2020s, Action-Adventure, Crime/Detective, Thriller

No Time To Die (2021)

Director: Cary Joji Fukunaga
Screenwriters: Cary Joji Fukunaga, Neil Purvis, Robert Wade, Phoebe Waller-Bridge

By Roderick Heath

Here there be spoilers…

It feels like an eternity ago when Daniel Craig was cast as James Bond. The thought of a rugged, jug-eared, blonde-haired bruiser in the role caused consternation and debate amongst fans fond of the character’s popular image as a slick, dark, handsome toff in a tuxedo. But Craig’s debut in the role, Casino Royale (2006), proved an audience-delighting smash hit and a smart reinvention of the well-worn franchise: taking its cue from Ian Fleming’s debut novel, Casino Royale stepped back from familiar, much-loved template filled with absurdist action, sci-fi gimmicks, and quasi-surreal villainy, and instead aimed for something tougher, earthier, more realistic, an edge that had been present in the earliest films in the series like From Russia With Love (1963) and On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (1969), and briefly returned to in For Your Eyes Only (1981). Casino Royale owed much of its success to the direction of New Zealander Martin Campbell, who had previously reinvented Bond effectively for the 1990s in Goldeneye (1995). But it was Craig’s strength in the role that enthralled the zeitgeist, his muscular sex appeal and skill in depicting Bond’s evolution from a relatively unsophisticated government goon to something more like the familiar, suave, ice-cold agent. Craig’s stint as Bond has been the longest of any actor to date at 15 years, although he’s made less movies in that time than either Sean Connery or Roger Moore, thanks to oddities of fate like the credit squeeze that held up making Skyfall (2012) and the Covid-19 pandemic that delayed release of No Time To Die, Craig’s avowed last turn in the part.

Craig’s tenure has also been bedevilled by violent unevenness in the quality and reception of his actual movies, even if the actor himself has held on to general, if not universal, acclaim essaying the role. Marc Forster’s Quantum of Solace (2008) was met by many as an excessively hyperactive, underwritten entry, and Sam Mendes’ Spectre (2015) was also met as a letdown after Mendes and Craig scored a colossal success with Skyfall, a movie that managed to convince the rest of the world to play along with Britain’s reborn nationalist delirium. For myself, despite being a Bond fan and nominally appreciating the moves the franchise made back towards Fleming’s model, I’ve found it hard to really like the Craig era. Quantum of Solace was a bruising disappointment after the excellence of Casino Royale, and I also found Skyfall rather ungainly; ironically I liked Spectre a lot more than many, whilst conceding it had serious problems. Campbell’s touch on Casino Royale expertly mediated the new sock-in-the-teeth grit with some of the old globetrotting lushness in a manner at once smart and unpretentious, but the production team’s choice to bring in artier talents proved frustrating. Forster’s tilt, much like his supposedly serious movies, proved flashy and facetious. Mendes’ gift for creating adamantine imagery with a sense of scale and solidity and touched with gentle abstraction helped the series retain its aura of lush, ultra-classy style – you could all but smell the money being spent during his entries – but at the price of a somewhat languid pace and a sense of top-heavy self-importance in a franchise that once served up neo-matinee serial thrills.

There were subtler problems with the Craig-era films, too. The Bond series had long sustained itself vampirically through emulating pop culture trends – annexing Blaxploitation for Live and Let Die (1973) and the sci-fi craze of the late 1970s for Moonraker (1979), for instance, or even the parkour and Texas Hold ‘Em portions of Casino Royale – whilst retaining its own, mooring roster of demarcating tropes – the inimitable Monty Norman and John Barry theme, the opening gun-barrel logo scene and dreamy pop-art credit sequences filled with naked, silhouetted women, the familiar in-universe touches like Bond’s weapon of choice, the Walther PPK, and supporting characters like Q and Miss Moneypenny. The choice of divesting the series of many of these for Casino Royale came with a mooted promise to bring them back as Craig’s Bond evolved, whilst in the meantime the new films heavily emulated first the Jason Bourne films with their maniacally edited hand-to-hand combat and chase scenes and superficial cynicism towards statecraft, and Christopher Nolan’s Batman films, particularly The Dark Knight (2008), which Skyfall emulated to such a degree it sometimes felt like someone had erased the names from Nolan’s script and pencilled in new ones. The emulation of strong tendencies in contemporary serialised storytelling also drew the Craig Bonds to adopt a running storyline that managed to be at once negligible and convoluted, and an insistence on personalised conflicts and revenge themes based in backstory, leading to the point where even protozoa on Ganymede rolled their eyes when the series reintroduced Ernst Stavro Blofeld, the mastermind of SPECTRE, only to now characterise him as Bond’s resentful adoptive brother and chronic behind-the-curtain tormentor.

Skyfall and Spectre did at least serve to fulfil the promise of reintroducing the familiar Bond tropes with a fresh sense of their function. Spectre, in bringing back Blofeld (played inevitably but with curious miscasting by Christoph Waltz) and resetting the table so SPECTRE could once again provide ideal running villains detached from geopolitical tides, seemed to finally set the scene so the series could go wild again. Trouble is, the Craig-era films were simultaneously locked into another pattern, one obedient to current screenwriting clichés and the niceties of star vehicles. Craig’s advancing age was thematically tethered to Bond’s backdated status as a retro kind of hero and already being joked about in Skyfall, and now with No Time To Die Craig’s popularity in the part essentially obliges the franchise to eat its own tail. What was supposed to be a superhero’s origin story is suddenly, abruptly a fin-de-siecle meditation and dismantling. No Time To Die breaks with series traditions in many obvious and very arch ways, starting with being directed by an American for the first time, Cary Joji Fukunaga, who sometime back suggested a gift for filming very English material with his intelligent and textured work on Jane Eyre (2011) and brought cinematic attitude to the TV series True Detective. On the face of it, he seems like just the sort of talent to give the series a shot in the arm and help Craig wrap up in a blaze of glory. But something went very, very wrong here.

No Time To Die opens with a long flashback sequence to when Bond’s current paramour, Madeleine Swann, a doctor and the daughter of the deadly former SPECTRE operative Mr White, was a child (played at that age by Coline Defaud), at home with her alcoholic mother (Mathilde Bourbin): a man wearing a kabuki mask, who we later learn is named Lyutsifer Safin (Rami Malek), traverses the snowy woods outside, enters the home, and kills the mother. Madeleine shoots Safin, but fails to kill him, and as she flees she falls through the ice covering a neighbouring lake. The intruder, rather than leaving her to die, saves her life. Cut to thirty-odd years later: Madeleine (Léa Seydoux) is travelling through Italy with Bond after he quit MI6 at the end of Spectre. As the pair resolve to make their peace with the ghosts haunting them as they stay in the town of Matera, Bond at Madeleine’s encouragement goes to say farewell at the grave of Vesper Lynd, his great love from Casino Royale. But Bond is almost killed by a bomb secreted in her tomb, and is chased by a gang of SPECTRE agents working under Blofeld’s command despite him being in strict isolation in an English prison. Hints given both by one of the assassins and Blofeld himself as he rings Madeleine on her cell phone, as well as her earlier encouragement, tell Bond she set him up for the assassination, and after he manages to wipe out the killers Bond stick her on a train and tells her she’ll never see him again.

