Bond #25*, No Time To Die will be released in November, probably, if COVID-19 is on the ropes by then (no idea).
Couple things:
*Ever since someone pointed out that the movie’s title logo had the exact same font as the Love Boat… that’s all I see, unfortunately.
*Five Bond films for Craig in 15 years. I’ll state right now that I really wanted him to equal the seven Bond films that both Connery and Moore did. If they stuck with the new Bond film every other year pace that they used to, Craig would have had EIGHT by now! Ah well.
*I’ll be sorry to see him go. My wife will REALLY be sorry to see him go.
*They are calling this the 25th Bond film, which is the official number but it’s also crap. Never Say Never Again, back in the early ’80’s, may have been a somewhat lackluster redo of Thunderball, but it had Connery, which automatically catapults the movie–warts and all, past most of the Moore entries and at least half of the Dalton and Brosnan films. Yeah, yeah, the Broccolis didn’t produce it, I don’t care. The Broccoli’s had a pretty spotty track record starting after Goldfinger, all the way up through Die Another Day. So yeah, NSNA counts in my book.
Now as for The Love Bond– I mean No Time To Die, I’ve heard that:
*Phoebe Waller Bridge (Fleabag) joined the writing team.
*They had to switch directors early on.
*Danny Boyle, the 1st director did NOT want to kill off Bond, as is the alleged plan.
*Hey, I heard they want to kill off Bond at the end.
Mind you, none of that matters to me as long as it’s a good movie. Hopefully much better than Spectre. I was not wild about Spectre. It was alright and had a few nods to ’60’s Bond. I’d watch it again and I might even like more on a third viewing. But I wasn’t crazy about Blofeld (Christoph Waltz) being the mastermind pulling all the strings behind everything in the Craig films. Nor him knowing Bond when they were younger. I don’t know… something about all that seemed to have a “come out of nowhere feel” to it.
Then there was Bond’s love interest, the evil Mr. White’s daughter, Madeliene (Lea Seydoux). Okay. All the women he’s danced around with through the films and the years and this is the woman he falls for AND quits MI6 for? True, he did fall for Vesper and was ready to quit and be with her too, but Vesper was interesting and seemingly more magnetic. Madeleine seems to be about the least interesting woman Bond has ever run into. And she also seems to be half his age. In the end, I guess I just don’t buy the relationship. Doesn’t feel real, just like most of the Blofeld stuff.
Now, in the new film, Captain Stubing–sorry, Bond, has retired to be with White’s daughter and there’s a new 007, Nomi (Lashana Lynch). Of course everything goes wrong and Bond has to be called back in to save the day–and probably die trying. Things aren’t what they seem, Blofeld is making trouble and Rami Malek, late of Bohemian Rhapsody and Mr. Robot is a new villain with creepy bug eyes. I guess there’s a new love interest for Bond as well but that seems a bit premature. Isn’t he still with White’s daughter? I don’t know. He quit for her, so…
And this whole thing about him dying at the end… could all be BS but Boyle did quit over it. And you know that the franchise will continue. If COURSE it’ll continue. They won’t let any other franchise die EVER (Aliens, Terminator, Die Hard, Rocky, Predator, Harry Potter, the list goes on) and a series like Bond is designed to keep going like the Energizer bunny anyway.
But maybe this is all part of the Broccolis finishing off the last few bits of trim in the corner they painted themselves into.
When Craig started in Casino Royale, they did a hard reboot on the character of Bond, showing him at the start of his 007 career. They went out of their way to tie his films all together to show he’s the one, true, actual Bond and there was never any Bond before him within this world. It all started with Casino Royale.
In the pre-Craig Bond films, they kept a loose history of the backstory so that this was the same Bond we saw in previous incarnations. The kind of thing that was laid out at the beginning of Moore’s For Your Eyes Only, when Moore’s Bond laid flowers on his wife’s grave, referring to Dian Rigg’s character in On Her Majesties Secret Service, which starred George Lazenby — technically two Bonds earlier.
So the producers starting all over with Casino Royale was a new twist and a refreshing change. Things had gotten very very stale over the decades with the same formula, puns, double entendres, etc., so CR was an amazing breath of fresh air. Seeing this all new, intense, superior Bond, it was easy to buy into this new incarnation. We would end up seeing his entire career. It did seem odd that after only CR and then Quantum of Solace, that we started Skyfall with Hillary and everyone else referring to him as a tired old man fit for retirement. Short career! Speaking of careers, I did find it odd that they showed us the beginning of Bond’s time as 007, yet we still had Judi Dench in there as M, as she was for Brosnan. That seemed a weird extension. Anyway.
So the grand plan seemed to be showing us the entire career of James Bond, so if they did kill him at the end of this movie’s cruise (see what I did there?), I guess it would make a kind of sense. No more Bond. His story is at an end.
But the problem as I saw it, was what would they do after Craig? As I said before, they won’t stop making Bonds. But as excellent a jumping on point as Casino Royale was… it seems like No Time to Die could be a really easy jumping OFF point.
Back in the dinosaur days, when we as Bond fans transitioned from Connery to Lazenby to Connery to Moore to Connery to Moore to Dalton to Brosnan, it was really no big deal once you got used to the notion that it was supposed to be the same character, different actor. But now, you’ve got a separate Bond with a separate story. A story which, for the better part of a generation, that’s the only story, the only Bond they’ve ever known. And a really really good one at that.
So when the inevitable next Bond film comes out, if you’re the producers, do you show the very start of his career again? A whole new hard reboot again? And hope that a rehash will do as well as Casino Royale? Hope that people will buy in again?
Or do you go back to the old ways and just cast a new Bond and pretend the Craig era didn’t happen and Bond just does his thing? That maybe he’s the same character as the last Bond– well not the last Bond, the one that died but the Bond before the last Bond, the one who didn’t die, the one from 20 years…. earlier. Good luck to the Broccolis.
As this new film was being made, having considered the quandary I mention above, and considering the new 007 Nomi being introduced, I thought maybe they had an ingenious plan. Maybe they were going to see how things played out with Nomi. If the audiences love her, really really love her, well then, the next 007 film could be just that, a new 007 film and not a Bond film. Just go with the new female 007. Easy peasy. It would only be if the audience did NOT like Nomi, would the producers have to go back to the drawing board.
At least, that’s what I assumed the ingenious plan to be. But I’ve also heard rumblings that the movie has not done well with test audiences and they had to do some substantial reshoots and rewriting. Don’t know, I’ve only heard rumblings. I don’t even know what the alleged audiences were allegedly complaining about.
It’s funny though because every time I talk about the ingenious way they could make 007 a woman, there are always those that start moaning “Bond can’t be a woman!” Then I have to clarify that I’m just saying that it’d be 007 that’s a woman, not Bond. It would be the height of stupidity to turn Bond into a woman, when you’ve got other excellent female spy characters out there already like Black Widow and Atomic Blonde. But 007 can be anyone.
But they never ask me, because the thing IS.
thingis.home.blog 