NO TIME TO DIE | A HUGE In-Depth Review

no time to die has the most crazy and agonizing announcement to release histories of pretty much all bond films from original director danny boyle leaving the project to reports of onset rewriting to the composer being fired to injuries while filming to blowing up the studio to that weirdest heck announcement conference where none of the cast seemed to have any clue what they were doing anna um when you first found out you got this role how did you try and prepare i haven't started preparing yet i don't know how's that gonna go um yeah carry any suggestions and of course delay after delay after delay after delay after delay after delay you get the idea but finally in september 2021 no time to die was unleashed on the world and was the excruciating weight worth it according to the fans yes and no i think most of the time bond fans as a group generally have a reputation of being quite civil and understanding when it comes to differing opinions of the franchise octopussy yeah i love that film i can see how it's not to everyone's taste though dine of the day well it's not for me but i'm happy that other people find enjoyment in it never say never again that is a film that exists yeah well mostly with no time to die i feel like the game changed somewhat with a lot of very strong opinions and camps emerging out look i'm said there shouldn't be able to get back for dinner huh there's all the wars broken out now don't get me wrong there are people somewhat in the middle ground on the film too of course but in my lifetime i've never known a bond film spark such a polarizing passion from people right from the off and indeed my own experience was i mean well immediately after seeing the film i could think about nothing else for a good few days and this is the only time that a bond film has really stayed at the forefront of my mind non-stop for days after first seeing it and i have an awful lot of opinions observations uh praise and dislike for so many elements of this film that kind of as soon as it came out on home media i just knew that i had to make this video to excise myself of a lot of the stuff that has been dancing around in the front of my brain for months after seeing this film good evening mr bond fans and welcome to the longest yep the longest and probably most detailed video you're ever gonna find on this channel why the need for such a video well i have an awful lot of feelings that i need to excise about this film and this is a hell of a lot cheaper than therapy and besides my bond fan therapist is fully booked until 2026. i mean it just doesn't make any sense they say that the nanobots are eternal but surely the emp could just wipe them out look this has been months now i've got patients with real problems why don't you just try exercising more or finding a less stressful interest well i guess i've always had a bit of a thing for star wars no no no no not that no time to die represents some of the highest highs of daniel craig's tenure as bond while also representing the lowest of the lows and through this video i guess my objective is to just really lay it all out the good the bad and the ugly and finally hope to come to some kind of peace regarding this thing and figure out for myself whether i think it's a perfect end to craig's tenure as the super spy or whether maybe he should have just left it well enough alone and sailed off into the sunset at the end of spectre just before we get started and go through no time to die scene by scene if this is your first time visiting this channel hello good evening please do consider scrolling below and clicking the subscribe button and the mrs bell notification button to stay super up to date on future video uploads i make on this channel and with all that out of the way let's get started with no time to die the film begins with the gun barrel sequence making it only the second daniel craig bond film to do so now if you want my detailed thoughts on this sequence specifically i recommend finding my video dedicated to discussing all of the daniel craig gun barrels but to be succinct here i'm a fan of it in general it has a really different look to it to what we're traditionally used to but as far as cg interpretations of these things go i think it's rather swell worth noting too that depending on where you're seeing this film you may or may not see the universal studios logo fade into the white iris to begin the sequence i personally love this particular version it's such a fun way to start the film and it's timed so nicely with the music blaring out i think it's a brilliant touch and the gun barrel is obviously most notable for lacking the traditional blood trickle now much can be read into this decision particularly based on where the story is going to go you could say that bond misses his target here and it's some kind of metaphor for how he's gonna be burnt toast by the end of the film and i think that those interpretations are all perfectly valid i just feel like it was probably a more practical aesthetic choice rather than thematic i think it might have been weird if the red hat trickled down but then faded away as the gun barrel opens up on the first scene which is all kinds of whites and grays and very similar to the look of the gun barrel itself anyway that's enough about the gun barrel sequence though let's get talking about the pre-title sequence itself which is to my mind the most narratively ambitious pre-title sequence in all of bond these things are traditionally either show-stopping action sequences or intriguing scenes to set up some of the plot or mystery or it could be indeed both of those things to grab the audience's attention before we get into more detailed exposition later on no time to die is certainly the series longest pre-title sequence by quite a margin but it's no surprise really given that it's going to attempt to set up a heck of a lot of stuff that's gonna be relevant later on in the thing so first up we start in the past interestingly the film does not do much in the way of on-screen text for dates or location names or anything like that but for the first two minutes we have a tamagotchi a walkman and someone smoking around a kid so this is definitely the 1990s this is of course the home of a young madeline swan and this first sequence is really just giving us a visual representation of the story that madeline tells bond on the train inspector a man once came to our house to kill my father he didn't know i was upstairs playing in my bedroom this is certainly the type of thing that i think only the most ardent of bond fans would pick up on and i certainly don't think that when they were writing spectre that particular scene inspector they were thinking this is going to be the opening of the next film so it's not too intrusive a retcon i don't think i do think that it works and it gives madeleine's little story inspector an extra added meaning in this whole craig arc so fine i think they're trying to do some significant rec conning regarding this sequence by the way in an attempt to minimize blofeld's presence in madeleine's story i always assumed that spectre was just more than hinting actually that blofeld himself was the intruder in question i came to your home once to see your father i don't remember that but i do but now i guess it's just another event that he's talking about this place must have been villain central in the 90s if madeleine can't even remember who was coming and going anyway mrs white here ain't winning mother of the year anytime soon but i'll be damned to seeing her drunk ass wallowing on the couch guzzling red wine smoking and listening to some awesome french pop ballad isn't one of the most relatable characters in all of bond madeleine madeleine oh wait i don't have kids the song is dan levy on me and i just love it it might be reductive of me to say this but i'll say it anyway it has an almost tarantino vibe to it that i just love it feels right out of in glorious bastards or something like that i've listened to this song so much since the film's release i just adore it turns out madeleine's father mr white is off working somewhere and his wife decides that this is the ample moment to reveal to her young daughter that he's actually an assassin by trade before dropping her wine on the floor and i love how this prompts a very quick moment when madeleine just looks straight down the camera i half expect a voiceover to kick in when this happens yeah that's me you're probably wondering how i deal with this on a daily basis this is a small detail but i love how when we see young madeleine she's talking to her tamagotchi like it's a patient like she's telling it it's depressed and considering she becomes a psychiatrist later in life i thought that was just a really nice little touch anyway this domestic misery is soon interrupted by a limping masked villain and this plays like something right out of a horror film it's really cool and honestly not since octopussy we had a sequence that feels like it could have been lifted straight from a slasher movie in a bond film the masked character reveals himself to mrs white who looks like she's tripping balls as she sees him walking towards her oh christ i knew i should have stopped on the third wine box my name is a guy named luke sapirsaff and turns out to be evil what are the odds safin kills mrs white in a pretty brutal moment which i guess kind of leads to some more potential retconning from the past you're protecting someone your wife she left long ago i mean i've never described a dead relative as having left as opposed to just you know died but maybe this is all totally hinting at the fact that mr white never really learned of his wife's true fate maybe young madeleine went back into the house after this episode and hid the body sparing her father from the horrific thoughts of the person he loved most in this world dying as a result of his own actions or maybe he was a bigoist so i guess we just have to buy that mr white remarried sometime later i've seen some speculate that the woman sat next to mr white at the opera in quantum solus could be his wife but i must admit i've always just thought of this as being some random lady but i guess it could be the second mrs white and would certainly make sense in this current timeline just as an aside who the hell would have guessed back in 2006 that this guy would become the most important and influential character besides bond in all these five films like it's crazy to think how much story mileage they got out of this guy and his exploits in the series anyway safin turns his attention to madeleine and i was kind of surprised seeing some of the behind the scenes set photos of this particular sequence they show that it's actually rami malek here doing the acting behind the mask and i mean i kind of just assumed that this would be a body double and malik's voice would have been dubbed in later for most of this we know that rami malek's schedule dictated that he couldn't be on the set of no time to die all that much and i always just kind of assumed that they gave the character a mask to get around the fact that they maybe didn't have him as much as they wanted but it turns out that that's not to be the case and he wears the mask for a different reason and we'll come to that in a little while but suffice it to say i didn't find it terribly convincing i think it's a really cool mask and it's creepy as anything but i'm not sure if i ever really buy why the character chooses to wear it he doesn't wear it later on and there's not much of an in-film explanation as to why he does it here i mean we're to realize that he has some kind of skin condition very soon so maybe it's for vanity reasons but whatever madeleine doesn't seem to be a fan of it either as she breaks a chunk of it off shooting at saffin uh terrible bad luck on her part that the bullet wasn't just a millimeter or so to the left because she just saved herself an awful lot of problems further down the line if this guy had just died here but no it turns out that after being shot at a few times he's alive because i guess he wore a bulletproof vest or something we never really get this confirmed i know that it's a fairly rote thing to do but traditionally when characters in films or tv shows get shot and it doesn't kill them because they've got something blocking the bullet you'll have a moment where they open up their coat and you'll see the bulletproof vest or they'll take something out of their pocket and we'll see that that was what stopped the bullet here they don't do that and i do find it kind of odd or maybe i just read way too much into this moment from the off uh we saw saffin with a bullet hole in his jacket and plenty of the trailers and promotional material leading up to the film and myself and a lot of other bond fans read into this detail that safin was going to be something of an adaptation of ian fleming's doctor no character a prominent detail of that literary character being that he was born with his heart on the right side of his chest rather than the left and i thought that this meant we would have had some explanation from safin later on about how the bullet went where his heart should have been and it didn't kill him but in a weird way he would kind of thank madeline for making him value the gift of life and that would explain his obsession with her or something like that but no it turns out that he was just uh very well equipped and that's that i certainly could have done with some more of an explanation later on about his motivations but hey get used to hearing that throughout the course of this review uh because here madeline runs across the frozen lake to escape it of course gives way and she's trapped underneath the ice this does something to safin and he ultimately decides that he's going to save the girl all be in an incredibly haphazard way i mean it straight up looks like he's just shooting at her here but i think we're supposed to assume that he's shooting around her to create a hole in the ice that he can break and pull her out though i do kind of like the idea that he's being kind of deliberately haphazard with his shots here like he's almost leaving it completely up to fate if she lives or dies she does live of course and he pulls her out of the water and there's a wonderful cut here where we see the grown-up madeline swimming in a much warmer looking climate and finally a good seven minutes into the film we have our hero james bond back on screen where the hell have you been we have a couple of lovey dovey scenes with bond and madeleine here obviously we're picking up with them some time after the events of spectre at the end of which we see the pair drive off in the aston martin db5 and now they're apparently just doing some aimless wandering around italy eventually stopping at the absolutely stunning material this location is just gorgeously presented it obviously gets harder and harder for bond films to do the uh exotic travelogue stuff of old when audiences on large are kind of used to going on holidays themselves and travel is just such a more viable thing for individuals to go to some of these exotic and beautiful places but honestly it's just awe-inspiring i'd love to go there myself someday and hey maybe i'll even be able to write down my own secret and burn it in the festival just like the locals do these scenes also work overtime to re-establish bond madeleine's romance i don't think i'm alone in saying that i was never fully sold on the pair falling in love inspector and i feel like in that film there is a severe lack of romantic frisson between the two leaving the ending of that film feeling quite cold as a result so no time to die is going to attempt to saciate whiny irritants like me by giving us soft focused vignette shots of the pair driving together a cute couple banter passionate snogging and perhaps most importantly of all for fans like us invoking thoughts of the great bond romance of old on her majesty's secret service we have all the time in the world and even sampling some of john barry's classic tune uh this is overdrive stuff because for the story to work they really want to make sure that we're all very much sold on the love story and uh you know what i am i'm not overly keen on the score reuse that's a little bit too gratuitous for me but speaking of someone who was really not sold on the relationship between these two characters in the previous film here i think it works and i'll go a step beyond that actually i think it works quite well anyway it turns out that the pair's wanderings are not quite so aimless after all because madeleine has deliberately led bond here so that he can specifically visit the grave of his dead lover vesper lind who we of course know from casino royale and put his unresolved feelings about her to rest i thought that was the entire point of quantum of solace but okay madeline makes it clear that in order for her and bond to have a future together he needs to make peace with vesper and then she will reciprocate by telling him all of her secrets she writes down the masked man on a piece of paper and burns it the next morning bond dons his finest corduroy suit and heads to the graveyard not sure why vesper is buried here of all places i thought she was french and worked for the british treasury so presumably she lived in england but i guess maybe her mother's family were from here there's a family crypt after all and based on the names and dates i'm guessing that vespa was buried with her mother and grandmother um saviani being her mother's maiden name presumably it's a little weird that vesper was apparently only around 23 years old during the events of casino royale she must have been one hell of an overachiever to be working in the capacity that she was in at the treasury if that's the case i don't know why they didn't just use the actress's actual age i mean it feels like a really odd choice to make her so young just one more thing on vespers 2 i genuinely can't believe i have this much to say about this but here we are this is going to be one hell of a long video if you couldn't tell in some of the behind the scenes shots of this sequence we can see that the image used of vespa on the set is different to the one used in the final film and thank goodness they changed it vespa looks so damn moody in that on-set picture which coincidentally is the same image that blowfeld used to psych bond out inspector or maybe it was all a deliberate callback given what's about to happen but before we get there i just want to say that despite this not being something i ever felt bond needed to do visiting the grave of vesper i absolutely adore this scene like i say i figured that the point of quantum of solace was about bond dealing with his grief regarding vesper and finding some well the clues in the title solace by the end of the thing coming back to vespa in this way 15 years after that first craig film was never something i thought i wanted but i'll be damned if the way this brief moment is shot scored and acted isn't one of the most emotionally investing moments in the film i miss you how craig delivers that line just really tugs