No Time to Die (2021)
Directed by Cary Joji Fukunaga
Bond has left active service and is enjoying a tranquil life in Jamaica. His peace is short-lived when his old friend Felix Leiter from the CIA turns up asking for help. The mission to rescue a kidnapped scientist turns out to be far more treacherous than expected, leading Bond onto the trail of a mysterious villain armed with dangerous new technology.
61 connections found
View:
61 films that influenced No Time to Die
What critics say influenced No Time to Die
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.
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 ).
The Craig movies have often been critiqued for sucking a lot of the zany fun out of the franchise in favour of more Bourne -influenced realism, but each entry has gradually brought back the fun and, whilst not going full Moonraker , No Time to Die does have a far more exuberant spring in its step.
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.
Only with Brosnan did the slightest of character development and ongoing sense of narrative become apparent – you can place GoldenEye and The World is Not Enough, for example, in the same universe.
Naomie Harris, Ralph Fiennes, and Ben Wishaw return to selflessly support the man of mystery, and more akin to Goldeneye , No Time to Die boasts an organic camaraderie among the characters, even with CIA ally Jeffrey Wright back for another bout.
A comic Russian scientist (David Dencik) is a bit much; he recalls -- and pales in comparison to -- Alan Cumming's Boris Grishenko in GoldenEye (1995).
Advertisement
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).
He also ties Connery in second place for the most consecutive outings as Bond (Connery’s sixth outing, Diamonds are Forever , was a one-off return between George Lazenby and Roger Moore).
I remember my parents getting a sitter three years earlier so they could see “Diamonds Are Forever.”
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.
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.
“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.
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.
Advertisement
There’s a nod to Escape From New York (1981) at the top of the final act that made me smile.
It’s a nostalgic amalgamation where the past and present collide with homages to Dr. No, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (right down to Hans Zimmer beautiful and grandiose score that evokes the spirit of John Barry) and Goldeneye – Fleming’s home in Jamaica where Bond was born.
Billie Eilish’s haunting Grammy-winning title song sets the tone for this emotional smackdown, and the pre-title sequence offers a nod to Dr. No, before updating the long-since retired silhouettes of dancing naked women, with images of a fallen Britannia.
No Time to Die is not nearly as evolved from Dr. No as it thinks it is, which is especially disturbing because it’s clearly trying so hard.
Well, there’s about 30 more subplots between the time Bond meets up with Madeleine and Bond faces off with Lyutsifur on his private, Dr. No-inspired island.
No and 1963’s From Russia with Love — to feature a woman among its credited screenwriters.
I was surprised, on a recent first-time watch of 1963’s From Russia with Love, to find the franchise already poking fun of itself in its second entry.
The best of which has to be the garrote watch in “From Russia with Love.”
En route to the incomprehensible but action-packed finale on a “Thunderball”-ish remote island, Bond encounters new friends (a slinky and engaging Ana de Armas) and old enemies (Christoph Waltz in full Hannibal Lector mufti as Ernst Blofeld).
In the 1965 “Thunderball,” a woman who has turned down Bond’s advances, is essentially blackmailed into having sex with him.
Fleming introduced SPECTRE in 1961’s Thunderball , specifically designing it to be unlinked to any nation-state.
Looking considerably older and a bit embarrassed, he top-lined the non–Saltzman-and-Broccoli Thunderball knockoff Never Say Never Again , a film whose title goofed on the actor’s noble, broken promise to himself.