The opening flashback puts a value on Madeleine’s past and perspective which does resurface later in the film, and yet I still don’t feel it was justified especially in a movie so long, but Fukunaga does tap the image of the masked man suddenly appearing in the window of the house for a jolt of effective creepiness. The subsequent sequences in the lengthy pre-credits movement are excellent. Fukunaga and the production team do their best to provide some thundering good action with some thankfully real-looking stunts as Bond throws himself behind a small brick fixture on an ancient stonework bridge to avoid being run over by a speeding car and then leaps off the bridge using a power cable as a bungee cord, and a few moments later rides a captured motorcycle up a cyclopean wall and leaps onto a terrace. This is the sort of daring, vivid, no-bullshit stunt work that’s been sorely missing from too much contemporary action cinema. But Fukunaga breaks the spell a few moments later when he has Bond, behind the wheel now of his beloved Aston-Martin, eject some miniature bombs that blow up a pursuing vehicle, done with obviously, horribly fake CGI. It’s dismaying that even James Bond films no longer have the courage of their own megabudget, go-big-or-go-home convictions.

Nonetheless Craig-as-Bond is at his best in this sequence: the way his eyes go wide and glazed in their fixed and murderous ferocity where he was warm and romantic a few seconds earlier, betrays Craig’s intelligent feel for how being an action hero requires a rarefied and demanding kind of acting, and builds to a moment when he seems paralysed by rage and heartbreak as he and the bewildered Madeleine are trapped in the Aston-Martin by gunmen who pound it with machine gun fire. Bond seems to be considering letting them both be shredded by the bullets once they finally puncture the armoured body as a just end for her deception and his foolishness, before his better self kicks back in as he beholds Madeleine’s weeping, terrified face, and he wipes out the shooters with the car’s secreted machine guns. A marvellous moment that knows how to express character through action, and seems to promise a Bond movie for the ages. The familiarly stylised credits sequence tips one of many nods to Peter Hunt’s series high On Her Majesty’s Secret Service in revisiting the imagery in Maurice Binder’s credits sequence for that film involving a Britannia figure and hourglasses, seen here crumbling to pieces and sinking to the ocean floor, with Billie Eilish’s duly dirge-like theme song on sound: the increasingly morbid and languid tenor of the last three Bond themes has exacerbated a certain cheerlessness starting to cling to the series.

The narrative proper takes up five years after the shootout in Matera, with a unit of heavily armed SPECTRE goons invading a covert germ warfare laboratory in a London skyscraper (!) to snatch a turncoat scientist, Obruchev (David Denchik), and a nanobot virus he was developing at the behest of M (Ralph Fiennes), capable of being programmed to kill anything from a specific person to an entire ethnic genome, and codenamed Heracles. Bond now in solitary, disaffected retirement in Jamaica, is visited by his pal and CIA agent Felix Leiter (Jeffrey Wright), along with a State Department official, Logan Ash (Billy Magnussen): they want to hire Bond to track down Obruchev as they’ve caught wind of the danger his invention represents. Bond initially turns them down, before he’s confronted by a British agent, Nomi (Lashana Lynch), who is soon revealed to be Bond’s replacement as 007: Nomi warns Bond not to get involved, which is a good way to make sure he does. Bond goes to Cuba where Leiter and Ash tell him Obruchev was last spotted, and in downtown Havana he finds the entire SPECTRE team gathered together to celebrate Blofeld’s birthday. Bond makes contact with an American agent, Paloma (Ana de Armas), who professes to being a recent recruit with three weeks’ training, but unleashes major skills when things go haywire.

Bond realises too late that he’s been lured to this place by Blofeld who wants his death by Heracles to be the crowning moment of the celebration, but when the virus is released it instead kills all the SPECTRE bigwigs: Obruchev, whose true master is Safin, has doublecrossed them. Bond and Paloma fight their way out and engage in a little friendly rivalry with Nomi in trying to catch Obruchev: Bond wins and flies him to a CIA spy ship disguised as a trawler where he meets with Leiter and Ash. But Ash proves to be another traitor in league Safin: he shoots Felix and leaves him and Bond to die as a mine blows a hole in the boat. Bond can’t save Felix, but he manages to escape and when he returns to London has a charged confrontation with M, before allying with Moneypenny (Naomie Harris) and Q (Ben Wishaw) to fully understand Heracles and seek out Safin. Bond demands to see Blofeld, who usually only allows Madeleine, now living in London and serving hand-picked as his psychotherapist, to visit him. Preparing for the next session, Madeleine is visited by Safin, and who blackmails her into spiriting a vial of Heracles in to Blofeld. Madeleine flees before actually confronting Blofeld, but Bond, having touched her, transmits the virus to Blofeld when he gets mad and tries to throttle him, and Blofeld promptly expires. When Bond goes to visit Madeleine, they swiftly reconnect, but life throws a new wrinkle Bond’s way – Madeleine has a daughter, Mathilde (Lisa-Dorah Sonnet), who he notices has his eyes: Madeleine swears she isn’t his, but of course she’s lying.

No Time To Die proves maniacally determined to cross the Ts and dot the Is when it comes to wrapping up Craig’s tenure, which, I might as well say now seeing everyone in the universe knows already, ends with Bond dying. In the process, the film completely contradicts the supposed initial promise of Craig’s entries as origin story. Instead, it exacerbates a trend that had been noticeable in Skyfall and Spectre in playing as a compressed greatest hits collection of tropes, but muted and pinched to fit in with the nominally more terse and down-to-earth Craig style, whilst also burning them as fuel for its own star vehicle engine. No Time To Die bewilderingly sets about wiping out Blofeld and SPECTRE just after they were restored to their proper place in the franchise, and also Wright’s Leiter, on the build-up to the climax where Bond himself finally seems to bite a bullet. Or missile. It’s as if the filmmakers feel that Craig is now so integral to Bond mystique that the character can’t survive in the same form beyond him as far as his fans are concerned, and so as far as this wing of the franchise goes, all the outstanding business must be ticked off. Or is simply that contemporary Hollywood screenwriting needs big bangs all the way through, and the only way to prove how big No Time To Die must be taken as is to be, as TV commercials might put it with thumping music stings, The. One. That. Changes. Everything.

Craig’s films have repeatedly tried to root themselves in concepts and lore taken in Fleming’s books, many of which were casually tossed aside as the film series became its own happily ridiculous thing, in continuing on from Casino Royale, the film of which obeyed the novel in presenting Bond as the product of heartbreak and disillusionment. The death of Vesper Lynd left him hollowed and icy, but Fleming’s most cunning and effective twist on this was that it finally made Bond the perfect spy. The Craig film accepted this as its own new beginning, but has, ironically, been dedicated to contradicting it since. Fukunaga and the screenwriters tip their hand many times to Fleming’s closely linked later novels, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service and You Only Live Twice, which saw Bond married and widowed at the hands of Blofeld in the space of a few pages, then travelling to Japan where he tracked down Blofeld and killed him before finishing up as an amnesiac living to a local diving girl and presumed dead by the world. Fleming had made a stab at killing off Bond before in From Russia With Love, only to bring him back for Doctor No, and when he tried to rid himself of the spy a second time deliberately left it more open-ended. So Fleming was hardly averse to the idea of his great hero proving very mortal, but he kept walking it back anyway.

