THIS ARTICLE CONTAINS MAJOR SPOILERS.
“No Time to Die” rings in the 25th movie in the James Bond series, and an end to Daniel Craig’s run as its leading man.
The film made its way to screens Oct. 8, after its initial November 2019 release was postponed multiple times, in part due to COVID-19.
A prelude gives the audience a needed backstory to Madeleine Swann and her mother’s death, before viewers are dropped into a scene with now adult Swann and Bond. This picks up almost immediately after where the previous film, “Spectre,” ended.
Taking on the final movie for a Bond actor is a large task, but that didn’t seem to scare the writing and directing team away.
This film has one of the most diverse cast and character lists in the series yet, which is a race that action movies are still falling behind other movie genres in.
In true Bond nature, the man makes himself out to be dead to the whole world. During his absence, the role of Agent 007 is given to Nomi, played by Lashana Lynch.
Ana de Armas is reunited with her “Knives Out” co-star Craig for a Cuban nightclub shootout. While her appearance was brief, her role brought a new take to the beautiful female sidekick trope, with Armas’s character being unsure of herself and nervous instead of completely perfect.
Even the returning Q gets new depth added to his character, with writers adding in a comment of him preparing for a date with a man when Bond shows up at his front door in need of his computer expertise.
The “big bad” in this action-packed movie is less about the villain himself, a man named Safin played by Rami Malek, but instead about the invisible and unstoppable death sentence hidden in nanobots that use DNA to become a deadly weapon to specific people.
Unlike other Ian Fleming novels and films, Bond can’t use guns or perfectly choreographed fight scenes to win. This unintentional reflection of the world we have been living in for the past year and a half gave the movie a lot more emotional weight than it would have if it had been released in 2019.
Even with a run time of 163 minutes, this movie keeps the audience on the edge of their seats, ready to see what is going to happen next. Every scene only adds to the last, and has more comedic dialogue than a Bond film has ever had.
Everything also feels a lot more personal to Bond this time around.
Bond girls have been a staple of 007 stories since the beginning, just as much as the expensive, bulletproof Aston Martins. But this time, James Bond has someone more important to keep safe.
For the first time, the audience gets to see Bond as a family man, with the jaw-dropping admission from Swann that she had a child shortly after Bond left, and that the young girl is his daughter.
This film gives the audience an emotional goodbye to James Bond, with no chance of another escape from death for the MI6 agent.
The final fight between Safin and Bond utilizes the targeted nanobots against Bond to keep him away from his family or risk killing them just by one touch alone. Because of this, Bond sacrifices himself to take out the island where this deadly technology was kept in order to save all of humanity.
James Bond’s death in “No Time to Die” left many wondering what will come next, and who would step into Daniel Craig’s shoes. No official announcements have been made, but 007 fans can rest assured that the agent will be back as the credits rolled with the same tagline they always do: “James Bond will return.”
Follow Hailey on Twitter @haileycampbell.
