We tell you what the long-awaited new part of "Bondiana" has turned out, after which the next restart awaits the franchise.
James Bond (Daniel Craig) has retired from MI6 and is enjoying a quiet life with Madeleine (Lea Seydoux). In order to finally let go of the past, he visits the grave of Jesper Lind (girls from Casino Royale - Eva Green played her there), but she turns out to be mined. Explosion, fragments, dust in the eyes, and now shell-shocked Bond is hiding from his pursuers, jumping from bridges and a reckless driver on a motorcycle. He believes that Madeleine betrayed him, and puts the girl on a train in an unknown direction, while he hides in Jamaica.
But they find him there too - this time a longtime friend from the CIA Felix (Jeffrey Wright) asks to intercept the Russian scientist Valdo Obruchev (David Densik), who ran to the Spectrum with a dangerous new weapon, nanorobots that penetrate the bloodstream and are transmitted as a disease - by airborne droplets: death is provided to everyone whose DNA is encoded in their program. It will soon turn out that the "Specter" has nothing to do with it - behind everything is a certain Lucifer Safin (Rami Malek), a billionaire with a disfigured face, who has personal accounts with Madeleine, Ernst Blofeld (Christoph Waltz, the villain of the previous part) and, it seems, the whole world.
The long-suffering 25th part of "James Bond" finally made it to the theaters - after a painful production, during which the director and the whole concept changed (the film was originally supposed to be directed by Danny Boyle, but did not agree with the producers), after two years of transfers and unsuccessful attempts to sell franchise to some streaming service for fabulous money. As if the whole universe was against Daniel Craig leaving the role of Agent 007, and until the last delayed the moment of his screen farewell to the image.
And “No Time to Die” is precisely that film-farewell, the swan song of that “new Bond”, which from the great opening of “Casino Royale” immediately began to play by its own rules. The movie about Agent 007 has always tried to capture the spirit of the times, and Craig's incarnation has captured it perfectly: first, on the wave of Jason Bourne's popularity, she “landed” a spy, and then - as if anticipating the craze for big narratives and cinematic universes - decided to build such a franchise within the franchise. After all, if you think about it, "Bond" from the times of Sean Connery or even Pierce Brosnan is rather a set of separate films connected by a common aesthetics (and even then not always) and the title character: not so much a person as a myth, someone like the Man without a Name or Mad Max. Craig's Bond is still a mere mortal. Craig's Bondiana is a single, coherent story.
Yes, it has its own successes and failures inside, and they go strictly in order: behind the beautiful Casino Royale - the dubious Quantum of Solace, behind the impressive Skyfall - the indistinct Spectrum. “No Time to Die” does not betray the tradition and ends the story of Craig's Bond - the nagging tragedy of a hero not of his time - on a rather high note. The elegant past again faces a terrible future, the half-forgotten characters return to close their arches (we have not seen Felix since the "Quantum of Solace", Jesper Lind hung over the hero like a heavy shadow since the "Casino Royale"). Bond tries unsuccessfully to escape fate and seek love in a world where, as Moneypenny's secretary puts it, "everyone has tried to kill him at least once." Now he is more vulnerable than before: in love, old, lost everything - even the classic call sign "Agent 007" was given to the insolent new recruit Nomi (Lashana Lynch). The Skyfall-era James Bond, with shaking hands and off-scope, did not evoke as much sympathy as this one.
And if in the same "Skyfall" the hero who hung in the past had to fight with a clearly "modern" villain-hacker, then in "No Time to Die" the relationship between the old and the new is turned 180 degrees. The antagonist here is a classic crazy megalomaniac with ambitions to destroy the world "just because", his own island and phrases from a shabby villainous quotation book. But Bond is already hopelessly "new", too mature and serious to do such nonsense. He just wants to live, love and finally overcome his own psychological trauma, while he is forced to jump on roofs and build traps in deep forests. He is slipped a "Bond girl" from a waist-length neckline (short but spectacular exit by Ana de Armas), and the agent is not interested in her. Blofeld is trying to rub in another mysterious nonsense, and all James wants is to strangle the bastard to hell and go home.
The horror of Craig's Bond is that at the same time it does not fit into the modern agenda, but you cannot call it retrograde either. It seems to be outdated, but the world still needs it: it's not for nothing that Nomi ends up giving him the call sign, as if accepting the supremacy of the old methods. Updated, but too late: while James delved into himself, the world was captured by heroes of a completely different kind. “No Time to Die” has everything in perfect order with action scenes - there will be jumping on motorcycles along narrow European streets, and trucks taking off in the woods, and a one-shot battle on the stairs with choreography in the spirit of some “Atomic Blonde” - but at the same time, director Carey Fukunagi does not even try to hide that the movie is not at all about explosions and beautiful stunts. First of all, this is the existential drama of the "superfluous" person. And the action is just a beautiful background.
In fact, Bond's personality overshadows everything else so much that at times it even interferes with the film. For example, the villain with the idiotic name Lucifer Safin is not needed here at all - in his place could be anyone, and absolutely nothing would have changed. The storyline with Blofeld also sticks out like a strange crutch: besides, it obsessively reminds of the "Spectrum", which, in an amicable way, I would like to forget about as soon as possible. All the small and big mistakes, however, are justified by the mighty finale - for the first time in the history of the franchise, putting a fat point in the history of the ever-rushing agent. So fat that it will be impossible to continue the "Bondiana" without a complete revision. But, as the hero said in Skyfall, resurrection is actually his hobby.
This article was sponsored by Vishesh Yadav.
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