The film version of You Only Live Twice threw out much of that novel’s business, but the adaptation of On Her Majesty’s Secret Service stuck closely to the template, ending famously with a note of tragic romanticism with Bond murmuring “We have all the time in the world” over his wife Tracy’s dead body, the phrase also providing the title to the Louis Armstrong warbled theme song for the film. No Time To Die gives warning this will be a reference point early on by having Bond repeat the “All the time in the world” line to Madeleine as they drive about in bliss, which for anyone who knows the series lore immediately sets antennae twitching, and wraps up with the Armstrong song, which is both agreeable – it’s one of the great themes and Armstrong’s singing is unbeatable – and a bit arch. It also incorporates the marvellous concept in You Only Live Twice of the villain propagating a garden filled with poisonous plants, although this classic touch of Fleming’s borderline surreal morbid imagery is here rendered in flavourless visual terms. At least, for the first time since Pierce Brosnan’s run, the plot stakes here offer the once-standard motif of a megalomaniac out to terrorise the world, working from a secret headquarters on a remote island – Safin’s father was in charge of a former Soviet chemical and missile plant on an island in disputed waters, where Safin grew up and now has set up a plant to manufacture Heracles there. Safin’s remorseless project of revenge was set in motion when Mr White killed his family by poisoning them all with smallpox, which Safin survived albeit badly scarred. Now, once he finishes his mission of wiping out SPECTRE, he turns his attention to remaking the world, mostly into corpses. He also seems to feel some sort of proprietary interest in Madeleine, feeling that he in effect owns her after saving her life, which makes it a bit confusing as to why he’s decided to wait thirty years or so to take possession of her.

Most of this heavy stuff is held off to the second half of the film at least. The first half tries on the other hand to restore some jauntiness too many felt had deserted the series. The added screenwriting hand of Phoebe Waller-Bridge, whose TV series Killing Eve offered its own, semi-satirical spin on a Bond-esque universe of assassins and spies, and which No Time To Die clearly seeks to emulate to a degree, is very apparent in this half, if not to much advantage. A lot of the humour falls flat, or at least it did for me, feeling entirely at odds with the tenor of the rest of the film. This in particular clings to Obruchev, who despite being a major villain in the film is also its comic relief: in his first scene where he’s being teased by his fellow scientists, he threatens to kill them in return. This tendency also inflects the scenes involving Paloma, although it works much better there, in part because De Armas knows exactly how to sell a blend of superficial naiveté and secret dynanism. The scene where Fukunaga cuts between Bond and Paloma engaged in their own style of fighting, Bond in brutal fisticuffs with a SPECTRE goon, Paloma using explosive gymnastic dexterity and ingenious physical wit, is a highpoint not just for movie but the series in general, particularly in the wry punctuation of Bond falling from a balcony and springing back up again and patting himself down again to recover his savoir faire, before pouring himself and Paloma a drink and the two downing theirs with brusque aplomb.

The ebullience of this scene nonetheless points up the shortcomings of the rest of the film rather painfully, particularly when it comes to Nomi, who’s posited in the film alternately as Bond’s replacement, rival, foil, and comrade-in-arms. Lynch has the right statuesque swagger for the part, but Nomi emerges as seriously underwritten and scarcely conceived beyond the basic proposition of “tough black chick,” and by comparison to the eager, surprising Paloma, she feels like a walking cliché and no fun to boot. I also got the feeling she’s a victim of the rather garbled midsection of the film which might have been the result of hasty reshoots. Bond’s contretemps with M also feels like a victim of this, leaping from the two having quite the falling out, in very English polite English fashion, when they meet face-to-face for the first time in years, only to be relatively chummy again a couple of scenes later, and there’s definitely some connective tissue missing there. This is also strongly suggested through small but consequential plot details like the fact Blofeld in prison is able to communicate through a bionic eye implanted in him somehow, which is a nice, very Bondian idea, except that its discovery and removal all take place off screen. The core team of M, Q, and Moneypenny, well-served in the past two entries, here get very little to do. Q in particular, despite being playfully characterised here as gay, is still reduced to a character who taps rapidly at keyboards and explains the plot. Oh, and Rory Kinnear’s Tanner is still around, doing whatever it is he does. Other problems are more existential for this material. Spectre interestingly mooted the continued need for the human touch in spy work in an age of cyber and drone warfare, which actually gave that entry a hint of contemporary political relevance, something the Bond series has generally run away from since its earliest days when it swapped out Soviets for SPECTRE as the necessary villains. But it also saddled itself with the silliest countdown in movie history as Bond and company had to race against a ticking clock…to when a computer system would go online!

No Time To Die similarly chooses a MacGuffin in the nanobot virus that’s both difficult to make work in a movie and also somewhat worn out as a plot device in sci-fi action flicks. Which wouldn’t be as much as an issue but it feeds into the clumsiness of the film’s narrative, which the urgent attempts to earn gravitas through killing off familiar characters feel mostly designed to paper over. No Time To Die take the cake-and-eat-it-too tendencies of the Craig era to the limit, setting up all the old-school Bond tropes at last but still also play off the beat, in a way that foils narrative intensity, as when Safin simply lets Mathilde go, whilst the jokey playing of Obruchev means he’s never convincing as a villain but not actually funny either. Nomi feels like the biggest victim of this indecisiveness. She’s plainly introduced as a sort of goad to the much-mooted idea of generation change in supplanting Bond with a black woman, one who treats him with an edge of cutting condescension (“I’ll put a bullet in your knee,” she promises when warning him against interference, “The one that still works.”), even if she finds he’s still able to give as good as he gets. Of course, they eventually become mutually reliant partners, and Nomi hands back the 00 title to Bond. There’s no particularly good reason given for why they’ve become less antagonistic by this point or why Nomi should give up a rank she presumably earned: of course James Bond should die, if he must, as 007, but the script fudges, and somewhere along the line Nomi was left as a fifth wheel rather than a potent new figure. Nomi is eventually given one would-be iconic vignette late in the film when she vengefully pushes Obruchev into a vat of his own nanovirus after he threatens to turn his invention on the “west African diaspora.” Mass-murdering bad guy? Fair enough. Racist too? Die, mofo!

It’s been compulsory for film critics to take a poke at the nominally outmoded aspects of Bond as a character and franchise for decades now, apparently oblivious to the fact that the series itself has been tapping it as a source of humour since the quips in Live And Let Die about “following a cue ball” and through segues like Judi Dench’s M tautologically calling him a “sexist, misogynist dinosaur” in Goldeneye, as well the issue of a superspy belonging to a country that had devolved into a mid-range power by the time he was created. There’s been a lot of debate lately about replacing Craig with an actor of colour or even a woman. The problem with such proposals, modishly pleasing as they are, is they reveal a fatal misunderstanding of what Bond is. The basic appeal of the character is rooted in ironic contrast, his surface appearance of the classic English gentleman hiding an existential shark whose interests, talents, and occupation all converge in bringing mayhem, delivering orgasm, and tempting chance, in about that order. Mendes got that, at least, particularly at the start of Spectre when he had Craig-as-Bond wearing a Day of the Dead mask and waving a red rose, his basic functions as bringer of death and life reduced to essential symbolism with a hint of morbid humour. There’s still nobody quite like him around: compare him to the gelded stable of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, full of grown men who can barely speak to a woman. Only Tony Stark, who tellingly birthed that franchise, was conceived in a Bondian manner – his first entry even sported a direct lampoon in playing Bondish guitar music over Tony having a quickie. Of course, Stark’s maturation saw him obliged to leave that behind, and Craig’s tenure sees him somewhat ironically obliged to follow that arc, now even forced to mimic Stark in Ave ngers: Endgame (2019), which also saw him become a father and die at the end. There isn’t even a hint of the fun Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008) found could be tapped in the idea of a loner hero finding he’s a dad.

