**Spoilers
ahead**
I don’t
normally do movie reviews on my blog, but I consider the last Bond movie of a
generation to be a bit of a momentous occasion. I have always been a Bond fan
since I can remember. The earliest Bond movie I can remember watching was For
Your Eyes Only, and as a small boy this was my favourite Bond until I saw Golden
Eye. That movie was epic. It is still one of the best, if not the best, Bond
Movies ever. Golden Eye captures the essence of what a Bond Movie should
be in all the right amounts, action, adventure, intrigue, charm, pointed and
appropriate quips, a fantastic bad guy, and just the right kind of gadgets.
Brosnan’s other movies, however, slowly degenerated into the over-the-top farce
that was Die Another Day. This precipitated the reboot of the series we
got with Daniel Craig.
Craig’s
movies were all fine, even fantastic action movies, very much in the mould of
the Born series of movies. Casino Royale blew everyone away, no
coincidence that it was made by the same director as Golden Eye. But it
wasn’t really until Skyfall that Craig finally made a movie that felt like
a Bond-flick. But still there has always been something missing from Craig’s representation
of the role. He lacked the charm, the wit, the devil-may-care personality of
all the previous Bond’s, even Dalton’s darker Bond movies. Craig’s movies also all
suffered from an obsession of modern movie makers to tie the threads of their
franchises together. It got a bit ridiculous in the end. Bond movies were
always stand-alone affairs with minimal references to earlier movies, like Moore
standing before the grave of his wife in For Your Eyes Only, who was
killed at the end of Lazenby’s On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. The old
Bonds hinted that James had a backstory, a deeper force driving him, but they didn’t
major on it, which made him more mysterious. Craig’s movies were all good
action affairs, great action affairs even, but few of them can hardly be called
good Bond movies.
So how does No
Time To Die perform as a Bond movie? Precisely adequate, with pretensions
of greatness. It was an ok movie, just that, ok. It started quite unlike a Bond
movie, giving a backstory for Bond’s girlfriend, that you barely come to care
for in the previous movie. Indeed, this is perhaps why the movie begins by
seeking to fill in some of her backstory. The movie desperately wants you to
care about Bond’s girlfriend/fiancé, and tries very hard to make this happen. The
movie very desperately wants to make you think that real “Bond” is back. He
even has a gadget watch in this one that is actually slightly impressive. The movie
desperately makes you want to feel like the whole world is in danger, but the
bad guy and his lair, seem to be almost a parody of what you would find in the
other Bond movies. The movie desperately wants you to feel entertained, by
dropping in sporadic actions scenes that feel largely feel like breaks in the
monotony rather than compelling sets driving forward the plot. The movie is
precisely adequate.
No Time
to Die attempts to reach
very high, even introducing real stakes by killing Bond’s best friend and forcing
Bond to give his life to save his girlfriend and daughter. The movie feels like
it is grasping at greatness, but it actually falls short. After all, at the end
of the day, Bond is just called in to fix the mistakes of his former boss who
has endangered the whole world by creating a designer virus at a black site off
the government’s official record books. Maybe it is unimpressive to watch the
movie version of what it feels like the world has sort of already just gone through?
But there is
more to the empty feeling of the movie. I think the movie really falls flat
because it just feels soulless. It felt like it was trying really hard to have
the life of a great Bond movie, and was only able to mimic it like a shadow.
Even the eyes of many of the actors in the movie came across as empty, lacking
true emotion. Casino Royale sold Bond’s love affair with Vesper Lynd (Eva
Green) really well. This movie only seeks to mimic that, and poorly. Perhaps
that’s why the movie felt so lifeless. It wasn’t art imitating real life, it
was art imitating art? Isn’t that the definition of soulless art?
