous courtship in Spectre , theirs is a polite but rather tepid relationship, while Craig’s Bond is comically ill at ease with the concept of empathy, fumbling with it as if somebody just handed him a baby to admire and he has literally no idea what to do with it.
Long-time Bond writers Neal Purvis and Robert Wade learnt from their mistakes with Spectre and have fashioned a story that suitably caps off a lot of the themes and character arcs they’ve been playing with for the last decade and a half.
It stands in relation to the original the way Amy Heckerling's Beverly Hills comedy Clueless does to Jane Austen's Emma.
If this Jane Eyre, in the wake of at least 20 earlier movie versions, doesn't fully sustain this spirit of reinventing the Brontë story (it can't match the boldness with which Jane Campion recalibrated The Portrait of a Lady for the 1990s), there are sufficient rewards to engage a viewer who hasn't encountered this quintessential Victorian, death-steeped romance since sophomore English, principally the two leads and their duet of Byronic morbidity and virginal fluster.
There was also at that time Jacques Tourneur's remarkable horror film I Walked With a Zombie (1943), a transposition of Jane Eyre to the modern Caribbean where the Rochester character's mad wife becomes a victim of voodoo.
If you don't count I Walked With a Zombie, this is the 27th screen adaptation of Brontë's classic, the mother of all Gothic romances.
It stands in relation to the original the way Amy Heckerling's Beverly Hills comedy Clueless does to Jane Austen's Emma.
It's as if all the updates, satires and reappropriations of various Empire romances didn't exist: Never mind that Jean Rhys refigured "Jane Eyre" as a post-Colonial critique in the 1966 novel "Wide Sargasso Sea," or that Amy Heckerling transformed Jane Austen 's "Emma" into the teen-flick "Clueless," or that the popular "Twilight" novels have inspired an improbable literary subgenre with titles like "Pride and Prejudice and Zombies" and "Jane Slayre."
Hans Zimmer’s score is fit-for-purpose, with its highest points being variations on the Monty Norman theme and the opening five or seven notes of the love theme between Bond and his inamorata of two pictures, Dr. Swann (Léa Seydoux), which promise to bloom into John Williams’ theme for Robert Altman’s “The Long Goodbye,” but do not.
Closer in spirit to Alfonso Cuarón's Children of Men than Elem Klimov's Come and See , which deployed a more subjective use of image and sound to convey the brutality of war on a boy's psyche, Beasts of No Nation is one maximalist, long-take-dependent display of violence after another.
The Africa-set drama is a relentlessly violent, vibrant, and electric film that is at once as druggy and entrancing as Coppola’s 1979 cut of Apocalypse Now and as sonically inventive as Elem Klimov’s Come and See.
It's more wise about how something like this should look, in other words, than how it should feel, and the epiphany one has while watching it isn't that this kind of thing happens in the world all the time, across centuries and continents, but that Beasts of No Nation looks a lot like Come and See before it looks a lot like The Thin Red Line before, finally, it looks a lot like Apocalypse Now.
And while it’s very of-the-moment to apply the descriptor of ‘horror film’ to anything sporting a notably sinister undercurrent (from Mulholland Drive to There Will Be Blood), the debasing effect of war is a real-world horror so elemental and so perpetually now that an unspoken exception must be made for the expressionistic likes of Full Metal Jacket, Come and See and, by association, a lesser but still worthy film like Beasts of No Nation.
As in “Skyfall” (2012), someone is trapped under a frozen lake, and the bunker where Safin breeds his toxins resembles the mega-garage where the madman in “The Spy Who Loved Me” (1977) parked his stolen submarines.
Grittier or more laidback elements that bring the franchise into the 21st century exist alongside a place called Poison Island, home to a lair straight out of The Spy Who Loved Me .
As for Safin, Rami Malek is slithery and creepy, but his motivations are muddled and his plan comes off as kind of a cross between earlier Bond villains like The Spy Who Loved Me ’s Karl Stromberg and Marvel’s genocidal Thanos.
The many memorable stunts are worthy of all the admiration they have frequently received (my favorite being the pre-credits ski jump of the 1977 The Spy Who Loved Me ).
From the 1944 Joan Fontaine-Orson Welles film to the 1996 version directed by Franco Zeffirelli, nearly every feature-length "Jane Eyre" has had to wrestle with the challenge of condensing Bronte's episodic narrative, a task more easily managed by five-hour-plus adaptations such as the beloved 1983 miniseries.
There’s a nod to Escape From New York (1981) at the top of the final act that made me smile.