The cinematic Bond’s arrival on the pop culture scene in 1962 heralded a tectonic shift in many regards, but one above all. Certainly Bond was a male power fantasy at a zenith, but he owes his success to also being a female one: Bond’s sexual prowess was a resource more valuable than all Auric Goldfinger’s bullion, capable of rewriting the world’s rules, as in Goldfinger (1964) itself, where the only actual, positive thing Bond does to alter the outcome of the plot is be a good enough lay to win Pussy Galore back to the side of right and virtue. Bond became thus the first authentic modern icon of female sexual need, save perhaps Dracula, a character with many fundamental similarities to Bond. The way a lot of critics talk about this aspect of Bond now, you’d think nobody in the world has casual hook-ups. Anyway, the Craig era’s general response to this has been to make Bond less an erotic swashbuckler and defined more as a kind of emotionally crippled pseudo-stud. Which would be fine, close indeed to Fleming’s character, but the Craig cycle has refused to stick to it; again, we are trapped within the formats of modern screenwriting manuals. Craig’s arrival in the role rang bells across the world with his shirtless beach scene, but now he’s middle-aged despite still being in ferociously good shape. Skyfall’s best moment also gave the best new twist on Bond’s sexuality, when the villain teased him with queer flirtation, “First time for everything,” to Bond’s unblinking, ever-so-cool retort, “What makes you think this is my first time?” The perfect line: on the one hand a nimble revision of the undercurrents (and sometimes overcurrents) of homophobia in some earlier movies and in Fleming, on the other one that just seemed to fit: of course Bond would have tried every dish before settling on a favourite. Anyway, No Time To Die has no such adroitness. Instead it settles for a few jabs at the idea of aging lotharios, with Bond striking out with both Nomi and Paloma, before taking it to the logical extreme of having suddenly face up to being a family man.

Craig and Seydoux were good together in Spectre, but here they totally fizzle in terms of chemistry, not that the script gives them much chance to work it up again. Madeleine’s reappearance in the story is so sudden and happenstance it’s almost like a reel got skipped, before the film underlines Bond’s new emotional dimension in the most hackneyed manner conceivable. In the prior film Madeleine was cool and ambiguous: now she’s the vaguely tragic baby mama, and that does her as few favours as it does Bond, until she becomes the object of Safin’s weirdly obscure attentions. It pains me to say that Craig himself eventually became part of the problem he was supposed to cure. There’s a pretty familiar pattern to Bond actors getting tired with the demands of the role and the consuming nature of the career-arresting fame that comes with it, and Craig’s increasing unease in the part has been apparent for a while now, even as he’s become so fixed to it in the public imagination. Craig’s good-humoured recent performances for Steven Soderbergh and Rian Johnson have indicated the kinds of parts he’d rather be playing. Craig still delivers in some vignettes, as already noted: he’s too good an actor and too smart a star to walk through a part. But somewhere along the line his characterisation was drained of the roguish force he evinced at the start of his tenure, and Craig’s pinch-mouthed and squinty impersonation of grim grit, once refreshing, is now somewhat rote, and as the character’s basic qualities have been eroded – his sex appeal, his omnicompetence, his jet-setting savoir faire, his dark relish for adrenalized thrills – his Bond stopped feeling groundbreaking and just became, well, a bit of a drag. The irony of No Time To Die is that it suggests the filmmakers were aware of this and wanted to put some zest back into things, only to then be obliged to double down on the pseudo-seriousness.

Of course, one can simply say that No Time To Die obeys the logic of Craig’s Bond as something distinct and discrete in the history of the character, and that’s fair enough, I suppose, but it also made me really pine for the good old days. Malek is surprisingly effective as Safin, playing his supervillain as soft-spoken almost to the point of feyness whilst retaining a cold conviction that he feels is perfectly reasonable even when revealing utter mania. The film does its best to build him up as a truly threatening, apocalyptic figure, from his creepy, slasher movie-like entrance through his process of wiping out such storied figures as Leiter and Blofeld. And yet Safin never comes close to being a Bond villain for the ages: he feels more like the ultimate by-product of the Craig era’s tendency to take an each-way bet when it comes to the series legacy, trying at once to present a vaguely realistic figure but also inhabit the superstructure of the old, epic-scale series villainy. He’s not physically threatening enough to lend real, feral intensity to their final confrontation – compare the limp tussle here to, say, Bond and Blofeld’s bobsled battle in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service – and he lacks the kind of arrogant stature and venom that’s long defined Bond’s most indelible enemies. Instead he’s offered rather too nudgingly in the screenwriting manual fashion as a mirror of the hero, to the point of giving him a very slightly revised version of the archetypal “we’re not so different, you and I” speech, and having them battle over possession of Madeleine and Mathilde. In that last regard, the film can’t even really commit to the basic melodramatic spur of a bad guy endangering a hero’s mate and child: instead we get a helluva lot of wandering around corridors shooting anonymous henchmen.

I counted down to the virtually inevitable moment when Fukunaga would, as he did on True Detective, interpolate a one-take action scene, another contemporary cliché that Mendes already ticked off at the start of Spectre: Fukunaga’s version is a long strenuous tussle on a flight of stairs that’s not half as engaging as recent variations on the same idea in movies like Atomic Blonde (2017) and Extraction (2020). Whilst I still think Fukunaga’s a talent, his work here for the most part feels rather fidgety and anonymous, and poorly geared to the rhythm of the performances. The action scenes aren’t particularly clever or well-staged either, except, again, for the opening, and bits and bobs like a nod to the gun barrel logo sequence in a different context, and the smart use of wildly varying vantages in the Havana fight. The scene of Obruchev being kidnapped begins with sleek, semi-abstract images that suggest a real style-fest is in the offing. There’s a solid chase that caps the second act in which Safin, Ash, and an array of goons chase after Bond and his new family into a fog-drenched Norwegian forest, which reminded me nonetheless just a little too strongly of the battle on Takodana in Star Wars – Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015) in serving the same purpose of providing a lot of bash and crash as a distraction whilst the villain snatches away someone precious to the hero. Ash is another character who suggests possibilities that barely get to register: Magnussen plays him as a bland WASP who’s also a star-struck Bond fanboy (do secret agents have fans?), but also a cunning and ruthless turncoat, a mixture that could be witty but here just feel random. He ought to have been kept around to loan some extra villainous presence to the climax, but he bows out in a nod to For Your Eyes Only when Bond literally drops a car on him as revenge for Leiter.

The film does finally hit the right notes again quite late in proceedings when Bond confronts Safin after invading his island base and finding its overlord seated behind a modernist-minimalist desk with Mathilde on knee. Suddenly, for a couple of crucial minutes, No Time To Die feels like an ideal James Bond film, with the classic situation of two extremely dangerous men with very different worldviews playing at calm conversation whilst discussing stakes both personal and global, given a new gloss by the hard conviction of the actors. The punchline of the film must be that Safin deliberately infects Bond with a dose of Heracles, this one programmed to make sure he can’t ever touch Madeleine and Mathilde again without killing them. This is entirely contrived to place Bond into a cul-de-sac he doesn’t want to escape as missiles rain down to wipe out the base, even as it scarcely makes a lick of sense on a basic plot level. Why the hell would Safin waste time on such a thing? Why not actually just kill Bond with it, especially considering Bond shoots him dead a few seconds later? Then he could still make sure his evil plan can be carried out. All right, so Safin’s a man with a well-developed sense of irony as well as a mass-murderer, sure. All this still plainly happens entirely so the film can have its ending, and apparently disturbs Bond so much he can’t face living without Madeleine and Mathilde, who he was doing a perfectly fine job of living without a few days earlier. So he climbs to the top of the base and lets the missiles rain down on him. This is designed to preclude any doubt of the character’s fate, with Bond disappearing in the blinding light of erupting bombs. “James Bond Will Return,” the very end credits nonetheless assure. There is direct heed paid to the end of the novel You Only Live Twice in the choice of poetic eulogy M chooses to read to his team in memorial of Bond.