In this way
the latest Bond movie is a product of Hollywood today. A movie industry that is
out of ideas, originality, and thoroughly devoid of soul. Yet, even though this
is true, it does not mean they are not without insight. Giving Bond a family, a
daughter, and a woman to actually love outside of himself was a good idea. It
just wasn’t done very well. OHMSS did it better, so did Casino Royale.
But one thing the movies does do really well, is that it understands nihilistic
humanity really well.
Towards the
middle of the third act, when Bond is hearing the classical motivations of the bad
guy, Lyutsifer Safin (yes Lucifer Satan…really guys?), he is told this by the
main baddy,
“The thing that no one wants to admit, is that most people
want things to happen to them. We tell each other lies about the fight for free
will and independence, but we don’t really want that. We want to be told how to
live. And then die when we are not looking.”
For all its
faults, this line was a moment of brilliance. Because I believe this is a
genuinely accurate summation of much of humanity. Most people don’t want to
take charge of their lives, because making decisions and being independent
terrifies them. This is precisely why humanity was so easily cowed in recent
years. Because their illusory bubble of safety was burst beyond repair. Safin
here has just summarized how many ancient Pagan Greeks thoughts about life:
just abandon yourself to fate, and let come what comes, we all die anyway, get
out of life what you can. This nihilistic and fatalistic worldview is the
worldview of much of the unregenerated world. And it makes sense why. If you
really believe this life is all there is, and you get very little of what you
want, why would you want to be fully free? Why not just go with the flow, fit
in, get what you can, and hope you die quietly and well. This is the
materialistic worldview. This is how many people actually think.
It’s
important that Bond doesn’t correct Safin here either. He doesn’t try to make a
case for meaning in life, because he can’t. He is just as nihilistic himself,
the difference is he kills for Queen and Country, whereas the bad guy kills for
his own schemes. They are Ying and Yang, two equal and opposite forces destined
to come up against each other. All he really says to Safin is shouldn’t we at
least give people a chance? Wouldn’t it be nice to have a chance? This is a
nihilistic perspective on life, that just happens to be a bit more benevolent.
For all its
flaws the latest Bond movie captures something very well: how meaningless and nihilistic
the material life is. At best people can hope to leave something of themselves
behind. It was this same hopeless worldview that the Christian gospel broke
into nearly two thousand years ago. And one of the reasons the gospel was so
powerful was that it told people they were not bound by their fate, they could
make a choice, and their choices really counted, not just for this life, but
for eternity. This concept revolutionized peoples lives and because of this the
whole western world was changed. Because the gospel gave people a hope beyond
the summation of a man like Safin, that people were not just automatons living
until they died. The gospel made people genuinely believe that having free will
and a degree of independence mattered, because how you used your actions would
resonate into the eternal kingdom of the true King of kings.
It’s not stretching
it at all to point out that the story in No Time To Die mimics the gospel.
Bond gives his life so he can defeat the evil Lyutsifer Safin and save his
loved ones. This is a mimic of the gospel story if I every saw one. The gospel
tells us that Jesus, the Son of God, lived the perfect life none of us could live,
and then died on the cross taking the punishment we deserved for our sins, in
the process defeating sin, death and the devil. The key differences are that
unlike Bond in the movie, Jesus rose again, and truly defeated Lucifer Satan.
Another key and important difference is that the real gospel offers us real
hope.
-
It
gives us hope that this life is not meaningless.
-
It
gives us hope that we can make a true impact on this world and the next through
our actions.
-
It
gives us hope to forge a small part of this world where we can live in light of
the good news that our king offers us.
-
It
gives us the hope to offer hope to others.
Maybe the
reason No Time To Die felt so soulless is because it was trying to
imitate the real good news, and as we know imitations never measure up. The movie
reached for greatness, a greatness far beyond itself, and only managed to
highlight how fatalistic mankind is without God in the picture. The authors of
the script have some good insight into the hearts and minds of a large amount
of humanity. But humanity can be so much more than their summation, if we just
remember for Whom and by Whom we were made. The Lord Jesus Christ.
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