No Time to Die (2021)

The latest James Bond film is a reworking of the novel version of You Only Live Twice (YOLT) with some aspects of On Her Majesty's Secret Service (OHMSS).  Let's take a look at those two books, which the movies are not always faithful in adapting.

In OHMSS, Bond is searching for Blofeld in the wake of Thunderball but has come up empty.  However, he has saved Tracy from committing suicide.  It turns out that Tracy's father is a mobster who offers Bond a fortune to marry his daughter.  She had been suicidal since the death of her daughter, but she wrote highly of Bond in her suicide letter.  Despite his attraction to Tracy, he declines.  He does ask for one favor: does he know where to find Blofeld?  Indeed, he does.  Bond infiltrates Blofeld's Swiss fortress and discovers that Blofled has infected a number of British women with specific viruses that will spread when they return to England.  One has a virus that will ruin the wheat harvest and another to wipe out poultry.  If all of them return, England is going to suffer a famine.  His cover blown, Bond flees and encounters Tracy!  Fleeing together, Bond realizes just how attracted to her he is.  He decides he will marry her and asks her father for a wedding gift: an assault force for Blofeld's stronghold.  Though the plagues are averted, Blofeld escaped.  Bond and Tracy are married but she is killed by Blofeld later that very day.  The movie is surprisingly faithful.

In the YOLT novel, Bond had fallen in depression after the death of his wife and was on the brink of being tossed from the service.  Instead, M gave him an assignment in Japan.  His code number was changed to 7777 and his mission was to acquire intelligence from Taiga Tanaka, head of Japanese Intelligence.  Taiga is willing but he wants something in return.  With the approval of the Japanese government, a foreigner named Shatterhand purchased a castle and its grounds.  He has planted all sorts of deadly plant species around the property.  As such, the castle has become an oasis for the suicide-prone Japanese.  If Bond eliminates Shatterhand, Taiga will share intel.  Though Shatterhand normally appears in full Samuri regalia - including a mask, there is a picture when he is without the mask: it is Ernst Blofeld!  Bond accepted the offer and, as far as the Secret Service was aware, died during his successful effort to destroy Blofeld's lair.  Unbeknownst to them, Bond survived but had amnesia.  A local fishing girl, Kissy Suzuki, had fallen for him and took advantage of his amnesia.  She was also pregnant though Bond is unaware of that when he leaves.  The movie uses the characters and setting but an entirely different plot.

No Time to Die uses many of the parts but reorders them and assigns them to different characters.  The movie picks up immediately after Spectre with Bond (Daniel Craig) and Madeleine (Lea Seydoux) driving in Italy.  In the wake of an assassination attempt on him, Bond leaves Madeleine, believing she had betrayed him.  She is pregnant but he does not know that.  Years pass.  Introduced wearing a Japanese mask, Lyutsifer Safin (Rami Malek) has developed some toxins that only harm specific DNAs; it is safe for most people but lethal to the chosen target.  Bond is no longer in the Secret Service and his code number has been given to another agent, Nomi (Lashana Lynch).  Safin has a grudge against Spectre and uses his designer toxins to kill every member, including the incarcerated Blofeld (Christoph Waltz).  Bond discovers that Safin's base is an island between Japan and Russia.  He and Nomi infiltrate the base, rescue the captured Madeleine and Mathilde (Bond's daughter), and make sure the blast doors are open for an incoming missile strike.  As Bond has been infected with a toxin that is lethal to Madeleine and Mathilde, he stays behind to protect them.  James Bond is dead.

The movie sweeps the field.  Felix Leiter?  Dead.  Ernst Stavro Blofeld?  Dead.  James Bond?  Dead.  How do you move on from here?  Though Nomi was the new 007 in Bond's absence, he regained the number on his final mission.  Well, it's available again and she can have it back.  Even so, I don't see her carrying on the series.  It was always a given that the role would be recast soon, but how does that work?  Is EON embracing the idea that James Bond is just an alias for MI-6's top operative?  Maybe they are going with the Bond multiverse.  In the Daniel Craig-verse, Bond dies.  Sherlock Holmes has been played by many actors but, so far as I know, he's never been killed and there has never been an issue with the Basil Rathbone Holmes vs. the Robert Downey Holmes.  Both are different interpretations of the same character.  The same should be true of Bond.

Not a bad movie, but a real problem for an ongoing series.

