All right, so blogging-wise, 2022 has hardly started with a bang, with this being only the second post so far. In my defence, I have been ill. That's also my excuse for making this a relatively unambitious post.
So, anyway, No Time to Die, the latest James Bond film, proved to be a good choice for an "omicron film": it kept my tired brain entertained, and its length, which put me off watching it in the cinema (it's approximately 2 hours 45 minutes long) is no drawback when you're collapsed on the TV sofa. It's also a solid Bond flick. In my ranking of Daniel Craig's Bond films, I'd put it in second place after Skyfall. Which is not to say that it doesn't have plenty of flaws.
For a film that's been in production for as long as No Time to Die, it's remarkable how little time has seemingly been spent on tweaking the plot so it makes any kind of sense (well, at least in a 007 kind of way). This is especially true of the villain and his evil schemes which just don't add up. Rami Malek is just as creepy in the role of Safin as is required (one might even say he overdoes it, but a Bond villain is a Bond villain: it should be impossible to be too creepy). The problem is, I had no idea what his end goal was, and equally bewildered reviewers reassured me that it wasn't because of my feverish brain. First, he wants to take revenge on the organisation that killed his family. So far, so good: it's a straightforward, functional if not spectacularly original villain motive. But once the revenge plot is done, Safin wants to use the biotech weapon he's got his hands on to... what? Wipe out a large part of Earth's population, and in that case, which part? We never learn the criteria met by the people targeted by the weapon, or what Safin has against them. Make Earth's population compliant? He grows a drug which has this effect, and speechifies about how people don't really want free will, but how can this drug be combined with a virus-thingy that straight up kills people? Or does he want to flog his weapons to rogue nations? The trailers made me think that Bond would be up against a villain with a clear, if mad and reprehensible, vision. But Safin is just a mess.
There are other examples of the kind of shoddy plotting that dragged down Spectre. The biotech weapon which poses such a worldwide threat consists of a deadly disease which can be programmed by nanotech to only work on those with a particular DNA, which means that not only the targeted victims but also their families can get it. It can be concentrated into a solution, and once someone has been tainted with it they will be the carriers of death to anyone whose DNA the disease is programmed with wiping out. I was prepared to swallow all of this, though it was a little hard (it seems there are no limits to what nanobots and similar can do in action films). But when Q insisted that once someone had become a carrier, there was no way to rid them of the nanotech, and the effect was "eternal", I could no longer suspend my disbelief. No scientist would ever say that. They'd say that there was no solution "as yet", but they'd keep working on it. Instead, Q just shrugs off the question: if you've managed to become a carrier, too bad, nothing to be done. This was such an obvious plot contrivance it had me groaning. Seeing as Bond is trying to be reconciled with Madeleine Swann, whom he dumped because he has trust issues, and she has a cute little daughter who she unconvincingly claims isn't Bond's, there are no prizes for guessing what happens by the end of the film. Also, the film's title makes no sense when you see how things actually pan out.
The question is: what happens now? In the credits, we're promised that "James Bond will return". But how? I suppose they'll have to reboot the franchise again. There's no way the version of Bond played by Craig can return, for various reasons. I'm strangely OK with this. I didn't like that they called the Craig films "a reboot", but now they've bookended the tale of his Bond, I can see them as their own separate thing, telling a continuing story of one specific version of the character, a story that started with Casino Royale and ended with No Time to Die. One reviewer called the Craig films a "pocket universe", and I thought that was a good way of describing it. Now that a future Bond isn't obliged to take over where Craig left off, I can more easily accept that he didn't take over where Brosnan left off.
Let's face it, though, the Craig era has permanently fractured what little continuity there was in the Bond saga. We aren't going to get a version of the character that connects to the life and experiences of Brosnan's Bond now. The best way to make sense of it all will probably be to see each version of Bond as their own thing, living in a sort of multiverse of Bonds where some things remain the same while others are changed around. This would allow Fiennes's M, Naoime Harris's Moneypenny and Ben Whishaw's Q to appear again with a future Bond: they could be "variants" of the same characters that co-starred with Craig, to use Loki speak. It's a geeky way to handle all the contradictions of the Bond films, but I can do geeky.
