Too Much Time To Die | Quinn Satterlund
Spoiler Warning - This article contains spoilers for “No Time to Die”
Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article do not reflect the opinions of Pulse Magazine as a whole.
With the advent of Netflix, Hulu, and other streaming services, it’s hard to come up with a reason to justify going to the movie theaters. $20 a ticket, plus snacks? I’d rather wait 3 months for it to be on HBO Max (with some movies, I don’t even have to wait)! But when a new James Bond movie comes out, I find myself pulling out my wallet and heading down to my local AMC, willing to shell out the cash. James Bond films almost need to be watched on the silver screen with an Icee in one hand and the other in a bucket of popcorn; it’s a tradition for me. I had enjoyed the last few films (“Spectre” was a letdown, but “Skyfall” was phenomenal), so I trudged on down and watched Daniel Craig’s final performance as the titular character.
Suffice to say, “No Time to Die” is a relatively fitting conclusion and farewell to Craig’s tenure as Bond. Set five years after the events of “Spectre,” we find Bond retired from MI6 in Jamaica, living a carefree life, until he is approached by the CIA and MI6 to recover a stolen super-weapon named “Hercules.” While nothing new, it’s still fun, and the director Cary Joji Fukunaga adds new life to the project with some breathtaking scenes and shots. The settings for the film are stunning, going from Cuba to Sweden to Singapore, so it rarely gets dull. The constant change in scenery is needed, as the run time of two hours and 43 minutes is extraordinarily long for an action film and the longest in franchise history.
The main issue I found with “No Time To Die” was neither the run time nor the basic plot, but the amount of villains and loose ends they felt they had to tie up. Every member of SPECTRE, the evil organization from past films, is killed by “Hercules” because they all attended the same party. Not only does this seem completely unlikely that a massive criminal enterprise would have all their high and mid ranking officials at the same place with minimal protection, but that it’s completely unnecessary. In “Spectre,” Bond captures SPECTRE’s leader, so why do we need to see them completely wiped out?
The character of Logan Ash adds another villain that Bond needs to take out and is pretty much a waste of time. It’s painstakingly obvious that he is a double agent, and is really only there to give a reason for Felix Leiter’s death. Rami Malek does a great job as Lyutsifer Safin, the hyper intelligent and chilling main antagonist, but Safin still feels underdeveloped, most likely because Bond is too busy with the other villains for the story to appropriately approach his character. He never is really given a true motive, just that he’s angry at the world or something; apparently, bad parents led to him wanting to kill half the world with nano-weapons.
The filmmakers were trying so hard to wrap everything up that they barely bothered to properly introduce the new characters, leaving some interesting areas staying half baked. Primary examples include Nomi, the new “007,” and Paloma, whom I felt had more chemistry with Bond than Bond’s actual girlfriend. I don’t want to completely spoil the ending, but it was a great final sendoff to Craig as James Bond and made up for some of the discrepancies from the first half. Even if you aren’t a huge James Bond fan, there's something there for everybody, so go check it out.