Star Wars: The Force Awakens

The movie is good but unfocused and repetitive. Our story opens on the desert planet of Jakku where Poe Dameron is acquiring a map that will allow the Resistance to locate Luke Skywalker, last of the Jedi. Just like Leia in the original movie, Poe’s location is attacked and he must hide the map in a droid before he is captured. The droid then falls into the hands of a young woman named Rey. The Force Awakens could as easily have been named A Newer Hope. Yes, it has an amazing number of similarities to the first movie. Here is a description I found on the Star Wars message board of IMDB:

A rag-tag group of heroes on a desert planet finds a droid with important information. They smuggle it off-planet to the resistance, who are fighting against the imperials. During the climax, they have to rescue the female of the group, disable the shield generator, and destroy the weak spot of the imperial's super weapon, which has the power to destroy planets. During the climax, the old mentor of the group is tragically cut down by the main villain, an evil force user. Despite this, the resistance manages to destroy the super-weapon and temporarily defeat the imperial army.

Yeah, lots of similarities. Our group on the desert planet is Rey and Finn. Rey is shown to have been left – for reasons unknown – on Jakku as a child. She lives in the ruins of an imperial walker and makes a living by scavenging parts from a crashed imperial cruiser. She rescues a droid from another scavenger. Finn the former Stormtrooper arrives on scene and joins her. The two then flee as the First Order seeks to recover the droid. They steal a ship that Rey judges to be garbage; it’s the Millennium Falcon. No sooner have they evaded the First Order and gotten into orbit when the ship is caught in a tractor beam and taken aboard an unknown ship.

Enter Han and Chewy. Han offers a brief explanation of how the Falcon was stolen and it has taken this long to track it down. Of course, we have hardly made introductions than Han’s bigger ship – which is never named – is boarded by two sets of criminals looking to collect money from Han. This actually bothered me. Han comes across as a newbie smuggler looking for the big score rather than a seasoned veteran who doesn’t make such rookie mistakes. In the original trilogy, Han had to dump Jabba’s cargo before his ship was boarded. He was competent but he got unlucky. Here, with his weakly comic fast-talking to the two sets of criminals, he comes across as incompetent. This is not the right way for Han to be comic relief. This is a very mellow and dispirited Han Solo. That is explained with later reveals but he felt a shadow of his former self. His death is telegraphed long before it occurs, which drained a lot of the tension. By the time he walks out onto the bridge, it is anticlimactic. I think I would have preferred the fiery old Han lecturing his son about being a damned fool to follow that old fossil Snoke and Ben suddenly snapping and killing him. Anyway, it is widely known that Harrison Ford wanted to be killed off during the original trilogy so his wish finally being granted here is even less of a surprise.

Rey grows in the force at an alarming rate. We first saw hints of her force ability when she flew the Falcon. Then, she really came to life when she resisted Kylo Ren’s interrogation. Though he has had training, he soon finds that Rey turns the tables and reads his mind! He has hardly left the cell when she mind controlled a Stormtrooper (played by Daniel “James Bond” Craig) into releasing her. Soon thereafter, she stomps an admittedly wounded Kylo in a lightsaber duel. Heck, she is already well beyond where Luke was at the beginning of Empire Strikes Back and he had had some instruction from a Jedi Master. Obviously, she is the character that the title references but it did seem that her advancement in the force came entirely too quickly and easily.

Fin is an oddity that wasn’t explained. Is he the only Stormtrooper to ever balk from butchery? What makes him different? If he has been ‘conditioned’ since childhood, why is he so normal around non-conditioned people? Are all Stormtroopers this affable once you take off the armor? Also, I found it irritating that the enemy didn’t just shoot him. During the fight at the ruins of Maz Kanata’s, he is called a traitor and then attacked. Okay, so that Stormtrooper recognizes him. Why not just shoot him? It isn’t as if Fin could have blocked blaster fire with the lightsaber. No, the Stormtrooper converted his weapon into some sort of energy club that could block a lightsaber. If you are the kind of guy who guns down unarmed villagers, why aren’t you the kind of guy who guns down traitors? Obviously because that would have killed off Fin. Screenwriters need to stop rescuing important characters by having villains act stupidly.

Poe, who is the first hero we meet, vanishes for much of the film. When he is brought back, he takes the role of lead pilot. It isn’t Star Wars unless you have some exciting space battles and our other characters aren’t yet suited for that. So in comes Poe and his squadron of x-wings. He is pretty exclusively a pilot in the movie.

