James Bond: No Time To Die – SPOILER discussion

Topic

Maybe worth having a spoiler thread for this one? Out this week, and it seems to be getting rave reviews.

Oh, and ignore the date on that poster – kind of a lot’s happened since then…

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Can’t be worse than the bore-fest that was Spectre.

(Complete with villain identity revealing subtitles on the BluRay.)

Saw it today and enjoyed it.

I know it’s not popular with some people, but I’ve always liked that the Craig films have all been connected. And it’s very much a finale to that version of the character. And quite an emotional finale at that. I may have got a little choked up at the end when We Have All The Time In The World stated playing.

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Rami Malek being another totally bland villain was a letdown. But he’s actually barely in the film, so it wasn’t that much of a distraction.

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Overall I thought it was a solid movie, and a fitting end to this iteration of the character.

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Rocket, njerry

I saw it tonight and found it very disappointing. I thought the story was nonsense, which is not the end of the world for a Bond film, but everyone involved seemed intent on taking it as seriously as possible at every turn – and never letting the movie risk getting close to doing something that might actually be entertaining.

The villain’s motivation was a bit of a mess, his resources completely unexplained, his plan was quite intangible and seemed to change as the movie went on, and the whole family angle in the back half really bogged things down and got in the way without adding anything. Plus as soon as they introduced the “you can’t remove it” rule with Heracles you could see where the entire movie was headed, and it was fairly torturous watching it all play out.

Craig looked pretty bored throughout, which reflected how I felt.

I’m definitely with the school of thought that says they need a major shift in tone with the next one. Making Bond fun can’t be that difficult, surely?

Ana De Armas was good though. But she’s a bit wasted here and feels like she’s acting in a different movie to everyone else.

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Rocket

Lashana Lynch Pitched an ‘Awkward, Anxious’ Female 007, and the ‘No Time to Die’ Team Listened

https://www.indiewire.com/2021/10/no-time-to-die-lashana-lynch-female-007-interview-1234669562/

‘No Time to Die’ Keeps Box Office Rolling With $60 Million Opening

https://www.thewrap.com/no-time-to-die-box-office-60-million/

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Todd

I saw it over the weekend and liked it.

I thought Craig did a good job in his swan song. The finality of his exit was much more dynamic than the previous iterations. I was sad that Ana de Armas’ role was so small. Geoffrey Wright was also good as Felix Leiter. The only time I payed attention to Lynch was when she flying the plane onto the island. It reminded me that she played Maria Rambeau in Captain Marvel. M and Tanner seemed a bit behind the times. Moneypenny and Q did well in their scenes. The chase scenes was very well done.

Caught up on this one.

Did my eyes deceive me or was Hugh Dennis in this movie playing a practical joke on someone? I thought it was him but by the time the movie ended approximately 738 hours later I couldn’t quite recall.

I never did make it through all of Spectre so was rather lost at the start about what was going on with Bond’s wife. If they wanted to insist on these movies being linked then a bit of a “previously on…” effort would not have gone amiss. Unfortunately, that all seemed to feed into whatever her father had been up to, which fed into whatever the actual bad guy’s motivations were and none of it was particularly clear other than him having constructed the terrifying endgame of Facebook.

Overall, the movie was as bleak as the Billie Eilish theme song. Bond loses his wife, has his best friend die in front of him, accidentally kills his evil brother, regains his wife, finds out he has a daughter, loses his wife again and his daughter and then gets blown to pieces, all of which gets stretched out across an absurd running time. I’m not keen on a return to Moore-era camp but, geez, weren’t these movies supposed to be fun at one point?

The only fun part of the movie was the team-up between Bond and the Ana de Armas character in Cuba. Of course, that entire section and her character could have been easily cut from the movie without disrupting the plot much at all.  They could have called this thing No Time To Edit.

Also, the ending for Bond was too daft for it to have any emotional impact.  If this is a world in which someone can make something as preposterous as the fatal nanobot poison then it is no stretch to imagine that someone in that world can make a cure for it in due course. Plus, even if he couldn’t get off of that island for some reason (that boat-plane they arrive at the island in seemed to not be an option for reasons I must have missed) then he could have at least run towards the other end of the damn island and made an effort at getting out of the way of the bombs. They were targeting the evil lair of doom, not the entire island.