up my heartstrings and this is a bit of score reuse that i actually quite like the reprise of vespers theme from casino royale it's a really small moment and i know that we're going to get into grander and more elaborate emotional stakes as the film goes on but just in terms of tugging on my own heartstrings this is kind of the peak of that in this film for me the sentimentality is abruptly vanquished though as it turns out that vespa actually requested cremation rather than burial and bond is unexpectedly blasted with the atoms of his former lover and it turns out that this is actually a big old spectre trap and that the young local who guided bond to vesper's grave was in on the whole thing i'd love to know exactly when the bomb was initially planted and when this kid was recruited assuming that there's at least 10 years between the death of vesper and this opening sequence and this guy is like what 15 or 16 years old expect to sure do recruit him young so it could be tomorrow it could be next year it could be in 15 years but eventually we are fairly certain that this man will turn up and when he does all you need to do is press this button and blow the whole thing to kingdom come any questions oh that's very good yes we do have a workplace pension scheme this is of course where the action really kicks off as bond is pursued through the streets by the film's main henchman character primo played by dali binsala this character has a surprising longevity in the film and i really like him i mean aside from mr hinks in the previous film he doesn't have that much competition but he's far and away my favorite henchman character of craig's era i love his look i love his bionic eye and obviously it's revealed later on in the film that this eye is how bluefield is seeing the outside world from his prison cell so presumably it's blofeld prompting primo here to tell bond and obviously our hero is somewhat perturbed by this information so he hightails it back to the hotel prompting a coolest heck stunt on a motorbike and i just love how he dumps the bike outside the hotel and just saunters off i love his walk here it's so good i also love the slightly sinister way this hotel porter delivers this line your baggage is already down mr bond as your wife requested a rather angry and now untrusting bond confronts madeleine and suspecting that more agents are on the way the pair set off in the db5 for some epic pre-title action i love how even all the while thinking that madeleine has possibly betrayed him he still opens the card door for her before they set off but of course we all know from thunderball that a woman opening a car door by herself is highly suspicious so i guess if madeline had opened the door for herself we'd potentially be embraced for a moment where she takes off her wig to reveal it's actually blow felt underneath so to talk a bit about this next sequence there's some terrific car stuff here and it's a delight seeing the db5 deploying gadgets and despite there being a good deal of dialogue during this sequence i think it's able to keep up the pace and excitement really well i mean from as soon as the action kicks off with vespa's exploding corpse there is a bit of a stop start nature to it it feels more like flourishes of action and stunts and dialogue scenes that are all kind of interspersed throughout so i feel like it doesn't have as accomplished a structure as something like the opening of skyfall does i feel where the whole thing is constantly moving and it has such a great build and escalation to it but i do think that for what it's doing here it's all kinds of exciting and a terrific opening sequence to the film now i don't know what level of control spec to have over matera that they have the phone numbers of every teenager in the place but the only thing that i don't like about this sequence is this little insert where a kid is threatened with death unless he releases his sheep to cause some disruption from bond i would have been totally fine with this being a bit of incidental sheep walking rather than seemingly a specific contingency element of spectre's plans but whatever so in the event of the grave bombing the bridge shooting and the motorbike chasing failing to kill bond we of course moved to plan d the releasing of the sheep this is where you come in probably the absolute highlight of the whole thing though is when the db5 is forced to a stop in the middle of a square and is promptly blasted from all sides this scene is absolutely fantastic it's just such a highlight of the entire film actually i mean it all goes quiet except for the sounds of the shots and the bullet impacts and madeline's flinching and convulsing in terror bond is just sat there kind of having a moment to process this apparent act of betrayal i love that we're seeing the bulletproof capacity of the db5 pushed to its absolute limits and bonds escape plan of gatling gunsmoke donuts is just phenomenal it's a signature bond moment and the music kicks in in such a badass way it's just sensational i love this moment and it works as the action climax of the sequence because right after this bond takes madeline to the train station to throw her on whatever the next departing train is he's sure lucky that no one working at the station caught them walking over the tracks like that though i've known stations suspend departures for such reckless passenger behavior and it'd be awkward as heck if bond had to wait around with madeleine for another hour until services resumed though maybe if they did have a little bit of time to wait madeline could have just you know convinced bond that she has nothing to do with this very elaborate assassination scheme so as much as i do really love this whole sequence and i'm willing to go with it because they obviously need to separate these two characters in order to tell the story that they want to tell for the rest of the film but it is a bit of a pill to swallow that bond is so willing to throw his future with this woman away on the back of blowfeld saying that she was working with them all along particularly when blofeld was very much just outed as bond's personal troll in the previous film i'm surprised that bond is so immediately believing of this it's my love your father would be so proud of you i think i kind of go with it largely because of the whole vespa thing like dredging up some past feelings of betrayal and bond not wanting to go through that again potentially with madeline so i don't i guess i don't blame him for behaving rashly here it just feels a little bit odd because leia said do was playing this very sincerely like her character is innocent in this and i think that comes through in her performance there's no duality going on here she's very much confused and frightened so it's a bit weird that bond doesn't seem to really think that there's you know there might be something up with this particularly as all of spectre seems to be out to kill her as well as bond but given how duplicitous specter can be i guess maybe bond just doesn't think much of this but as i say i can go with this setup because it's necessary for them to rearrange the pieces for the story that they want to tell believe it or not i'm fine with swallowing a plot contrivance or two if i'm enjoying the film and i'm enjoying this so far so uh bottoms up the sequence ends on another just absolute emotional gut punch moment when bond is saying goodbye to madeleine and leah sudo is just acting the hell out of this seeing her well up with tears here is just heartbreaking her running down the carriage to keep sight of bond until the last moment it's another bit where the emotions genuinely got to me and i credit the filmmakers and the actors for investing me in a relationship in the space of what 10-15 minutes that the previous film couldn't do in 90 or however long the characters were on screen together there's obviously a bit of setup going on here for later on too as madeline grabs her stomach as the train door closes and chekhov's stomach grab indicates that she either has terrible indigestion that will become relevant to the plot later on or she is in fact pregnant i get the sense that it's kind of 50 50 whether people pick up on this little moment or not and i'll admit that i did on the first time watching it but it takes so long to actually get to the reveal that there is in fact a child involved in this situation that by the time we get to that moment i'd forgotten about this completely so the surprise of the child reveal later on did work quite well for me and hey look this is one hell of a packed film and it's going to be some time until we get back to madeleine's story in this thing i mean hey have you seen how long this video is there's an awful lot to talk about and we're only at the end of the pre-title sequence for god's sake so yes 24 minutes into the film we finally get to the title sequence after the longest bond opening ever though i will say that it doesn't feel like it and i feel like that is something that i feel throughout the entirety of no time to die i think that it's phenomenal that for as long as this film is and it is the longest bond film of them all by some way i never feel a lag and maybe that's a testament to just how much stuff is going on in every scene but um yes as a pre-title sequence as a whole i absolutely love this daniel kleinman returns once again to do the title sequence itself and i have to admit that i didn't quite know what to think about this when i first saw it but the more i see it the more i absolutely adore it and it's such a great companion piece to the classic maurice binder sequence from on her majesty's secret service with its tridents its britannia iconography hourglasses vibrant background colors i love seeing all this stuff rusting and falling apart it's almost like the majesty's titles have been pulled out of an old cupboard but it's 50 years later and everything's a bit tattered and ruined but it's perfectly repurposed in this context as much as i like all of the majesty's homaging during the sequence i'm not sure that i'm fully down with the use of the doctor no style dots that appear throughout the sequence and there's like a silhouetted diver who obviously gives thunderball vibes at one point i guess the whole thing is just kind of cherry picking things from the past though i suppose the only thing in the sequence that i don't much care for is the short bit where we see faces from the past in the gunsmoke maybe it's because i recognize most of these images from past promotional materials and stills and the like and it just kind of takes me a bit out of the sequence because i feel like craig here is trying to sell me an omega i absolutely adore the billy eilish song it's one of my very favorites of the entire bond filmography in fact and i know that it's not for everyone i know that billy eilish's singing can be a bit marmite for some people um works really well for me i really liked it the first time i heard it i really like seeing it with the title sequence so um it's all a winner for me once the titles are over it's a rare bit of expository text that informs us that five years have since passed and we have a scene set up some plot absolutely adore this shot by the way i think that this film has some absolutely gorgeous visuals in it and this is definitely one of them um this is like one of those sequences that were commonplace in the roger moore era in particular where we leave bond for a little while to see some setup for the plot he will eventually become involved in you know the stealing of the sub the hijacking of a shuttle the sinking of a ship well in this case it's the workplace bullying of defected russian scientist obrachev played by david densick a character who i had no idea was going to be as involved in the film as he ends up being but i'm quite glad of that because he's very much a comic relief character and yeah he's a bit goofy at times but i think he's great and funny and hey i have paintings of sheriff jw pepper and charles it's just a jump to the left grey's a blowfeld on my wall i love these kinds of characters in bond films the sequence shows obrichev in league with saffin who gives the scientist a call to warn him that spectre are infiltrating the place to secure the weapon as safin calls it and that he must go ahead with whatever they say and if he does they won't kill him that clearly doesn't apply to the rest of his colleagues though as this is a pretty brutal scene uh where a good few of seemingly innocent people are moaned down while aubry chef just as he's told and hands over the weapon also known as heracles to primo just a little sidebar here i don't know if this means anything to anyone outside of the uk but hugh dennis is here as aubruchev's colleague hardy and this really caught me off guard on a first watch because hugh dennis is very well known here from tv comedy panel shows and sitcoms and he's a very recognizable face to most people in the uk so the fact that he's here for a relatively brief straight role is a little odd similarly his colleague is an actress who is also a familiar face from a lot of british tv priyanka burford and she was in the thick of it alan partridge bbc dramas and stuff and casting director debbie mcwilliams did an interview where they asked her about like the casting of you dennis and she just said yeah i just like to throw casting curveballs like that now hugh dennis was a character in phoebe wallabridge's fleabag series and he's really great in that and casting director mcwilliams does talk about how that familiarity with phoebe waller bridge was an influence on the casting here but i just love to imagine that it was part of phoebe wallace bridge's requirement for uh working on this film that that casting choice be made no thank you so much miss wallabridge it's been an absolute pleasure to negotiate with you all we need is your signature on the dotted line and uh what was that sorry you have one last request okay yes sure hugh hugh oh okay yes well i'm sure there's a part in the film for him somewhere no we already have someone cast to play james bond primo and his men kidnap and escape with oprah chev and i just love this little bit where they use these magnet suits to flee down a lift shaft before blowing up the place and yes this line from umbrachev is so overtly expositional it hurts but it's not even the worst defending line in the firm in that regard but whatever they blow up the floor and it's all really cool and then it's off to mi6 where we see naomi harris there's money penny rushing into rafe finds his m's office to let him know the news this prompts a rather tense moment actually as m gets a bit touchy about money penny potentially spreading the news further insisting that their story should be that there was a gas leak that caused the explosion in the lab which is described as not being on the books it's something that definitely sets up a bit of mystery as to m's anxiety about this whole situation and it continues to play with ray finds them as being perhaps a bit more morally ambiguous than some of his predecessors i don't know if it's just because feinz has played so many villains throughout his career that it kind of puts me on edge but i'm always just a little like i don't know with bernard lee's m and judy dench's m i never had anything but respect for them and even though they might not necessarily have been 100 correct in every situation i never questioned their integrity like they are always going to ultimately work towards the greater good with malory i feel like he could turn on a dime and i think that skyfall played into that a little bit and this plays into that a little bit too and it sounds like they might have gone fully on board with making him a complete villain inspector if fines hadn't pushed back on it although i think i can say now that i had to fight off an attempt by sam in in spectre to make m i said i don't want to play m and then you turn around and make him the bad guy m is never the bad guy oh wow he was going to be on the other side i had to have some pretty intense discussions with sam saying this is not flying with me was he in league with blofeld yeah yeah no it was like yes he was blowfield or something but um that was that was a red line i feel like in no time to die they kind of try to play it a bit both ways but he does kind of end up being a bit of a dr frankenstein character in this whole heracles thing but uh more on that later m asks me pennywise seven is and in a nicely misleading or foreshadowing we go to bond who is enjoying retirement in jamaica though with a lack of on-screen text expositing this it might not be obvious right off the bat where he is it's weird but i do think there are shots in this film like throughout the thing that feel like they're composed specifically to have some text over it giving the location place name but they just the text never arrives anyway this is of course the perfect place for bond to seek out retirement giving that his creator ian fleming had a home in jamaica and it was of course where he wrote the james bond novels and bonds home here as something of a secluded paradise it's just stunning bond returns home from fishing to find some cigar ash on his porch and i have to admit that when i first saw this film in cinemas i thought that this was bird droppings and i figured it was some kind of elaborate setup for a doctor no reveal later on given that in that book the villain is killed by having a ton of bird crap dumped on him but no really he is but sometimes a bitter cigar ash is just a bit of cigar ash and this obviously acts as a tip-off for bond that someone has been snooping around his living quarters he finds the butt of the offenders delegato cigar which could or could not be a deliberate call back to dine of the day i'm here to pick up some delictaros on the back of this bond seems to know who the person is who is snooping around his place so he gets showered and brushes his teeth and heads out just as an aside i really wish we had some deleted scenes or something hinting at what might have been included in this scene at an earlier stage because we saw all of these behind the scenes shots of bond looking around the place with a spear gun in hand and these shots aren't in the film so i i suppose initially there was maybe more of bond investigating maybe we saw a bit more of his place in these shots but they're ultimately cut for the sake of time i don't know but i really hope that we get to see them in some form someday love that we see that bond still has some secret spy compartments and the like we see snippets of articles expositing that blofeld was found guilty and incarcerated and i also love how this whole thing builds to bond meeting up with felix lighter it has a nice air of that thing that they used to do in the past where they'd play on the possibility of felix potentially being a bad guy and they could do this then because they were always changing the actors it was always a new face here with the returning jeffrey wright they obviously can't do that exactly but this is a different spin on that format and i like it a lot so we have this pair of scenes with felix