No Time to Die

No Time to Die.

We/hero haven’t the time to die. We’re in a rush, to save humanity itself from a toxic threat (Think covid on steroids, plus blood-spurting). But under that threat, we will die in no time at all. Or this is not the time to die. No, it is time to die. For legends as for mortals.

A valedictory air hangs over this film, that concludes the Daniel Craig Bond-age. Retired from the Service, our James struggles to secure his new passion against the shadow of the old. Not just his past love-life but — it turns out — the new one’s  personal past.

An early festival celebrates the burning of old memories. We advance by respectfully setting aside those old hauntings. He and his current love both join in. At least, try. 

Bond’s current beauty is one Madeleine Swann — a double-barrelled summons to Proustian recollections of things past. 

But Madeleine proves suspect when Bond is bombed during his visit to his dead love Vesper’s grave. Did Madeleine set him up?  Is she the enemy, i.e., the reverse of Pussy Galore, the enemy Bond converted to Us Good by his sexual-cum-moral prowess? 

Relax, she herself is victim of the evil Specter she has struggled to survive since her own childhood trauma and loss. 

Not that retirement has softened the old warrior. Bond here is as physically sound (i.e., unbelievable) as ever. For all his advanced gadgetry, his various escapes and exertions show him more of a Wiley Coyote than a warrior. They start with him surviving a direct hit from a bomb — and grow from there. There is much running and jumping and little standing still. And if no man is an island, it will take the obliteration of one to get him.  

Bond’s enemy here is himself a cartoon figure, even in name: Lyutsifer Safin. A double-barrelled allusion himself, he’s a warped/misspelled Lucifer Satan. With spellcheck so neutralized, what hope Civilization? He makes the resurrected Lecter-like enemy Blofeld seem saintly.  

Bond enjoys a formal resurrection himself when the currently-designated 007 offers to restore his number. If Bond’s wake turns woke with the possibility this black woman might take over the genre, she proves way less effective than the beautiful young white Paloma. Superman may have sired a gay superson but the Bond family business is likelier to pass to a white gal.

And guess to whom? As the film opens on the burning of memories, it ends on the  start of a story. Madeleine is telling her stoic infant daughter: “Once upon a time there was a man. His name was Bond. James Bond.” This kid has survived a catastrophe even worse than the one her mother did. She bore up —personfully — herself. When Paloma outshines the 007-temp she may be clearing the way for James Bond’s longtime lover’s daughter. As Mom admits, the gal has James’s eyes. Yathink….?   

    This blue eyed savior evokes another classic. That is the real classic: Renoir's Le grand illusion. As the two comradely foes strike out to their likely tragic ends, the generals' frozen humanity is countered by the French farmer: Marie has blue eyes. theimage treasures human connection over the cold hands of political war.