I would be interested in some sort of follow-up story about M having to Japan and Russia why the UK was firing missiles at an island they both believe to own. That sounds like a fine premise to start an international espionage thriller with.

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Dave

saga wrote:

Did my eyes deceive me or was Hugh Dennis in this movie playing a practical joke on someone? I thought it was him but by the time the movie ended approximately 738 hours later I couldn’t quite recall.

Yeah, they did a whole bit about it on Mock the Week last week.

Phoebe Waller-Bridge co-wrote the movie; Dennis played her father on Fleabag, so she’s probably the one who got him in the movie.

saga wrote:

Also, the ending for Bond was too daft for it to have any emotional impact.  If this is a world in which someone can make something as preposterous as the fatal nanobot poison then it is no stretch to imagine that someone in that world can make a cure for it in due course. Plus, even if he couldn’t get off of that island for some reason (that boat-plane they arrive at the island in seemed to not be an option for reasons I must have missed) then he could have at least run towards the other end of the damn island and made an effort at getting out of the way of the bombs. They were targeting the evil lair of doom, not the entire island.

I mean, sure… and this is a Bond movie, where people can survive death-dealing injuries… but still, he had been shot like at least three times by Eliiot dude… realistically, he shouldn’t have even had the strenght to get up, let alone get back to the upper bunker to open the hatches again…

Anyways, watched this too… never been a huge Bond fan so, to me, all of them movies are just fun action/thriller movies that range from okay to good, this one falling into the “good” category, for the most part. I really enjoyed the grittier more realistic approach of Casino Royale, and I never liked they kept pushing the more exagerated elements in the sequels. Like I REALLY hated the tricked out car at the begining of this one… it felt like suuuch an out-dated silly thing… or the EMP watch that somehow doesn’t diable his ear piece… and the worst part is those things weren’t necessary at all… ugh… u_u

So yeah, it was mostly good, and I did like they gave the Craig arc a proper finish, so it’s now a pretty neat self-contained Bond interpretation. But I would’ve prefered if they had stayed the course on the more “realistic” approach of Casino Royale overall, because at times it felt I was watching a superhero movie… or worse, a Fast & Furious movie.

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Rocket

Dave wrote:

I saw it tonight and found it very disappointing. I thought the story was nonsense, which is not the end of the world for a Bond film, but everyone involved seemed intent on taking it as seriously as possible at every turn – and never letting the movie risk getting close to doing something that might actually be entertaining.

Have to agree with Dave here.

The weird thing about it is that like the first third of the movie (well, after the opening bits) actually are kind of fun, in an old-fashioned way. In the sequences with Ana De ArmasBond is quipping, they’re having fun – it’s like an entirely different, enjoyable movie for a while there. And then it gets dreary and self-important in annoying ways.

As usually, I think it’s a mistake to give Bond emotion beyond loyalty to his country and enjoying his job.

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Dave

For the sixtieth anniversary, all of the Bond movies are coming back to the cinema over here. My local cinema is showing one every Wednesday from May 4th, starting with Dr. No and running up until NTTD in October.

It’s included in my membership plan, so I’ll definitely try to watch as many as I can. Tomorrow Never Dies was the first one I saw in the cinema (I was 10), all of the older ones I only saw on TV.

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Todd, Rocket

paul f wrote:

Tomorrow Never Dies was the first one I saw in the cinema (I was 10), all of the older ones I only saw on TV.

Moonraker was the first Bond movie I saw in a theater.

Todd wrote:

paul f wrote:

Tomorrow Never Dies was the first one I saw in the cinema (I was 10), all of the older ones I only saw on TV.

Moonraker was the first Bond movie I saw in a theater.

LIVE AND LET DIE for me (in a cinema in Cork City, Ireland); for years after, I considered Roger Moore to be the “best” Bond.

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Todd

The Spy who loved me was my first Bond in the theater. Jaws and the underwater car.

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Todd

Mine was View to a Kill.

MoonRaker

I was with a Summer day camp group and we saw it.

Then as I got older, I saw the Connery movies…

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Todd

The first Timothy Dalton film, whatever it was called. I wasn’t that interested in Bond and probably wouldn’t have gone at all except the cinema in Sunderland was so cheap that we went to see all kinds of random crap in the 80s.

DavidM wrote:

The first Timothy Dalton film,

The only thing I remember about this one is the cellist.

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DavidM

I think there were horses, too.

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DavidM, Rocket