After waiting nearly a year for its release No Time to Die is finally out in the cinemas!
It just had its glitzy premiere in the UK at the Royal Albert Hall and reviews are already
spreading across the internet with many fans praising it has a fitting finale to the Daniel
Craig James Bond films, with high scores pretty much across the board. So it appears the long wait
has been worth it for fans of the famous 00 agent though speaking with some of my close friends they
weren’t too impressed with it. With it costing over $250 million to make and being advertised
what maybe 2 times due to the changing release dates as a result of the pandemic, Universal
Pictures and MGM which is now owned by Amazon, are going to need a big return to just break even.
Now I’m not going to discuss its plot as I want to avoid any spoilers,
I will be exploring the movie in more detail soon with a spoiler discussion but for this video I
just want to get my thoughts across on what I thought about it and if it lives up to the hype.
We all know Spectre didn’t live up the quality of Skyfall, so a lot was riding on this to deliver
something really special for Daniel Craig’s last outing as 007. I personally haven’t followed its
production that closely and have just watched a couple of trailers and I had made a conscious
effort to avoid any speculation on its story to avoid any surprises before seeing it.
So going into it completely fresh, I personally thought No time to Die was a very good film but
it does have some elements that will leave fans divided. Casino Royale set out to strip back the
character and leave behind a lot of the classic tropes of the Bond series, in No Time to Die, they
bring it all back for the fans, the gadgets, the villains lair, two Aston Martins this time, with
my favourite the V8 making an appearance, the film makes a strong connection to ‘ On Her Majesty’s
secret service’ which Hans Zimmer homages with the music as well, and even the opening titles
have a nod to Dr No, you only live twice I think is also referenced in some way, I’m sure there
are few other hidden easter eggs throughout the film to please the James Bond fanbase.
With Cary Fukunaga in the director’s chair he injects it with a high level of energy
and visual flare and even moments of horror with some traditional jump scares thrown in
for good measure. As Cary has joined the EON Productions team you have a number of regulars
behind the camera such as second unit director, Alexander Witt and FX Supervisor Chris Corbould.
So the action and visual effects are to the usual high standard you come to expect from
a James Bond film. The editing is slick, with none of the headache inducing action that came
with Quantum of Solace and even some recent action films released the past year. You get to see the
action and fight scenes play out clearly with no choppy editing. As the bond franchise have done
everything when it comes to the action the past 50 years, No Time to Die surprised me by throwing new
stuff onto the table which was really exciting to watch. Its also great to see the film is shot on
35mm and they make use of IMAX cameras, though I don’t know which sequences made use of the large
format celluloid? When watching something like Tenet, you can clearly tell what’s shot in IMAX.
It has the longest run of all the Bond films, but I didn’t feel it ran on for too long,
I didn’t look at my watch, I was glued to the screen, so I do think the run time was justified,
with Craigs last outing, it couldn’t be a 100 min or 120 min run time, as it had a lot to tie up,
due to the mangled narrative they laid out with the sequels after Casino Royale,
with his involvement with vesper, then introducing spectre, connecting Bond with Blofeld and falling
in love for the second time with Madeleine. Having Bond fall in love again has been an
issue with this series, its great for Bond to have more consequences thrown into his life,
and not just for these films, to be a simple adventure of Bond receiving a mission,
defeating the bad guy and sleeping with a bunch of women along the way. So in their efforts to expand
the character and his world it was totally justified and needed for modern audiences,
they want to avoid the franchise going stale but they clearly didn’t know where they were going
with the sequels, thanks to jarring shifts in the direction and often clumsy attempts to link all
these characters together but I think No time To Die does somewhat nicely bookend the story.
Rami Malek as Safin, is a superb actor and makes for a great villain, he has a strange
delivery to his dialogue and comes across as a very creepy character but he sadly doesn’t get
enough screen time to really do much ,he does get a couple of moments to really chew the dialogue
and there is a superb scene between him and Bond, the dialogue in this confrontation is brilliant.
but I just wished he was given more time for his character to breathe and be fully developed.
The new 00 agent, Nomi played by Lashana Lynch I don’t think will get much love from the fans,
nothing to do with her as actor, but just with how she is written, from the offset she is very
forgettable, she just ends up being aggressive and just rude with her interactions with James Bond,
though James doesn’t seem fazed by what she says and just goes with the punches and just humours
her. Once they start working together, there isn’t any interesting dialogue between them to
get some decent banter, they just have respect for each other by the end. To be honest I don’t
think the character was really necessary but then again they needed to show the times had
moved on since Bond had quit as a 00 by the end of Spectre. Paloma who works for Felix Lighter,
was a far better character, well written and funny, it’s a shame she only has a minor role.
The script has 4 writers contributing to its screenplay, I think the biggest news was that
Phoebe Waller Bridge was on board to spice up the dialogue, There hasn’t been a female writer on the
series since the early days with Sean Connery. Phoebe is best known for her comedic writing,
and the film does have some good humour thrown in, nothing laugh out loud funny but it’s well
served into the dark direction the film is taking. Humour and Craig’s interpretation of the character
I don’t think go hand in hand though, because of the serious direction Craig has gone with James
Bond since Casino Royale, when he is supposed to be funny, it feels slightly out of place for
me or somewhat forced. Daniel is a very funny guy in interviews but I don’t think he quite has the
comedic timing to pull off the humorous moments without it feeling crowbarred into the script.
Roger Moore and Pierce Bronson could nail those funny moments effortlessly and it didn’t feel out
of place but with the specific tone of the Craig series, comedy doesn’t seem to find its footing.
I wasn’t surprised to see Hans Zimmer come on board as the composer,
he is a safe bet for film studios and one of the most sought after in the industry,
he has been attached to many big productions as of late with DUNE and Top Gun Maverick. The score is
probably the darkest of all the Bond films, very menacing throughout but also he does a solid job
of adding strong emotional themes. Hans makes use of the James Bond theme in the right places
and it sounds fantastic, I was pleased with Zimmer’s approach with this score but his style
is very familiar though and by the end he does unfortunately use his usual method of copy and
pasting from his previous work in the music, one moment during an action sequence, you can clearly
hear the music from The Dark Knight then it morphs into the Bond theme which was quite jarring.
Overall it’s a good score but for Craigs last outing I just wished they brought back David
Arnold who in my opinion is the best person in the film scoring world to handle a James Bond score.
The Billie Eilish title song, I avoided listening to when it came out and wanted to
wait till I saw the film. Billie is a talented singer but the song didn’t do much for me,
two 3rds of is slow and dreary and it didn’t sound like a Bond song then it begins to build up and I
was thinking ‘ oh yes this is getting good, this is sounding like a traditional Bond opening , then
it just abruptly ends, if only it went on for a bit longer. A bit of a let-down for me.
I do think it’s a solid final outing for Daniel Craig as James Bond and for me his
best performance as 007, he has big emotional arch in the story, the film has some upsetting moments
that may leave you a bit teary eyed but some may argue it feels a bit forced. Craig’s outing as
Bond set out to give a new take on the character and I think he really achieved that, it was a
slightly bumpy road along the way, down to the series not having a real clear structure on where
they wanted to go, as it was the first to have a story that unfolds through a series of sequels,
and not just be stand-alone adventures that we were so familiar with for all these years.
Definitely catch it at the cinema as Bond films are intended to be seen with
the largest screen possible. It’s going to be interesting where they take the series next,
it will probably be another 4 years until we see another film in the long running franchise,
will they go with an origin like story again or go straight into it, with whoever is cast
as 007 being sent on a mission to save the world? I personally think the later.