No Time to Die
2021 · Directed by Cary Joji Fukunaga
Original language: English
- action
- thriller
- adventure
The story
Bond has left active service and is enjoying a tranquil life in Jamaica. His peace is short-lived when his old friend Felix Leiter from the CIA turns up asking for help. The mission to rescue a kidnapped scientist turns out to be far more treacherous than expected, leading Bond onto the trail of a mysterious villain armed with dangerous new technology.
What it’s like
Wide, glossy anamorphic frames carry most of this one: Jamaican shorelines in hard tropical sun, Italian hillside villages washed in golden hour, then the cold blue-grey corridors of a Norwegian clinic and a sealed, fluorescent-lit laboratory. Cary Joji Fukunaga stages the action with clean, legible geometry and long tracking shots, while the night sequences lean into deep shadow and sodium-orange glow. Hans Zimmer's score swells with brass and low pulsing strings, and quieter passages let a single piano or a hush of wind hold the room. The rhythm is sustained and cinematic, with lengthy stretches of melancholy between bursts of set-piece energy. Its emotional register is wistful and elegiac, a long goodbye dressed in spy-thriller clothes, and its central arc follows a weary man who has tried to close his past and finds it reopened. Violence is frequent and often sharp: gunfights, hand-to-hand brawls, explosions, and a few brief, abrupt deaths, with some sickness and body horror in the lab scenes, though nothing lingers on gore. Sexual content is present but restrained. It suits a long-haul flight, a late-night watch with the lights low, or anyone who wants a big-screen thriller with a bruised, reflective heart, though it is not gentle.
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