and his colleague logan ash played by billy magnussen i love how this character is introduced with such great economy and you just know that they're playing him as a square right from the off seeing his vest through his white shirt the way he checks his pockets after he's bumped by a passerby to make sure that he wasn't pick-pocketed obviously this is in stark contrast with bond and felix who just looks so at ease and cool and fit right in i really like that they don't actually have to do all that much but you know exactly what kind of character this guy is right from the off and he does prompt one of my favorite lines in the entire film where'd you find the [ __ ] of mormon anyway it's exposition time felix has met with bond to recruit him to head to cuba to pick up obrechev who has been spotted in the country coincidentally around the same time that spectre are planning a big gathering obviously bond is the guy for the job according to felix and logan but he's initially a bit reluctant to get back in the game so i love this scene so much i love that the bar that they're talking in is called 25 obviously in reference to no time to die being the 25th eon produced bond film logan ash provides some funny moments he's looking so out of place in this setting i love the game that bond and felix are playing and kind of similar to the pre-credits scene having to re-establish and strengthen the love between madeline and bond this scene really has to do the same thing with the friendship with felix and bond for what they're going to do with felix later on to mean anything they need to really establish these two as best of buddies in a way that we didn't see in either of the pair's previous encounters where they were really just sort of at the start of their relationship in casino royale and quantum of solace i know for some people this kind of pally pally relationship is a little bit abrupt particularly compared with how we last saw these characters interact in quantum of solace but i think the pair just have a fantastic chemistry here uh this is my personal favorite felix performance in the entire series i think jeffrey wright's a phenomenal actor and i think he plays really well here and i think he brings out some fun traits in bond in this scene so there's absolutely no complaints from me except for that weird moment where they seem to try to mimic each other's accents regarding the pronunciation of package i was hoping you could pick up a package where's the package i can't be the only one to hear that can i like craig's pronunciation goes very american on package i don't quite know why are there deleted scenes to explain this release the package cut god damn it though some might say we already do have the package cut it's also interesting how felix's plea to bond feels very personal there's some lip service given to the fact that the pair's elected leaders aren't playing nicely and while i don't think that felix is going rogue exactly with this mission there's definitely an air of off the books about it bond rejects the offer and tries to head home only to discover that his truck has been immobilized fortunately for him a sexy lady on a motorbike turns up to offer him a ride nomi played by lashana lynch now this character is teased at a few points throughout this jamaica sequence and she's initially rather forward with bond and they have a little flirting going on another one of my favorite lines is coming up i'm a diver what do you dive for i have a thing for order x well then you come to the right place the pair arrive at bond's home and initially bond looks like he's going to get some action tonight but nomi takes off her wig and drops the jamaican accent and it becomes clear that this character is not destined to be a secondary bond girl but rather is revealed to be working for mi6 and is there as a professional courtesy as she puts it basically just telling bond to back off from obrachev she's in the area to extract him herself the scene ends on quite the bang that she's not just any old double o but i'm double 007 and i think that this is a setup for some great conflict to play out throughout the film nomi is very much presented as overly confident and cocky here she clearly feels like she has something to prove to this guy and i love how prickly bond is with her too pulling rank by telling her to call him commander bond is great but there's a moment where he genuinely is appealing to her to use some of her own common sense that i think is quite nice you need to ask yourself a few more questions he's basically saying look i know that you're following orders but maybe you just need to be a little bit objective here but she's just not interested because she's very much a by-the-book kind of double-oh i also love how she drops in the double 07 line because she just knows that that's going to be a good punch to bond i really enjoyed the little hint of backstory that barbara broccoli revealed in the last episode of the official no time to die podcast explaining how nomi ended up taking the double 07 designation and we you know we also sort of had this backstory that no one wanted to take the double o number and and she was she went for it and she got it and she lived up to it i love that little bit of backstory and i just love that they go with this there was obviously a lot of unwarranted click bait uh pearl clutching articles about how a black woman is playing double 07 and there was a lot of stuff that was quite deliberately misinterpreting the facts to say that lashana lynch was playing james bond um and obviously all of that kind of stuff is just you know it's it's click baiting right i'm sure that some outlets did very well and got a nice little spike in their earnings because of the online traffic generated by such alarmist headlines how they handle the whole double 07 designation thing is one of my favorite aspects of the film and i really like that they went there with this casting the shauna lynch is the new double 07 feels so meta and it's something they've never really been able to explore in the series before it's exciting new ground to be in and i love that as much as bond might dismiss it as being just a number it's clearly something that does mean something to him meanwhile back in london emma's trying his best to cover his tracks regarding the destruction of the secret mi6 lab having hugh once again played by ben wishel examine aubry chev's burnt up hard drive antana again played by rory kanier dodging calls from the pm it's here that bond cole's using a phone that nominee left behind and i love how he greets them here seven m darling couple of things calling m darling is such a power move and i just love the way he speaks to him throughout this scene we get more of this later on but just from the off i love how bond is like yeah i'm retired and i never quite garnered enough respect for you while you were my boss so here's the way it is it's a lot of fun seeing a totally different bond and in relationship in this film by the way i really love q's lab set in this one it's kind of similar to how it looked inspector but i love this wind tunnel thing edition where i guess this is where they keep the aston martins um this particular aston we never actually see used in the film but you can barely go a scene in this film without seeing an aston martin so here it is we get a snippet at what blofeld played by a returning christoph waltz is up to these days bond drops a mention of spectre so m asks for the live feed of the villain's prison cell where he's muttering seemingly random nonsense to himself or as tanner so eloquently puts it that is a bag of peas obviously it's revealed later that blowfold is communicating with his team through use of a bionic eye and here he's planning the party that bond is going to be infiltrating in cuba and can you just imagine how irritating it would be if you were privo and you just had blowfield muttering away in your brain all day i've already seen this episode and it's not funny at all why can't we watch the one where joey wears all of chandler's clothes at once you can't eat these eggs now you bought them two weeks ago they'll be terribly out of date mine is much bigger than yours bond is a contemplative moment before telling felix that he's in obviously spurred on the prospect of getting back in the game and this is another moment that i love it's quiet but it's just great seeing bond's thought process to say this is a super long bond film i appreciate that it's not afraid to take these moments to just stop and breathe every once in a while so bond heads to cuba and from this point on for the next 20 minutes or so i am in absolute double 07 heaven and i'll explain why as we go through i love that nomi arrives at the same time as bond and i love her giving him the middle finger when they see each other from across the harbor now first things first this cuba set is phenomenal this was filmed to pinewood studios and everything about the design of this sequence is just stunning and seamlessly immersive i adore it and speaking of adoration whether you love this film hate this film or come slap bang down in the middle on it i would say there's about a 98 chance that you love anna diana's as paloma because everyone loves this character right yes the performance that launched a thousand pleas for spin-offs anna diamos appears as bond's ally for this next chunk of the film and she's sensational she brings a totally unique quirky energy to the thing she and craig have some great chemistry i'm sure carrying over from their previous starring roles in knives out together but she's just a fun bubbly delight in another world she would probably have been someone who would sleep with bond before going out on the mission together but this film very much seems to want to keep bond as a one-woman kind of guy but i feel like similar to how he was with nomi earlier on i get the sense that if they were up for it he'd totally go with the flow but hey you know what he doesn't have anything to prove in that regard at this point and i like that when it comes to paloma he just can't help but smile at her i feel like he's very much an on-screen translation of how the audience feel about her the pair share a drink before heading over to the party and meanwhile lobricheb is using a sample of bond's dna taken from his toothbrush for something yeah remember that shot of bond brushing his teeth earlier on well chekhov's toothbrush if you set up a lovely bamboo bit of kit like that then you have to pay it off later down the line presumably primo who we also saw in jamaica earlier on went to bonds to pinch the toothbrush for use here that's all well and good but it does beg the question if bond was even trying to hide away from the world in jamaica given that the cia mi6 and spectre were all seemingly able to pop by at various times but whatever they've got bonds dna and at this point we're not sure what they're doing with it but whatever it is obrichev is up to some backstabbing replacing bonds dna sample with another unbeknownst to the watching primo anyway i think i've said this in pretty much every video where i've talked about this film but this specter party sequence is my absolute highlight of the entire film it's blofeld's birthday because of course it is so all specta agents have assembled to commemorate the event in our bunga bunga party as bond so eloquently puts it this is all kinds of fun and give me this over the stuffy and boring boardroom meeting we see inspector any day of the week there are dancers there's a band there are people in animal masks having orgies like bond is in the overlook hotel from the shining or something michael g wilson makes his customary cameo appearance in this sequence and bridget millar reprises her role as dr vogel from the previous film which is a wonderful little bit of continuity and i just adore how bluefield is seeing the party through the bionic eye that is being walked around the place on a pillow on a silver tray by three bald guys and people are paying their respects to the iron oh my god just tonally this is exactly where i want my bond films to be is this setup outrageous yes of course it is and i absolutely love it it's harkening back to some of the kind of sillier but fun ideas that we'd see in the 60s and 70s bond films is it weird that bond is attending a party where presumably all of the spectre agents attending like know who this guy is i imagine he's pretty high up on their wanted list but for me it kind of harkens back to that line that we hear in from russia with love they follow us we follow them it's a sort of understanding we have even earlier on when felix and logan are trying to entice bond along on this mission they're sort of selling it to him as if it's this kind of fun game he's leaving out the best part it'll be like old spectre and i love that i love it when the spy stuff is kind of fun and these people look like they're having a good time doing this stuff though my only complaint about this entire sequence is that i would have loved it if they could have fitted in a variation on the don't touch your ear line that we heard in a few of the previous craig bond films stop touching your ear don't touch your ear the sequence also features a song that i've come to adore in the form of and i'm probably gonna mangle the pronunciation here but whatever donde estabas ii uh to the extent that i now own a vinyl with a version of the song on it and i'm definitely trying to replicate the aesthetics of this specter party when it comes to my next birthday the whole thing builds to an attempted assassination attempt on bond using what looks like a poison gas in this moment to kill the agent in front of all the spectre alumni present this is just one of my favorite shots in the whole thing by the way when all the agents have suddenly stood behind bond and he's just gotten on as to something's going on i love how no one is blinking and they all have these neutral expressions on their faces it's just wonderful primo and his extra accomplice appearing with these awesome reflective glasses and the old-school spectre logo on the ceiling is brilliant too i just adore this whole thing if i may be permitted just one bit of knit pickery however i do think things can get a little uh clunky once paloma and bond start having blofeld's audio channel in their ears too like his ramblings are kind of treading on some of their dialogue and i think it's just a little bit too much in a couple of places but overall absolutely love this sequence anyway the gas looking substance does not kill james bond but rather starts to take out the spectre agents but just in case you missed this incredibly obvious plot point that we're all witnessing um here's a really clunky bit of adr from obrachev to confirm this it is a working only structure of dying some have pointed out that it's a bit odd like supremo don't seem to be affected by this substance but i've always kind of taken this as like okay it's the big time spectre agents that are being killed like respect to the numbered spectre agents and all of the rest of the people who survive this are kind of like their staff and hired goons you know henchmen hotline kind of stuff in primo's case especially it turns out that he is very much a gun for hire i also love how uh once it becomes clear that all the spectre agents are dying blowfeld just shuts up like i'd love to have had an awkward cutaway to him just sat in his cell like he's obviously seeing this through his bionic eye so i would love to see his reaction farewell mr bond my favorite action sequence of the film kicks off here as palmer and bond try to get away with obrichev this is complicated of course by the pursuing goons and a third entity in nomi who drops in and attempts to extract obrechev for mi6 there's obviously a lot of gun play going on here and if anything it's paloma who gets the most impressive stunts of the sequence though i do love this i assume deliberate callback to one of the best moments from quantum of solace this overhead shot of paloma killing the goons is terrific and again just this character's energy and bond's reactions to her are a delight i do wonder if in some version of the script if it was ever posited that rather than paloma we would have had felix joining bond on this mission but obviously it was changed to be a new character at some point it just feels like this would have been a perfect opportunity to show the pair of friends on a full-on mission together something we've never seen with craig and wright's versions of the characters now i'm not complaining about that and i'm very happy that we end up with what we get in this film but given that adamus was brought in quite late in the game by all accounts i wonder what the impulse was behind this character because at the end of the sequence bond tells her that she was excellent and i very much agree with that but then that's it she's out of the film of course also kicking ass in this sequence is nomi who has some pretty great moments and i love it in particular when she tells aubrey that she's i'm taking you back to mother darling and i just love that she's this third entity in this whole fight sequence bond and paloma obviously aren't gonna kill her but i love the bit where bond shoots out her zipline and she goes crashing into the wall i could have watched these four tangled up with these goons for a sequence twice the length of this i love all of this stuff i know bond with a machine gun isn't to everyone's tastes but hey i grew up in the 90s with pierce brosnan's bond so it doesn't at all feel out of place to me and god when the bond theme kicks in when he grabs a gun slides over that bar and just starts taking out bad guys with such calm swagger and confidence goodness i love this in the battle bond and paloma square obrachev and a cigar for felix and then the blokes escape in a plane but i love that this isn't just any old plane it's the same plane that nomi flew in on like she's just gonna be so pissed off when she gets back and realizes the bond is made off with her own escape vehicle i love it bond flies the scientist to a sea trawler which is acting as a makeshift base for felix and logan and then presses obrachev for answers i remember being so exhilarated watching this particular scene for the first time because well we're an hour into the film and we don't really know any of the details about what the ultimate villainous scheme is and whatever information bond gleams here is going to decide the trajectory for the rest of the film and i'd say that there are a good few possibilities in play at this point m's role in obrachev's invention there's the possibility that felix might even be involved somehow but no it's logan who is revealed to be the one in league with obrachev and saffin and this scuffle between he and bond is just terrific felix is short and tumbles out of the way while the blondes have a pretty brutal confined fight just to sidebar and billy magnuson here i think he's an awful lot of fun in this part and a great henchman character and the craig era has been kind of uh barren in terms of great bond villain henchmen characters obviously there