Perhaps the filmmakers intend a segue into some variation on Fleming’s last, posthumously-published revival of the character, The Man With The Golden Gun, where Bond turned up after several years in amnesiac exile after being thought dead. But if they want to go that route, they ought to have been a tad less explicit. Such questions are, I expect, being held off for the time being. The real point of this ending is to allow Craig to draw a firm line under his tenancy and allow another reboot. After all, if Spider-Man can keep going through the same origin story again and again, why not James Bond? It’s the sort of thing that might please those who considered Craig the apotheosis of the franchise, but will leave others wincing and wondering why they even bothered. What’s most galling is that when one considers the many references to previous entries and to On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, realisation dawns that as well as filching from Marvel and The Force Awakens, No Time To Die is also powerfully beholden to another J.J. Abrams movie, Star Trek: Into Darkness (2013). That film, whilst okay in itself, has deservedly become a byword for incoherent franchise remixing and self-sabotage, particularly in the finale where it decided to rearrange the immortal end of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982) so that Kirk dies instead of Spock, whilst casually denuding all the qualities that made the model so memorable. No Time To Die does basically the same thing in having Bond rather than his great amour die, and also forgets what made that long-ago tragic ending so strong, the stinging irony of a man so talented at keeping himself alive cursed to remain that way after crushing loss. By comparison this Bond’s end feels like a sigh of relief. Bond’s greatest enemy isn’t Blofeld, or Safin, or love, or time, or fate, but the shrunken horizons of modern franchise creativity. The price paid for making Bond more earthbound, it seems, is to eventually drive him into the mud.

1960s, Action-Adventure, Crime/Detective, Scifi, Thriller

You Only Live Twice (1967)

Director: Lewis Gilbert
Screenwriter: Roald Dahl

By Roderick Heath

I vividly recall, when I was a very small boy, the first time I saw You Only Live Twice on television. More specifically, it was the opening scene that sank like a fishhook through my imagination. A NASA Gemini space capsule in orbit, carrying two astronauts. One astronaut, Chris (Norman Jones), starts a spacewalk, only for the trackers on Earth to warn some strange contact is approaching. With John Barry’s score swirling in ominous and ratcheting intensity, Chris sees another spacecraft zeroing in, its nosecone splitting apart like a hungry maw and capturing the Gemini. The closing jaws sever Chris’s lifeline, cutting him adrift as the devouring craft moves off. Director Lewis Gilbert conveys something stark and chilling about the notion of death in space in the way the frantic dialogue of the astronauts and the trackers is suddenly severed and Chris drifts away in silence into the cosmos like so much refuse. Not long after, Pauline Kael accused Stanley Kubrick of trying to inflate this affecting vignette into an entire film with 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). Such a vivid evocation of space and death as harsh and lonely certainly didn’t sit with the usual, larkishly nasty entertainment value of the James Bond series, which in just five years had become astonishingly successful to the point of reorganising much of popular culture in its own image.

You Only Live Twice was also the first Bond film I ever saw and the one that made me a lifelong if sometimes hesitant aficionado, deeply fascinating me with its vivid, iconographic style, particularly the opening credits with their evocation of dreamlike romanticism and seething natural force. John Barry and Leslie Bricusse’s great theme song as sung by Nancy Sinatra warbles over Maurice Binder’s visions of naked geishas and boiling volcanic lava, describing a grandly sensual and mysterious world that treads close to subliminal zones, a vision that powerfully infiltrates the often more boyish fantasies glimpsed in the rest of the film. The relatively modest initial hit that was Dr. No (1962) had made Sean Connery synonymous with the lead role and resulted in three follow-ups, From Russia With Love (1963), Goldfinger (1964), and Thunderball (1965), each of which outstripped the last in astonishing popularity and moneyspinning: the margins of profitability on those films would make modern blockbuster producers weep in yearning. By 1967, the Bond marque had to fight for screen space amongst a plethora of other spies and suave action men, and so the series, which was never exactly realistic but certainly had an initially gritty and intimate approach to its thrills, began exchanging that for grander showmanship and a more overt engagement with science fiction. Sci-fi had been percolating in the series since Dr. No’s plot involving rocket toppling, and it persisted in the futuristic edge to Q’s (Desmond Llewellyn) inventions, as well as the supervillains and mysterious cabals borrowed from old serials and Fritz Lang movies.

To give the instalment some fresh vigour, producers Albert R. Broccoli and Harry Saltzman turned from their settled series team. Directors Terence Young and Guy Hamilton had forged the series in aesthetic terms, working with regular screenwriter Richard Maibaum and cinematographer Ted Moore. Hamilton had affixed a glistening pop sheen to Young’s cool jazz template with Goldfinger, but the relatively languid and indulgent style of Thunderball pointed to difficulties the series would have in reconciling a greater and greater push for fan service with propulsive plotting. Trying to up the stakes, You Only Live Twice saw something like the birth of the modern blockbuster as a genre unto itself, melding special effects and action in a delirious blend. Lewis Gilbert, an experienced and robust director used to handling big productions and just coming off a major hit with Alfie (1966), was taken on as director. With Maibaum busy on another project, Roald Dahl, a writer known mostly for his maliciously witty and cunning children’s stories, was commissioned to write the script. Freddie Young, winner of two Oscars for his work on Lawrence of Arabia (1962) and Doctor Zhivago (1965) with David Lean, was hired to give the film a dose of widescreen spectacle. The making of the film proved somewhat fraught, as Connery was getting sick of the role and fearing typecasting, and disliked filming in Japan, leading to his fateful dropping out of the role.

You Only Live Twice already represented a break for the series beyond the personnel changes, as it was the first entry to more or less compose its own storyline and only borrow basic elements from Ian Fleming’s source novel, abandoning the credibility of the early entries, albeit whilst merely amplifying the tropes of futuristic technology and grandiose conspiracy already established. Dahl, who disliked the Fleming novel he was nominally adapting despite having been a friend of the writer, decided instead to offer a more expansive variation of the plot of Dr. No, and You Only Live Twice would itself be recycled in the Bond series, as The Spy Who Loved Me (1977) and Tomorrow Never Dies (1997). Fleming’s book, the last he properly completed in his lifetime, was one of his harshest and strangest entries, with Bond sent to Japan on the hunt for Ernst Stavro Blofeld, the leader of the insidious SPECTRE organisation, after Blofeld had killed Bond’s wife Tracy at the end of the preceding novel, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. Blofeld had taken over an old castle on a remote island and amongst his varying projects had turned it into a garden filled with poisonous plants and creatures as a place where rich people could come to kill themselves. Most of the book, including the finale where Bond was left amnesiac in blissful ignorance, was jettisoned, and the order of the novels reversed in filming, leaving only the basic premise of Bond going on a mission to Japan and battling Blofeld in alliance with local spymaster Tiger Tanaka (Tetsuro Tamba).

