No Time to Die **Spoilers from post #1449 onward**

Saw this yesterday. Not as good as the Craig Era peaks , which were Casino Royale and Skyfall, but a decent end to his era as Bond. Its three biggest issues are its love interest, its villain and its run time.

The love interest

There's no getting around it, Lea Seydoux's Madelaine Swan just isn't a patch on Greens Vesper. You can understand how Bond fell for Vesper and why he's still hung up on her 14 years later . Madelaine not so much . She's just incredibly bland, it feels more a case of her being a symptom of Bonds need for connection at that time of his career/life rather then the catalyst for change Vesper was. She came into his life when he was looking for an out. In a way I suppose that's why it still half way works for me, even if I don't buy her as this great love , she was symbolic of his need for connection, of a life he wanted but could never have, or maybe even deserved to have.

The Villain

Both Malek Saffin and Waltzs Blofeld feel like throwbacks to previous Bond Era's , I don't think they suited Craig's grittier Era. Bring back Spectre by all means, introduce a victim of Spectre out for revenge in the form of Safin , but Waltz's Whimsical delivery and Maleks flat monotone rob them of any gravitas . It feels like they felt they had to shoe horn in as many tropes as possible to please the purists regardless of whether it suited the tone of the Craig era.

The Runtime

Just like Spectre before it(which I'd watched the night before) its just too bloody long. Unless they were genuinely setting up spin off characters in Paloma and Lashana's 007, one of them definitelyshould have been cut . Similarly with Blofeld, either forget Safin and make him the main villain again or kill him off in the prologue and use his screen time to develop Safin beyond a cypher.

All the faults above being said I was still emotionally engaged enough to have something in my eye over the ending.

As such, it gets 3 out of 5 from me.

You have a lot of catching up to do! Assuming you saw the two Timothy Dalton films from the late 1980s, there are four Pierce Brosnan ones and four other Daniel Craig ones. From the PB era, I would recommend Goldeneye, and, from the DC era, I would recommend Skyfall.

Definitely has its flaws, but I still thoroughly enjoyed - much more so than I did QoS, Skyfall, or Spectre.

I totally get the anti Malek arguments (and he was pretty rubbish), but that didn’t ruin the movie for me… for once, Bond’s mission and focus were not the bad guy or threat, but the personal story, and in a way I liked how they ‘backgrounded’ the stuff that we’d have normally been hit over the head with (bad guy motives, who the global targets were, how the factory worked etc) - it didn’t matter to Bond, so it didn’t matter to us.

Given the corners they’d been written into by the previous movies, I’m pretty happy with this as an end to the Craig series. Though I didn’t need the grimness of the ending. Casino Royale still the top dog anyway.

As a side note, that ‘agent Paloma’ segment definitely felt like a test run for a character, and it really worked I think. Could be quite a playful, fun spinoff.

It got off to a below par release in the US and has an older audience then venom

Having seen the movie it's absolutely crazy to me that in the 18 months of limbo they didn't recut it. Even crazier if they did.

I know people are complaining about the run time, but imo it didn't feel like a 2.75 hour film. It's a very fast watch.

One thing for me that stands out that could have been cut is the AM Vantage. It's a nice nod but completely unnecessary (presumably they didn't have the budget for another gadget car chase) and adds nothing to the plot although it's also not going to take much off the runtime but there's a lot of that kind of padding.

Quantum of solace starting on itv4 now.

Think I only saw it the once and wasn't impressed at the time. After the big disappointment that was NTTD I said I'll give it one more go and see if my opinion has changed any bit.

She is and she lied presumably to protect the child from what happened to her. Bond ditched her at the mere hint of a betrayal.

if it is supposed to need 8-9 hundred million to make a profit , it seems difficult to see it getting above six hundred at this stage as its not going to do great in the US, they probably made a mistake delaying a US release as the audience would have heard the mixed reviews and the spoilers. First Bond film to make a loss, I think they will need to take a break for 5 years or more before they even consider making another film

Grosses

DOMESTIC (17.6%)

$55,225,007

INTERNATIONAL (82.4%)

$259,028,000

WORLDWIDE

$314,253,007