was mr hinks in spectre but that was kind of it in most of the previous films and i think it's interesting that in no time to die we have well we have billy magnussen's character we have primo and we have obrachev all working under saffin at various points in the film it's like they're trying to make up for the lack of decent henchmen in craig's era magnuson has these really fun little psychotic flourishes like when obrachev kicks him the gun and he lets out this little giggle and when they're escaping he has a line about being a fan of bond and he sounds quite genuine when he says it i just love it bond is trapped below deck with the wounded felix while logan takes off with oprah chev and sets off an explosion on the boat which promptly starts to sink it becomes clear very quickly that felix is being set up to die here he's losing blood fast and when the explosion goes off and water starts tumbling in it's clear that he's not getting out of this alive so felix's death i love geoffrey wright he and craig have great chemistry in this film i think they're great together in scene royale 2 and just seeing the character end up as something of a sacrificial lamb here is tough i'm glad that they brought him back for this last terrar though and if it was going to be anyone to pull bond back in for one last job i'm glad it was him and not some new character or indeed a new actor as felix just seeing him drift away in the water so similar to vespa's death in casino royale conjures up some residual emotions from that the music and then bond struggle to get to the surface principally thinking while holding the cigar intended for felix it it actually does all work quite well for me and yeah i guess i'm just more sad to see geoffrey wright out of the film than anything else bond is able to float on a raft until he's picked up by a passing ship and then it's off back to london where we see pond head to a lock up and rip the cover off another classic aston martin in the form of the vantage i love too how judy dench's m's bulldog ornament is there one wonders exactly how many of these storage lockups bond has dotted around london and precisely how many classic astons he has now longtime fans will of course know this car best from its sensational appearance in the 1987 timothy dalton film the living daylights but wait a tick these bonds exist in separate universes do they not the creek era was a hard reboot from everything that came before so how could his version of bond possibly have such a car when it was only owned by his previous incarnation in another timeline i suggest you don't worry about this sort of thing and just enjoy yourself that goes for you all too yes yeah i suggest just not caring to be perfectly honest about the continuity of these things it's just a cool car and this bond collects cool cars apparently and hey i'm thrilled to bits that they brought this thing back it's nice to see cars other than just the db5 and whatever the aston martin model of the day is appearing in this thing if he'd have pulled off the cover and it had been yet another refurbs db5 it wouldn't have had quite the same impact it's nice to see a different era of bond represented on screen and i didn't need mr exposition himself to pop up to tell me how this vehicle can exist in this timeline what bothers me more is that there's a bit of an odd shot in here as bond pulls off the cover of the car and goes to get into it we see him on the left and then the camera pans over and there's something of a split screen effect where for just a few frames we have double bond on the screen as he hops into the car and it's such a specific effect i wonder if it was done in camera with a double of craig standing in or whether it was done with visual effects or what but it's slightly jarring it almost gives the impression that someone else has gotten into the car and driven off with it well i'll be damned good thing there's that other lock up around the corner with a lotus esprit in it the music that plays over this little sequence though may well be my favorite piece of music in the entire score it's such an awesome version of the bond theme and just as a transitionary scene from all of the drama that we had in cuba and with felix to bond rocking up at mi6 i love this little bit and i think it works really well i also like the gag where he has to give his name to the clueless guy at the front desk of mi6 and i really love the stuff of bond walking through mi6 know me looking absolutely incensed by it all and all of the staff dropping their jaws at the sight of the current and formen double 07 standing side by side all that's missing here is a confused drunk or a double-taking pigeon looking through the window and neither of those things would feel out of place because nomi is even representing the roger moore era here wonderfully in this safari suit i love that she's wearing this thing the verbal sniping between the pair is a lot of fun and they also like how friendly bond and money penny are here they're such a lovely chemistry that kind of makes up for the fact that their relationship has never been particularly flirtatious not in that classic bond and money penny way anyway but i think that for the few scenes they have together they work really nicely and naomi harris continues to be an excellent player in this series despite not having all that much to do in this one i get why you shot him yeah well everyone tries at least once bond is in such a [ __ ] mood here and the scene with them is just one of my absolute favorite bond and m scenes of the entire series this is a bond with absolutely zero f's to give and this scene is pretty much him just being all like hey malory look at the allotment where i grow my f's and notice how there's none for me to give away this is also a seed where i think the dialogue has such a spice to it throughout all the stuff like is the desk bigger are you getting smaller mighty all thirsty today it's all such good stuff and i just like how it gives bond's relationship with mallory some edge aside from perhaps license to kill we've never seen a bond so openly disdainful of an m before but at this point in the story and concerning mallory's role in the creation of this bio weapon i think it's fully deserved bond is here to basically trade the information he has for access to blofeld which em refuses instead deciding to send 007 to investigate how blower felt has been able to communicate with the outside world scan the whole prison in fact scan the whole damn man sir covering my gloves not sure i'd be cracking wise at the prospect of probing christophel's bum but each to their own i guess all this bionic eye stuff does beg the question how did they get it to blowfield in prison in the first place was he already wearing it when he was arrested inspector or did they have to smuggle it into him the old-fashioned way hey inmate you got mail while nomi goes off to finger blowfield's various orifices bond has a much nicer time by accompanying money penny to q's house to do some off the books investigating i love how many penny and q are helping bond away from the prying eyes of them it reminds me very much of license to kill where the characters were also dedicated in their loyalty to bond above all else and i just really like this trio of actors together i'm very happy that we have this scene because the chemistry between the three is wonderful ben wishaw really shines in this film in particular he's responsible for some very funny moments and can we please just trap him up pinewood studios so he has to return his cue until he's an old man like desmond llewellyn q's home is just designed to perfection i love this little security porch or whatever it is the first thing that he lives in a flat but no it's a house and there's a doorbell camera and then guests are buzzed into this porch area and then further buzzed into the main house it makes so much sense that he'd be super security conscious but it feels very real i also just love just everything about this house i know the bond lifestyle is a thing but can we start a subheading of that about q lifestyle because i just want everything here everything about this house i love i love being wishful's wardrobe throughout this whole thing personally speaking i'm very much more a dog person and hairless cats creep me out so i can leave those behind but i do kind of love bonds snarky comments at seeing them you know they come with fur these days i just love that we're actually seeing inside queue's home uh in all of the daniel craig films we get small insights into the lives of some of the mi6 regulars aim in bed with her husband in casino royale and his voice is heard in quantum of solace he's confirmed as being dead in skyfall inspector we see money penny at home with a potential boyfriend and now here in no time to die we get q preparing for a date and i think it's just lovely that we get these little glimpses into these characters private lives because they are characters and hey this is hardly a new thing ben wish you're saying he'll be here in 20 minutes is no more of an insight than made one of these for the kids last christmas but as much as i think the mi6 regulars can be overused in awkward ways like in the climax of spectre for instance i do like it when we get just these little glimpse into their actual lives and they feel like actual human beings as opposed to just you know exposition dumpers but speaking of exposition bond gives kiwi usb that he took from umbrachev and then starts helping himself to some of q's wine i don't know why but pouring a glass of wine from moneypenny and then them just totally making themselves at home always really amuses me i just love this whole bit so the usb contains a heck of a lot of data files containing the dna info of many individuals this information fills in the blanks from what queue was able to extract from other chip's hard drive earlier on it even contains all dna information for all spectra members and blofeld is the only one of the villainous group left alive just another aside on this info about bluefield to give his birth date as 0407 1946 meaning that depending on what year this film is actually set presumably around 2020 at least he's in his mid 70s which is bizarre and totally doesn't match with the idea that he was just a few years older than bond when blofeld's dad was teaching bonds to ski i assume this is some kind of oversight error but yes i mean it's a really weird choice anyway upon seeing the thousands of bits of dna info on the hard drive mini penny reveals that there have been breaches of databases holding dna info around the world bond is convinced that blowfold will know who's behind it but m earlier on said that blofeld isn't speaking to anyone hearing this line prompts a bit of and collar tugging from q and moneypenny as in one of the film's bigger contrivances that we have to swallow madeleine swann has set up practice in london and is apparently the only person that blowfield will speak with it is another contrivance swallowing moment but i guess they they need to get meddling back into the story and this is a way that makes it feel kind of connected to what's going on so um okay well bottoms up again potentially more problematic is saffin's reappearance into the plot posing as a new patient of madeline's who she doesn't recognize okay fair enough maybe she didn't see his full face back when she was a kid but given the traumatic nature of that event this guy's particular way of speaking and his unusual skin condition that she did see earlier on when barbie's mask was blown off you'd have thought that these things would have been seared into her brain but it actually takes him handing over a box with his broken mask in it for her to realize who he is i never forgot your eyes i can't say the same for you i'm afraid i'd forgotten about the whole thing until now so in terms of the plot safin is here to convince madeleine to wear a nanobot perfume available at all despicable retailers to her next visit to see blofeld she initially refuses but he threatens her why would i do anything for you because i am a man willing to kill the person you love most and on a first viewing you may think he's referring to bond with that line but on repeated viewings it's clear that he's actually referring to her daughter so madeleine of course acquiesces now i know it hasn't been long since my last teenie but i might just have to have another one as i do have to admit it's very convenient that based on this pair's interaction years ago madeleine would grow up to be the only person on the planet apparently the blofeld will speak to to make her the ideal person to execute saffin's assassination plans and as well as this i think we're supposed to start buying that safin is obsessed with madeleine feels a deep connection with her feels like he owns her life after saving her earlier on all of the above saving someone's life connects you to them forever the same as taking you they belong to you but specifically 25 years later when they become useful to a very particular part of your villainous scheming we'll talk more about saffin's motive or lack thereof later on because for right now it's back to bond who meets up with m on the bank of the thames in hammersmith very quick sidebar story about this um when this scene was being filmed like in this location i work in an office like just up the road from where they filmed this and i come down onto this bank of the thames like most fridays for like after work drinks or whatever some of these pubs i know really well like i say i literally 5-10 minute walk up the road i work and of course on the day that they were filming this scene guess which was the only sick day that i had in all of 2019 yes it was that day though perhaps that was a blessing for the film lest i be running up to all of the various cast members with dvds to sign every five minutes so this is kind of an odd scene based on how the pair ended their previous interaction i'm amazed that m would deem to meet with bond again but i think that the point of this scene is to kind of exonerate em from any ethical wrongdoing concerning the whole nanobot plot explaining away his secrecy about the whole thing as him being concerned that enemies would kill to get their hands on the tech if they knew about it and he'd be putting people in danger that way so he had to keep it off the books i don't think this entirely clears him from potentially being found in breach of the 1925 geneva protocol which prohibits against the use of biological weapons but you know who cares about that mallory becomes the second air in a bond film to drop an f-bomb following on from his predecessor in skyfall and much like in that film launches into a speech about how enemies are much harder to fight these days existing in the shadows and so on and i guess this is what causes him bond to sort of soften to each other again they start suddenly sharing information as a recognizable tune starts to play in the background namely the john barry theme from on her majesty's secret service i've seen a lot of bond fans debate this online and i guess that i kind of side with the the argument that it is perhaps a little bit jarring don't get me wrong i think it's a nice tune and i guess it's there because bond is literally rejoining her majesty's secret service so the tune reflects that m also relays to bond during this scene that despite his information they were unable to find a shred of evidence implicating madeleine in any spectre wrongdoing and they've been fine working with her to get info out of blowfeld and bond just kind of brushes this off for the moment seemingly not believing it which feels odd i feel like he should be more like how interesting could you please elaborate on that sir but uh yeah i guess the bio weapon is a bit more of an immediate issue tana pops up to collect the pair or something i don't know how he knew to pick em up from here but didn't seem to know that bond would be there too is this just dem's favorite spot to hang out it's a bit of a trek from whitehall but maybe he's as big a fan of the hammersmith riverside as i am back to mi6 now for another exposition scene i can't help but think that some of this stuff could have been condensed in rewriting it feels like we're darting about around london being drep-fed information that might have been more economically conveyed in half the number of scenes but there's been a funny business with q and now there's this whole thing that nomi starts to get tetchy when she realizes that bond has been reinstated as a below that i really like double o what so the gist here is that thanks to blood samples nomi obtained from a funeral of a specter agent whose family members also perished after making contact with the corpse from all this q has figured out that it's nanobots they're nanobots right as a plot device i really like the nanobots as kind of a just futuristic enough thing that it feels like it's just on the horizon of our own futures without it feeling too sci-fi we're not science fiction we're in fact science fact i would of course be remiss not to mention also that nanobots were previously used as a plot device in the pierce brosnan era video game everything or nothing where willem dafoe's villain used them almost like weaponized metallic termites in no time to die though they're kind of dna attachments that get into a person's body and kill them like a particularly fast virus and signed off on the heracles project to target specific enemies of the state aubry chev has modified the formula to basically target entire families even ethnicities there's some moments given to m's remorse and i get that we're supposed to be thinking that he made a mistake and he's determined to put it right and everything but still some of his intentions i find bit hard to forgive it was designed to be the most efficient weapon in our arsenal passing through people harmlessly before reaching its intended target i mean okay it's not gonna harm innocent people necessarily but still for the nanobots to get to your intended targets they need to pass through the general public surely and later on the film we find out that once you have the nanobots in you they're in you for life so whether or not they're gonna harm you or not you are still infecting the general public with a substance against their knowing and will so uh i think this guy actually needs locking up anyway bond and nomia sent off to interrogate blofeld with tanner and of course madeline in tow who pauses in the restroom for a moment to apply her new scent i love your perfume what is it it's called odonobot another line from nomie that i really loved during this scene by the way if bond does anything weird in there you will be doing me a huge favor so don't make it too easy this is of course the first time bonded madeleine are meeting in years and bond is a bit uh odd about it which makes sense it's an awkward situation but going in for the handshake is a bit much and despite em's assurance earlier on that madeleine had nothing to do with blofeld's scheme to kill him in matera i find it weird that bond would behave this way if he thought it was