Kylo Ren is initially very intimidating but, as we get to know him, proves to be a conflicted and moody villain. His tantrums are hilarious. Where his grandfather would Force choke underlings to death to release stress, Kylo hacks inanimate objects to shreds with his lightsaber. In the wake of his betrayal of the Jedi, he is used to being the only person who can use the Force but he has a rude awakening when he squares off with Rey. His lightsaber with its almost flame-like blade strikes me as another sign that he is still unskilled. The blade is unstable which, though scary, also implies that he didn’t put it together quite right. Though a lot of grief is being heaped on the character, I liked him. He is what Anakin should have been in the prequel trilogy: very conflicted, at times menacing, at times vulnerable. Anikin was just one long woe-is-me it’s not fair the Jedi are evil whine. Piling the chemistry-free love interest with Padme only made it worse. So, Kylo is a vast improvement and I expect he will mature into a more Vader-like villain by the next movie. Killing his father puts him solidly on the Dark Side of the Force and should purge his conflicted feelings.

General Hux is an arrogant and surprisingly young leader. I was initially surprised at how he spoke down to Kylo Ren but that only further demonstrated that Kylo wasn’t a Vader clone. Where Grand Moff Tarkin insouciantly stayed on the Death Star despite being told “there is a danger,” Hux was the first to evacuate Starkiller Base. Wow, these are some villains. The First Order is proving to be a pale imitation of the Empire.

Captain Phasma decided to shut down the shield because a traitor – who had recently demonstrated that he couldn’t shoot unarmed villagers - held a gun to her head. The fate of Starkiller Base is sealed by her decision. Phasma is shown to be a sad excuse for a Stormtrooper and utterly undeserving of her conspicuously shiny armor. Doubtless, she will return but her character has been damaged.

What is the political situation thirty years after the deaths of the Emperor and Darth Vader? General Leia appears to command a single base with a few dozen X-wings. She is part of The Resistance. Resistance to what? The Empire is gone, right? There is a New Republic. We saw the capitol planet of the New Republic destroyed, right? Why aren’t Leia, Akbar, and all the rest part of the military of this New Republic? Where are the capital ships aligned with the Republic or the Resistance? The planet where Leia is based is going to be destroyed and the best she can muster is a couple of dozen fighters? Wow, that’s pathetic. It very much seems like the First Order is the governing body though, at the same time, they are talking about conquest. But there is virtually nothing standing in your way? Why did you bother with the planet killer if there isn’t anyone actually opposing you?

The First Order comes across as generally incompetent. Not one but two of our heroes escape in separate incidents. During one of those escapes, another team has simultaneously infiltrated the base. Their impressive Starkiller Base, like previous planet vaporizing weapons, manages to take one shot before it is destroyed by a handful of enemies. The First Order has great set designers but they aren’t so great at the fighting. Of the many battles that First Order fought, they only won one, which was when they attacked a mostly unarmed village. Not an auspicious beginning for the forces of darkness.

There is a new and bigger death star. Wow, we haven’t gone there before. Granted, that first one was really quite cool. It was unfortunate that it was destroyed before it got to really instill terror across the galaxy. The second one was pathetic and a death trap. It blew up ships here and there but never got to target a planet. This new one is stupid. I can accept a moon-sized space station with a cannon that is powerful enough to destroy a planet. Hey, it’s just physics. A big enough gun will turn a planet into an asteroid field. But Starkiller Base is different. First, it is in System A while the target planet is in System X. The ‘projectile’ is fired and traverses who knows how many light years in mere moments. Moreover, the projectile – which appears as just an energy beam – has a guidance system that allows it to turn toward the target planet. Maybe that was gravity pulling it to the targets? No, at the speed it was going, a black hole would have trouble modifying its trajectory. I would have gone for a massive torpedo. Yeah, that would be doable. Modify some obsolete frigate, fill it with explosives, and have it hit a planet at light speed. The Starkiller just defied physics. Worse, there was that stupid visual of the planets exploding. If a planet around Alpha Centauri exploded, we wouldn’t know about it on Earth for years. And we certainly wouldn’t be able to see the explosion during daylight with the naked eye! Even though this is science-fantasy, this really grated on me. Much as I think it has been done quite enough, I would have preferred Death Star 3 to this travesty.

