"No Time to Die," Daniel Craig's final outing as James Bond,
ties up a lot of loose ends from his tenure onscreen as the renowned superspy.
When the dust settles, the day has been saved, and this era of Bond has drawn to a close,
we still have some unanswered questions.
"No Time to Die" is a whopping two hours and 45 minutes long with a 30 minute opening
sequence. The most stirring part of this epic opening set piece comes when Bond,
at the behest of Madeleine Swann, visits the final resting place of Vesper Lynd, the love interest
who betrayed him in "Casino Royale." Madeleine wants to start a new life with James, and that
requires closing the chapters behind them. For Madeleine, that means telling James all
the secrets she's never shared. But for James, that means forgiving a dead woman he still loves.
When he gets to her grave, it's been booby-trapped and explodes in his face,
setting his quest in motion and severing his trust with Madeleine, who he now believes must
be Vesper 2.0, having lured him into this mess. Later in the film, Blofeld confesses to Bond that,
as in "Spectre," he was the author of this particular pain point,
knowing Bond would eventually visit her tomb and that all he had to do was bide
his time. What's not explicitly spelled out is just how long he had been planning this.
At that point in the film, Blofeld has been in prison for half a decade, so did he have his
long-distance henchmen rig up the cemetery with explosives even before he wound up incarcerated?
Or were his men on the outside just keeping tabs on Bond in the hopes an emotional ultimatum in
his relationship would lead to him being at the right place at the wrong time?
The film's opening flashback reveals a fuller portrait of a plot point originally revealed
in "Spectre": That Madeleine's mother was killed by one of her father Mr. White's
enemies while she was a child hiding upstairs. Here, we see that the enemy was new Bond
villain Lyutsifer Safin, played by Rami Malek. We find out Safin himself had his own family
brutally slaughtered by White, so his revenge was inevitable. But when Madeleine-as-a-child
fights back against his attack and he chases her to the point she collapses under a frozen lake,
Safin chooses to rescue her. In present day, after the five-year time jump,
Safin reappears in Madeleine's life and makes her an unwitting pawn in his master plan,
making it clear he's been obsessed with her since that fateful day.
"You don't know what this is." But the film is built around the premise
that the full details of their connection will prove devastating to James. In a way, they do,
because Madeleine and James have lost years of their lives not even speaking because the plot's
circumstances convinced him she wasn't to be trusted, which couldn't be further from the truth.
We just never find out more about Safin and Madeleine's connection. He must have taken her
to safety after retrieving her from under the ice, but did he help raise her for a time? He claims to
have kept a close watch on her over the years, but was she ever aware? Was there more to this shared
history, or was it all just a misdirect?
After appearing in both "Casino Royale" and "Quantum of Solace" as franchise stalwart Felix
Leiter, Bond's American bestie, played by Jeffrey Wright, was nowhere to be seen in the ensuing two
sequels. He returns here as the catalyst for much of the film's plot, and when he does,
Leiter and Bond seem even closer and chummier than they did when he was still a brand new 00-agent.
This mission the two men embark on together proves to be their last, as Leiter dies in front of Bond,
drowning and suffering from gunshot wounds from fellow spook Logan Ash,
who betrayed them both. It proves to be one of the film's most affecting moments,
largely because of the palpable chemistry between Craig and Wright.
Bond being an international agent, it's presumed he and Leiter worked on many, many unseen missions
in between his last appearance and this film, but we still wonder what he was
up to as a rogue former MI6 agent ran amok in "Skyfall" and as Spectre became such a powerful
force for terrorism.
In a key moment in the film, Safin uses a kidnapped MI6 scientist to alter a weaponized
disease Blofeld was planning to use to kill Bond, making it backfire and kill every living member
of Spectre. This happens at a ball thrown for the evil organization, with Blofeld, in prison,
attending via the connection from his bionic eye to a mirrored one out in the real world.
When Bond has to explain to M that Blofeld has been orchestrating Spectre activities from behind
bars using his bionic eye, M explains that no one sees or speaks to Blofeld all day outside of his
therapist, Madeleine. But how did MI6 not notice this man had a cybernetic science fiction eyeball
for the last five years?
The film's primary MacGuffin is Project Heracles, a bioweapon designed to only affect genetically
marked targets. MI6 was developing it as an off-the-books program that would make missions
simpler and risk fewer field agents' lives. Somehow, M is surprised when it's stolen by
Spectre, then Safin's upstart operation, and repurposed as a weapon of mass destruction.
In the film's climax, Safin's island, existing in a nebulous, ungoverned space between Russia
and Japan, must be destroyed to stop Project Heracles from being deployed globally.
"He's going to kill millions." M struggles to navigate the quagmire
strategically, because England can't be seen as instigating an international incident,
especially when the impetus behind it would reveal gross negligence on their part.
So when the dust cleared, how did M avoid catastrophic geopolitical blowback
after destroying this island with missiles? As the remaining cast eulogizes the fallen,
it certainly appears M still has his job,
so he must have executed some true diplomatic finesse to keep his head.
When "No Time to Die" and its lengthy credits finally crawl to a close, the film's closing
message is that "James Bond will return..." But not only is Daniel Craig not returning for
another film, his iteration of James Bond meets an untimely end in a tragic scene of self-sacrifice
in the movie's final act. We know how this goes. New Bond actor usually means new Bond continuity,
but we're in uncharted territory now that we have a canonical Bond film
that shows the hero dying at the end. So with Lashana Lynch's Nomi most likely
reclaiming her official designation as 007 after temporarily relinquishing it to Bond on his last
mission, will she return in another film? Just because the next Bond film will probably start
from scratch doesn't mean this particular world can't continue in a spinoff sequel, especially
given the warm reception to Lynch's performance and Phoebe Waller-Bridge's exceptional writing.
Folks have been clamoring for a female Bond or a Black Bond in recent years, but perhaps
now that Lynch has done such a fine job with Nomi, a Black female 007, why not give her a
solo film devoted to fleshing her out further?
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