even like even remotely possible that she was guilty i'd have thought he'd be giving her the silent treatment more than anything else but okay i mean he's a bit snarky with her when they actually get into the interrogation room but i think that that's just because she left him hanging on the handshake so this is the blowfield interrogation scene and i just love the build up to blowfeld getting in the room with bond the music is so ominous and i love that he's slowly riding down this little corridor i think leo sedu is doing great work here acting all terrified and indeed she flees telling bond that she's heading home but not before he grabs her arm thus transferring the blowfield nanobots over to himself oh my hand smells lovely now what are you wearing it's odoo nanobots goodbye blowfeld's trolley finally wheels into the room and despite all this build up of him only talking to madeline she's the only psychiatrist in the world to whom he will speak he gets into the room and he's like oh hi with pond right off the bat and bond begins interrogating him with craig's performance going into a place that i don't think we've ever seen him go before perhaps you can help me cuba was quite the party happy birthday by the way thank you yeah but then it all went wrong didn't it so i'm going to talk a bit about craig's performance specifically in this film because i know that this is a big point of contention in the fandom and yes his acting in this film is kind of nothing like what we've seen of his bond before i talked about this in my craig marathon video but i actually really like that craig gives a slightly different type of bond performance in each of his films and while i think that what he's doing here is more than just slightly different i do like it a lot and yeah you know what it's his last film in the series and i'm glad that he has more than three words in a sentence to deliver at any one time not that i'm gonna dog on his performances in any of the previous films i think he's a really great actor but so much about his previous ones particularly in skyfall i feel like they're very internalized performances it's up to kincaid and m to hypothesize about his past in that film where he just doesn't want to talk about it this is where you grew up how old were you when they died you know they also do that you know the whole story here he's talking to anyone and everyone about everything and i'm sure that part of craig's agreement for returning for the film was about having you know actual lines to read and scenes to play but i will say that i think it feels organic because of the film's time jump earlier on in the pre-credit sequence he still feels like that stoic man of few words we know from the previous films and it's only after the five years pass of him living his life in jamaica that he changes a bit and that feels natural for me yeah i'm sure living alone for all that time and being out of the secret service game for so long maybe he would have found a different side to his own personality after all of that isolation i can appreciate that it might be jarring for some people and particularly in this scene with blofeld some of his line deliveries seem almost out of character with what we've seen previously but in terms of an evolution of performance it makes sense to me and i quite like him during this interrogation anyway back to the scene and of course the fact that we have christophe waltz returning as blofeld yeah cuba was a disappointment but we all cry on our birthday do we i don't think we do so i do like this scene and waltz is attempting to do that thing that he became so famous for from glorious bastards where he's delivering these really nasty provocative lines in this softly spoken manner and the tension is ratcheting up throughout the scene is he anywhere as good as he was in glorious bastards no not even close and that's a shame because waltz himself seems to be aware of his own shortcomings inspector and this could have been a great redeeming moment for his portrayal of the character i wish that he was more unhinged scary threatening something but whatever i still like him here more than anything he did inspect her this is nowhere near a defining blowful performance by any means but it's fine i'll take it for what it is it does feel a bit odd to me that bond isn't addressing him as franz oberhauser given that that would be the name that bond knew him by the most surely but i guess for the audience's sake it does make more sense to just call in blofeld or is that blowfield just tell me who they are blow phil bond attempts to get a name out of blowfeld as to who is responsible for the spectre assassinations but rather than that blofel just decides to tell bond that the whole thing about madeleine being a part of the material assassination that was all made up just did it for the lols mate oh sour um while it's not out of character for blofeld to have done all this given that the previous film did establish him as bond's own personal troll in a way the fact that bond was so easily duped by it is a bit of a contrivance to swallow but hey what choice do we have at this point this provokes bond to the point that he's ready to strangle blofeld to death though he may be subtle on that intent now i know that that line is from ian fleming's young live twice and he says it when he's strangling blow felled in a different context but oh it's just so cringy i think if this has taught me anything it's that just because something has precedent in the fleming texts it does not automatically give it a free pass it's one of those lines that's fine when you're reading it but as soon as an actor is actually saying it it's just like oh gosh i'm gritting my teeth my buttocks are clenching i think it's really the shoulder thrust that bothers me more than anything else just how it's timed with die die die i don't know there's something about that just makes me feel like i need to apologize to everyone for it even though i had nothing to do with it there is just no sugar coating it and uh i'm sorry from the bottom of my heart i'm sorry i know that it's really cringey and kind of awkward but it was there in fleming so they felt a need to do it here i just i i can only sincerely apologize from the bottom of my heart for it madam madam do you have a moment please who the hell was that and there's nothing to snap you out of murderous intent than a bit of cringe as bond let's go with blowfield and tana goes ballistic and quite rightly bond you have violated the most important rule in the whole bloody playbook the choking we can forgive obviously but that line ish i shall have to report you to the minister but no time for bickering because when bond grabbed blow felt he of course passed over the blowfeld or oberhauser targeting nanobots from madeleine's perfume that's a really nice fragrance where did you get it from it's odoo nanobot so this is perhaps not quite the most satisfying event for the villain considered to be bond's arch nemesis i mean it happens off camera for god's sake and it's quickly moved on from i appreciate that some might be very disappointed by this uh personally i i can kind of shrug and go with it more so because i don't think that waltz's blowfield was ever that good to begin with if he has to go then this is as good a way as any i guess it's no drop down a chimney stack but hey maybe someday we'll have a truly satisfying blowfield and a truly satisfying blowfill death in the same film meanwhile q complete with gummy worms has been analyzing the date on blofeld's bionic eye which includes a full playthrough apparently of prebo's daily activities and obviously they get through this quake but i could totally have had an extra 10 minutes in this film dedicated to what q was seeing here would you like to see spectre's ninth tentacle oh dear god also shout out to the pure campness of this particular line it's through this footage that q spots are meeting between primo and logan ash where logan recruits primo on to saffin's side now i know that some people don't like this and primo did indeed seem pretty dedicated to the whole spectre thing and boy would you need to be dedicated if you were going to be the one wearing blofeld's eye and hearing his mutterings in your head 24 7. but this is surely a call back to when henchmen were cool with switching employers jaws in moonraker it's the return of the henchman hotline hello henchman hotline how can i help you oh hello mr saffin how are you oh well i don't mind telling you we've been absolutely rushed off his feet here did you hear about the big blowfield birthday party massacre uh what was that you orchestrated it oh it's a funny small world isn't it well now that all the villains are dead there's a big surplus of henchmen you see we haven't been this busy since 1977. funny you should ask we do have one with the bionic eye yes and just for you we'll throw in the eye for free lovely stuff i'll send over the paperwork right now and if you don't mind giving us a heads up the next time you plan a big villainous organization massacre it'd be much appreciated as for why primo continues wearing bloefeld's other eye when he leaves spector i don't know maybe he's vain or maybe he just wanted to really rub it into blowfeld who'll have been sat in his cells stewing away while his prime henchman gets recruited away you know i really never liked working for that bluefield guy anyway you know i can still hear everything you're doing bond heads to queue for analysis of whatever the heck is on his hands that killed blofeld but the only real point of this scene is to establish that no no bots aren't just for christmas which is going to be a big plot point later on so keep that in your back pocket in the same scene money penny informs bond that mi6 have lost track of madeline and he deliberately misleads everyone by saying he has no idea where she might have gone before heading to exactly the place where she has gone her family home or holiday home or something bond rocks up in the aston martin and we have probably one of my favorite scenes in the entire film here madeleine is bonds only lead now so he's here to find out who gave her the nanobots but obviously this is also bond's opportunity to tell her how he feels now that blow felt has revealed that she had nothing to do with blasting him with vespers corpse earlier on the dialogue performances music shot composition i mean this is just bond pouring his heart out it's beautiful i think this is an absolutely terrific scene it tugs at my heartstrings and i think both of these actors sell it so well for all of the issues i might have had with their relationship and chemistry inspector it is made up for here i think these actors really sell you on their love for one another i don't think that they necessarily have that magic sexual chemistry like some actors have like like craig had with eva green and casino royale but both actors are giving great performances here so even if there isn't that that true spark between them i still think that as individuals i believe that these characters mean a lot to each other and as i say it's a huge step up from the previous film just as an aside when it does come to that magic sexual chemistry between actors and films one of the best examples i've ever seen is pierce brosnan and rene russo in the thomas crown affair they are just electric on screen together in that film check it out particularly if you're a brosnan fan anyway the moment is somewhat undercut by the reveal of a five-year-old child in a shot that probably sent many a cinema goer gasping and or choking on their popcorn of course earlier on in the film we saw madeleine grab her stomach and well check off stomach grab you set that up in act one and there's gonna be indigestion or a child later on as i mentioned earlier on when i saw this film for the first time i'd forgotten about the stomach grab earlier on so this moment really did come as a big shock for me and i think it does for most people watching this thing for the first time and everyone quickly puts two and two together and this is james bond's daughter right well put a pin in that because we cut to a pencil looking m fiddling with a bulldog clip sadly he isn't waiting arrest for potentially breaking international law but rather is hanging out in the well i guess it's the hall of m's i mean we see a portrait of judy dench's m and robert brown's m adorning the walls i assume that bernard lee's portrait is hanging in this hole too off camera and as much as i really wish we got a shot of it in the film i am happy to see robert brown zem get some love i mean lee had his portrait viewable previously in the world it's not enough of course um does it annoy some that robert brown's image is appearing here despite it being from a different continuity timeline yes i'm sure it does but even the first 20 films of this film series barely work on a linear timeline as it is this is just a little nod for fans of the series and i appreciate that it's here all the same this is a really quick thing too but i do love how mallory is looking at judy's portrait and it is obviously open to interpretation what's happening in this moment i've always taken it as him kind of looking at her and feeling guilty for the hard time that he gave her in skyfall it's just like he's thinking yeah you were right this ain't easy is it that doesn't mean that i don't think the man shouldn't be arrested immediately or at least removed from any significant position of power in the british secret service but it's a nice moment all the same so nomi has a track on logan ash based on the lead that bond gave her earlier and m has the goal to disown bond here for some reason well your predecessor was less deferential yeah and thank goodness he was less deferential i can't imagine what other kind of international treaty breaking stuff you would have had him doing if he hadn't been going off and doing his own thing back to casa de swan as madeline puts matilda to bed and this happens she's not yours so lots to say about this first of all the she's not yours line got audible laughs from every audience i saw this with in cinemas i think it's a great delivery and a very funny line same for the i have something to show you another child line follow-up it breaks the tension nicely and subverts our expectations of how this scene was going to play but it does create some issues going forward nothing but problems okay the blue eyes obviously when she says she's not yours i take that at face value meaning that she's not biologically yours bond's line referring to eyes kind of backs this up i mean he's clearly taking this statement to mean biological too of course there's a double meaning to the phrase she's not yours as madeline could also just not want bond in either her or her daughter's lives after all this which is all well and good but clearly we're being asked to think of this in the biological sense all so that they can keep the big reveal moment the big truth moment for the very end of the film but this to me is like the first truly unforgivable stumble in a plot line that is staggering like it's just in too many g's in a centrifuge and i think this whole thing would have been so much cleaner if they just acknowledged here and now that yeah this kid is bonds i'm not even entirely sure what bond is supposed to be understanding in this sequence his mentioning of eyes clearly means that he's thinking of this in biological terms but after madeleine's second she's not yours he kind of straightens up and looks a bit solemn i think from that he's realizing that she's saying she's not yours in a way to mean back off out of our lives kind of thing but it's murky in the waters and potentially confusing an audience's understanding it confused me the certainly the first time that i watched this and i mean because i mean spoiler alert everyone's first instinct is going to be proven right and she is indeed bonds we last but it's really oddly handled and i don't know what they really get narratively out of keeping it murky like this nothing that bond does throughout the rest of this story would change one iota whether he was confirmed as matild's dad here or not so why confuse the issue i assume that they wrote it this way because if the child was just confirmed as being bond's biological daughter here they would have felt the need to have some kind of heart to heart between bond and madeleine and maybe that would have slowed down the film's pace and maybe they just want to keep things going they want to push that reveal moment to the very end of the film but i i don't think the final film would have changed all that much if they'd have just had it confirmed here like i if if madeline didn't say she's not yours here i don't think that the rest of the film would have changed all that much bond would still want to go and save madeleine and the kids so i i i don't really know what it gets you other than a kind of a fake reveal moment at the end which we will come to talking about of course anyway more on that later madeline takes bond to her dad's secret room and spills the beans on saffin and their whole shared backstory how her dad killed his family and so on i do find it odd that we don't even have a photo of mr white in this entire film i kind of thought they given his prominence to the narrative some visual representation of him somewhere would have been helpful particularly to audiences who maybe haven't seen the craig films since their initial releases but maybe they spent all of their money on securing the rights to eva green's likeness and there just wasn't anything left in the kitty for poor old jesper christensen the pertinent information here is that she reveals that the saffin family had an island where they maintained a poison garden for use inspectors various assassination schemes bond relays this information to queue and asks him to find out where the island is so he can head there and kill safin i would have thought that he'd be heading there to thank him more than anything else given that the guy is responsible for killing all of bond's arch enemies and i mean we don't even have a real motive for the next stage of saffin's plot yet so you know maybe he really did just want blowfeld dead and is content retiring to live out his days on his poison island mourning his dead family but no we gotta go kill him to cover m's ass the night passes and come morning bond is making breakfast to matild i'd have loved it if this was some kind of scrambled eggs that he was whipping up for given how much bond of the books loves his egg dishes and there are plenty of eggs in the scene right there but i guess yeah pancakes are all good and apple skin as well well yeah vitamin c is important i suppose this is such a short scene but it's really nice giving bond this brief moment of domesticity i love him in this moment just looking at matild looking at madeleine and you can see that he's kind of thinking okay could this be my life now i think you could get so much more out of this setup and it's a bit of a shame that the daughter is introduced so late in the film but for what we get i do really like these scenes i think that