James Bond: No Time to Make Sense

007

The final instalment of Daniel Craig’s James Bond is finally in the cinemas but I had no high hopes for it given the plot-hole riddled previous movies. No Time to Die added to the pile of rubbish that was Spectre. Liberals, though, can learn from its mistakes. Beware, spoilers galore!

The World Is Not Enough

The story starts well, promises a good movie, then it quickly falls to pieces. The plot feels a bit like it was written by J. K. Rowling. It draws up a world that never existed, which – as it gets more entangled – contradicts itself to the point where nothing makes sense.

Abaddie, whose motives are not clear, is just evil for evil’s sake. The systematic murder of the title characters, supporting friends and family to accentuate that the whole storyline is really coming to an end.

No matter the amount of action the creators of the movie dressed it up in, No Time to Die feels more like a drama than anything else. It is unmistakably about James Bond and his life, rather than an external conflict or the world he is supposed to save. This is what happens when the fame of the character outgrows the imaginary world it inhibits.

The actions of the characters define the world rather than vice versa. This is the case with the move. If James Bond didn’t go to Cuba, if he didn’t visit Blofeld, if he didn’t go to the poison garden… nothing would have happened. It was these actions that had consequences that James Bond had to solve.

More relevant to liberals is the globalist utopia the movie conjures. James Bond just globetrots with a myriad of diverse characters from all over the world. A gay Q, and black 007 (2.0) weren’t the shoehorned social justice malarky it could have been (though a more hardliner move would have been to make Felix Leiter or M gay, rather than the cardigan wearing wimpy geek so as not to reinforce a false stereotype), it was enjoyable, but the international relations in the movie where more fantastical than Roger Moor shooting lasers in space.

Just once it would be delightful to see retired James Bond go through all the bureaucratic hurdles of getting a visa, waiting days for approval, queuing up at the airport, then standing for hours at immigration and customs.

The movie’s supposed villain is not connected to any nation, country, group or anything or someone might be insulted. Diplomatic quarrel with Russia is mentioned once, but Japan is added to the mix so as not to seem anti-Russian, and China, a large market for Western movies is omitted, making the Japanese dispute the territory of an island with Russia.

The writers lack chutzpah in creating a real enemy. Lucifer Safin, the alleged baddie is not really a baddie at all. There is no proof he wants to kill masses with his weapon. He eradicated the terrorist organization SPECTRE. His only fault is that buyers (no one is named lest somebody gets insulted) are arriving to the same island, allegedly to buy a weapon, that Britain previously had but wasn’t supposed to. So we come to the question of who the real villain is.

Dial M for Misguided

The real villain thus is not Safin, whose motives and intentions are unclear, but Mallory, also know as M. He, without proper oversight brushes aside all consideration for rule of law, transparency, international conventions, and constitution, and embezzled fund so he can create a superweapon of mass destruction.

He claims it would be used for scientific purposes, as if that would be a responsibility for the secret services. So when the bioweapon is inevitably stolen, he tries to solve the problem by doing more unauthorized shadowy operation, risking a large international diplomatic crisis, using NATO resources and authorizing a rocket attack on an island that is the subject of dispute between Russia and Japan (which actually bears no relevance to the plot).

Funny, really, how it was Mallory who succeeded the previous M due to issues with oversight. Funnier still that the bioweapon can target people based on their DNA, and nobody asks the question how Lucifer Safin could have secured thousands of DNA from secure servers. Wasn’t privacy sort of the driver behind the plot of Spectre?

James Bond quickly glossed over the fact that M created the weapon using taxpayer’s money instead of investing into cybersecurity. It shows that the writers don’t understand the characters or the world they created. Nor do they apparently understand the real world, just a would be utopia of diversity and good neighbourly nations.

Dr. No Innovation

At the end James Bond dies, but he was long dead, not because of the rocket, or the tonnes of bullets fired into him at point blank range after which he could still climb a ladder. It was because the writers killed him before the move even started by not understanding the world or the characters.

The fact that a garden growing poisonous weapons, that are somehow connected to manufacturing a bioweapon which kills through nanobots is blown up, with James Bond in the middle has nothing to do with destroying the weapon itself. It was created in a British laboratory by the Brits. They also manufactured it., It means that the formula exists and others can manufacture it.

James Bond died in vain. The writers didn’t believe in innovation, that others would be able to recreate the weapon, all the more so if hacking into systems is so easy, and they can just download the formula.

James Bond also didn’t believe in innovation, that in a year or so a cure can be found for the bioweapon he is infecting him, barring him from touching his family ever again. Which is ironic given that the movie’s release was postponed for over a year, up until scientists found, if not a cure, but a vaccine for a completely novel virus that caused a pandemic hitherto unseen in modern times.

No Time to Die leaves you shaken and stirred but not in a good way. Despite the raving reviews from the press it is a terrible movie, but liberals can at least learn from it. Here are the takeaways:

No utopias please. Don’t sugar-coat the world and shy away from creating and naming real enemies, they exist in the real world too! Dare to insult them.

Be more realistic. See how the real world works (politics, physics, biology, chemistry, logic, and all) and do not gloss over government oversight. Liberals should after all be the torchbearers of not only liberty but reason. Don’t dismiss innovation. The world is not stagnating, rather than ignoring the possibility of innovation, be a drive behind it.

The movie was a failure and for me it killed not only Daniel Craig as James Bond, but the whole character.