There are a lot of people—Daniel Craig included—who got tired of the Bond franchise over the last decade. There are also plenty of people who have been tired of the new-woman-every-scene international man of mystery for much longer, but this review is for both the former and the latter groups.
Of course, the Bond movies provide more than enough material for several volumes on what exactly the attractive, seducing super-spy character teaches us about what kind of man we want to be (or be with) and about how we think about our sexual and romantic partners. Even though I would argue that the current era of Bond movies reflected a departure—or at least a shift—in our thinking about the dapper stereotype, the movies are nevertheless still strewn with less than fully developed female characters up to and including the latest installment.
There’s also a whole book to be written on how spy-versus-supervillain plots are satisfying and appealing. They tell stories about our world where the worst possible things that can happen to humanity come down to lone actors—like who wins a multimillion dollar poker game or whether we can defeat a secret cabal with high-tech weaponry and a sinister agenda—instead of larger structural forces that provide the circumstances that make the real conflicts we have in our world occur in the first place. They don’t tell us that that’s how the world actually is, but they do let us entertain and enjoy that fantasy for a few hours of action.
But that’s for another time. I think that we still get to appreciate how they tell those stories. The Bond franchise, which turns 60 next October, is a fantastic case study for just those interests because the twenty-plus movies let us see how much those stories can change over time, even while retaining the same premise throughout. And the current era of Bond films can show us just how far we’ve come in terms of the kinds of stories we choose to tell.
No Time to Die, from Oakland product Cary Joji Fukunag, was released to the world at the beginning of October. Fukunanga studied history and political science at UC Santa Cruz before attending the Tisch School of the Arts at NYU to study film full time, and his multidisciplinary background shows up in the beauty of his new film. The final installment of the Daniel Craig era, the two hour and 43 minute long movie concludes the grandest Bond story we’ve seen to date.
There were 21 Bond films made before Daniel Craig ever took up the mantle of 007 for these last five movies. Sean Connery made seven, George Lazenby one, Roger Moore seven, Timothy Dalton two, and Pierce Brosnan had four. There was also Casino Royale, the 1967 parody starring Peter Sellers, Ursula Andress (who was also in Dr. No, the first Bond movie), David Niven, Woody Allen, and Orson Welles, which definitely did not resemble anything like the five Craig films.
The current era of Bond films could be said to have begun in 1999 with The World Is Not Enough, Brosnan’s third turn as 007 and the first movie to be written by the team of Neal Purvis and Robert Wade. But after Die Another Day in 2002, Eon Productions—the company responsible for every film except for the parody and 1983’s Never Say Never Again—decided to reboot the franchise so that they could have more freedom to tell an entirely new type of Bond story.
Unlike the previous iterations, 2006’s Casino Royale stars Daniel Craig as a young James Bond, just obtaining his 00 status—his license to kill. We see Bond on his first missions, taking out a corrupt bureau chief, chasing a bomb maker through a construction site and an embassy, seducing the wife of an international terrorist and finally following the trail to Le Chiffre (the excellent Mads Mikkelsen), an over-leveraged criminal banker who MI6 hopes to turn.
For a vast majority of Royale, the film seems like a pretty faithful addition to the story of the suave agent we knew from the previous portrayals of Bond.
We also got the assertive Vesper Lynd, an agent of the British treasury played by Eva Green. When they first meet, Bond and Lynd each give their assessments of the other, and Vesper tells James that she thinks “it wouldn’t be a stretch to imagine that you think of women as disposable pleasures rather than meaningful pursuits”.
The most significant sign of the shift in the franchise doesn’t appear until the end of Royale, when Lynd—formerly not much more than the closed-off woman Bond manages to seduce—is revealed as a double-agent, working with Le Chiffre’s bosses to get back the money he lost. Not only does Bond’s love interest turn against him, as had happened to Bonds of the past, she also dies, leaving our protagonist genuinely heartbroken and hurting long after the mission is complete. Sean Connery’s Bond had to fight his own SPECTRE, but they did things like hold a city hostage with some bombs and demand millions in diamonds. That’s just not really the same thing as the guys Craig’s 007 went up against.
Across Casino Royale, 2008’s Quantum of Solace, and 2015’s Spectre, MI6 learns of the existence of a new SPECTRE—an evil transnational cabal led by Bond’s adoptive brother Ernst Blofeld, played by the lovely Christoph Waltz who somehow still manages to maybe outstay his welcome in his first movie, although he plays better in No Time to Die. Anyways, SPECTRE, plus the terrifying Raoul Silva (Javier Bardem)—a former MI6 agent with a grudge against M—in Skyfall, repeatedly ruin Bond’s life even when he foils their plots, and they regularly kill his loved ones including both M and Lynd.
