Max Dowler

Tonight's film is the final entry in Daniel Craig's James Bond reboot cycle. I've long wanted to point out this contrast. GoldenEye opened with the fall of the other side's gods. Lenin's statue toppled, the hammer and sickle shattered, the whole apparatus of Soviet iconography broken and sunk. The Soviets had been the heavies from the first day of Bond, SMERSH, the Lubyanka, the machinery of fear in Moscow. Bond existed, in part, to rub their noses in the dirt and prove that the West still held. The Soviet Union collapsed, and the GoldenEye titles marked the victory. The British agent and the free world had outlasted the system that wanted him and his way of life dead. The enemy's symbols went down; Britain's stood. No Time to Die's title sequence? Britannia falls and breaks. Her shield drops. The British emblem is shown in ruin at the start, and the designer has said why: it is not Britain's finest hour. I do not see it that way. Where GoldenEye celebrated the destruction of the adversary's order, this one advertises the dissolution of our own. The villain, Lyutsifer Safin, succeeds where SMERSH failed. He finishes the British hero. The titles place the crumbling of the national symbol of Britannia as the necessary prelude. Is it revenge for that earlier GoldenEye sequence? In effect, that is what it achieves. The irony is that both title sequences were made by Daniel Kleinman. It is a mirror image: Soviet icons destroyed then, British icons destroyed now. It is foreshadowing the end. Bond does not walk away; he stands under the missile bombardment at the end. Visually, that is the revenge of the side that lost the Cold War, served up as high art and melancholy. Fleming wrote Bond to win, not to die after Britannia had been shown falling to pieces in a title sequence. He gave the public a British secret agent who did his duty, enjoyed the pleasures of life, and always came through. Ruthless, self-indulgent, a wonderful character. Not a hero in the sentimental sense, but a man who gets on with it. Loyalty to the Service, to Queen and country, are his few perceptible virtues. The novel You Only Live Twice has him look death in the face and survive. That is the point. To have him stand under a missile barrage and simply take it is antithetical to who Bond is. This is the precise opposite of what Fleming wrote. He did not open his books with the ruin of the symbols under which Bond served. He opened them with the certainty that a British secret agent, however battered or broken, would still climb Everest, still beat the world at its own games, still rub the villain's nose in the dirt. The Soviets understood what Fleming was doing. Izvestia called the books rubbish and pornography. Fleming was delighted. They feared the idea of a free man who wins. Fleming's books are not for people who need their national icons dismantled before the story starts. James Bond is not a vehicle for self-loathing like Jason Bourne. He is the reminder that the old virtues and values of the West still count. Kill him and show Britannia in pieces, and you have made a film of the opposition's book. You've made the Soviet book Avakoum Zakhov Versus 007 into film. The Daniel Craig films are competent, often stylish, and occasionally rather good. They are not Ian Fleming. They are the contemporary preference for institutional self-doubt and the dismantling of one's own icons, rendered with expensive melancholy. No Time to Die makes one wish we had a fifth Pierce Brosnan film instead. I do not hate it. The stunts and the action are all good, and Daniel Craig did do a lot of his own stunts, so kudos to him for having guts, but this film is why I do not enjoy his run the same way I enjoy the original twenty films. The original films one can watch again and again. With Craig's, one needs more time before viewing it once more. What a fall from Sir Roger Moore parachuting under a Union Jack. #JamesBond #NoTimeToDie #DanielCraig #IanFleming