the young actress playing mathilde is just adorable too i mean you don't even often see kids in bond movies all that much and when you do they tend to be either just delighted reaction shots irritants to be scolded or money grubbing elephant floggers as i say i wish that she and craig had more scenes together but no time for dad bond because the mi6 gang have been doing their homework and located isle saffin in disputed waters between russia and japan satellite images show some suspicious activity on the island so bond asks how nomi is doing in tracking down logan ash and not very well apparently as daniel craig has to channel carol kane in a real the calls are coming from inside the house moment as it becomes apparent that logan is very close and more than likely coming for bond and madeleine this prompts the trio to skedaddle not in the aston martin though oddly enough but i guess they are in a hurry so maybe we don't need the additional scene of bond and madeleine trying to fit matild's child seat into the back of it or or maybe we do actually that sounds pretty funny no as handy as the potential aston martin gadgets might be time is of the essence so off they go in madeleine's car some beautiful shots here and good suspense too i think this scene works really well and the way the incline of the road is used to reveal the bad guys coming for the heroes is awesome there's some curious dialogue during this scene though as matild mumbles on in the background about mosquitoes and how one has bitten her now i think that a good chunk of people watching this for the first time probably heard that and thought okay well chekhov's mosquito bite this is a plot detail that's coming back later on maybe the girl was infected in her sleep maybe someone injected her or she was injected with an antidote or something like that there's going to be something like that that comes out of this right well no sometimes the mosquito bite is apparently just a mosquito bite so this has no bearing on the plot at all which i actually think is fine and i think it's kind of nice having her just chatting away in the back like kids do it feels very real it's just that in a movie that is this stuffed full of ideas and there's so many lines and setups and payoffs it's unusual that this is just idle chatter with no consequence but no time for your adorableness matild we've gone a while without an action sequence so things kick into high gear here as loganashen is men pursue the family through some gorgeous looking terrain now i think that this is a fun and absolutely beautifully photographed scene but i do wish that there was a bit more variety to some of the action i feel like bond dispatchers of the various pursuers in much the same way and there's definitely a car flip to many but what follows this bit of action is another of my absolute highlights of the film bond attempts to lose the pursuers in a foggy forest dropping madeleine and matilda off in a little hut and luring the bad guys away madeleine actually gets a real badass moment here too when she shoots a guy and that moment actually the first time i saw this film that moment got a cheer from the audience yeah i agree it's great to see you actually getting involved in the action like this i think bond looks cool as anything in this coat like he's really going to work in this scene executing the drivers with such methodical precision and setting traps and search the fog is kind of reminding me of like the jungle level from goldeneye on the n64 and i love how casually he's dodging bullets and i love oh boy do i love how he dispatches of logan ash it's obviously a call back to the moment when roger kicked the car off the cliff in for your eyes only but i love how craig acts this like ash is begging for his life and bond is just examining the car the branch looking at it like yeah is this gonna help me or will i need to bash his head in with a rock but no he just tips the car at him and i love it zafin pops up again seemingly doing his own dirty work and acquires mother and daughter to take back to his island incidentally there's a shot from the trailers of saffin in a helicopter so i assume that he may have initially had a bit of a bigger part in this little sequence but whatever it works well as is i think bond is picked up by a passing gnomie who has apparently spent much of the last day just driving around in her lovely aston martin a few paces behind logan ash now bond is in no mood for snippy banter as he relays to know me that madeleine and her daughter have both been captured i i didn't know she had a daughter that line really does make you question mi6's surveillance work i mean they had an eye on madeline i mean she was living in london she was the only person who blowfield would speak to so they had a vested interest in her but no apparently no one knew that she had a kid despite her being a valuable asset as emperor said and many penny mentions earlier on that they even searched her flat they searched her flat she hasn't been home so you'd have thought that someone somewhere would know this fact and possibly relay it to nomi or bond or m or money penny but hey five years passes and this slips right under their noses apparently so how is the madeline swan surveillance going absolutely nothing unusual to report at all sir though coincidentally she has lost an awful lot of weight recently i mean she was just piling it on piling it on for nine months and then all of a sudden gone just joined a gym or something and her flat again nothing unusual to report at all sir perfectly normal single woman flat complete with an extra bedroom painted pink with a tiny bed in it and toys all over the place good work agent now if you'll excuse me i'm off to commit some war crimes war crimes sir did i say war crimes i meant well-intentioned developmental research into a program that is 100 percent ethically sound airtight seeing how much bond is hurting clearly affects nomi who in the next scene relinquishes her double 07 status so that james bond can once again be james bond double 07. i certainly think that this beat could have been fleshed out further if they hadn't stuffed this film with quite as many story threads as they did but overall i like it and i think it's sweet that she arrives at a place of respect for bond she effectively decides to put her own ego aside in this moment and hey this is craig's final mission as bond of course as a fan i want to see him go out as double 07 though admittedly maybe the filmmakers took the go out part of that a bit too seriously but we'll get there just on the nomi character because i know a lot of people feel like she isn't used enough in the film and i kind of agree that some moments such as this one could be fleshed out more but given that this film is such a smorgasbord of ideas and characters and story concepts for how much time of the film is spent on her and bond in their evolving relationship i actually think she works really well i also think that this character had such an unfair level of scrutiny in the build-up to the release of the film because of the whole a black woman is double 07 headline thing which is rife for just click bait and faux internet outrage which was also clearly unfounded and it's just a testament to the media landscape that we live in at the moment particularly as her whole arc in this film is about kind of like reigning it in and losing the ego and respecting james bond so when people are like oh i don't like her she's so arrogant it's like well this is kind of the point she needs to learn to deal with her own arrogance and kind of respect james bond which i think works really nicely i really like this character i really like sean lynch and i love that bond has a partner to go storming the villain's base with it harkens back to the roger more movies that i love spy love me moonraker and then also to tomorrow never dies with way lynne i think this is a great setup and i love it the pair meet with q who was apparently in such a rush to get here that he hasn't had time to change he's still in his pajamas which is such a lovely little detail i love this q scene 2 by the way it's such a classic cue scene it's him equipping the agents for battle with some really nice gadgets and there's some funny gags i think that ben wishore is just so so brilliant please keep doing q until you're 80 like desmond llewellyn did m gives the agents their threefold mission confirm the presence of heracles on the island kill albert evans effin and save madeleine and matild all really great stuff and believe me i am so ready and pumped for a finale but this is where the film really does go off a cliff for me and unfortunately there aren't enough contrivatinis left in my mini bar to to save it we cut to saffin's base where he meets with obrachev who provides saffin with a vial containing swan nanobots created by use of a hair from madeleine that safin pinched from her office earlier on we're not to know exactly the details of this until later in the film though and you may well be distracted by the fact that safin just casually drops in here the information that matild is indeed bomb's daughter you love a killer you bore his child despite his rejection now this is really the first time that we have a character properly confirming this little story detail in the dialogue and i think to us an audience it's kind of like a huh wait could you sorry could just slow down and rewind and expand on that a little bit please and they don't safin then goes on to ramble about his father's poison garden which is pretty darn cool looking though it is obviously very different to the poison garden that we read about in ian fleming's union live twice i wish that the garden here facted more into the actual plot and i assume that at some point in the scripting it did before things got changed but more on this later so this scene also tries to do its best to establish exactly why saffin has gone out of his way to bring madeline and matild here given that if he'd left them where they were he'd probably have been better off but i think that we're supposed to believe that he has some sort of weird connection with madeleine or he just wants to acquire a family of his own or something we'll talk more about this in a bit but in isolation i kind of like this scene and it's probably my favorite bit of rami malek in the whole film him walking around with his with the girl in his arms is as creepy as anything she is such a great little actress really get a sense of fear from her you're wondering what's going to happen next it's really nice and of course the scene ends with madeline being taken away meanwhile bond and nomi fly into staffing's base under the radar using q's stealthy bird plane it's a really cool vehicle and in that proper q branch of old style it converts into a mini submarine which is all really nice stuff i also just love these scenes of the pair prowling around saffin's base for all of my story and character issues coming up i certainly can't fault the film's visual style it's just stunning i adore saffin's base finally for the first time in a long while we actually have a classic bond villain lair of old and all it's fantastic borderline sci-fi we're not science fiction we're in fact science fact okay science fact glory the pair work together really nicely they have gadgets to use as well it's wonderful stuff story-wise they bump into obrachev who gets her much-deserved beating and the agents piece together exactly what the whole villain scheme here is i think obrachev has been overseeing the production of nanobots designed to wipe out a good chunk of the world's population how who and why we're not quite sure but look this map goes red so it must be bad right i feel like the film does its best to try and dumb down this whole thing for the sake of audience members like me with that was the farm this is the factory but even with that i still don't quite get it do you want to put that in english for those of us who don't speak spy because this is nanobots labeling it as farm and factory feels so odd as they're not organic things but this water and the people raking it or something it's almost like they're collecting the nanobots i mean do they breed how are they being generated are these technical questions important when we don't even know the villain's actual motives no so let's join bond in his little sit down with safin who will hopefully illuminate us all to these details spoiler alert he really doesn't so this is the classic bond meets the villain scene this is usually the scene where everything is laid out and we understand the whys whether it be increasing the value of personal gold getting revenge on the british government who betrayed your parents or just really really liking the sea apparently and wanting people to live in the water i feel like this scene in this film though causes me more confusion than anything else so right off the bat safin is comparing himself to bond james bond history of violence license to kill vendetta with ernst's blow fell in love with madeleine swann i could be speaking to my own reflection i love her so much i went more than 20 years without even contacting her in the slightest just so that she'd forget all about me so i think that this whole saffin and madeleine plot is one of the biggest dropped balls of any story element of any bond film ever as an audience we really need to understand what the what the deal is with these two characters because i feel like it is a big part of saffin's villainous motivation but it's so wishy-washy and unexplained and hazy and i mean i think it screams of a script that has gone through multiple hands and something has been watered down i assume over the various different drafts but quite how this story element was the one that ended up watered down baffles me because so much of this last chunk of the film kind of depends on understanding what his deal is with her and it's just not there in the film zafin being in love with madeline makes no sense at all based on what we see in this film he literally had nothing to do with her for decades and then only reappears in her life when she provides a useful tool for him to get his revenge on blofeld and that whole side of saffin's plot makes complete sense to me that he would want revenge against blofeld the madeleine thing much less so and i think it's a casualty of the filmmakers feeling like they need to give the villain some kind of personal connection to one of the film's protagonists and this can work well like in skyfall where silva's whole scheme comes down to revenge against em or it can work poorly like inspector where blowfield apparently sets up an entire evil organization to act as a personal troll for james bond because he blames him for an alienation of parental affections or something safin and madeleine definitely falls into the latter category and something that needed to track through more of the film if it was to become such a big element of his motivations here at the end but aside from that we obviously need to understand too why he is so hell-bent on creating a thing that could wipe out a good chunk of the population and he has dialogue here about how he thinks people effectively want to be told how to live and how he feels like he's doing them a favor people want oblivion and the few of us are born to build it for them so here i am their invisible god sneaking under their skin while just having a god complex and just wanting to destroy the world isn't the greatest of motivations this is a bond villain and don't get me wrong there are bond villains of the past with weak motivations or vague motivations that you just kind of roll along with because it's just a fun bond film in the novelization of the spy who loved me i think christopher wood does just this exact thing really well in that book stromberg literally just flat out says i want to destroy the world because i can that's it cut and dry and i think it works in that book because you really get the horror through bond in that moment when he realizes that that is stromberg's motivations like there's no bargaining with that there's no tangible ransom as a last resort to stop the bad guy he's just stark raving underpants on head bonkers here it's similar if less succinctly put and to be honest bothers me far less than the fumbled saffin and madeleine love story however what does bother me is that safin seemingly confirms to bond here that he is indeed matilde's dad and there's hardly any reaction to this at all do you want to die in front of your daughter i would have thought that bond might be like oh could you elaborate on that point i could do with some extra clarification please do you mean that literally because i was led to believe not so earlier on but no we're dragging this thing out right until the end apparently so on a more positive side i do really like some of bonds lines in this scene i think that the dialogue here is really quite wonderful and eloquent i think we are the same we both know what it feels like to have everything taken from us before we're even in the fight it would have been nice to have chance don't you think i love that matilda's here as a hostage i love bond's super quick moves to take out safin's guards while the villain escapes down a shoot with the child and while all this is going on madeline is having a right day and a half of her own first she is being pressured into drinking mind control tea by primo but she is able to escape and she meets up with bond in this moment now if like me you were a bit confused or perhaps unclear on sapin's motivations here's another scene to truly make you go so saffin has escaped with matild and is being flanked by some guards when the kid realizes that she's lost her stuffed animal so she bites his hand he puts her down and then tells her that she can jolly well bugger off if she doesn't want his protection which she does and he lets her walk away so i saw this film multiple times in the cinema every time the you know the girl would turn around and walk off it would get a laugh from the audience but then you could always sense that the laugh was being cut short when safin turns around and walks away because it was like everyone in the cinema is collectively thinking the same thing namely what the [ __ ] is going on safin makes a thing earlier on about mathilde living with him on the island obrachev greets the mother and daughter of saffin's family so this is all telling you he wants to keep them both there right like even beyond the fact that having a kid in tow is just like you know good collateral in this situation handy to have a hostage right uh it's bizarre that he's just like oh okay off you go now you might well interpret this as he thinks that she's not exactly going to get too far maybe this is him just thinking well this is her home too so she's fine to just wander around as she likes but as i say you'd think that he'd realize the value of keeping her close by interestingly there's a snippet from the promotional trailers where we see saffin in this setting raising a gun and given the similar framing and the background and whatnot i do wonder if at some point there was a