It isn’t Craig’s best – that honor still and forever goes to Skyfall, as perfect a Bond movie as you can get – but No Time to Die is a fitting conclusion to this iteration of the character, thematically consistent and perhaps the most Fleming-esque of the Craig era.
Five years after defeating the forces of Spectre, James Bond (Daniel Craig) is called back into the fight after Lyutsifer Safin (Rami Malek) kidnaps a defecting scientist (David Dencik) and his powerful bioweapon. The chase for Safin finds Bond crossing paths with his old friend Felix Leiter (Jeffrey Wright), a new 00-agent (Lashana Lynch), and his old love Madeleine Swann (Léa Seydoux) before the trail leads back, as it always does, to Ernst Stavro Blofeld (Christoph Waltz).
As much as the Craig-era Bond films have struggled to fit all its disparate parts into one unified narrative – we all remember how Spectre tried unsuccessfully to weave its antecedents together – the films have been at their best when considering the psychological toll that Bond’s life is taking on the man. Casino Royale intimated that Bond’s callous womanizing stemmed from a deep personal trauma, while Skyfall showed us that happened when Bond’s closest relationship (with Judi Dench’s M) got too close. No Time to Die picks up on the unlikely ending of Spectre, in which Bond ostensibly rode off into the sunset with Madeleine Swann, but it wisely reminds us that Bond has been down this road before, in more films than just Casino Royale. There are numerous nods, for example, to (and this may be a very light spoiler) On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, which for many is the gold standard for Bond. (Appropriately enough, it was #007 when I ranked the films in 2014.)
But No Time to Die is conscious of its place as a finale of sorts, and so we get reunions with Felix Leiter from Casino Royale and Quantum of Solace, and with the Blofeld of Spectre; there’s even a wink-nod at Skyfall with a portrait of Judi Dench and a well-timed cameo from her porcelain bulldog. These references tie Craig’s tenure together more authentically than Spectre’s stubborn insistence that it was all connected, but the true payoff is in Craig’s Bond getting a better understanding of himself. He’s cognizant of his own flaws, sensitive to his blind spots, and determined all the same to save the world as only he can. When one character asks him if he knows the worst thing about himself, he quips, “My timing?” He’s become self-aware and, in the process, self-realized. Having taken Bond from his roots to his ultimate self, it’s only fair that Craig calls it a day and leaves the character for the next – and, perhaps not insignificantly, seventh – incarnation.
No Time to Die is, then, a kind of grand tour through the Craig era, but it has its eye on a more distant past, going back to Connery’s 1962 debut and to the Ian Fleming novels of that era. Safin is not, as the rumor mill had hoped, secretly Doctor No in disguise, though his island lair may as well be the good doctor’s; with its hazmat-suited servants, nuclear generators, and vaulted ceilings, one half-expects Joseph Wiseman to saunter out in his Nehru jacket. Meanwhile, the lair’s retractable bay doors are straight out of the film version of You Only Live Twice, while the denouement and a certain Jack London epigraph are airlifted from the novel of the same name. The 1967 film, scripted by Roald Dahl, was somewhat less than faithful to Fleming’s 1964 original, which saw Bond stalking Blofeld in a poison garden; here, it’s Safin who becomes the lethal horticulturalist, while Bond has no Tracy to avenge but comes bearing equally personal motivations. Indeed, I came out of No Time to Die – as I often do when a new Bond film arrives – finding myself lunging for the Ian Fleming novels on my bookshelf.
The unlikely star of the film – though perhaps not so unlikely, if you’ve been reading my blog for a while – is Hans Zimmer. After a forgettable title track by Billie Eilish, Zimmer runs away with the film, giving us a rousing score that had me stomping my feet with excitement. When he’s not winking at previous soundtracks, Zimmer is remixing and reinventing Monty Norman’s Bond theme with fearless aplomb. Thomas Newman did a fine job with Skyfall (though he revisited his own footsteps too closely with Spectre), yet throughout No Time to Die Zimmer makes a compelling case for the next Bond maestro. If Inception was a kind of proto-Bond for director Christopher Nolan, its Zimmer score was only the beginning; his love theme here is reminiscent of Inception’s showstopper “Time,” while his 007 action beats would be equally at home in Nolan’s ski lodge setpiece. David Arnold’s score for Casino Royale famously winked in the direction of Bond as we know him, and Zimmer takes us over the finish line with dexterity.
It was a gamble to try to tell one story across five films, rather than tell more standalone stories about the world’s greatest spy. Before his untimely passing at 56, Fleming came to that concept late in his novel series, with his final three books forming a kind of “Blofeld trilogy.” No Time to Die is, finally, the successful culmination of that ambition, and it gives a suitable arc to these versions of Fleming’s characters. Whether it’s an ending or a transition may be for the casting directors to decide; let’s hope, however, that the MI6 crew – Ralph Fiennes, Ben Whishaw, and Naomie Harris – opt to stick around for that sense of internal continuity. Yet if you find yourself wondering, as the credits roll, what comes next – stick around. There’s no postcredits sequence, but there is one final guitar riff and the words “James Bond Will Return.” So too will I; after twenty months, it was fun to go to the theater once again and tell the coronavirus that now was no time to die.
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