But we also got some other great additions to the series of Bond characters we already new.
Ben Whishaw is a worthy successor to the great Desmond Llewelyn as Q, starting in 2012 with Skyfall. Llewelyn played MI6’s quartermaster in 17 movies starting in 1963 in From Russia with Love until his final turn 36 years later in The World Is Not Enough (1999). James Bond, of all the spy franchises, has the best gadgets, and the MI6 R&D department receives some great 21st century updates to their imagination. After no Q in either Royale or QoS, the anticipation was built up for Wishaw’s debut and he has not disappointed as the brilliant and loyal top mind for the service.
Unfortunately, there’s not a whole lot to praise in QoS. The highlight is probably Jack White and Alicia Keys collaborating on the title track, “Another Way to Die,” which isn’t a great indicator of what the rest of the film has to offer.
In my opinion, Skyfall was an excellent comeback, and Javier Bardem’s revenge tour against M, Bond, and the agency is just awesome. Silva, the villain, is just evil. He wants nothing but to destroy, and it’s because of what his time in MI6 did to him. By the end of the film, Bond is mourning another friend and questioning the cost of the job.
Ralph Fiennes is excellently serious as Gareth Mallory, who eventually replaces M after her death. After a real tease of a joke in Royale where Bond and Green say the words “money” and “penny” in back to back sentences, Naomie Harris finally appears with Feinnes in Skyfall as the new Eve Moneypenny, M’s secretary in the home office.
Spectre, I think, is where a lot of Bond fans lost patience with the franchise. Christoph Waltz is great and all and it’s cool to have an antagonist appear from Bond’s past after Silva came back against M in Skyfall, but another supervillain in the desert was sort of the last thing we needed. The imperfect plot spoils what are otherwise great performances from Waltz and Léa Seydoux, who plays Dr. Madeleine Swann, the daughter of Royale villain Mr. White (Jesper Christensen).
The fantastic Rami Malek stars opposite Seydoux and Craig in No Time to Die as Lyutsifer Safin, the man Swann had told Bond about in Spectre who came to her home looking for Mr. White and killed his wife, Madeleine’s mother, instead. Safin is the man Madeleine said she had shot that day, when she was just a child, and she had said or at least implied to Bond that he died from his wounds. But Safin, it turns out, was not dead, and in fact it was he who ultimately had spared young Madeleine’s life that day at her house.
Obviously a lot happens after we learn that, and the film actually takes place five years into Bond’s solo retirement in the Caribbean. There is, we learn, a new 007 (Lashana Lynch). Good old Felix Leiter (Jeffrey Wright) returns to ask James for a favor, and Ana de Armas plays a kickass new CIA agent assigned to his mission in Cuba, where a SPECTRE convention of sorts is occurring, of course. Bond revisits lost loves and friends, and balances his loyalty to the service and to his loved ones. But I’m not going to spoil this movie.
No Time to Die has its strengths and its weaknesses, but I’m very happy that they got to see this story through. After up and down entries, this one lets us say goodbye to Bond in a way that feels a lot closer to Skyfall and Royale than it does to Quantum and Spectre. All in all, I think it made me feel better about the time I’ve spent watching this series over my life, and I appreciate getting to see the story grow and change over the last 15 years
Perhaps Lynch might return in the future films as the new 007, after rubbing it in Bond’s face when they first meet. But it doesn’t seem like Eon had any intention of figuring that out before releasing No Time to Die, so we’ll probably have to wait a good while to see what comes next.
As Craig said in September:
"It's been incredible to do these films.” "It's very emotional. I'm glad I am ending it on my own terms. I'm grateful to the producers for letting me do that. But I sure miss it. I'll probably be incredibly bitter when the new person takes over."
Whatever happens, I’m optimistic that whoever gets to take up the role next will be given a whole new kind of story. I can’t wait to see what it looks like whenever it comes around, and until then I’m pretty darn content to rewatch these bad boys.
If you like James Bond, keep an eye out for the upcoming six-part miniseries The Ipcress File on British network ITV this winter. Peaky Blinders star Joe Cole gets his own turn in the spotlight as British spy Harry Palmer, who was played by Michael Caine in five films from 1965 to 1996.