moment here where safin was contemplating just shooting her but held off maybe in an attempted parallel to the opening where he also spared madeleine's life and if that was the intent i might well have liked such a scene but it isn't in the final film maybe it was deemed too intense like putting the little kid in such immediate danger and maybe that would have increased the age certification rating or something i don't really know but at the moment is a completely pointless little beat because right after this the girl immediately meets up with bond and madeleine again anyway given that hardly any time passes between saffin running off with mathilde and her getting back to her parents i would have thought it more economical to just have her escape safin in this scene rather than waste time with an extra couple of scenes that do nothing of her like escaping saffin and then meeting up with the parents again this to me reeks of an unfinished script we know that rami malek only had a certain amount of time to dedicate to the film and i think it shows that pretty much everything with his character is causing all of these logic and story issues but this just stands out to me as something that was probably filmed and then other scenes were changed later on and they didn't have the time to finesse it so they're patching up the holes in the whole of the storyboat but it's a damn see-vac drill of plot contrivances coming at the thing and good luck trying to stop it right so something else that happens in this scene is this line the first shipment is on the dock ready for pickup docker it was much rumored in the build-up to the film that rami malek's character would at some point be revealed to be a reimagining of dr no similar to how christoph fultz's oberhauser preferred to go by the name blofeld in the previous film's pointless is anything twist the fact that the mask from the pre-titles is called a no mask the nehru jacket the crab key design call backs the eastern influences the film is called no time to die for goodness sake and this line sticks out so much because nowhere else in this film is he referred to as dr saffin now given how much onset rewriting was going on it wouldn't surprise me if at some point he was indeed going to be revealed to be a doctor no but they'd pull back on it and thank the fleming they did i definitely didn't need another completely pointless villain name change towards the end of the film that would have no bearing on the story or the plot or anything it would totally just be like you may have known me so far as lucifer saffin but i prefer to go by doctor no these days for a variety of reasons which i shall relay to you now right could i have my daughter back please however the fact that that line is left in there is curious to say the least it's something that could have easily been addressed in additional dialogue recording it's hard to tell who's even saying it out of saffin schoons they could have just removed the doctor and replaced it with sir or boss or whatever but it is here and i'm guessing that that's deliberate so i just wonder if it's supposed to be a little nod to the original film or is it an indeed a nod to the rumors um curious is how i'd best describe its inclusion here so just one more thing on this little scene safin and his men are apparently on their way to meet with some ships coming to collect the nanobots these entities are referred to as buyers our first buyers are arriving and for me this just further murky's saffron's motivations because well this whole scheme is for profit then i mean if he is just cuckoo basket case a few sandwiches short of a picnic in the head would it not be simpler to just have him carrying out this scheme for his own insane reasons why is he selling this stuff it implies that he's not even really in charge of the distribution of them and that's weird i'm pretty sure that these buyer ships are just included to give the film some kind of ticking clock like the good guys need to win otherwise bad stuff happens in t minus five minutes or whatever but it's at the detriment to an already relatively murky motivation i guess it all does just come down to the fact that he's mad but he also really likes money so elsewhere on the island nomi gets an absolutely badass moment where she gets to kill obrachev after he turns out to be a racist i mean he would've thought he seemed like such a swell guy do you know what time it is what time to die is it a cheesy line yes do i love it yeah right so off the island meanwhile mi6 are feeling the pressure of the navy the russians and the japanese who are perhaps understandably breathing down their necks because what the hell are you guys doing flying around this island in this disputed territory i would have thought that it'd even perhaps be in mi6's best interest to attempt to form some kind of international unity over this issue but i guess that doing so would mean that em might have to come clean and jesus forbid that that might happen that he might actually have to face some kind of penance for his role in breaking international treaties but there may be an alternative reason why they don't want any other nation to get involved which we will get to soon the bond family wow it feels weird saying that um well they all meet up with nomi and it isn't just me who's weirded out by the mention of family actually this is one of my favorite moments of the film from bond madeline my tilt am to mi6 that they're going to need to blow the whole island to kingdom come before he and nomi get madeline and matild to a boat while i'm ashamed to say that i didn't pick up on this on my first viewing everything about this moment screams that bond is going to his death the swelling music the lines this shot is such a and he'll never see them again kind of shot and you should probably know from this alone that either bond is going to his death or these two are gonna get out into the middle of the sea and realize that there's a hole in the bow to meet a watery end but it should be clear how this is going to go not to me though who was blissfully unaware during that first viewing james bond's gonna save the day not sure it's entirely clear why nomi has to be the one to drive the boat to get madeline matilda's safety given that her and bond are supposed to be contemporaries and she's actually getting paid to do this so you think that he'd be the one to go off with his own family while she takes care of heading back into the base to open the blast doors in anticipation of a missile strike but outside of the logic of the film obviously this is a bond film we need a climax with bond in it so for what we're gonna do it really wouldn't be the same if nomi was the one doing all this stuff so take a glob of contrivatini off she goes with mother and daughter while bond heads back inside the base i must admit the contrivance to get bond back into the action here is forgiven somewhat quickly given how bad ass the action is for these next few minutes i know some fans don't love seeing bond go commando like this machine gun in tow obviously flashbacks to tomorrow never dies again and i love that film and i love this whole action sequence craig is badass as anything and there are so many moments here to love from him blowing up the control room to this gun barrel homage to the rainfall of grenades to the wanner action sequence on the stairwell where it all looks like it's done in one take which is all kinds of amazing this is obviously craig's final big action moment as bond and it's brutal it's brilliant the music with the bum bum bum bum bum bum i'm having flashbacks to awesome video game action sequences set in stairwells like an agent under fire and night fire world is not enough i love this sequence so much and it's just a perfect cherry on top that it ends with bonds taking out primo with this q branch emp watch and a typically bonding quip really blew their mind bond makes it to the control room and i always find it funny how q is giving him some instructions on what to press and what norton bond just goes ahead and starts flicking switches and stuff seemingly at random but it does the job and so the missile launch is ordered so a big reason of why this strike needs to happen now apparently is that these buyerships are approaching and this is the ticking clock to explain why they need to launch the missiles right this very second rather than i don't know just giving it the ten minutes it's going to take for bonds to actually get off the island the thing that makes this a particularly potent contriver teeny to swallow is the fact that we're dealing with entities that we have no idea who they are they're all off screen and the plot is supposed to be very dependent upon this all of a sudden and who are they well earlier on when bond and nomia watching a map displaying the nanobots intended targets you'll notice that some continents are harder hit than others asia getting off mostly scot-free i'm not sure what was supposed to take from this other than maybe is this implying that the buyers are other governments looking to get in on this tech but i mean few europe in particular apparently on the basis of this distribution i'm totally screwed if this is going to be the case and now we reach the film's denumon and buckle up folks because there's a hell of a lot of complaining coming your way bond is making his way out of the base when he spots matild's stuffed toy doo-doo on the floor just as an aside i love that this toy can be glimpsed in the pre-credit sequence too presumably it's a hand me down from madeleine which is really quite sweet anyway a hero pauses to collect the toy when the blast doors start to close again as previously established the blast doors need to be open when the missiles strike otherwise they'll bounce right off them because they're just really bloody strong apparently so down what's left if you can try the teeny and we'll move on i said down it but better get yourself another one poured sharpish because as bond is running back to the control room to close the doors again safin appears from the side and shoots bond and actually hits him several times considering how much ammo bond dodges in this entire film even when he's not moving at speed it's jarring as anything to see suffering get shots in while bond is running full pelt but hey this leads to a scuffle between the two with bond snapping saffin's arm in a heck of an awesome moment but in the middle of this scuffle the villain smashes the vial of swan nanobots in bond's face and thus the stage is set for the ending the ending that is a result of the many many contrivatinis throughout this film but first we have saffin explaining to bond and the audience exactly what this all means and i'll just say i hate this scene i hate it so much i hate saffin's dialogue i hate the delivery he's waxing lyrical and i'm just cringing i'm cringing so much that my buttocks have folded in on themselves and the lower half of my body is starting to disappear if the scene continued i may well have vanished completely but fortunately bond puts the villain out of our misery and makes his way up the stairs blood pouring out of him or at least as much blood as the age rating certification will allow to reopen the blast doors and accept his fate on the roof as the missiles reign down just a few words of warning before we proceed because i just want to say that if you enjoy this ending if it has the desired emotional impact for you if you think that it is the perfect way to end this story to end this actor's tenure as bond then great i am genuinely really happy for you i've said this multiple times in other videos that if there is something in a bond film that other people like that i don't like very much then all i can be is jealous i'm just jealous that you end this film on some kind of a high note because every time i watch it and every time it comes down to this ending i just i i hate it once it becomes clear what they're about to do with bond all of the contrivances that we've had to buy throughout the film have clearly been to facilitate this moment bond gets on the wire to queue in order to reiterate to the audience that once you have the nanobots in you it's forever it's eternal better start eating for 2 000 for the rest of your life because these things are in there for good the only reason that they set it up earlier on is so that they can put bond in a completely hopeless situation that he is in here but it feels so inauthentic to me why well for a start nanobots are tech and bond has his emp watch so i mean just why not just use that to nullify them but more than that it's just really weird that q is just like nope that's it absolutely no it's it's done and dusted thing it's eternal that's it there's no coming back from it and it's like do you want to have a go why not abort the missiles that heading to the island and then maybe send some more missiles to destroy those buyer ships and then send nomi back with the boat rap bonding cling film get him off the island and then maybe figure out some way of getting them out of him it's weird that it's presented as such a cut and dry thing where's the can-do attitude people i feel like if this had been a virus rather than nanobots it would have made more sense in the opening credits we see dna we see vines growing inside a person's body and maybe if this was a virus that changed a person's genetic makeup when they were infected or something like that maybe i'd have had a better time buying it because nanobots just seemed like a tech thing that q would be able to sort out in a few minutes if you gave him a chance i don't want to get too sidetracked here but apparently earlier on in the production it was indeed some kind of virus and this would have made so much more sense given saffin's garden the poison garden his family's history as saffin's poison as it feels like such a natural fit but at some point during production it was changed to be nanobots and by the way as of me making this video there's no real evidence to suggest that this change was motivated as a result of the pandemic breaking out nor can i imagine that it would have been feasible for them to change such a thing given the lockdowns and getting the cast together and all that kind of thing like if there were substantial reshoots we would have known about it no this was a decision made during production and it's to the film's detriment i think but even if they did take you know just two seconds to think about it and actually get bond off the island won't madeline and matild be in danger bond certainly wouldn't be able to touch the pair until they had some kind of solution figured out oh and not only that as established earlier on the nanobots will actively hop from person to person until they find their intended targets so you know bond pops to his local pub for a sunday roast passes the nanobots onto the landlord who then passes on to a customer who passes on to a friend who passes on to their partner who just so happens to be madeline's secretary and two dead swans is what we get so there we go they've covered all the bases with this nanobot stuff haven't they and i'm only saying that semi-sarcastically because yes if you do take all of the information that this film is giving you at face value yeah it's there they tell you that the nanobots are eternal so that's the reason why he can't leave the island and it's not that i'm complaining about details not being in the film it's the fact that i'm saying that i don't find them very convincing it's their film they can write it however they damn well please but the fact that all of this set setup purely exists to get us to a point where bond feels that there is no hope just feels so inauthentic to me but it's not just the nanobots oh no he's been shot at pretty bad tomb we have close-up shots of blood dripping on the floor and if chekhov's blood dripping has anything to go by and this is surely a sign that he's dead meat right but the fact that it's this villain to achieve this saffin who has had barely any screen time whose motivations are muddled at best the fact that this is the guy to do what has never been done before and kill james bond is baffling to me i think that on a first watching i had issues with saffin for all of the reasons that i stated previously but on re-watching the film my dissatisfaction with him grows and grows probably because i feel like the contrivances that really hurt this film all stem from the lack of clarity regarding this character and his goals but even if they do rap bonding cling film get him off the island curious nanobots and treat his gunshot wounds there is still of course the matter of the approaching buyers that are coming in to collect the nanobots you know the ships that we see in like one shot crewed by unknown people to take away the nanobots to infect the rest of the world well there's them to think about too so no way to abort the missiles now i'm afraid i do find it kind of hilarious though when the island is bombed at the end the ships do like full on 90 degree turns in a matter of seconds once they see that the island is exploding it's pretty funny what about sending other missiles to take out the ships themselves rather than the island well we can't do that either because the island itself has to go otherwise the russians and all the japanese might get there and see what's been going on and be jolly cross m for his role in this whole debacle which will reflect badly on britain and i think we're supposed to be invested in this but if i had my way this guy would be in belmarsh prison i hear they have a vacancy then there's the fact that i think we're supposed to believe that this is the first time that madeleine actually admits to bond that matild is indeed his biological daughter and that has been so badly handled throughout the film that it doesn't feel like a reveal but it feels like it's being treated as a reveal but both the audience and bond and as well as everyone else in the film seems to realize that this is a situation way before so i'm just not really sure what we're supposed to be making of this moment is this madeleine trying to comfort bond like don't worry i'll raise her fully well knowing that you were her dad all along i i don't understand it but anyway have i got them all have i got all the contrivances that we need to swallow to actually buy the emotional impact of this ending well i'm sorry but my contrivatini is empty there are no ingredients left in the house for another one there's no ingredients left in a 10 mile radius for another one and even if there was another one available i think i've swallowed too much i can't swallow any more first time for everything oi and sure this might not bother you at all because all of the reasons leading up to bonds death are valid if not well represented on screen if you're happy buying lines about the danger of the approaching ships and the tensions with russia and japan it's there it's in the script and believe me i'm much less discerning when it comes to a lot of other bond plots stromberg again dude just really loves water and i don't need to know more than that and i think that's because for