The mysterious spacecraft that swallows the Gemini capsule at the outset has been launched by SPECTRE – the Special Executive for Counter-Terrorism, Revenge, and Extortion – from a base secreted within an extinct volcano and carefully hidden from all aerial and satellite surveillance. The USA blames the USSR for taking their craft, but during a heated summit meeting in the ironically frigid climes of Scandinavia where the Americans accuse the Soviets of trying to seize control of space, the British Foreign Secretary (Robin Bailey) reports radar signs the craft responsible returned to Earth around Japan. In Hong Kong, James Bond is currently off assignment and enjoying the fruits of his labour with a local girl (Tsai Chin, best known for playing Fu Manchu’s daughter in the Christopher Lee series), only for her to trap him and let in two machine-gun wielding assassins. When policemen arrive they seem to find Bond dead. Bond is given a burial at sea from the deck of a destroyer in Hong Kong harbour, only for his sail-wrapped body to be collected by two frogmen and brought aboard a submarine, where M (Bernard Lee) and Miss Moneypenny (Lois Maxwell) wait: Bond’s death has been faked and he’s being spirited to Japan in the most covert fashion to take up the search for the spaceship.

Dahl’s cruelly mischievous sense of humour and imaginative gift for absurd mechanics, long apparent in his own writing, quietly invaded the Bond style here, meshing with the wistful spiritual overtones suggested by the title and the many games with identity and culture played throughout, to invest the film with a blithely surreal energy. Bond’s once-solid identity is fractured in many pieces to keep pace with the vastly inflated stakes and bizarre new facts in the age of the space race. Dahl’s imprint is particularly obvious in an early run of droll flourishes, like the Hong Kong girl trapping Bond in a spring-loaded Murphy bed, and Bond being put through all the trappings of a naval funeral, before being brought aboard the submarine where M holds court in a travelling version of his familiar office complete with wood panelling. You Only Live Twice skirts satire of the already-settled Bond formula at quite a few junctures, only to prove they were always a moveable feast. Soon Bond, ever a globetrotter who reminds Moneypenny that he “took a first in Oriental languages at Cambridge,” lands in Japan nominally as a dead man and therefore free to experience on a deeper and stranger level. Upon landing on the Honshu shore, after being fired out of the submarine’s torpedo tube (!), Bond looks towards the sun as it sets with mystical import: Bond reborn in a new land in time to take on a new age.

The film still retains some of the flavour of Fleming’s exotic tourism at a time when Japan was truly becoming a world player again after World War II, offering it as a country with a shell of glistening, ahistorical super-modernity concealing a far more potent classical culture at once unfamiliar and appealing to a westerner half in love with death and dedicated to pagan mores like Bond. So Gilbert cuts from that evocative sunset to shots of pulsating Tokyo neon, putting the dualistic sensibility into the visual language. Bond’s adventures in Tokyo nightlife take a hard swerve towards the mysteriously transformative and unstable spirit of Lang and Orson Welles, as Bond makes contact with one of Tanaka’s operatives, Aki (Akiko Wakabayashi) at a sumo match, and she takes him to meet his colleague, the local British intelligence officer Henderson (Charles Gray). Bond takes the quick and expedient route of ensuring Henderson is who he says he is by taking his cane and giving one of his legs a whack, accurately establishing it’s false. The beaming Henderson begins explaining why he thinks the mystery rocket really is locally based when suddenly he stops speaking in mid-sentence. Bond realises someone’s stabbed him through the paper wall of his room. He chases down the assassin, knocks him out, and dons his clothes, including the surgical mask he wears, to take his place: another goon waiting in a car spirits him to the skyscraper belonging to the Osato Chemical & Engineering Co.

When the second goon uncovers Bond’s face after hauling him up to an executive office, the two have a brutal battle that Bond wins by swatting his foe with a decorative statue. Bond cracks and robs a safe and flees, with Aki proving to be waiting nearby to spirit him away. When Bond demands to take over, Aki lures him into an underground tunnel where the floor opens up and drops Bond into a chute that deposits him neatly on a chair directly before Tanaka in his secret office. This hilarious flourish of destabilised reality strongly evokes the funhouse sequence in Welles’ The Lady From Shanghai (1947) and would itself be filched by Bond fan George Lucas for Star Wars – Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back (1980) in Luke Skywalker’s plunge out of Cloud City. Bond and Tanaka prove swiftly to be well-matched collaborators and personalities, both being fantasies of man-of-the-world largesse and finesse as well as effective force. Upon inspecting the stolen Osato documents, they find a suggestive list of chemical orders and a photo of a freighter, the Chinese-registered Ning-Po, at anchor off a coastal island that the company has gone to ruthless lengths to suppress.

After Tanaka introduces Bond to the pleasures of a Japanese bath, with his harem in attendance, Bond and Aki become lovers. Posing as a chemical buyer, Bond visits the Osato building legitimately to meet with the boss, Mr Osato (Teru Shimada), and his sultry assistant Miss Brandt (Karin Dor). After sparking another attempt to kill him, Bond heads with Aki to Kobe to inspect the Ning-Po to see if it might be carrying constituents for rocket fuel. Dor, swanning into the film with mane of red hair and eyeliner thick enough to dam the Mississippi, doesn’t get to make as much of an impression as some other Bond femme fatales, like Luciana Paluzzi in Thunderball, as this seems the one aspect of the Bond formula Gilbert and Dahl don’t quite seem to know what to do with, not in the same way they give a new flesh to the familiar figure of the ally-lover-victim in the form of Aki, who overshadows the official Bond Girl. Brandt’s attempt to kill Bond by trapping him in a plane and letting him crash is rather lackadaisically staged. Nonetheless Dor gains a memorable note of sadistic incision as she threatens the captive Bond with a knife used by plastic surgeons for slicing away skin, only to free him and hand the blade over to cut away the straps on her gown. “The things I do for England…’ Bond murmurs.

It’s tantalising and disappointing that no-one involved in the franchise has yet done something with the Sadean poetry inherent in the novel’s concept of Blofeld’s garden of death, imagery that accords strongly with the cult of extreme experience Bond and Blofeld both subscribe to. Certainly it wasn’t however a particularly cinematic concept in a series increasingly defined by action. One aspect of the novel retained was the theme of Bond being immersed in Japanese mores by Tanaka. The very dated bawdiness of Tanaka introducing Bond to the pleasures of the Japan way of life where according to him “men come first, women come second” gives the requisite dose of Bond-as-playboy business as he takes pleasure in being scrubbed over by the harem. Fortunately this stuff is quickly and playfully undercut by the way the film offers Aki and, later, Bond’s second partner and “wife” Kissy Suzuki (Mie Hama) as deft agents for Tanaka. Kissy even saves Tanaka with a well-aimed shot in the finale, and the two women are rather more effectual heroines than many from the franchise’s more officially enlightened eras. Aki in particular is a terrific partner for Bond, dashing around Tokyo streets in her zippy white Speed Racer sports car, shimmying down ropes to make a speedy getaway, and calmly calling up the familiar Tanaka surprise for pursuing goons, a helicopter with a dangling electromagnet to pick up their car and dump it in Tokyo Bay.

Bond and Aki’s foray to Kobe justifies a sequence that sees Gilbert and Young delighting in their unfettered sense of the cinematic as they shoot Bond battling off a horde of dockyard thugs, set upon them by Osato, in an ebullient helicopter shot watching Bond punch and thrash his way through opponents as he dashes along a pier rooftop, with Barry’s scoring surging joyously on the soundtrack. Bond escapes them a display of physical daring and skill and he leaps onto piled cargo from on high, only to be knocked out as he calmly tries to walk away. After escaping the villains’ attempt to kill him in a staged plane crash, Bond has Q bring to Japan one of his inventions, Little Nellie, contained within four suitcases, which proves to be a gyrocopter festooned with weaponry. Bond uses Little Nellie to search for the SPECTRE base, and gets to use all her talents in a terrific aerial action, a few ropey, interpolated model shots notwithstanding, as four SPECTRE helicopters appearing seemingly out of nowhere and attack him, only to be out manoeuvred and outgunned by the nifty little vehicle. This sequence augments another familiar element to new importance: where before Bond’s gadgets had been used as part of more functional action scenes, this time an entire scene is contrived purely for a ritual display of what Bond can accomplish with Q’s ingenious weapons. Gilbert employs a puckish cinematic joke as Little Nellie is assembled in an array of still shots without the constructors, the finished machine only becoming coherent in the last.

