No Time To Die (Bond 25)

[surreal]

SPOILERS
Also, Madeleine is pregnant when he put her on the train right?

Yeah, she touches her stomach when he shuts the door and says she'll never see him again.

[Pinball]

Yes, to kill perhaps just one person - if you have their DNA - you would infect, a la 6 degrees of separation - everyone in the whole world (do they know to stop looking once the target is dead?). Do it again, everyone gets full of another set of nanobots. Including all M16, Royals, Bill Gates, dogs, cats, draclias etc. I suppose it was nicked before they built in some kind of 'off switch'?

If Q can build an EMP watch, then he can build an EMP device to kill nanobots. Bond clearly didn't think this through. Oh, and there's wearing gloves too.

[Dr Rock]

What if you got some dna from the targets Madeleine and Mathilda, like a pint of blood each, injected it into a couple of monkeys, then let Bond stroke the monkey? The stupid nanobots would jump into the monkeys (or paedoes, if you prefer to use them) and kill them and think their job was done. Might be some nanobots left? Repeat until monkeys/nonces don't die, meaning all the nanobots are gone from Bond's body.

[Pinball]

If there is indeed a robotic element to the nanobots, then EMP should inactivate them. More realistically, some form of dialysis might work, or vaccination against some shared antigenic component of all the nanobots.

The plot is rather silly, mostly that nanobots would spread via the skin and not solely via blood.

But overall, Bond didn't wait to find out, he just let himself be killed (after having plenty of time to do one of his big dives into the sea).  Silly sod. Title should be 'Deserve To Die'.

[Thomas]

I still think Bond was fated to be stuck on the island from the moment Safin shot him. I know he usually finds a way out, because he lives in James Bond films, but he was written onto a ledge. His only recourse was a blind leap into the sea (to be thereafter crushed by falling masonry, burned to death, or succumb in the currents to his deliberately very-serious-looking wounds). The nanobots revelation just provides an additional poetic barrier and an imperative to drop the brief fantasy of escape. The universe saying 'look mate, not this time.'

I guess part of that does involve the viewer's acceptance that there's a high risk the nanobots would find their way to Madeleine and sprog, unimpeded, if Bond escaped the island. It would at least feel more sensible if the nanobots had actually been a biological virus, I think. A living, DNA-targeting virus strikes me, in my layman's suspension of disbelief, as more invincible than lil' robots.

Of course, the main reason Bond died is that

Spoiler alert

it was definitely the first thing Daniel Craig demanded

[close]

.

As for the next Bond, I've been thinking that the oft-floated choices like Cavill and Hardy would pretty boring. I'd love a surprising outsider, but the cartoonishly slick Cavill (who, like Brosnan, was once previously approached) would be a safe studio choice after the experimentation of the Craig era.

[Pinball]

[Claude the Racecar Driving Rockstar Super Sleuth]

It was the '70s. Buckaroo!

[checkoutgirl]

Could the nanobots survive the explosion, float around the air a bit, attach to some cakey bleeder and then eventually make their way to the woman one and her kid? I think there's a distinct possibility. Did anyone confirm that the nanobots couldn't survive a missile strike?

[mothman]

Unsure. I'm not up to speed on Daring-class load-outs so I don't know what missiles they were supposed to be that were being fired there. Some sort of cluster munition, which I thought were banned..?

EDIT: OK, the Vertical Launch System is loaded out with Aster 15 and Aster 30 anti-aircraft missiles, so depicting them as ship-to-surface missiles is a plain goof. The closest thing the class has is Harpoon missile launchers recycled from Type-22 frigates.

[lankyguy95]

This was a lot better than I thought it would be. I think it might be my second favourite of the Craig run (although given I don't rate Skyfall that highly, maybe it's not that difficult). Skimming through the thread, I think most of my thoughts on it have been covered here.

A few more jokes in this one, although I don't any of the written gags were funnier than Malek's character being called Lucifer Safin. Also want to note the very pleasing line, "Q, hack into Blofeld's bionic eye". And the bizarre Hugh Dennis appearance.

[Pinball]

[Mr Trumpet]

Just got back from seeing this one. Pretty good, although I doubt I'll remember much of it in a week's time. Ana de Armas was effervescent and underused. Lea Seydoux is hard to warm to, much like Daniel Craig so I suppose they're a good pairing.

Why oh why would you put a secret bioweapons lab in the middle of London and not at, say, Porton Down?

[Old Nehamkin]

Unsure. I'm not up to speed on Daring-class load-outs so I don't know what missiles they were supposed to be that were being fired there. Some sort of cluster munition, which I thought were banned..?

EDIT: OK, the Vertical Launch System is loaded out with Aster 15 and Aster 30 anti-aircraft missiles, so depicting them as ship-to-surface missiles is a plain goof. The closest thing the class has is Harpoon missile launchers recycled from Type-22 frigates.

You might find yourself disappointed looking for technological accuracy in James Bond films.

[Bernice]

My wife refuses to refer to my ejaculate as 'Darling-class load-outs.'


I have not seen this film, and nor am I married.