This far, far away galaxy has never heard of a history book. In the first trilogy, characters have never heard of the Jedi and find the Force to be something bizarre. But in the prequels, the Jedi Council is a branch of galactic governance, its members are the generals during the Clone Wars. Heck, Chewy fought alongside Yoda! Now in this one, Rey thinks Luke Skywalker is a myth! That Han has to confirm Luke’s existence is just odd. “The Berlin Wall, the Cold War. It’s all true.” Even in the prequels, this problem persisted. In such a technologically advanced society, how did a whole star system just vanish from the star charts and only some short order cook knew about it?

Speaking of star charts, what was with that kooky map? In the super high-tech world of Star Wars, there is no such thing as email. The map is on a memory chip of some kind and can never be copied or transmitted. Moreover, shouldn’t it just be galactic coordinates. I’m sure there must be some mapping system similar to latitude and longitude that would map even unexplored regions. Even when the data is at the Resistance base in the dormant R2-D2, it is inaccessible. How does technology work in this galaxy? Of course, this could now be a complaint of the original movie. Why didn’t Leia just email the Death Star plans to the Rebel Alliance? Email was virtually unknown in 1977. In 2015, we can watch a movie on a phone that fits in our pocket. It is troubling that some of our current technology exceeds that of the Star Wars universe.

Luke does not appear until the final scene. He was kept out of the story because including him would have undercut the new characters. Really, once Luke is on scene, he becomes the central character while everyone else is a sidekick. Though I understand the reasoning, it makes Luke look bad. One of his apprentices has just turned to the Dark Side and killed the other Jedi trainees so Luke runs away and hides? Moreover, he left some sort of map to find him? Are we playing hide and seek? It is going to take some good writing to rehabilitate Luke from this apparently cowardly act.

The most important thing about The Force Awakens is the absence of a Jar Jar Binks character. Nor was there any mention of midi-chlorians. And, as already mentioned, the central character wasn’t a plaintive Anakin. Yes, it is a rehash, it has lots of unanswered questions, it used some weak plot devices, but it was fun. Most of the characters have lots of promise for future development.

Spectre

Bond is back and so is Ernst Stavro Blofeld.  After a decades long absence, Blofeld is back as the head of Spectre though his backstory has dramatically changed.  The movie opens with Bond in Mexico City for Dia de los Muertos (Day of the Dead).  He's on a mission to kill a man.  The action that follows is ridiculous to the extreme and a return to the silliness that we saw in Quantum of Solace.  Also echoing Quantum of Solace, Blofeld's secret hideout is amazingly combustible.  Why do James Bond's villains use dynamite, hydrogen, and gasoline as construction materials?

 

Mr. Hinx (Dave Bautista) is an excellent henchmen along the lines of Odd Job and Jaws.  He is pure aggression and his dialogue is next to nil.  Where Jaws had steel teeth, Hinx has sharpened steel thumbnails, the better to gouge eyeballs.  Unlike Odd Job and Jaws, Hinx is not some grim humorless thug.  No, he spends a lot of time smiling, especially after killing someone or shooting holes in your plane.  He is also surprisingly well-dressed.  I hope to see him again in the next film.

 

Blofeld has proved a more durable villain in the movies - 8 so far - than in the novels - only appeared in 3.  In the novels, Spectre and Blofeld were introduced in Thunderball (9th novel).  Bond killed Blofeld in You Only Live Twice (12th novel).  The movies opted to replace the Soviets with Spectre right from the start so that Blofeld and his fluffy white cat appear in almost every Sean Connery Bond film.  I did like how Blofeld (Christoph Waltz) is made the architect of the previous 3 movies.  The mysterious Quantum group was just a facet of Spectre and the chief villains in each of those films was just a minion of Blofeld.  Blofeld is mostly unemotional and unmoved by whatever is happening.  He is never angry and rarely shows anything beyond mild amusement.  He plays a good host but it is just an act.  Reminded me a bit of Jake Gyllenhaal in Nightcrawler.

 

The Daniel Craig period as Bond has seen a lot of more depth to the character and very few of the post-kill witticisms.  In Casino Royale, we saw his first love - Vesper Lynd - and her death.  Quantum of Solace was basically a waste though it does fold into the storyline of Spectre.  In Skyfall, we see his childhood home and learn how he was an orphan.  Here in Spectre, we learn of Hans Obenhauser, a man who adopted him after his parents' death.  This was only ever mentioned in the short story Octopussy in the novels but is greatly expanded here.  Wow, I really didn't see that coming.