In spite of his jokes and flourishes of weirdness, Dahl’s script is also notable for having a remarkably solid plot by the series standard, and for actually letting Bond do real and effective spy work. As opposed to, say, Goldfinger where the plot depends on him being incredibly incompetent at his job but then doing Pussy Galore so well she rats out the entire evil plan. By contrast in You Only Live Twice Bond successfully uses ruses to uncover his enemies and collects information that yields clues that describe the increasingly tangible outline of what he’s facing. He also contends with enemies with an edge of real guile and brutality, like Osato, who uses an x-ray machine in his desk to uncover the fact Bond is armed when posing as a buyer, and Brandt, who uses Bond for sex and subversion in the same way he often uses others to get him where she wants him and then tries to kill him. Gilbert conveys all with his hard, clean, rigorously flowing images that play off the specific landscape of 1960s Tokyo. He builds to spasms of terrific action like Bond’s combat with the fearsome goon in the Osato office, a small masterpiece of stunt fight staging, and rendering even episodes of comic-surreal weirdness like Bond’s fall into Tanaka’s office somehow coherent.

You Only Live Twice has significant rivals to being called the best Bond film, particularly From Russia With Love, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (1969), and Casino Royale (2006). Tellingly, each of them retains a more intimate sense of Bond’s character in professional travails and emotional risk, whereas Bond here is necessarily at his most acquiescent at the dizzying flow of violence and strangeness thrown his way, in one of his most serial-like adventures. You Only Live Twice fully codified some aspects of the series most beloved of lampooners and apt for generalised caricatures, the first Bond film that really adheres to the popular lore of what an old-school Bond film was like. Where before the intimations of awesome force and alien threat represented by Blofeld and SPECTRE were kept fairly minimal and suggestive, here they step out into the open, with their colossal lairs and technology, their nasty paraphernalia for mistreating weak employees, and their nice line in futuristic fashion and architecture. But You Only Live Twice also lacks significant flaws its rivals films have: it doesn’t contend with an awkward lead performance like On Her Majesty’s Secret Service or a first half crammed with franchise-building make-work as Casino Royale, and it moves faster than the relatively slow-burn From Russia With Love.

The major quality as a consequence of You Only Live Twice is that it surely represents the finest balance the glib and absurdist aspect of the series with the side defined by a tough and percussive sense of adventure. Despite its enormous box office success Thunderball had evinced signs of the self-indulgence that would often dog the franchise, as Terence Young had been both the perfect man to kick off the series and a vexing one to continue it precisely because of his strong identification with Bond. Broccoli and Saltzman were wise to turn to a talent like Gilbert to take over. Son of music hall performers and a former actor and screenwriter before making his directorial forays as a documentary maker, Gilbert was a skilled classical storyteller with a talent for evoking atmosphere and finding strong human dramas within big-budget spectacles, with war films as excellent as Reach for the Sky (1956), Carve Her Name With Pride (1958), Sink the Bismarck! (1960), and H.M.S. Defiant (1962), as well as more intimate and ironic movies like Ferry To Hong Kong (1959), The Greengage Summer (1961), The 7th Dawn (1964), and Alfie. A connecting thread between many of his diverse movies was a fondness for studies of sardonically disaffected and detached characters who find themselves trapped between worlds figuratively and/or literally, often trying to convince themselves they’re not affected by their quandaries and heroically, or sometimes tragically, discovering they’re right.

Bond fits neatly into this attitude, the existential survivor and gladiator who feels it when one of his lovers dies but doesn’t let it divert him one iota, the perfect British swashbuckler who finds more self-recognition in Japanese culture, and who is, eventually, even transformed into a Japanese man with makeup at Tanaka’s insistence so he can infiltrate a fishing community. You Only Live Twice evolves a uniquely precise atmosphere for a Bond film, largely thanks to the pulse of Barry’s scoring, constantly revising and recapitulating the essential theme to offer a permeating sense of exotic fancy to accompany Gilbert and Young’s lush visuals, and the sense of double identity and duplicitous appearance that defines the film stems from the interplay of sound and vision. One particularly affecting scene in this regard comes when Bond has to marry Kissy, one of Tanaka’s operatives and an Ama girl who can give him good cover in his search for the SPECTRE base. On one level the scene involves a rather crass joke as Bond dreads the wedding because Tanaka has told him his bride has “the face of a pig,” only to behold the lovely Kissy. But Gilbert pays close attention to the evocation of ritual and a different cultural sublimation of a common act. It’s perhaps the closest the series ever came to reconciling its intensely romantic impulses and its celebration of louche behaviour.

The way Gilbert shoots Bond’s first glimpse of Kissy, with Barry’s surging music, packs an unexpected jolt of romantic intensity, and suddenly Bond’s act of tourism becomes a genuine immersion within the spiritual and sexual life of Japan (Gilbert would later offer a semi-remake of the film with an explicitly romantic gloss with 1976’s Seven Nights in Japan). It also suggests a new act in Bond’s sputtering evolution, setting the scene for his marriage in the subsequent film. Meanwhile SPECTRE’s plot hits its climactic phase as their rocket swallows a Russian capsule, pushing the Soviets and the US on the brink of war as the former accuse the later of a revenge attack. With the second snatching, Gilbert this time follows the mysterious craft through its descent into the atmosphere and landing within the volcano lair. The rocket is a delightful piece of hardware, beyond what rocket engineering was at the time and yet strongly resembling more recent attempts to build a lander. Here, we gain glimpses of Blofeld, his presence still only signified by the infamous white cat he pets and his ruthlessly commanding voice. In From Russia With Love and Thunderball Blofeld’s presence had been suggested with actor Eric Pohlmann’s plummy European accent wielding sonorous menace, offered as an enigmatic, near-abstract source of evil lurking behind the schemes Bond fought, commanding and terrifying his underlings from behind veils of mystery and remote-controlled punishment.

For Blofeld’s first proper appearance Donald Pleasance was cast, but his revelation is left until the climax. Until then he’s the same unseen source malignancy lurking in an apartment off the lair that, like M’s mobile office, mocks the pretences of old European power with its art and tapestries even whilst adapted to a new landscape of cyclopean metal and hewn living rock, high life for the age of the nuclear bomb shelter. Blofeld pushes a lever with his foot that dumps Miss Brandt from a footbridge into the pond filled with ravenous piranha to punish her for her unsuccessful attempt to kill Bond, a moment that still packs a disquieting note, although it’s neatly dispersed by the deadpan comedy of the bridge snapping back into place and Osata scurrying off in alarm to obey Blofeld’s orders. This scene also sees Blofeld meeting with the people who provided the plot’s financing and equipment with the strong hint they’re Chinese Communists, fitting the film neatly into an odd run of movies and TV shows around the same time, also including the likes of Battle Beneath The Earth (1967) and The Chairman (1969) based around a paranoid feeling the Chinese were quietly outstripping the rest of the world.

