Anna Daniels
With No Time to Die being Craig’s final James Bond film, and with no actor as of yet officially announced as taking up the mantle, all bets are off as to how this is going to end. We’re saying goodbye to a specific iteration that has transformed the format we’ve known for 50 years more than any other man who has come before. Craig’s Bond has been a very emotional creature who has experienced actual, true love twice in 10 years. He also has real friends in his colleagues — and we can call them friends because they are capable of doubting, confronting, and calling him out on mistakes.
Craig’s Bond began with high aspirations in his newly acquired 00 status during Casino Royale and has deteriorated into basically a hermit who actively hates his job because it has killed his humanity. We know he’s an orphan who has never known familial connection save through one human being: Judy Dench’s M — who died a terrible death right in front of him. Of his four currently released films, vengeance defined the first half, and loss, the second. He acknowledges his own alcoholism, because it’s not 1962 anymore and it isn’t suave or debonair to cope with shaken-not-stirred martinis.
Pop culture treats James Bond, the historical archetype, like any other superhero: conceptually immortal, tireless, always right, casually womanizing and frequently denigrating to those he doesn’t consider his equal, which is virtually everyone. Craig’s James Bond has often been completely wrong, and has time and again been portrayed as desperate — though in that silent, straining, very upper-crust British way. He asks for help — and asks it of people very different from him as a grizzled, stoic, buff white dude — because he knows exactly where his strengths begin and end, as much as it annoys him to admit it. And he is always, always tired. That doesn’t cheapen or, as has been suggested in the past, feminize him; that makes him so much more real. Safin’s reference to Bond as a reflection suggests that the final boss for James Bond is himself. That’s not a novel idea, as he’s previously tangled with people just as smart and cunning and capable as him, but the twist is in making that narrative twin he must battle be the worst of himself and the society he represents.
The piece missing to continue this extended trope upheaval is death, because to give Daniel Craig’s James Bond death is to give that character the humanity he consistently craves. The No Time to Die trailer sets the stakes around Bond — his life, his friends, his love. His existence is held over him as transient, while Safin wants to achieve effective immortality. The threatened destruction isn’t political or social, it’s personal, which is the only correct way to frame it at the end of all these years. That’s not sad at all — that’s fresh, new, and freeing. It acknowledges the many uncomfortable societal truths Bond’s fictional life has encapsulated, then puts them to rest. Maybe James Bond does need to die, and in doing so, represent compassion and humanity.
Fans can find out Bond’s final fate when No Time to Die opens in theaters on April 2, 2020 in the U.K. and April 8, 2020 in the U.S.
Written by: Looper