 

Another interesting development is that this Bond is part of a team.  M (Ralph Fiennes), Moneypenny (Namoie Harris), Q (Ben Whishaw), and Bill Tanner (Roy Kinnear) have sizeable roles that span the movie, not just the opening office bit when 007 is dispatched on his mission.  Part of this has to do with how the modern world works.  As Bond can't be an awesome computer hacker - very important in modern intelligence - that facet goes to Q.  Also, the proliferation of cellphones means that the office is always available, thus contact to M or Moneypenny is as easy as pie.  This is a departure from the novels but I welcome it.

 

A rarity for Bond movies, none of the Bond girls died.  Daniel Craig has not shown himself to be the lady's man of previous Bonds.  Though he has a beauty with him at the start, he leaves her in the room before anything happens and never returns.  His only love interest here is Madeleine Swann (Lea Seydoux), who appears not to be just another ship passing in the night.

 

All in all, a fun Bond flick with more weight to it than others in the franchise.  The series has moved into an overarching storyline, fitting it more to the mold of the Borne movies or Harry Potter.

Skyfall

The movie opens with Bond in Istanbul and coming upon a number of dead or seriously wounded agents.  A hard drive has been stolen from a laptop.  Bond and his female driver, Eve, get into an epic chase to recover the hard drive.  They fail to get it and that becomes a national security threat that defines the rest of the movie.  Unlike most Bond films, the majority of this one takes place in the UK with a middle part in Shanghai and Macau.  This is interesting since MI6 is supposed to do foreign intelligence while MI5 is domestic intelligence.  I suspect there was a lot of arguing about turf between the agencies was left on the cutting room floor.

 

To a degree, this is an origin story of Bond.  We see his childhood home and learn that he was orphaned (this was revealed in the books but I don't recall if that had been mentioned in the movies).  We get to meet the man who taught him to shoot.  Bond shows little interest in his childhood home, even stating that he hated the place.  Granted, it is on a bleak Scottish moor in the middle of winter, which makes it quite unappealing.  We also get a scene where Bond does the word association that is sometimes humorous and paints him as a grim fellow.  The results of his psych analysis are revealed later, giving a deeper look into the character.  This isn't Sean Connery's Bond.

 

Javier Bardem is a peculiar villain.  I give him credit for his willingness to look silly.  That haircut in No Country for Old Men was a real winner but blond hair is painful on him.  Here, he is equal parts arrogant genius, deranged madman, petulant child, and playful goofball.  Yeah, it is a strange and complex character.  His love-hate obsession with M echoes a former villain; Elektra King in The World is Not Enough (1999).  He gives the obligatory "How come you won't die already" attitude some new life, seeming both amused and annoyed that Bond has yet again foiled attempts to kill him.  Also of interest, though he has amazing intel about the inner workings of MI6, the villain is not part of the Quantum group that was featured prominently in the last two films.  He would have fit just fine within it so I am perplexed that they didn't just say he was to keep that going.  Maybe next time.

 

The Bond girl who gets the most screen time with our hero is... Judi Dench. Unlike most Bond girls, there is nothing between them beyond the employer/employee relationship and some mutual respect that is shown with pithy barbs.  For her part, M proves willing to sacrifice her agents for the sake of the mission.  This is an ongoing theme with Judi Dench's M, dating back to Golden Eye (1995) where she told Bond she was only too willing to send him to his death if the circumstances warranted.  She is cold-blooded by her words but often motherly by her actions.  I think I preferred the more hands-off Bernard Lee in the role.  Give Bond his mission at the beginning and then scold him at the end.  M used to be a support character but with a big name like Judi Dench, M became a major character in the films.  M promises to remain a major character in future outings.

 

The Aston Martin made famous in Goldfinger (1964) returns in this film.  It is nice to see the old car again.  Bond has kept it in a garage all these years just in case he might need another ride.  I have read that car geeks were offended since that model is gutless compared to modern sports cars.

 

One big twist is that Bond has a base that the villain attacks, a complete reversal of the usual where Bond invades the enemy camp and blows it to bits.  Also of interest, this Bond finally gets Q.  This Q is a young fellow who is good with computers rather than gadgets.  Bond also gets Miss Moneypenny.  Both are welcome additions back to the series.  Bill Tanner, who was a regular in the book series, is also present here and in the last movie.  However, he doesn't have a clever name like M, Q, or Moneypenny so vanishes into the background.

 

Something of a departure from the usual Bond film but certainly enjoyable.  Thumbs up from Dave.