Unlike the novels, where Fleming cast Bond as the mortal enemy of the KGB, the Bond films liked to avoid dealing with the Cold War too explicitly, playing up SPECTRE instead as a foe. The series even recast the plot of From Russia With Love from a SMERSH operation to one cooked up by SPECTRE, which is rather an supra-national organisation formed from the human refuse of clashes between political systems – their cover, as glimpsed in Thunderball, is a refugee resettlement organisation, which also hints this is how they recruit operatives – and aggressively committed to subverting and leeching off all such blocs. Blofeld even forces the Chinese backers in this film to give him more money before committing to the last part of the plot, and when one retorts furiously, “This is extortion!”, Blofeld coolly replies, “Extortion in my business.” This concept of SPECTRE as something rather larger, more insidious, and more efficiently malignant than any rogue terrorist operation or even rival spy group gave the early Bond films much of their cohesive force, and less random than the later pool of lone wolf tycoons that would provide most of Bond’s foes. It’s also an idea the more recent revivalist entries with Daniel Craig have tried to leverage but have yet to properly exploit.

You Only Live Twice offers Alexander Knox as an American President who’s all terse business and warlike grit, dismissive of the British theory and determined to forestall another snatching, putting the world on the brink of nuclear Armageddon. Fleming’s book had meditated on the decline of British standing in the Cold War game, but the film cleverly points the way forward for the series and Bond as a character in presenting the British influence as a mediating one, a level head outside the whirlwind of Cold War intransigence, and Bond as the hard human edge of that attitude. The regular production designer for the Bond films was Ken Adam, whose style almost invented a way of thinking about the future in his cavernous, Spartan spaces, a touch he also applied to Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove, or, How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964). The similarity of Adam’s war room designs here certainly reflect his design principles but also accords with the vision, not at all dissimilar to Kubrick’s, of nuclear brinksmanship as something harsh, alien, incomprehensively destructive and real yet also waged through the prophylactic of telecommunications, and so entirely modern. This contrasts the supernal retention of homey environs M prefers. Like Dr. Strangelove, You Only Live Twice beholds an age of annihilating terrors and readily provoked national egos. Only Bond is big enough, in various senses of the word, to hold it off.

This thread runs right through the early Bond series, albeit mostly only explored on a specifically visual level, the tension between futurism’s homogenising power and the peccadilloes of established order. Attempts to dissect or revise Bond from a more politically correct angle are always doomed to fail because they don’t understand this tension is fundamental to the series’ popular cachet. This entry even was the first to start making constant jokes about Bond’s traits a ritual facet, in repeatedly making sport of his smoking habit. Blofeld, once revealed, resembles a kind of full-grown misbegotten foetus, the scarred and malignant, asexual embodiment of a world defined by radiation and pollution and monstrous will to power. The immediate follow-ups, which cast Telly Savalas and Charles Gray in the part (and, much later, Christoph Waltz), failed to live up the specific charge of perversity personified Pleasance offered. By comparison the whole of Japan is presented as embodying the dualism of contemporary existence, again according with Bond himself, the primal man enclosed by a loose glaze of civilised mystique.

Fittingly, Tanaka has Bond join his cadre of trainee ninjas who will when the time comes attack the SPECTRE base. The ninjas are presented as both modern warriors but also still proficient in an ancient arts, thus achieving perfect balance and fusion. Amidst their number Bond has to slay a couple of moles out to kill him. One of them sneaks into the house he shares with Aki and tries to poison him by dripping poison down a thread, only to kill Aki by mistake. It’s to You Only Live Twice’s credit that it actually feels connected with some genuine Japanese thriller films of the period (the manner of Aki’s death is borrowed from one), true to the baroque, even surreal lilt many have, if far short of the bravura lunacy of someone like Seijun Suzuki. A lot of Japanese thrillers, like their sci-fi, were attuned to the same tensions as the Bond films, the feeling that the modern world was the insubstantial hallucination, not the past. Tamba, Hama, and Wakabayashi were popular faces in Japanese cinema at the time, and the two women had appeared in both King Kong vs Godzilla (1962) and the Toshiro Mifune vehicle Samurai Pirate (1965) together.

When Bond, Tanaka, and Kissy head to a small village in the region where they think the base is hidden, they and the other ninjas blend into the populace. They’re forced to spring into action as it’s announced the next American launch has been moved forward, and Bond and Kissy act on a clue presented by the death of a local Ama girl: inspecting where she died, they realise she was killed by gas warding off inspection of a volcanic tunnel linked to the SPECTRE hideout. Bond and Kissy’s relationship is initially defined by Kissy’s insistence they’re engaged in business, not indulging themselves, but heats up as they take a time out from climbing the volcano for a bit of smooching, an act that fortuitously makes them look innocuous to a helicopter that flies into the volcanic crater. Once Bond establishes that what looks like a lake in the crater is in fact a huge metal hatch, he sends Kissy back to fetch Tanaka and penetrates the lair. There, he finds the captive American and Russian astronauts and breaks them out, and attempts to pose as one of the SPECTRE astronauts to take command of their craft. But Blofeld spots the deception and has Bond brought to him, cueing Blofeld’s unveiling, eyeing Bond like a frog blinking out of the water with sadistic intentions.

Today the makers of many franchise works and blockbusters fret over giving audiences too much of what they want, but You Only Live Twice has no such compunction: it promises James Bond and an army of ninjas rumbling with SPECTRE in their hideout to decide the fate of the world, and it delivers. Moreover, the Bond films had properly anointed themselves by this point as the inheritors of old-fashioned Hollywood values despite all their pop-age chic, the Roman Forums of recent epics now giving way to glistening abodes of super-science. Adams’ set for the SPECTRE base, the largest ever constructed for a film at the time, is still an awesome piece of movie infrastructure. The set’s enormity helps give the film palpable drama: all this absurdity seems like it could actually be happening, fusing a precise depiction of functional detail and scale with an edge of the dreamlike, another aspect of the film that anticipates the Star Wars series. This is a world where radically different realities nest within the apparent, lethal beasts planted within beautiful landscapes. SPECTRE’s method in capturing the space capsules rather than simply blowing them up seems to be based in the charge of menace the act evokes for the audience: an explosion would be blatant and clear-cut, but the act of swallowing is stranger and leaves no trace, making it seems as if in space there literally be dragons.

The rush of action in the finale is perfectly organised and delivers every gleeful absurdity you could ask for, the ninjas rappelling into the lair, complete with a katana-wielding badass carving his way through SPECTRE operatives. The running joke about smoking being bad for your health finds its punchline as Bond requests a last cigarette only to launch a tiny rocket at the controller for the lair’s hatch, allowing the ninjas access. Blofeld guns down Osato as a lesson in failire, but Bond’s life is saved when Blofeld next means to shoot him when Tanaka plants a throwing star in the megalomaniac’s wrist. Bond himself has to fight his way past Blofeld’s hulking bodyguard Hans (Ronald Rich) in order to make the swallowing ship self-destruct before it intercepts the next American capsule. Hans of course finishes up as food for the piranhas and Bond manages to blow up the craft in time. The injured but unbowed Blofeld sets off the lair’s self-destruct system, the explosions reawakening the volcano and forcing the heroes to flee via the sea tunnel, and the air force drops rubber rafts for them. There Bond and Kissy seem ready to consummate their marriage at last, only for M’s submarine to surface directly under them. Someone always wants to wake you from a good dream.

film freedonia

Film essays and commentary by Roderick Heath

Tag Archives: Ian Fleming

No Time To Die (2021)

You Only Live Twice (1967)