the most part the bond series exists as pure fun entertainment and for that i can shrug my shoulders at contrivances in the occasional plot hole because so long as i'm having fun i can do that here because it's trying to do something more than that they want me to be emotional they want me to be devastated by how this sequence of events has led to this and as soon as you try to provoke those emotions out of me i'm sorry you need to earn that and the thing is this series hasn't that many times in the past tracy vesper judy dentures m i have shed tears during each of these scenes over the years but here i'm just arms folded this does nothing for me on an emotional level because the thing is so messy and the excuses are just piled high on top of each other and everything is running so fast that they hope that you're not asking any questions that to me the end result just doesn't feel earned okay if you're still with me after that believe it or not i do have some nice things to say about the ending of this film the amount of people i know and comments i've seen reviews and so on i i understand and appreciate that this does work for a lot of people i know this moves some people to tears and while i can't say that that has ever really happened to me on my third or fourth viewing of the film this line really tugged firmly on my heartstrings and dare i say a small tear did form in my eye i'm not gonna make it and i think a good deal of this is down to performance craig is sensational here he performs this with such sincerity and sadness and also a genuine fear of what death is gonna be it's a complex set of emotions that he has to deliver in such a short space of time and i think he's phenomenal um i think the rest of the cast are really great in this moment too but ben wishaw and leia siddu knock it out of the park they're giving this their alls as is hans zimmer's score it's incredibly powerful and befittingly epic the whole sequence looks beautiful i think this is one of the most gorgeous looking bond films there is overall and again i want to make it clear i'm not trying to convince anyone over to my point of view if this works for you great i'm jealous that you're getting an emotional response from something that doesn't work for me and this isn't even like a tit-for-tat kind of thing i've had many a great conversation with bond fans who really love this film and many who really hate this film and particularly this whole thing about bond dying and those conversations helped me realize that my issues with it aren't going to be rectified by someone saying ah yes but you see they say this in the script so therefore your negative opinion is invalid there are illusions and lines here and there to grab hold of if you want to say that this is a great airtight script but for me nope i think to boil all this down for me my main issue is that this feels like a story that was written backwards and indeed interviews with the creatives since the film was released have seemingly confirmed that yes daniel craig and barbara broccoli wanted to end the film with bond dying and when kerry fuganaga came on board they were all this is our ending and to fukunaga's credit his line on that was that bond dying is not an ending in and by itself that's a result and you need to craft the ending you need to craft the story to lead to build to that moment but i think that that shows sometimes in really great films you forget that the thing is even being written like it just feels like the characters themselves are driving everything forward here there are too many things to me that are vague or unexpanded upon or tenuous and the result of a lot of these things is to essentially contrive the story to get to a point where you're to accept this fate and as a result i can't lose myself in the story because when i'm watching it on screen i'm thinking of poor kerry fukunaga in a hotel room tasked with the job of having to fill all these holes and juggle all these plates to try and make this feel inevitable when to be honest it's something that i can't say i ever particularly wanted to see on screen anyway bond dying so the fact that the film is having to work overtime to manufacture all of these reasons to get to this point it's exhausting and i'm tired for it so bond dies here and yes he does die his vitals go flat we see him incinerated before our eyes i don't think that there's any way around that fact he's dead and we have a couple of scenes to follow to wrap up the film starting with the scene with the mi6 gang m reads a quote from jack landon something that fleming used in his own writing and everyone drinks to bond and then it's back to work this also i find a little disappointing just because this is such a momentous thing like killing off james bond and i get it the point of this is that this is spy work it's espionage it's undercover stuff of course bond isn't gonna have a state funeral in a minute silence across the nation because this is all covert stuff but it just feels so odd that it's so muted especially compared with a previous bond funeral that we've seen in the series with jon live twice that felt like a more befitting uh funeral for a naval commander and even if they did just do a smaller scale version of that obviously without his body but just some kind of service even if it is just money penny and a few tearful restaurateurs i think i might have liked that a bit more and then the final capper is of course mother and daughter driving the aston martin through the hills leading to matera where madeleine begins to tell matild the story about a man named bond james bond the kid smiles and i i need to just stress again i think this kid actor is she's fantastic she's very cute she's brilliant throughout this entire film but this shot is just so soppy the smile it has me cringing again and by this point i'm so folded in on myself that i think that all is left of me is my head and a pair of buttocks and then they play the louis armstrong song from majesty's secret service and i'm just done i'm gone sorry i just this song is so synonymous with that george ladies and the film and repurposing it here obviously tying him with the lines referencing all the time in the world throughout the film maybe i'd have liked it more if this was covered by a different artist or even just an instrumental or something but it just confounds the ultimate bum note that this film ends on for me and why the hell are they even in matera is madeleine just heading back there because she doesn't feel like she got her money's worth the last time okay i i do like that we essentially end on the visual of a gun barrel type circle and it fades to black that's quite fitting but otherwise why i can't believe that this is the way they end this film and boy this video is stupidly long this really got out of hand that's no time to die excuse me while i collapse still rolling you still there are you awake wake up you know there's a bond film tradition that i don't know if anyone who isn't a die-hard bond fan even really knows about probably even certainly doesn't even care about it but at the end of every bond film there is a variation on the phrase james bond will return somewhere in the credits this started out as something that they would do in the early days to announce the title of the next film so uh thank you for watching goldfinger come back for thunderball kind of thing and then later on down the line certainly when they started running out of ian fleming titles um they stopped doing it but there was always james bond will return in the credits usually towards the end sometimes at the beginning i don't know if it even really means that much to many people because it is something of a given like yes of course james bond is gonna come back it's been many decades of this film series now of course they're gonna keep on making more but my god i don't think i have ever been so tense in my entire life the prospect of four relatively until now insignificant words appearing on the screen as the first time i saw no time to die in cinemas i'm not sure if killing off bond at the end of a bond movie is brave daring stupid crazy or a combination of all of those things but honestly all my issues with no time to die come down to that decision all of my issues with the plot are the things that are being layered in to support that moment the reason this film exists is because they wanted to kill off craig's bond at the end and the hoops that they have to jump through to try and sell that to an audience the idea that this is how this particular story has to end despite this guy escaping dozens hundreds of implausible situations over the decades this scenario is the one that he just can't escape from and uh i'm sorry i i just don't buy it the contrivances are so heavy and they're piled so high that the supports are buckling under the pressure and it completely caves in on itself for me and i'm sorry to say that i have really no emotional impact this ending and that's you know i can't believe i'm saying that about my favorite cinematic hero is being killed off in a film for the first time and i feel nothing when i look at previous bond films judy dench's m i shed a tear when she died vesper even outside of bond like i'm not against the trope of killing the protagonist off at the end of the film i look at avengers end game i look at logan really love those films and really like how they handle killing off some of the heroes in those films and i i just i can't believe that it's completely lost on me with james bond i've learned a lot of things about myself and how i talk about films as a result of the conversations i've had about no time to die because i think so much of your own personal enjoyment is going to depend on your own personal gauge of contrivance if you hear nanobots are eternal and just accept that then you're good to go if you're okay with saffins madeline obsession being this relatively unclear thing you'll be fine and maybe i would be too in a different context hey i am with a lot of bond films i know that there's stuff about skyfall that some people can't swallow and can't go with silver's whole escape plan is really contrived but i can go with it because i'm enjoying the film enough to that point that i'm happy to go along for the ride but here it's just the realization that all of these elements are kind of retrofitted or feel retrofitted into the story because they have to end with bonding because that's what they want to do i find it frustrating because there's so so much more here that i do adore to speak broadly about the quality of filmmaking i think it it's a marvel the locations stunts directions cinematography costume sets the music it's an absolute joy the craftsmanship is incredible this is one of the best made best looking bond films ever it's certainly cinematography wise it's up there with skyfall i would say to the living daylights majesty's secret service you only live twice purely on a sensory kind of level this film is terrific i do really love seeing james bond the dad and i wish that there was more time in this film to flesh out those ideas it's obviously picking up a direct thread from one of the ian fleming novels where we understand that james bond has indeed fathered a child it's not really ever fully explored in those books either so i guess okay fine i guess it's not going to be explored here either but i think it's fascinating that when it comes to talking about this film that particular plot thread is often overlooked and it's crazy because i think back to in the build-up to this film thinking like of all the things like i was really not expecting it and it feels like it should be the main talking point of the thing that they made james bond a dad but everything is overshadowed by what they do in the last five minutes and i think that's a real shame i don't want to dog on the writing specifically because i i think specifically it's the plotting that bothers me because i i do think that some of the dialogue here is some of the most witty and quotable dialogue in all of bond individual scenes have great lines and exchanges it's funny and bright and i love how stuffed full of characters this thing is i think that the vast majority come off really well q and nomia highlights for me but i think that craig in particular just excels here he's a delight to watch yes he's doing a lot more talking and emoting than his previous bond performances but i think he's witty i think he's sharp i think he's brutal i think he's funny when he needs to be i don't think it's his most uh fleming-esque bond performance i think i would probably give that trophy to skyfall out of all of them as a lead character in an action movie i think he ticks all the boxes really excels i think he's a brilliant actor my main issues are of course with the plot specifically towards the second half of the film and a lot of that stems from saffin's goals being simultaneously vague and simple i've heard the filmmakers and even fans of the film almost evenly describe his plans in you know on the one hand these very flowery terms so much open to interpretation all that kind of stuff and and also i've heard people just boil it down to well he's just got a god complex and that's it and he's in love with madeleine and i appreciate that we aren't told these things the problem is that i don't believe what i'm being told and i i feel like so much of this falls down because of how his objectives are being figured out backwards from the point of bond dying at the end so some of his goals wind up feeling nonsensical for me but as i say i appreciate that there is stuff here to cling on to if you want to take the stance that his scheme makes sense as i say i think it's down to an individual's taste and propensity to accept what you're being told in this given situation and i'm not saying that snobbishly i can swallow a good few contrivatini i dare say more than most when it comes to bond i hope that this video has served to give a broad overview of my many mixed emotions regarding this film because i feel like how i feel about the ending kind of overshadows every other opinion i have about the stuff that precedes it and i think that that is a real shame because i'm not overall negative about this film i think if i were to rank all the films right now it would probably come slap bang in the middle if not slightly lower than some others and certainly judging it against other bond actors final bond films it's uh well i i guess second to license to kill maybe and to that point i am happy that it works as a final wrap-up as a showcase for daniel craig's talents as james bond in a in a way that none of the other bonds none of them ever really had that same opportunity but then craig's entire era became a a retroactive saga by the end which perhaps makes it more difficult to think of this film exclusively on its own terms it attempts to take the previous four films well okay three at least sorry quantum and provide an emotionally satisfying conclusion to this entire journey craig's performance brings baggage from previous installments and i'm genuinely surprised that they did a relatively good job of tying a bow on elements from previous films his relationship with vespa his conflict with blofeld relationship with madeleine i mean it's crazy to think what they might have had to do with this story had layers to do decided that yeah you know what i don't want to come back for another one after all and if there is one thing that i do like about killing off bond at the end it does mean that we are set up for a completely fresh new slate when it comes to whoever will follow in craig's footsteps it's the most definitive ending to any bonds tenure and indeed the fact it was originally conceived as an ending is nice we knew this was going to be craig's final bond film and indeed it does feel like a true farewell to craig who i would say has been a pretty damn great james bond all things considered while my own proclivities if if you watch any video on this channel you will know that i lean more towards light-hearted bond i like roger moore i like pierce brosnan but craig's performance is so expertly malleable like he can do the more campy stuff in this film in the cuba scene as well as took on the heart strings confessing undying love to meddle in and that's a real skill i think overall craig himself has been an absolute credit to this series and his popularity extending beyond a good deal of his predecessors means that he's leaving very large boots to fill very large charred boots if you have made it to the end of this incredibly long in-depth review of no time to die then cheers i salute you i drink to you thank you very much for watching i often talk about how this channel is very much my uh my online soapbox when it comes to talking about james bond because i just have too many opinions about these films apparently um and and this video certainly took that to the extreme um i'm pretty sure if this was a literal soapbox that i was stood on talking in public someone would have come along after about 20 minutes and just kicked out from under me and thrown it in the thames or something like that so uh thank you for watching i hope that you have found this video to be amusing and possibly even a little bit interesting um i always really like it when um reading constructive comments from people who have slightly different opinions to me as well when they say like uh you know i don't really agree with you i really liked it or disliked it or whatever um but i enjoyed the video all the same so um if that's you please do feel free to leave me a comment down below hey leave me a comment if you agree with me too feel free uh yes you can also drop a like on this video if you care to do so you can subscribe to this channel if you haven't already um that would be magnificent and of course there is the mrs bell notification button also below you can find links to my various social media pages including my twitter page my instagram page my facebook page and my patreon page for those of you who want to go one extra step in supporting this channel so please do head below and check out those links if you care to do so so with all that out of the way i suppose the only thing that i can think of to say to truly wrap up this review of my feelings of no time to die is to just say to honoree commander daniel craig cheers i salute you thank you for being a brilliant bond and i mean that quite sincerely um here's to what comes next folks [Music] daniel craig is so never watching this video

Channel: Calvin Dyson

Views: 349,168

Keywords: James Bond, 007, Review, Reviews, Video Essay, Analysis, Vlogger, Vlog, Vlogging, Movies, Films, No Time To Die, Daniel Craig, Spectre, Skyfall, Quantum of Solace, Casino Royale, Die Another Day, The World is Not Enough, Tomorrow Never Dies, GoldenEye, Licence to Kill, The Living Daylights, A View to a Kill, Octopussy, Moonraker, The Spy Who Loved Me, The Man With the Golden Gun, Live and Let Die, Diamonds Are Forever, Goldfinger, Thunderball, Dr No, Ian Flemming, Reaction

Id: AOK6A5JcsU4

Length: 136min 47sec (8207 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 09 2022