[Mr Trumpet]

And the friend I saw the film with really struggled with "the dad from Outnumbered" being in it. I was more impressed that his colleague was the handwashing expert from This Time With Alan Partridge. Potential crossover?

[Old Nehamkin]

And the friend I saw the film with really struggled with "the dad from Outnumbered" being in it. I was more impressed that his colleague was the handwashing expert from This Time With Alan Partridge. Potential crossover?

Oh shit, that's where I knew her from!

"We mustn't."

[A Hat Like That]

Watched Quantum of Solace last night. The look of sheer boredom when he stabs the guy in the femoral with some nail scissors.

[sevendaughters]

I did a lecture on continuity editing and it turrned out all of my students had seen the new Bond but not the thing I told them to watch so I just improvved for 45 minutes around the new Bond so thank you Cory Fukunaga for turning out something fairly formulaic and watchable!

[Thomas]

What boring shit had you instructed them to watch?

[sevendaughters]

What boring shit had you instructed them to watch?

Shadow of a Doubt!

[Thomas]

I'd genuinely be interested to know what points you made in relation to No Time to Die. Were there any particular moments that were useful for your lecture?

There's a sequence with a seaplane, and whilst we see the plane on the water and in the air, we never see it take off or land, which leads to a briefly jarring shot when Bond exits the plane. As Bond is shot from below whilst climbing out, we see only the sky behind him - there's no immediate visual indication that the plane has landed. The effect only lasts a second, but I wondered if it was a result of overly tight editing.

[Mr Trumpet]

There's also a scene where he's

Spoiler alert

in a shipwreck, then finds a lifeboat and suddenly he's back in London

[close]

. And another bit where

Spoiler alert

someone barges out of a door and starts grappling with him, and it's a few beats before you get a good look at his face and realise he's the main henchman who's appeared throughout the film

[close]

. I don't normally notice that sort of stuff but there were a few clunky moments in this one.

[sevendaughters]

I'd genuinely be interested to know what points you made in relation to No Time to Die. Were there any particular moments that were useful for your lecture?

I definitely talked a lot of bollocks but I contrasted the scene where he fights his way up the stairs in Safin's lair to the scene in North by Northwest where the plane is trying to kill Cary Grant (particularly the bit where the plane flies in behind him and he runs toward the camera) as an example where a lack of edit actually heightens the sensation in relation to Bazin's article on realism.

[Bad Ambassador]

I definitely talked a lot of bollocks but I contrasted the scene where he fights his way up the stairs in Safin's lair to the scene in North by Northwest where the plane is trying to kill Cary Grant (particularly the bit where the plane flies in behind him and he runs toward the camera) as an example where a lack of edit actually heightens the sensation in relation to Bazin's article on realism.

Interesting, because I found that sequence very dull. Just running and shooting hoards of faceless mooks that might as well be dummies hurled at him by clay pigeon launchers. But your point about the edit is well made, there's lots of other strong one-take scenes that might illustrate it, I'm sure.

[sevendaughters]

Interesting, because I found that sequence very dull. Just running and shooting hoards of faceless mooks that might as well be dummies hurled at him by clay pigeon launchers. But your point about the edit is well made, there's lots of other strong one-take scenes that might illustrate it, I'm sure.

i suppose i didn't want to get locked into a discussion around merits of "quality" but you are right that there probably is better material from it to be perfectly honest and i just got caught on the back foot because others hadn't done the required viewing. Bazin talks about realism in a slightly different context than how we might understand now: he even makes a point of saying this one scene in an otherwise mediocre film where a wild animal is in the shot just milling around the human actors is good partly because it is obviously not fake because it unites time and space in a way that brings you out of the mediocre assemblage of causal logic of the rest of the film.

[Bad Ambassador]

i suppose i didn't want to get locked into a discussion around merits of "quality" but you are right that there probably is better material from it to be perfectly honest and i just got caught on the back foot because others hadn't done the required viewing. Bazin talks about realism in a slightly different context than how we might understand now: he even makes a point of saying this one scene in an otherwise mediocre film where a wild animal is in the shot just milling around the human actors is good partly because it is obviously not fake because it unites time and space in a way that brings you out of the mediocre assemblage of causal logic of the rest of the film.

If it's something that's fresh and in everyone's minds, then it's a good shout as an example.

[lipsink]

I was kinda bored by a lot of the action sequences in this. Just seemed a bit generic for a lot of it. Things like the opening chase scene of Skyfall or the chase of Silva through the London Underground are just thrilling. Similarly, I can watch the airport chase or Bond trying to catch the bomber at the start of Casino Royale endlessly and still be totally captivated and in awe. The whole 'shootout in a baddie's lair' finale in No Time To Die I just felt like I've seen countless times before.

[Blofelds Cat]

Too much like a video game shoot em up...to relieve the monotony they should have cut to one of the henchmens family waiting for him to come home a la Austin Powers

[Mr Trumpet]

My friend described the last bit as "him playing Goldeneye on easy mode".

[mothman]

All in all given how much I love his work on True Detective and Maniac, I was quite disappointed by the standard of the directing on this.